I guess it took a couple of years for the reporters to get to him for a quote:
Jack Cust still wonders why his name appeared in the Mitchell Report.
I think it’s because he did a whole bunch of steroids. Oh, there’s more?
“With all the other stuff going on, with a lot of the guys coming out recently -- big-name guys -- to me it’s kind of funny they spent all that money on the Mitchell Report and a bunch of hearsay and the guy who made all the money off it happened to work for the Red Sox. Were there any Red Sox on the report? To me, that’s kind of a joke. How does that happen? It’s coming out now with guys on that team. The guy worked for the Red Sox -- they spent all kinds of millions of dollars -- and then no one there had their name brought up.”
Many have offered a similar criticism of George Mitchell -- who sits on the Red Sox board -- for allegedly overlooking Red Sox players. Taking such an oversight seriously, however, is to give way too much credit to George Mitchell and Major League Baseball for cunning.
Simply by reading the Mitchell Report, it becomes obvious that it only sought to report on the low-hanging fruit. Specifically, to parrot the names that were turned up in the course of ongoing criminal investigations such as BALCO, the McNamee business and the Radomski business. George Mitchell didn’t whitewash Red Sox names -- he simply never bothered to look.
The Mitchell Report was a very thin slice of pie. The fact that the big names that were missed -- including Red Sox like Big Papi and Manny -- was a function of Mitchell’s failure to look into or even really comment upon international sources of drugs. To give the Mitchell Report any weight is to believe that a couple of lowlife personal trainers and a mad scientist in the Bay Area were the alpha and omega of baseball’s PED problem. Such an assumption is foolish.
There was a big story at the end of June that almost everyone ignored, and that was about the feds probing Miami physician Pedro Publio Bosch, who allegedly has tons of ties to Latin American ballplayers and allegedly has been a source of hCG, which is the drug for which Manny Ramirez was suspended. Word on the street is that Bosch is talking. You can bet that, if he is talking, he’s going to give up a ton of names, none of which appeared in the Mitchell Report.
So hold tight, Jack Cust. Others will join you eventually.
