Major League Baseball has taken some steps forward earlier this week and then backpedaled a few days later.

MLB announced early part of this week that they would be releasing the names of athletes who tested positive for amphetamines for the first time to the public on its report on its drug-testing program. But a few days later, the organization said it would not.

According to league’s VP Rob Manfred during his telephone interview with the New York Times the commissioner’s office and the players union would withhold the details of positive amphetamine tests since “under our program, first-time positive tests for amphetamines are treated as confidential, and because of that, those numbers will be kept private.”

“The report will detail the number of tests conducted this year, the number of positives for steroids, the names of the substances players tested positive for and the number of therapeutic-use exemptions but will not include the total number of amphetamine positives,” Manfred said.

MLB officials say it’s a case of internal misunderstanding; there are some people, however, who have this suspicion that elite sluggers could have tested for the banned compound, thus the cop-out.

They asked why release the names of those who tested for anabolic steroids and not for amphetamines? They’re both prohibited compounds, so why the bias for cases involving amphetamines now?

From the New York Times:

Baseball has tested for amphetamines since 2006. A player is not publicly identified or suspended the first time he tests positive, so few failed tests have been reported. Only two players — Neifi Pérez and Mike Cameron — have been suspended for testing positive, and two others — Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds — have been linked to first-time positive tests in published reports.

In January, baseball’s drug-testing administrator, Dr. Bryan W. Smith, is scheduled to release a report on the status of the program, including some testing data.

The decision to release some information came in response to a recommendation from George J. Mitchell, who had conducted an internal investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. In his report, which was released last December, Mitchell said the testing program needed more transparency, including the aggregate data on testing results. In April, the commissioner’s office and the players union amended the drug-testing program in response to Mitchell’s recommendation and, as part of the new policy, said the program’s administrator would include aggregate drug-testing data in his report.

However, both sides agreed not to reveal the number of first-time positive amphetamine tests

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By next month, the Mitchell Report will be a year old.

In his interview with AP, George J. Mitchell, the former Democratic senator who headed the investigation on the use of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone in baseball, thinks something positive came out of that inquiry. He said doping in the Major League decreased as a result of the report.

“The impression I get is that it’s had a significant impact of reducing usage, although that still remains very difficult to measure with any complete precision,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell, who now chairs an international law firm and works as the chancellor to a university in Northern Ireland, has some regrets when it comes to the report’s impact on the lives of the people who got implicated in the drug scandal.

“Obviously as a human being, I regret and don’t take pleasure in someone else’s misfortune, whether I have any relationship to it or not,” Mitchell said. “What we did was to try to meet the obligation which we’d undertaken, and we did so. Each player involved made his decision on how to respond.”

The 20-month and 409-page investigative report have named 89 players in all, including Roger Clemens whom the AP article tagged as “the report’s biggest loser”.

Headed to the Hall of Fame with 354 wins before the Mitchell Report, his Cooperstown chances deteriorated when Mitchell made public McNamee’s allegations that the seven-time Cy Young Award winner had used steroids and human growth hormone before they were banned. It led to a high-profile congressional hearing in February in which McNamee accused Clemens’ wife, Debbie, of using HGH, and the Department of Justice was asked to investigate whether the pitcher lied when he denied McNamee’s account.

In addition, Clemens sued McNamee for defamation, a case still in its early stages. In the fallout from the suit, the New York Daily News reported Clemens had a decade-long relationship with country star Mindy McCready that began when she was 15. Clemens denied having an affair with a 15-year-old but didn’t specifically address whether he had a romance with McCready.

The former Majority Leader acknowledged that there still so much that needs to be done to eradicate use of PEDs in the sport.

“I would be very doubtful that it is completely clean in the sense nobody is using,” he said. “You don’t know whether this is a temporary response because of the attention it’s gotten and whether over time it will begin to resume an increase. I think that’s unlikely given the aggressive nature of the response, but it’s something you have to be continuously concerned about.”

“The most important thing is to create an attitude which reflects the awareness that this is a dynamic ongoing program,” he said. “You can never reach the stage where you can say, we solved it, that’s it. You may have solved this drug, but there’s a lot of money involved and there are a lot of people who are seeking to make some of that money by creating new illegal drugs. And so you have to have a constant attention, constant focus, constant effort.”

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Barry Bonds’ defense team got five of the 15 pending charges dismissed against their client, and for the controversial slugger, that’s way better than scoring several home runs.

From AP:

Home run champion Barry Bonds won a reduction of the criminal charges against him Monday when a federal judge in San Francisco dismissed five of the 15 pending counts.

Bonds, 44, is due to go on trial in March in the court of U.S. District Judge Susan Illston on charges of making false statements and obstructing justice in 2003 grand jury testimony in a sports steroids probe.

The former San Francisco Giants slugger is accused of lying when he denied ever receiving anabolic steroids or human growth hormone.

In a pretrial ruling, Illston granted a request by Bonds’ six defense lawyers for dismissal of five of the false statements counts on the grounds they were legally defective.

The judge found that two counts duplicated other counts, two were based on ambiguous questions or answers and one other charge contained a typo in which prosecutors left out a key word.

The home run king, however, is still facing 10 criminal counts and that number could reach 11 since prosecutors are seeking a new indictment, intending to correct the charge containing the typo.

Each of the criminal counts carries a potential maximum penalty of five years in prison; however, some legal observers say Bonds could get a lesser sentence with just 2 ½ years in prison.

Illston is known to hand lenient verdicts, such as in the case of cyclist Tammy Thomas. The judge sentenced Thomas to six months in home confinement, not anywhere near the 2 ½ -year prison term prosecutors had sought.

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“Does greatness always come with a price? Can only someone with nothing to lose tell the whole truth? The play follows the turbulent careers of three very different teammates in baseball’s steroid era whose clubhouse secrets bring them under federal scrutiny.”

The above is the plot of the new play entitled “Back, Back, Back” by Itamar Moses. It will be shown at the Manhattan Theater Club at Stage 2 at NY City Center on Nov. 18.

The off-Broadway play tackles the controversial duo of American pro baseball circa 1990s – homerun kings and steroids. It specifically focuses on two former baseball bigwigs Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, plus the lesser known Walt Weiss. All three were former teammates at the Oakland Athletics.

Here’s a review of the preview performance of the play by Steve Kettmann, former baseball beat writer and ghostwriter for Jose Canseco’s tell-all offering “Juiced”. Excerpts from the article published at Daily News.

The play is a fictionalized inquiry into the strange saga of former Oakland A’s teammates Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. The daring and talented playwright tosses in a third teammate, the lesser known shortstop Walt Weiss, as a pretty good device to get some of his own points across.

…the play offers what about no one else has: A fully imagined moral response to the pressing question of how the steroid era in baseball happened and what it meant. That is what art is for. That is what it does. I’m still trying to figure out if the gents did not know that there was a real Jose Canseco who gave the world a real book called “Juiced,” that shot to No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list and precipitated congressional hearings, all thanks mostly to Canseco’s naming of his former teammate, McGwire, as a steroid user and his vivid description in the book of jabbing McGwire in the ass with a steroid needle.

The notion of an imagined conversation between Canseco and McGwire about why one of them wrote the book that would kill the Hall of Fame chances of the other is, to any real sports fans or to anyone who has grappled with the baseball issues of recent years, deeply fascinating and irresistible. For sheer creative bravado and raw courage, I think we owe young Berkeley, Calif.-born playwright Itamar Moses an extended ovation. And I defy anyone to question the man’s ability to imagine his way to truth that others have missed.

McGwire never confessed to steroid use but admitted to have used steroid precursor-androstenedione when it was still an over-the-counter supplement.

His impressive performance in the field has been under scrutiny since he has been linked by Canseco to performance-enhancing compounds. Canseco has repeatedly said in his book and in his interviews that he had personally administered his former buddy with steroids.

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