Caught! Three foreign NPB players named in Mitchell Report - Alex Cabrera, Jeff Williams and Adam Riggs

Edit! Added one more active player, Yakult's Adam Riggs!

The biggest news in the sports blogosphere right now is the Mitchell Report. For those who don't follow Major League Baseball, steroid and drug use has apparently been running rampant and ruining America's pastime and it was time that someone put a stop to it! So former U.S. Senator George Mitchell was tapped by Bud Selig after the cat was out of the bag reading Game of Shadows, the book that details how Barry Bonds' head has grown throughout his career.

89 current and former MLB players were named in the report and two Nippon Professional Baseball players were named: Seibu's Alex Cabrera and Hanshin's Jeff Williams.

Cabrera's name first pops up on page 94 of the report. Cabrera was with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2000 and a package arrived for him in September of that year. A snooping clubhouse employee - probably looking for stuff to take - found anabolic steroids and diet pills in the package, turned it over to the team and it was sent to the DEA. While the DEA took it's time thoroughly investigated the package the Diamondbacks had gotten rid of their potential problem shipped Cabrera to the Seibu Lions. The investigation was halted because Japan is really far away from Arizona. Cabrera has insisted that he does not know why the package has his name on it.

Williams paid for his steroids by check back in 2004 which turned out to be a bad idea because former Mets (!) bat boy Kirk Radomski turned it over to Mitchell. Williams is first named on page 227 and on pages 230 and 231 we get to read about how he and his minor league teammates (all five of whom were later called up to the big leagues, four of them to the L.A. Dodgers that year) had a little party in 1999. But rather than play cards and have drinks they injected themselves in the butt with steroids. Fun!

Whoa, I just realized something: Williams only played in L.A. from 1999 to 2002. He was already playing for Hanshin by 2004 which was also the year he helped Australia take the Silver at the Athens Olympics.

This is apparently bad timing for both players since I believe that their contracts were up after this past season. In fact, if I'm looking at this Asahi Shinbun story right, it looks like Williams was in contract negotiations this morning when the report went public. Oops.

Edit: I just picked up from here that I missed another current player: Adam Riggs of the Yakult Swallows is also mentioned in the report. His story unfolds on pages 211 to 212 and started when he was either with the Dodgers, Padres or Angels. Man, they must have nothing to do in California except inject themselves with steroids. In this case, there is even a scan of an international money order sent from Riggs to Radomski.