Having watched with wariness how the Feds’ laudable investigation of a cabal of fitness quacks had morphed into a seemingly obsessive crusade to take down superstar athletes—including Barry Bonds—I wondered whether the San Francisco investigation had degenerated into a drive-by character assassination of innocent players. I knew that Pettitte, in particular, had a straight-arrow reputation, so I set out to determine whether he (or others) had been unfairly smeared in a media frenzy. Law-enforcement officials confirmed to me that some of the names published by the Times were indeed inaccurate, but they refused to say which ones.
When an uncensored version of the Grimsley affidavit finally became public before Christmas, the names of Pettitte, Clemens and some others identified by the Times were not mentioned. But all the players they identified did turn up in December’s Mitchell Report on “juicing” in baseball. My instincts were right, but I’m certainly relieved that I never wrote a story debunking the Times report, since Pettitte was the first noteworthy player named by Mitchell to confirm his use of human growth hormone. (He said he used it only briefly to speed his recovery from an injury. Clemens, on the other hand, claims to be innocent.) I’m still feeling uncomfortable, though, about the Feds’ use of powerful criminal-investigation tools (search warrants, grand-jury testimony) to out athletes who may have cheated their competitors but were not even low-level drug distributors or money launderers.
A law-enforcement source told me that the San Francisco Feds got the final pieces of evidence they needed to complete their criminal case against Barry Bonds while the World Series was still going on, but decided to hold off on indicting him until after the Series because they didn’t want to spoil the fun. (That chore was left to Alex Rodriguez and his agent.) This restraint suggests prosecutors had some sense of proportion about how to use their considerable powers. But Mitchell is right when he says that it’s really the duty of baseball to police its own frontline cheaters. Don’t the Feds have more important wrongs to right?
