FIELD OF BROKEN DREAMS

A sizeable proportion of baseball's glitterati have, according to a report published by former senator George Mitchell, been taking performance-enhancing drugs. America's national game is as bent as professional cycling. Say it ain't so, George.
Mitchell's report fingers luminaries like Barry Bonds, Andy Pettitte and Miguel Tejada and, most damning of all, the iconic pitcher Roger Clemens, who is to American sport what, say, Sir Bobby Charlton is to British.
The breast beaters in the US media have been quick to condemn. Johnette Howard in Newsday was fairly typical: "The public was systematically deceived. The record book and rosters are polluted with cheats. This sport is filthy."
But the sport's apologists have also weighed in, questioning Mitchell's agenda and claiming a "conflict of interest" because he was born in Maine and there are no Boston Red Sox players listed. Clemens, incidentally, spent 12 years on the Red Sox roster.
There are, however, other questions for the punters here.
Why, for example, did it take a 74-year-old retired politician 18 months to out the baseball cheats when any writer with "insider knowledge" could have done the job in five minutes? Discovering that Bonds, Pettitte and Tejada were doping is like noticing that the sun rises in the east.
The answer is that specialist sports writers (cycling and cricket being the other prime examples) tend to keep their whistles in their pockets when scandal threatens to invade their own little province.
Tour de France journalists are not going to dive into a cycling cesspit and pull out the corpses when it could mean an end to their annual month-long jolly round one of the most civilised countries in Europe.
Specialist cricket writers, particularly the former players turned journos, also tend to fade into the background when anything remotely controversial crops up. They consistently covered up Freddie Flintoff's booze problem - common knowledge in the game - and went AWOL when Bob Woolmer was found dead in his Caribbean hotel room.
Baseball hacks as a whole, as has now been proven, are also guilty of a gross dereliction of duty.