So, What Does It All MEAN?

Whew! OK, now everyone can just relax and read the whole actual Mitchell Report. We're sure everyone will be drawing up a Cognac and poring through tonight.

Well, perhaps not, but we've devoured pretty much the whole thing — it's a quick read — and we can say with 100 percent certainty that we are no closer to the truth about steroids in Major League Baseball over the last 20 years than we were this morning. ( The Sporting Blog states this in the plainest, most eloquent way possible.) Bud Selig gave his press conference of empty platitudes, Suzyn Waldman stopped touching herself (as Drew memorably put it), Theo Epstein took a couple of hits and we all got to titter and speculate for a while. (And we got to see Jose Canseco kicked out of the press conference.)

But honestly: This is what MLB paid $20 million for? This took nearly two years? Essentially, Sen. Mitchell has two sources, a bunch of media reports, Jose Canseco's book and every player in baseball (save two) ignoring his requests to talk. The only reason Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte are in here is because they were unfortunate enough to have acquaintances who had no choice but to talk. The report has brought us no closer, because nothing possibly could. We don't think this is going to bring us any closure, because the report is so obviously not comprehensive.

Everyone wants us to move on. That's fine with us; we've been wanting to do that for a while anyway. But the people in this document are guilty scapegoats; they're the unlucky folks who got caught. (Kind of.) Is that enough to discontinue suspicion of everyone? They hope so. We highly doubt it.

(Huge, huge thanks to Greg Lindsay, Noah Robischon and Matt Sussman for their help today. Now, we're gonna go sleep for a few days.)