Mayne voices his opinion

Brent Mayne, a product of Costa Mesa High and Orange Coast College who went on to play 15 seasons of Major League baseball from 1990 through 2004, called KSPN radio Thursday afternoon to weigh in on the Mitchell Report, the culmination of an investigation into steroid use in the game that was released Thursday.

Mayne, who said his 1,279-game career put him right in the middle of the so-called steroid era, told Steve Mason, host of “The Steve Mason Show” that he never dabbled in performance-enhancing drugs, despite watching an increasing number of peers use them to try to supplement their careers.

“For me, I think it was moral, more than anything,” Mayne said of his reasons for not using. “Obviously, there were some health issues that are unknown, or whatever. But, thinking back, even if they said it was totally safe, I just feel that morally, I just couldn’t do it. I just felt like it was cheating. And I defy anybody that took it to say they didn’t have that in the back of their head.”

Mayne condemned baseball executives, Commissioner Bud Selig, the players’ assn. and others for not drawing attention to the problem sooner.

He also expressed pessimism that drug testing would ever catch up with those creating performance-enhancing drugs capable of avoiding detection.

“One thing I’ve heard people say that I can agree with is that it’s just societal,” said Mayne, who was a first-round draft pick (13th overall) of the Kansas City Royals in the 1989 amateur draft out of Cal State Fullerton.

“The day of the pure athlete is long gone. Regardless of sport, it just doesn’t exist anymore. We live in a society that if you have a leg that twitches too much, you can take a pill for it. I just think that there’s just, it’s just the pure athlete is long gone and all the records that were previously set are ... it’s impossible to compare them to what’s going on now ... I just think that there’s so much more money on the side of taking [performance-enhancing drugs] than there is on the side of catching, that they’ll never, ever, ever catch them, ever. It will always be 10 steps ahead.”

Mayne said the use of steroids was not evident when he came into the league (September of 1990).

But by the time he began playing on the Texas Rangers teams of 1993 and 1994, he knew “there was something going on.

“Then, it really came into focus for me when I had people that I grew up with, who I knew in baseball circles, who were going from average players to superstars overnight. And it just became a full-blown epidemic and everybody knew about it. Owners knew, players knew, everybody knew. But it took it to get this far for it all to come out.”

— From staff reports