The Mitchell Report - such as it is

Baseball has come out with the Mitchell Report.

If you're not aware of the Mitchell Report, it's the final report of an investigation into steroid (ab)use in major league baseball, the report of an investigation lead by former US Senator George Mitchell.

Mitchell's investigation has lead to a report that MLB is considering as the official and nearly-final word on performance enhancing drug use in baseball during the era from the early-1990's through the early- or mid-2000s. In the report, a number of current- or former-MLB players were implicated as being steroid users - on an occasional or regular basis.

And I don't care.

I don't give the faintest, littlest, tiniest crap about the report in the least.

Owners, players, reporters, fans all looked the other way for a decade or so.

We watched Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa smack record numbers of home runs out of the park for a number of years. We saw more 50-HR seasons in the 1990s (13 of them) than we saw in any previous decade, until the 2000s, which has twelve already with two years to go. And we came up with excuses about better weight training, smaller ballparks, expansion, and weaker pitchers at the bottom end of the bullpen.

And I'm okay with that.

Yes, baseball needs to find a way to get rid of steroids from the game, but baseball needs to do that by moving forward and negotiating with the player's association to start regular, random, effective testing in the game.

But what baseball needs to not do is to look backward and speculate. To not debate about clearing records of those who have been implicated, because we'll never know which homeruns, how many wins, which strikeouts were the results of steroids and which weren't.

A done bun can't be undone.

Let the records stand.

Let the players into the hall of fame because - like it or not - they were the best of this era no matter what.

And move on.

I don't want to ever hear about the Mitchell Report or the players named therin or who might or might not have used in the past. I don't even want to hear about who might or might not be using now - unless there's some sort of evidence to win the argument.

I

don't

care.

Countdown to 1000: Three to go, it's like a real frickin' countdown at this point. We're just about ready to light this candle.