Report shocks sports figures around the nation

President Bush said he hopes it marks the beginning of
the end to steroids.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Wow.

That’s what New York Giants defensive end Michael Strahan had to say after seeing the names in the Mitchell Report on doping in baseball.

The ramifications stretched far beyond baseball Thursday, sending reverberations through the other leagues and all the way to the White House, where President Bush’s spokeswoman expressed hope this “marks the beginning of the end of steroid abuse.”

Even an obscure middle reliever found himself on the defensive after being linked to a case that tarnished two of the game’s greatest players, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

“I’m not worried,” said St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Ryan Franklin, among the 86 current and former players implicated in a report nearly two years in the making.

But others did have concerns about the fallout from what might be the sport’s most scandalous day since the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

What about the Milwaukee Brewers, who just finalized a $10 million deal with new closer Eric Gagne — then read the embarrassing allegations that he received two shipments of human growth hormone and once questioned the supplier about how to get air out of a syringe?

“Our goal is to field the best team possible based on information we have in hand,” general manager Doug Melvin said in a statement. “While we were disappointed to see information from 2004 related to Eric in the report, we still firmly believe that his addition to the club makes us a much stronger team as we head into the 2008 campaign.”

Gagne finished up this season with the World Series champion Red Sox. Always outspoken, Boston pitcher Curt Schilling weighed in on the report.

“There will be no shortage of media opinions, castigating, berating and blaming all the names involved. Just remember that this will be coming from the very same people who, like many, turned a blind eye to what many of us believed when we were smack dab in the middle of all the things the Mitchell Report will say,” Schilling wrote on his blog, 38pitches.com.

Other sports certainly took note of baseball’s dirty laundry.

“Is it a dark day? I think there’s been a lot of dark days. You go back to the Black Sox scandal. There’s always been those moments. You go back to the early ’50s when college basketball was absolutely rife with point-shaving guys,” Miami Heat coach Pat Riley said. “There’s always something. Drugs, steroids.”

Tony Dungy, coach of the Super Bowl champion Indianapolis Colts, said everyone has been tainted by performance-enhancing drugs.

“There’s always a push in sports, and probably in life, to get ahead,” he said. “We’re all naive if we think that things haven’t happened and guys haven’t tried to get ahead in other ways in all sports. I think that’s just human nature.”

Said New York Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce: “I think it is a disgrace for the sport, baseball, whatever sport, if you have to use some kind of enhancement or some kind of performance to get ahead.”

“We all put in the same amount of hours of work throughout the year and for you to go and get something like that, especially if you are a guy with a big name, it makes no sense to me. It is something I would never hope to see in the National Football League and I hope baseball can deal with it and recover from it,” he said.

Campaigning in Iowa, Republican presidential candidate John McCain put most of the blame on the players’ union for blocking meaningful steps to clean up the sport, which has seen some of its biggest stars tainted by the stain of illegal substances.

“It’s time now for the players union to step forward and say ‘OK, we’ll save the game and the reputation of the game and cooperate with meaningful, tough punishments, and testing procedures so that we can prevent this from ever happening again,’ ” he said.