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–The most prominent name that has been thrown around is Roger Clemens<\/a>.\u00a0 Personally, I am not upset one bit about this.\u00a0 I have always seen Clemens as a pompous egomaniac, who always puts himself before the team, while using his family as a veil for his blatant selfishnes (a la Brett Favre).\u00a0 If he is named in this report, and it speaks with credibility, the big question now becomes:\u00a0 How is Roger Clemens any different than Barry Bonds?\u00a0\u00a0It will be fascinating to see how that plays out in the next couple of months\/years.\u00a0 Personally, I do not think their situations are different at all, but I can see three possible reasons why the media may cover them differently:\u00a0<\/p>\n- \n
- Clemens is\u00a0a pitcher–maybe the media could swing the public opinion in a way that says that pitchers do not gain quite the same advantages as hitters, and, honestly, I think there is some merit (to a point) in this argument.\u00a0 Just not in this case.\u00a0<\/li>\n
- Clemens is\u00a0perceived as a “good guy”\u00a0because he gives interviews and\u00a0is generally liked by the media.\u00a0\u00a0Again, in my\u00a0opinion, no reason to\u00a0give him a pass in the history books.<\/li>\n
- Clemens is white.\u00a0 I\u00a0DESPISE the\u00a0overuse of the race card (sounds like a topic for\u00a0a pet peeve) because\u00a0it has become so commonplace in any conversation that surrounds two players of different ethnicities, even when race has absolutely\u00a0NOTHING to do with\u00a0the topic.\u00a0 However, in this case, I\u00a0believe that if Clemens gets\u00a0that proverbial\u00a0on this, as compared to Bonds,\u00a0it\u00a0may be\u00a0legitimately to\u00a0do with race.\u00a0 Hopefully it will not happen,\u00a0but we\u00a0shall see.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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–The Bergen Record\u00a0is reporting that “several prominent New York Yankees will be named in the report<\/a>.”\u00a0 This begs the question:\u00a0 Who?\u00a0 Obviously, Clemens is\u00a0an odds-on favorite, but from everything I have heard, it sounds like it is going to be multiple players.\u00a0 Though I have not heard his name anywhere, it would not surprise me if Andy Pettitte was named because of his closeness to Roger, his ageless effectiveness and the fact that he quickly signed a new contract right before the release of this report.\u00a0 Further, though I am not\u00a0a Yankees fan in any way, I genuinely hope that the names Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter are as far from that report as Bryan Cimorelli\u00a0and Dan Doogan.\u00a0 I do not root for A-Rod or Jeter, but I do root for the game\u00a0of baseball.\u00a0 A-Rod, though he has his obvious faults, has\u00a0always been perceived to put\u00a0up\u00a0clean gawdy numbers in an era of very dirty gawdy numbers.\u00a0 And Jeter, well let us just say that\u00a0Derek Jeter (though I find myself often rooting against his also) actually is to baseball what everyone\u00a0believed\u00a0Cal Ripken, Jr was–a clean-cut, friendly, hard-nosed, talented, dedicated, hard-working, five-tooled shortstop who plays the game the “right way” (whatever that means).\u00a0 I will not get into my feelings on Ripken (wow, that would take a long post), but I do feel that Jeter is\u00a0who is portrayed to be,\u00a0and I hope that he is not implicated in any way by the Mitchell Report.<\/p>\n
–The days leading up to\u00a0the report saw a relative flurry of action\u00a0in the major leagues:<\/p>\n
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- The Orioles traded Miguel Tejada<\/a> to the Houston Astros for five prospects<\/li>\n
- The Giants signed Aaron Rowand<\/a> to a 5-year deal (as first reported in minor detail here on BSB<\/a>)<\/li>\n
- The Dodgers signed Andruw Jones<\/a>\u00a0to a 2-year deal<\/li>\n
- Other players that have changed teams recently include:\u00a0 Eric Gagne, Edgar Renteria, Orlando Cabrera, Paul Lo Duca, Randy Wolf, Jose Guillen, Miguel Cabera and Dontrell Willis, Elijah Dukes, Delmon Young, and Lastings Milledge<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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It should be very interesting to see if any of these players are named in the report (we already know that Guillen has been suspended<\/a>), and whether or not that affected any decisions that they or their teams made.\u00a0\u00a0Many sportswriters in Baltimore\u00a0believe that the Orioles may have been able to get more for Tejada, but they had to take the best deal on the table before the report was released.\u00a0 Now, that is simply presumptive, but it does make some sense.<\/p>\n–There seem to be\u00a0four big warning signs of steroid use:\u00a0 (1) an all-of-a-sudden power surge in the late-90s, (2) an all-of-a-sudden power decline in the last year or two, (3) agelessness (mainly in pitchers), and (4) unnatural body mass.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see how many of the players named fall into any of these categories and how many are people we would not expect, based on these four prototypical ‘roiders.\u00a0 For example, I would not be surprised to see guys similar to the following (I am, by no means implicating any of these players, just using them\u00a0as examples):\u00a0 Jeff Kent, Greg Vaughn\u00a0or Richard Hidalgo (category 1); Todd Helton (category 2); Mariano Rivera, Trevor Hoffman or John Smoltz(category 3); Troy Glaus\u00a0or Eric Gagne (category 4).\u00a0 Maybe the Mitchell Report will give us more updated characteristics of steroid users.\u00a0 Either way, it should be interesting.\u00a0 I will be tuned in to the wall-to-wall coverage of this “sporting event.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, here we are at the dawn of baseball history.\u00a0 The Mitchell Report\u00a0goes public\u00a0in\u00a0about 2\u00a0hours, marking probably one of the top three most significantly negative off-the-field events in the 125+ years of professional baseball (the 1919 Black Sox and the … Continue reading
- The Giants signed Aaron Rowand<\/a> to a 5-year deal (as first reported in minor detail here on BSB<\/a>)<\/li>\n
- The Orioles traded Miguel Tejada<\/a> to the Houston Astros for five prospects<\/li>\n