By John Klima
Staff Writer

I miss Willie Mays.

I never saw him play, but I know about the arm. I never saw him run, but I know about his speed. I never saw him hit, but I know about his power. Perhaps I was born too late to see a natural ballplayer.

Say it ain’t so, George.

The era of the natural ballplayer is over and the names are out. The Mitchell Report leaves not a sense of finality but of uncertainty. Asking the Commissioner’s Office, the clubs and the Players Association to work together to eliminate drug use isn’t as simple as convincing the Irish to stop hiding pipe bombs and tossing Molotov cocktails.

And yet, the most explosive name is not one of the players, so many of which are not surprises, but the name on the cover: the Commissioner.

More than anything else, the Mitchell Report is Bud Selig’s penance. It is the document of a repentant man, but it is also an attempt to preserve posterity at the cost of great pain. To call the naming of names selective is perhaps too short-sighted; shotgun might be more appropriate. All of the Commissioner’s Men covered the steroid scandal the way the rest of us have – a rumor here, an innuendo there – in the quest to find those willing to turn their backs on baseball, to sacrifice their own livelihoods so that Selig may preserve his own. There is no real way to manipulate the kind of information an investigation like this may yield. You may find footprints, but it’s difficult to capture the beast. The truth is in a landfill somewhere.

And, yet, the beast lives. The beast is the Players Association. The beast is what allows players to get away with whatever increases their value. Human Growth Hormone will continue to rage through the veins of the game’s elite, untested for and safeguarded by an ironclad union that has more protective power than even mighty Major League Baseball. Baseball is a backroom business, where the multi-millionaires sit around the table and snipe at each other, and decades-old blood brews sour and vindictive.

If you want a real historical document of the steroid era, you’d have to walk inside the walls of the Players Association and have players break rank like scabs. You’d have to go inside the offices of some of the game’s elite agents and steal their contact lists. Players love to be waited on.

If you want the history of corruption, you’d have to unearth the landfill of the Players Association, which protects players both honorable and manipulative. You’d have to delve into the dark closets of players still active, productive, famous and adored to find illegal boxes of the stuff that makes them the very commodity that Major League Baseball sells and, in turn, wages a constant inner battle of how much to tear down and how much to leave standing.

I love watching these players and you love watching them. Fans have made it clear that they will spend huge sums of money to support sluggers and flamethrowers. The truth is that what’s good for business is to leave the closet closed and the landfill undisturbed. So how does the game reconcile the need to co-exist with that which it vilifies, yet pads its pockets with?

Selig offered hints that the names in the Mitchell Report are a blacklist, suggesting that he will go against Mitchell’s advice and consider punishment on a case-by-case basis. That is direct retaliation at the Players Association and will be considered as such. That’s why Mitchell can’t solve this. Northern Ireland was a jig compared to this. Just as the Steroid Era was spawned by the forces that drove the Union and MLB apart, Mitchell’s suggestion that the memory of the same era should pull the two together is noble, but speaks of a woeful ignorance to the history and the culture of this game.

And this is what we are left with. This report should not be considered the definitive account of the era, but it is as close as we will ever get. Selig has sought penance through purging. He has allowed to be told what he hopes is enough to grant him admission to a sanctified place in baseball’s historical pantheon, his statue next to Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis and Bowie Kuhn and, most certainly, in front of the small edifice of Happy Chandler. This is as much about maintaining his integrity as it is about the game’s integrity.

Selig, like the rest of us, knows that the truth was left decaying in the dumpsters of every Major League ballpark in America. But landfills are messy places to do our penance. Perhaps there was a Kirk Radomski in every city. There certainly wasn’t a Willie Mays.