MAJOR LEAGUE Baseball suffered the most painful day in its history on Thursday afternoon, when former Sen. George Mitchell released a report he’d been working on for nearly two years.

The report, which has been a topic of conversation in baseball circles for over a year, documented the rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs throughout baseball over the past two decades. 

Mitchell’s report, compiled with the help of a handful of informants, ruined the lives and legacies of 86 players. The players named weren’t nobodies, as Mitchell’s findings determined it wasn’t as if the only players juicing were the last men on rosters, or fringe players trying to remain in the majors.

The opposite is the truth, actually. Turns out, according to Mitchell, that a slew of the game’s best current players, and even some future Hall of Famers, have cheated.

Of the players named in Mitchell’s 302-page report, more than 30 are still active in the game. So while they panicked, frantically making phone calls to friends, family and attorneys on Thursday, the game of baseball mourned.

What good came out of Mitchell’s report? None. What did his report accomplish? It allowed us to find out–based on hearsay from people we don’t know any more than the kid serving us burgers at a fast-food joint–that steroid use was prevalent in baseball over the past 15 or so years.

Wow, earth-shattering stuff. Baseball players took steroids. Want a few more brain-busters? Eating fast food makes you heavy, and two multiplied by two equals four. Where is the news in that?

I’ve long thought that a ton of the game’s best players used steroids. The fact is simply that there wasn’t any testing in the game up until 2003, and now there is. Fewer players have tested positive for performance enhancers in each of the four years since testing was put in place.

The system was working: drugs were being eliminated from the game, and baseball was being cleaned up. The system would have continued working without Thursday’s hellacious news and worse-yet aftermath.

The fact is that Mitchell’s report, as well founded and enlightening as it was, was unnecessary. More than that, the game today is worse than it was on Wednesday, and fans are more upset than they have been since 1994, the last time a season was ended by way of a work stoppage.

Mitchell’s report served as a reminder to young people and to baseball fans everywhere that baseball players are not superhuman.

Soldiers, police officers, firefighters–they’re heroes. Not athletes, and especially not the 86 whose names were listed in Mitchell’s report. A report that was unnecessary and shouldn’t have ever been conducted or released in the first place, because nothing good will come from it.