Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Sunday, February 08, 2009

Orza Must Be Fired


I'll have more on this tomorrow, but if this report from Jon Heyman is correct, Gene Orza should resign or be fired first thing in the morning, and the whole of union leadership should rethink everything they've said and done with respect to PEDs over the past seven years:

That list would have been long gone if not for the union, several baseball people say. Players union COO Gene Orza worked long and hard to try to pare down the list. Orza's mission, according to baseball people, was to find enough false positives on the list to drive the number of failures so far down that real testing wouldn't be needed in 2004 or ever.

Orza wanted to get the list down below the five percent threshold for testing to go away entirely. But try as he might, he could not drive it down quite that far. After months of trying, Orza couldn't do it, and baseball announced that a curiously amorphous 5-7 percent of players failed the 2003 survey test, enough to ramp up the testing in 2004, much to the union's dismay.

According to multiple baseball sources, Orza spent way too much time studying the results in hopes of lowering the number. And while Orza was playing with the paperwork, BALCO struck, foiling his grand scheme.

And when BALCO investigators asked for the results of the players linked to that scandal, Orza did what came naturally to him, which was to fight. He had a history of winning his fights, so that gave him confidence that he could win this fight.

But this time he didn't win. The feds subpoenaed all the records instead of just the BALCO boys.

All 104 players who tested positive were now at risk.

No, this doesn't wash the hands of anyone else -- not the person who wrongfully leaked this information or Alex Rodriguez for using in the first place -- but Orza's actions and motivations, if Heyman is accurately describing them, constitute negligence and hubris of the highest order. No one charged with representing the interests of others as Orza is should ever be in a position to do as much damage as he appears to have done.

(thanks again to The Common Man for staying the hell on top of this story as I lounge my weekend away)
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 4:08pm (10) Comments

Deep Thoughts


If I'm Ken Griffey Jr., I call a press conference for tomorrow morning to announce my retirement, because my historical stock will never be higher.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:04am (4) Comments

And it begins


Sometimes I wonder if anyone understands that the New York Yankees are in the baseball business rather than politics or public relations:

Nine more years. Nine long, bold-headlined years. That is how much longer the Yankees are contractually obligated to put up with always-something Alex Rodriguez. With his celebrity distractions, his need to be noticed, his clubhouse-integration issues, his Derek Jeter envy and, yes, his prime-time failures.

Nine years, and now, it appears, without the authentic historic payoff that Hank Steinbrenner and the Yankees were so seduced by, they couldn’t wait to sign A-Rod to a deal that would carry him well past his 40th birthday and could cost them $300 million . . .

. . . The Yankees were the most ardent admirers of Rodriguez and are also positioned to be the biggest suckers, given the contract they gave him, along with promises of bonuses for every home-run hero he passes. They convinced themselves that A-Rod was the man for the 21st-century reclamation of baseball’s tarnished record book — except they conveniently forget he was taking major league swings as early as 1994.

As much as anyone, he is a product of a decade in which the sport took a pharmaceutical path that, for too many reputations, has become the road to ruin.

This screed -- in the New York Times, not the tabloids -- only makes passing mention of the fact that people care about the New York Yankees because they are a baseball team, and that to the extent they care about Alex Rodriguez, it is because he is the best player on that team. Yes, many people will complain about the latest steroid news. I suppose even a few may give up on Rodriguez and the Yankees altogether, though if they do they are drama queens of the first order.

But to suggest that the Yankees are somehow suckers and Rodriguez somehow worthless in light of all of this is to misunderstand why anyone pays attention in the first place. It's baseball. It's a game. Alex Rodriguez will continue to play it better than just about any player. The Yankees will continue to win games at a clip surpassing just about any team. And the fans will continue to show up and root for them both -- the latter far more than the former, of course -- just the way they have for the past 109 years.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:07am (15) Comments