Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Memo to Miami

Sanders also points out that besides enjoying steady growth, American Cooling is trying to diversify its base. What he means is that strawberries are becoming a bigger part of the commodity mix the coolers handle. "Our strawberry business has increased dramatically," Sanders said, which explains why he has been so busy.

Strawberries must be separated from other commodities since they need a drier, less humid environment than regular produce. The cooler operator must either rearrange the existing facility to isolate the berries or create a new one.

"When we have a customer commitment, we will build or remodel a cooler," he explained. "This isn't baseball. We don't reverse the process and assume that if we build a facility the customers will magically appear!"

Deep Thoughts

Perverse Incentives, Part I. Rodriguez stands to make a $30 million bonus if he breaks the all-time home run record. If he gets close, those are 30 million reasons for him to extend his career until he does, rather than consider early retirement.

Deion vs. Buster

So I returned to the press box before game time, not knowing about the Clippers' team meeting and wondering whether Sanders' anger had subsided and he thought it a waste of time to complain about a column written in a small afternoon paper (one that would fold a decade later).

In fact, Sanders was still quite perturbed. In the fourth inning of the game, the same batboy who had summoned me earlier walked into the press box, holding a baseball. "Deion told me to give this to you."

The baseball was dirty, probably a leftover from batting practice. In the sweet spot, Sanders had scrawled a message. He didn't include his signature. "Keep writing like that your whole life, and you'll always be a loser," he wrote.

It’s time to go long on steroids

If journalists are going to admit that they were asleep at the wheel throughout much of the steroid era, it’s time to start asking the hard questions. I’ve seen, so far, only one instance of this, with Ivan Rodriguez. Credit to whoever it was that asked, though I can’t find it online.

Finally, we need to take a look at players who have played their entire minor and major league career under a testing program and decide whether or not we believe in professional sports’ strongest testing program. I’m pretty sure that it’s done baseball no good, because no one seems to believe that it’s stopping things, despite positive results going from 96 to 2 in five years. I was at the NFL Combine today, watching 350 pound men running sub-5.0 dashes, lifting cars … and being called undersized.

We can continue to cover this story as if we’re the sports section of TMZ or we can do the hard work it takes to try educate and enlighten the story. If I were Dinn Mann, the editor of MLB.com, or any sports editor across the country, I’d have my beat writer asking the question.

Garret Anderson

A-Rod Lawyers-Up

Alex Rodriguez has bolstered his legal team, adding Jay Reisinger, who has represented a number of high-profile baseball players who have been confronted with questions about the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

According to several people familiar with the matter, Reisinger will work alongside the lawyer James E. Sharp, who has represented Rodriguez since it was revealed two weeks ago that he had tested positive for steroids in 2003.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing matters related to the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Rodriguez is not the only high-profile baseball player that Reisinger and Sharp have represented together. They represent Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, who is a government witness in the perjury investigation of Roger Clemens. In 2005, Reisinger and Sharp represented Sammy Sosa when he testified at a hearing before Congress. In each instance, Reisinger was the lead lawyer.

Lance Niekro

The Elias Sports Bureau studied 190 father-son combinations in major league history and found that in 143 cases — three out of four — sons do just what their fathers did. That is, if the father was a position player, so was the son. And if the father was a pitcher, so was the son.

After parts of four seasons with the Giants, and a brief retirement after his release from a Houston Astros farm team last May, Niekro is doing what comes naturally. He has embraced his inner knuckler at age 30, making a comeback as a pitcher at the Atlanta Braves’ minor league camp.

“I’m not going to say that I have an excellent knuckleball right now,” Niekro said last week in an interview at a restaurant here, his hometown. “But I think I have the makings of it, and I’m working hard at it.”

Wallace Matthews to give up writing

In the week since I spoke with Bud Selig, I have thought long and hard about what the Omissioner can do to right the dreadful wrong he, his players and the players association have committed upon baseball.

After much contemplation, I came up with the answer.

Nothing.

For all the tough talk from Selig and for all the hand-wringing and mea culpas coming lately from Rodriguez, the fact is, this game is rigged so that nothing of, um, substance, can be done about it.

Jim Bowden is going down

A federal investigation into the skimming of signing bonuses given to baseball prospects from Latin America is looking at Washington Nationals general manager Jim Bowden as far back as 1994, when he was GM of the Cincinnati Reds, according to a baseball executive familiar with the investigation.

Two sources inside baseball say that a long-time scout in Latin America, Jorge Oquendo, 47, is the man who links the FBI's investigations of Bowden and his special assistant Jose Rijo to that of former Chicago White Sox senior director of player personnel David Wilder. Last May the White Sox fired Wilder and two Dominican-based scouts after allegations surfaced that they had pocketed money earmarked for player signing bonuses. Oquendo worked for Wilder in 2006 and 2007, as well as for Bowden with the Reds in 1994 and again with the Reds from 2000 through 2003. Oquendo left Cincinnati in 2005, two years after Bowden was fired. (Bowden became Nationals GM in 2004.)

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