Valley PR Blog

To admit or not to admit

By Len Gutman on December 19th, 2007 In Hype!

You don’t have to be a baseball fan to understand the significance of the Mitchell Report, and you don’t have to be a PR expert to learn from the various strategies we’re seeing played out in the aftermath of the report.

In the past few days we’ve seen a variety of PR tactics being employed by player agents and lawyers — and I do mean tactics. Because guilty or not, each player on the report is going to have to address the situation eventually. Since it doesn’t appear there are going to be any legal ramifications from the report, the question becomes how will each player manage their reputations.

Roger Clemens is easily the most prominent player outed in the report (since we already knew about Barry Bonds). Clemens strategy has been to deny the accusations, despite some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary.

Several other players have played the “I didn’t inhale” strategy, in other words admit to taking steroids or human growth hormone (HGH) once or twice only. Orioles second baseman Brian Roberts is using this tactic, as is former player and current ESPN analyst Fernando Vina. Clemens’ teammate Andy Pettitte was the first player to “come clean” after the Mitchell Report with his statement about HGH.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of the 80 or so players outed in the report have opted to remain quiet, hoping the storm will blow over. Good luck with that.

I’ve long been a believer in the crisis strategy of coming clean as quickly and fully as possible and I suspect baseball fans will quickly forgive Pettitte and Roberts and others who claim to have tried HGH a few times. For Clemens, I guess he hasn’t learned anything from the Bonds situation or the Rafael Palmeiro fiasco (Palmeiro flatly denied using steroids at a congressional hearing, famously wagging his finger at the cameras, only later to be caught with a positive roids test).

Of course, what if Clemens is indeed clean? Not much he can do at this point is there? This is one of the main criticisms of the Mitchell Report — so what if they did or didn’t do steroids, baseball was looking the other way and there was no testing program. Do we blame the players? Do we blame management? Mitchell says we should blame everyone and start over with new and improved regulations. And if that’s how it ends up working, perhaps Clemens’ deny everything strategy is smart. His legacy might be tainted, but it’s only speculation and the worst case scenario is he doesn’t get elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. If he did do the crime, that’s a pretty easy sentence.

Regardless, you know it’s bad when Pete Rose comes out and tells the world these athletes have tainted the game!

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