Krause: At least MLB has finally put some parameters in place

The most amazing aspect of yesterday’s release of George Mitchell’s report on steroid use in major-league baseball is the degree of slack-jawed shock that accompanied it.The consensus of opinion was that yesterday’s dog and pony show by Mitchell, baseball commissioner Bud Selig, and the Major League Baseball Players Association represented a dark day for the game.I don’t think so. The “dark days” happened during the years when baseball turned a blind eye to the problem, and when the union dragged its feet on working with MLB to come up with a way to root out – and solve – the issue once it became too obvious to ignore.The dark days happened when the likes of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens (if the reports are accurate) compromised their professional integrity just to play a few more years and set a few more records.Yesterday? Not such a dark day – at least not to anyone who has been paying attention for the last five years. Yesterday was a breath of fresh air, because – finally – someone got up and at least established the parameters of the issue. Those may be pretty wide parameters, but judging from the names on that list MLB released, we now have some idea (if we didn’t already) about what we’re dealing with here.Most of the shock centered around Clemens, who has steadfastly denied (and still denies) using steroids. About the only thing you can say – at this point – is that George Mitchell has dealt with more complex issues than steroids in baseball in his career, and that he’s smart enough to understand what libel and slander mean. But by all means, form your own conclusions.Do you know what makes me laugh, though? I find it hysterically ironic that the National Football League, and the country at large, can have a collective stroke over the Patriots filming defensive signals on the sidelines at the Meadowlands, but that, for the most part, we shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, what can we DO?” about this. Even Mitchell pleaded with commissioner Bud Selig not to punish the offenders on that list.Which form of cheating to you consider more egregious? Filming defensive signals or taking performance-enhancing drugs?The answer should be readily apparent. You could film an entire game, and break it down into a thousand different components, but you still have to rely on the physical skills of the players to carry out your subterfuge. However, if those players you’re trusting have not had the advantage of steroids, or human growth hormones, and the guy on the other side of the ball has, well, all that filming, planning, scheming, CHEATING isn’t going to make a difference. For the other side has cheated better ? or, at least, more effectively.The crux of the issue is that there are already enough people who doubt the veracity of professional and college sports as it is. Gambling has insidiously wormed its way into the process so much that the NFL has to issue weekly injury reports now. The line that separates a legitimate sporting event from pro wrestling just keeps getting more indefinable.Now, this. Now, not only do we worry whether gamblers have infiltrated our sports, we now have to worry that medical technology can help create human robots ? players who are artificially enhanced to be bigger, stronger, faster and meaner. This is far, far bigger than Videogate on a Sunday afternoon.Perhaps the reason the report is so shocking to people is because Mitchell picked up all the scraps of paper that had served as the main source of information on the scandal and tied them up into a neat (albeit long) document. It’s all there, if anyone wants to go through it.But anyone who’s shocked at any particular item in this report either hasn’t been paying attention, or has worked extra hard to stay in blissful denial.I don’t suppose you can just arbitrarily purge the record books of anything that happened in the so-called “steroid era” any more than you can eject Gaylord Perry from the Hall of Fame because he threw sp