ESPN’s Steve Phillips on WXYT: Thoughts on the Mitchell Report

Outside of listening to The Cotton Jones Basket Ride...is there anything better than diggin’ some Steve Phillips?

I’ll put myself in there, as well, quite honestly I was in the clubhouse, I got criticized for being there too much. I’m surprised by how pervasive this problem is. I really, truly thought maybe a handful of guys during my six years as general manager. I could always kind of identify the guys from the other team I thought were doing it but because there wasn’t a system in place, because there wasn’t a process or testing in place there was nowhere really to go with it and the reality is this is and this is the honest truth that every general manager wanted a level playing field where nobody took steroids, but because we couldn’t have it, we wanted a level playing field. I wasn’t going to go in and clean out my clubhouse and look in every shoebox and see who had syringes, who was doing this and who was doing that because in the end I could do that, and clean it all up and then lose a lot of games and then go to my owner and say, but at least are guys are clean, they’re skinny, they’re good guys they don’t have any roid rage, but were not winning any games. So that’s the reality and that’s the truth of it, that everybody wanted it clean, but until there was a system in place, they could do it and I don’t think it’s Bud Selig’s fault, exclusively, I don’t think it’s the union’s fault, I think everybody deserves the blame for it and now the responsibility is on everybody to clean it up.