Mike Nadel: Enabling managers mostly manage deceit

Go ahead. Be disgusted and outraged about all of baseball's cheating juicers. Just be sure to save some disgust and outrage for all of the managers who pretended it wasn't happening on their watch.

In his report on performance-enhancing drugs in the major leagues, former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell concluded that managers, coaches, trainers, GMs, team presidents, players' union officials, MLB officials and commissioner Bud Selig share the blame.

Managers come out looking especially bad.

Tony La Russa, for example, was complicit in the steroid use of Jose Canseco in Oakland and Mark McGwire in both Oakland and St. Louis. La Russa, who ripped Canseco for his 'roiding ways on national TV, inexplicably told Mitchell's investigators that he didn't know Canseco used steroids and human growth hormone. Liar!

Dusty Baker's San Francisco clubhouse was so rife with juicers, syringes and drugs that it might as well have had a sign in the doorway reading: "WELCOME TO BALCO II!" Yet somehow, Dusty - the ultimate players' manager - says he never noticed a thing. Go figure.

And here's a little anecdote from page 110 of the Mitchell Report:

"In 2000 or 2001, a visiting clubhouse manager working for the Minnesota Twins found a used syringe on top of a trash can in the visitors' clubhouse. He brought the incident to the attention of Twins manager Tom Kelly, who told him to dispose of the syringe and to be careful doing so. Kelly confirmed the incident and said that he did not report the incident to anyone because he felt it 'wasn't any of my business.'"

Beautiful! Is that classic head-in-the-sand behavior, or what?

With men like these in charge, the only surprise is that EVERY player wasn't juicing.

Thoughts on the Mitchell Report and other baseball news were featured prominently in recent editions of my blog, The Baldest Truth (www.thebaldesttruth.com). Here are some more excerpts:

The Bald List

Andy Pettitte's top five statements about his HGH use:

1. "My elbow hurt something fierce, and the medicinal marijuana wasn't helping a lick. (Though it did make me appreciate peanuts and Cracker Jack.)"

2. "Hey, pal, don't knock getting needles jabbed into your buttocks till you try it!"

3. "What's the big deal? We're entertainers. Do people criticize actresses for enhancing their 'performances' with Silicone implants?"

4. "Everybody else was doing it!"

5. "C'mon, give me credit. At least I didn't lie to a federal grand jury about it."

Acting Commish

Selig said the Mitchell Report "is a call to action, and I will act."

In fact, The Commish already has come up with a clever idea: Players on the team from the league that loses the All-Star Game won't be allowed to use Deca-Durabolin in the World Series.

Priorities in Place

Thank goodness our elected officials in Washington are planning to get involved in baseball's steroids mess again.

I'd hate to think our legislators would waste their time balancing the budget and doing something about global warming and stopping the human tragedy in Darfur and ending pork-barrel spending and keeping quality jobs from being outsourced to other countries and eliminating the alternative minimum tax and making some tough choices about immigration and getting our brave soldiers out of a horrid place where the mission supposedly was accomplished 55 months ago.

Edmonds Era Ends

There hasn't a more exciting center fielder over the past decade than Jim Edmonds.

Oh, sure, he'd occasionally make a play look more difficult than it really needed to be. But he'd still catch just about everything hit near him - and, with his amazing, full-out dives, some baseballs that weren't hit anywhere near him.

He's been hurt so often the past few years, it's hard to blame St. Louis for trading the 37-year-old Edmonds to the Padres. The Cardinals even paid San Diego $2 million to take him off their hands (and their payroll).

Still, I'll miss having Edmonds in the NL Central. And if he stays reasonably healthy for the Padres this season - a big if, of course - the Cards will miss Edmonds, too.

Pitcher Interrupted

Last week's news of the Cubs cutting one-time savior Mark Prior merited merely a brief mention within AP's Kosuke Fukudome story and only a 10-paragraph item on the team's own Web site.

This for perhaps the most ballyhooed prospect in Cubs history and a guy once on the verge of being baseball's best pitcher.

Prior went 18-6 with a 2.43 ERA in his first full season, led the Cubs into the 2003 NLCS and was considered so mechanically sound that he would be one Cubbie hurler who never would have to deal with injuries.

Then, as the injuries mounted, many people thought he was faking. Why he'd be faking and sacrificing millions of future dollars ... none of these geniuses ever provided an adequate answer for that one.

I never really got to know Prior. The few times I did have serious, one-on-one conversations with him, I found him to be intelligent, proud and sensitive.

Whether it's an athlete or any other human being, it's a shame when an obviously talented individual cannot realize his or her potential for whatever reason.

And so I wish Mark Prior good luck as he tries to get healthy and re-start a career that was interrupted before it ever got the chance to be great.

Mike Nadel (mikenadel@sbcglobal.net) is the Chicago sports columnist for GateHouse News Service.