The Baseball America Take on Mitchell

BaseballAmerica.com has a good story by Chris Kline about the fallout from the Mitchell Report and a a few things that may have been overlooked with all the naming of names.

For example this one:

The report included information that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of the Double-A El Paso team regularly would drive across the border into Mexico to purchase steroids. Many of the 88 players cited in the report are minor league veterans who spent much of their careers in Triple-A. And at least one unnamed minor league player was sent home after a trainer found a package that contained a steroid had been mailed to him.

The bread and butter of Baseball America is their draft and player development coverage.

Do you think that performance enhancing drugs make that difficult?

"If a player showed big tools or a power arm as an amateur, sure, you had questions (about possible drug use)," said one scouting director from an American League club. "But if he came up clean on tests, there was no real reason to doubt it. You'd hear things in the background that maybe gave you some pause to go after and sign a player, but the bottom line was always the tools and projection—this player could help your club."

And there were always players who drew suspicion, but without testing, it was always a case of speculation. One area scout mentioned the name of a player who was in the Mitchell Report whom he'd suspected as a steroids user since he was drafted in the first round.

"There are guys you suspected that you tried to stay away from," the scout said. "When you see a player make a jump in performance these days, the first thing I think is, 'He must be using.' "

How about this story:

Before the 2004 draft, one scout was looking at two righthanders, trying to determine which had the higher ceiling. His club wound up not taking either one, but scouting both pitchers served as an ominous sign of things to come.

"I remember seeing those two guys in college and then saw them the next year; each lost 3 to 5 miles an hour in one year," the scout said. "It was a real eye-opener. MLB really needs to put something into their overall testing policy where guys can be tested before they're drafted."

The suspicion of performance-enhancing drugs is likely to continue to cloud the scouting world, particularly when signing current free agents or players from Latin America or elsewhere internationally. Those free-agent decisions became tougher than ever at the annual GM meetings this year in Orlando, where there was little movement in advance of the Mitchell Report. And if the report changes anything right now, it's how it affects decision-making among clubs at the highest level.

Head over there to read the whole thing.