After years of BALCO and Barry Bonds, fans like Burman are almost numb to news that yet another player took a pharmaceutical short cut. The Mitchell Report might have been bigger and more noteworthy, but its shock value wore off a long time ago.
"I'm kind of indifferent to it, I have to say," Burman said as he watched Thursday night's NFL game between Houston and Denver at Goose Island, a bar near Wrigley Field.
He wasn't alone. From coast to coast, in cities home to both major leagues and bar leagues, the public's reaction to the Mitchell Report was largely a shrug of indifference.
Baseball's two-year investigation simply confirmed what most fans had already assumed. If there was surprise about any players, it was the ones not named in the 311 pages.
Even the news that Roger Clemens was accused of spending part of his stellar career shooting up failed to generate much outrage.
"I really think, over the last decade, that we've been so inundated with athletes using performance-enhancing drugs that nobody is shocked by this report," said Eric Bronson, a sociology professor at Quinnipiac University who teaches "Sociology of Sport."
"You have to remember," Bronson added, "professional sports are more along the lines of entertainment than anything else right now. We're looking at sport as entertainment rather than sport as sport or competition."
Perhaps worst of all, fans doubt the report, no matter how embarrassing, will change anything.
"As a baseball fan, I just want to get over it. I just want to move on," said John Suwalski of Chicago. "It's not going to change anything."
It was impossible to avoid the Mitchell Report on Thursday. It was the lead story on both sports and news networks, and the report itself was downloaded 1.8 million times off MLB.com just in the first three hours after it was posted.
People were talking about it at sports bars and games throughout the country. It even caused a buzz at the women's volleyball final four at Arco Arena in Sacramento, Calif.
But as baseball has seen for the past decade, knowing and caring are two very different things.
Baseball has been dogged by whispers and rumors about steroids for almost two decades now, with suspicions of performance-enhancing drug use rising right along with the number of home runs. Most assumed Bonds was doping long before he was indicted for lying to a federal grand jury about his steroid use, and any player who bulks up or puts up career numbers is automatically suspect.
Yet fans continue to flock to the ballparks in droves. Major League Baseball set a total attendance record for the fourth straight season this year, drawing 79.5 million people. Eight clubs set season records.
"Every week there's something else. Every day practically," said David Swanson of Denver. "Eventually, it goes in one ear and out the other."
