Put on your tinfoil batting helmets
At last, George Mitchell’s nefarious plot has been exposed!
I have a soft spot for that theory. The idea, see, is that since George Mitchell has a stake in the Red Sox, he intentionally left them out of his report. Except for Eric Gagne, I suppose, whom everybody hates anyhow. See, normal, sane people would view the lack of any Brewers or Rangers as a problem with this theory, but the Daily News has concocted a lovely explanation that only requires a moderate amount of data-searching in order to survive. See, Mitchell let his own team off lightly, but he also let the Brewers go because Bug Selig used to own the Brewers and he’s a good buddy. Obviously it would have hurt his feelings had Mitchell implied that anybody on a team he used to have a financial stake in participated in a wave of cheaters that Mitchell estimated at around 25% of the entire player-base.
The bit about the Rangers is even better. You know, President Bush used to be an owner of the Rangers. So clearly senator Mitchell – senator Mitchell, wink wink – would let the Rangers off easily so the President won’t… ahh, won’t… well, maybe he’d preside Mitchell upside the fucking head for that. I don’t really know, and the Daily News and its "baseball official with no ties to the Yankees" don’t tell me.
Even better than that, though, is this idiocy: "Without subpoena power, Mitchell insisted, he was limited in terms of where he could take his investigation. But that’s a cop-out. Investigative journalists don’t have subpoena power either and look at what they’ve been able to uncover independently over the course of history." Do investigative journalists generally call people up and say "hi there, my name’s George Mitchell and I’m working with your boss and the federal government to find out if you’re a cheater so we can send you to jail"? I don’t really know, but I’m thinking maybe if they did they wouldn’t get as far. And senator Mitchell was burdened with an extremely-high-profile journal to investigate. Food Lion this ain’t.
