Mitchell steroid report fingers top baseball stars

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dozens of top baseball stars including Roger Clemens were named on Thursday in the long-awaited Mitchell Report on steroids use, which Major League Baseball hopes will help clean its tarnished image.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dozens of top baseball stars including Roger Clemens were named on Thursday in the long-awaited Mitchell Report on steroids use, which Major League Baseball hopes will help clean its tarnished image.

The sharply worded report by former Sen. George Mitchell called for unannounced year-round steroids tests to help end a pervasive culture of performance-enhancing drug use at all 30 Major League teams.

The players named included a virtual Hall of Fame of some of the sport's biggest stars: Clemens, Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, Eric Gagne, Miguel Tejada, David Justice, Chuck Knoblauch and Andy Pettitte.

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"For more than a decade there has been widespread illegal use of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing substances by players in Major League Baseball in violation of federal law and baseball policy," Mitchell told a news conference.

"The response by baseball was slow to develop and was initially ineffective," said Mitchell, who launched the independent investigation into doping in baseball at the behest of MLB Commissioner Bud Selig in March 2006,

He said steroid use fell after the adoption of a mandatory random drug-testing program in 2002, but club officials routinely discussed substance use when evaluating players.

HGH USE GREW

And while testing since 2002 spurred a decline in steroid use, the use of Human Growth Hormone rose because, unlike steroids, it is not detectable through urine testing, he said.

Mitchell said former baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent told him the problem was possibly "the most serious challenge that baseball has faced since the 1919 Black Sox scandal" -- when Chicago White Sox players conspired with gamblers to affect the outcome of the World Series championship.

So pervasive was the use of steroids -- which help build muscles and endurance quickly -- Mitchell said, that "hundreds of thousands of children" were also using them to do better in baseball, a sport long considered America's favorite pastime.

To help discourage use among aspiring professionals, the 311-page report advocates testing the top 100 prospects prior to the major league draft.

But Mitchell, who helped broker the 1998 Good Friday Accord to bring peace to Northern Ireland and was once U.S. Senate Majority leader, stressed the report was not the start of a protracted witch-hunt.

"Baseball does not need and cannot afford to engage in a never-ending search for the name of every player who ever used performance-enhancing substances," he said.

It was unclear whether players named in the report would receive penalties from MLB, which was scheduled to hold a news conference to discuss the findings later on Thursday.

The report advises against disciplining players for past use, unless Selig believes "the conduct is so serious that discipline is necessary to maintain the integrity of the game."

(Writing by Mark Egan, editing by Patricia Zengerle)