Of course we are all talking about Roger Clemens and steroids and what a bad guy Roger is for using them, while ignoring the fact that we Astros fans are all happy (well, most are happy) that we acquired known steroid user Miguel Tejada.
We are the proud, the many, the hypocrites. Hitting .300 absolves a player on our team from scorn for using steroids.
Roger Clemens is no longer an Astro, having deserted us for the bright lights of the big media, so he isn’t afforded the same absolution by Astro fans. We have decided (most of us, it seems) that Brian McNamee is a bastion of honesty and truthfulness. It has escaped most people that only a year ago, he gave an interview saying the exact opposite.
And please check out Jose Ortiz’ interview with Clemens’ lawyer.
Now, for a fun discussion, let’s suppose you, the reader, are Roger Clemens, and let’s suppose that McNamee IS lying and he never injected you with anything. How would YOU go about proving you are innocent of the accusations?
Now, for something completely different, here is John Brattain’s take on the MLBPA and the steroid issue. I’ve always liked to save the best for last.
Tags: Houston Astros, MLB
Here’s an article by Peter Gammons and whatever you think of him, it’s still worth reading and considering.
Bart Giamatti and integrity
posted: Saturday, December 22, 2007
Former Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent was a guest this weekend on Bob Costas’s radio show — the best show of its kind — and in linking Gaylord Perry’s admitted cheating to the current steroids scandal, suggested that Perry, as well as those of the steroids generation, should be ineligible for the Hall of Fame.
Vincent, ever thoughtful and passionate, cited a suspension for cheating issued by then-National League President A. Bartlett Giamatti that was considered excessive by the media and, naturally, the Players Association. As we all now have to deal with the notions of cheating and its relation to Cooperstown, it seems a good time to recall the words of the most eloquent and intellectual voice of most of our lifetimes.
Giamatti wrote “Baseball fits America. Above all, it fits so well because it embodies the antithetical, complementary interplay of individual and group that we so love, and because it conserves our longing for the rule of law while licensing our resentment of lawgivers.”
The suspension that escaped Vincent’s recall was a 10-game suspension given to Phillies pitcher Kevin Gross for being caught with sandpaper. In a sport where wink, wink and nod, nod is so common, Giamatti considered Gross’s offense a violation of the essential integrity of a game that has nothing without its integrity.
Years later, when Sammy Sosa was caught with a corked bat, George Will put that, and the Gross ruling, in far better perspective than I could type.
Will wrote:
In 1987 pitcher Kevin Gross of the Philadelphia Phillies was caught with a small patch of sandpaper affixed to his glove, and a sticky substance on his glove. Sandpaper can be used to scuff a ball’s surface, changing its wind resistance and hence its movement when pitched. Foreign substances also can alter the movement of a thrown ball, and it is no defense to say, as a pitcher said when indignantly denying that he put a foreign substance on the ball: “Everything I use on it is from the good ol’ U.S.A.!”
Gross was suspended for 10 days by Giamatti, then National League president. A former president of Yale and a professor of Italian and comparative literature, Giamatti died in 1989 shortly into his five-month tenure as baseball commissioner, after imposing a lifetime suspension from baseball on Pete Rose for gambling on games. Giamatti knew exactly why “boys will be boys” is not a satisfactory response to paltering with the rules of the game. Most of baseball’s punishable offenses involve fighting or other violence that arises from the heat of competition. While such acts cannot be tolerated, Giamatti wrote, “It must be recognized that they grow often out of impulse, and the aggressive, volatile nature of the game and of those who play it.”
Such offenses, he said, are less execrable than acts “of a cool, deliberate, premeditated kind” — acts that have “no organic basis in the game and no origins in the act of playing.” They are acts of cheating that are “intended to alter the very conditions of play to favor one person.” Such acts “are secretive, covert acts that strike at and seek to undermine the basic foundation of any contest declaring the winner — that all participants play under identical rules and conditions.”
Giamatti understood that a team sport, like democratic society itself, involves a precious and precarious equipoise of individual striving and collective endeavor. In sport or society, break the rules that govern that equipoise and hark! what discord follows.
As we wrestle with steroids and other artificial performance enhancing issues and who does or will belong in the most important Fall of Fame in sports, the thoughts of Giamatti and Will, two men passionately attached to baseball, are worth recalling.
I would call Mcnamee out. I’d tell him to do a live Q&A interview with him, me and a mediator.
Kind of what Roger is doing but with Mcnamee there.
joel,
i would bet LARGE quantities of $$$ that the feds wouldn’t never allow mcnamee to be FULLY questioned by mike wallace or any other reporter or mediator. remember that he is being used by them to get at all kinds of other people…
steve,
i remember a certain saying from ty cobb, that most saintly of ballplayers from back in the good old days when baseball was pure and played by gentle souls who played solely for the love of the game and abhorred the thought that they would receive any payment other than the delight of the fans for their efforts:
“baseball is a hard game played by hard men…”
and i think the world of peter gammons…
Yes, Lisa, it’s a tough game. And Bart agrees, saying that stuff done in the heat of battle was understandable and should not be as harshly judged as premeditated cheating. We know that guys try to cheat all the time to gain an edge. That doesn’t mean that cheating should go unpunished.
Things were in reasonable balance until Bug Selig, stooge of the owners (and an owner himself) became commissioner. I think that the players no longer felt the commissioner was acting in the game’s best interest. Maybe there were right.
Meanwhile, the players union made the call that they could ignore the drug problem because it wouldn’t affect their escalating salaries and such. They may have been right about that as well.
Did y’all see these stories about two marginal baseball players (one a former Astro) who faced the personal decision to use, or not to use, what they did, and how they now feel about it? Pretty interesting.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071221/COL22/712210401/1048/SPORTS
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2007/dec/21/past-catches-up-to-anabolic-prospect/
steve,
i’m still waiting for someone other than jose canseco to say – i did roids, i’m glad i did roids, i’d do em again and heck, i STILL use roids
as for roids = cheating, well, when fans attack ryan franklin and ramon castro and miguel tejada with the same zeal that they do bonds, mcgwire and clemens, who, by the way, have never even tested positive unlike franklin, well then, i might could change my mind. sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander if you reading me
as for the commissioner, well, there’s no doubt that the owners are deliriously happy with buddy boy. he’s breaking the players union more rapidly by the day.
it has been the owner’s main goal since 1976 and they are getting closer by the minute
the only owner i can think of who actually concerned himself with the game’s best interest was bart giamatti, and unfortunately, he died after only a few months