Mitchell report due Thursday

No sense ignoring it anymore:

The Mitchell report will be released on Thursday, following a 2 PM press conference. 60-80 players are expected to be named, and ESPN has confirmed that All-Stars will be among them.

Mitchell’s ties to the Red Sox have been well documented since he was first assigned to this role (he’s an investor and will resume his position as director once the investigation concludes). His role casts doubt over the integrity of his report, and many suspected that he was involved when the whistle was blown on Paul Byrd during the ALCS with Boston down two games.

At some point between now and the end of the 2004 World Series, I repressed the memories of the shady tactics surrounding the acquisition of the Red Sox by the Henry group. I probably hadn’t thought about it at all in the last year or so, but in his excellent story on the Mitchell investigation, Howard Bryant recaps the controversial purchase.

“The commissioner was accused of engineering the $660 million Red Sox transaction to the Henry group, while various other competitors to buy the Red Sox, such as HBO and CableVision founder Charles Dolan, believed the Henry group’s bid had not been the highest. Dolan reportedly believed he had outbid Henry by nearly $100 million, and a bid by Miles Prentice was said to be the highest, at $755 million. Selig denied any involvement in managing the sale of the team or that he favored Henry, who had owned the Florida Marlins, or Werner, who endured a turbulent experience as owner of the San Diego Padres during the early 1990s when baseball was embroiled in a rift between large- and small-market franchises. Selig, who was fond of Werner, watched the bitterly divided owners push Werner out of the game in 1993 and told him he would run a team again one day.”

As a Red Sox fan, it’s a difficult situation to rationalize.

On one hand, we have the best ownership group in baseball, and we should be glad to have an insider leading the investigation.

But on the other hand, do you really want to owe a favor to the devil? And as fans of the game, can we trust a report that is surrounded by such a huge conflict of interest?

The worst case scenario for Sox fans is that Mitchell may feel pressure to name Red Sox players. If Sox players are absent from his list, it would cast suspicion over the report and could hurt Mitchell’s career as a public servant.

Plus, Selig desperately wants this whole issue to go away, and having a well-received report drafted by a senator would certainly help. But the report can’t be well-received unless it appears to be unbiased, and what better way to make it look unbiased than to finger a Boston icon?

Maybe I’m being paranoid, but it makes me nervous that Mitchell has to call out some Red Sox just to qualify his report in the public arena. And you have to assume that he had more access to Red Sox staff through personal relationships than he had with any other club, so implicating information may have been more readily available.

The whole thing is absolutely terrifying to me.

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