Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Not my most creative title ever, but it's perfectly reflective of my mood at the moment. Since I'm a self-proclaimed baseball lover, if you've been paying attention to the sports pages over the last week, you might have tuned in here today expecting to hear my commentary on the Mitchell report on steroids in baseball, a culmination of a 20 month, 20 million dollar investigation conducted by former Senator George Mitchell. The report details baseball's problem with drugs over the last decade or so, and specifically lists 75 current or former players who the investigation linked to performance enhancing drugs.

Trust me, in time, I will have plenty of commentary about the report. Not today, however. You might wonder why. Well, I haven't read the thing yet. It was realized at 2pm this afternoon, and is 409 pages in length. I'm not going to be trying to speak intelligently about something I haven't read. Shocking I know.

That brings me to my title. Once again, the media has managed to drive me to frustration, by acting quite predictably. As I said, the report wasn't released until 2 pm, which at this moment is roughly two hours ago. At this point, it's pretty clear that no media figure who is talking about the report has actually read it in full. Of course, being the media, this would never stop them from reporting on it and discussing it's ramifications. Hell, Jim Rome, whose show runs from 12 to 3 pm, spent large chunks of the first 2 hours of his show discussing the report, before he had even seen it. My favorite part was when he basically concluded "This is nothing new" based on a single sentence that a source had used to summarize the conclusions of the report. When I left work today at 3, The Drive on FOX with Chris Myers was laying out their virtual poll for the day - "Does the Mitchell report change your opinion of baseball?" Really? It's been available for an hour, an hour in which most of America is at work, is 409 pages long, and you think there's some significance to our current reaction to it? Realistically, all anyone listening at that point knows about the report is what you're about to tell them, and you admit you haven't read the whole thing yet.

At this moment, the most the average baseball fan has really seen is a list of the 75 players that were specifically named in the report. And those names are pulled totally out of context, so I'm sure no one has a clue what most of them have been named for. They might have heard some or all of Mitchell's press conference at the release of the report.

Look, I know this is a big story and it merits a lot of attention. I also know that the average baseball fan isn't going to actually read the report, so I'm not really expecting the media to give them time to do so. But, it would be nice if the media would actually read and process the thing before "educating" the waiting public on it.

By the way, if you're interested in actually reading the report, here it is.