Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Nice sport jackets

And That Happened

Alex Rodriguez was booed, then homered in his first game since admitting he used a banned substance.

The New York Yankees slugger started the spring training season with a two-run home run and two walks Wednesday at the Toronto Blue Jays' ballpark. The third baseman left the exhibition opener in the fifth inning.

There were a lot of cheers, a smattering of boos and occasional cat calls from hecklers. Earlier this month, Rodriguez said he used the banned substances from 2001-03 while with the Texas Rangers.

Rodriguez walked on five pitches in the first inning. Many in the crowd at mostly filled Dunedin Stadium stood and cheered as he circled the bases after homering off Ricky Romero in the fourth.

New Kauffman

In the end, it was decided that there was no need for a new baseball stadium in Kansas City. Instead, Kauffman Stadium would be renovated.
Still, the scope of this project defies that term.

"It's amazing," said Royals president Dan Glass, who regularly tours the site. "I know a lot of people have seen the outside of the building, the exterior, and it's as much a drastic change on the inside, the interior, as it is on the exterior."

Glass paused and smiled as he mentally paged through the $250 million undertaking.

"We used to call it a renovation, but it really is a brand new facility," he said.

Research

If this is too much inside baseball, I apologize, but I am too devastated and outraged to write anything else at the moment. Major League Baseball, which can’t kill steroids, has killed the Red Book and the Green Book.

Baseball officials would say the books died of atrophy. No one was using them any more. But I used them, often on a daily basis. They sit on a shelf an arm’s length away from my desk. I can get them that quickly when I need information from them . . .

. . . What are the Red Book and Green Book? They are league reference guides for club executives and the news media, Red for the American League, Green for the National. They have more information than we need to know, but they have what we need when we need it.

Each book has five pages on every team, each team’s won-lost record and place in the standings for every year of its existence, each team’s managers for every year of its existence, all sorts of hitting and pitching statistical lists, year-by-year list of 20-game winners, club leaders each year in hitting and pitching categories, teams’ top marks since their beginning, individual league champions, award winners, comprehensive statistics from the previous season, the previous year’s player transactions, relevant rules and that season’s schedule.

The release announcing this development is shrewdly written. It doesn’t say the books won’t exist any more - that would be negative - but it says the books will be available exclusively online for the first time, as if that’s a good thing.

The way to San Jose

Well, after Tuesday, no more straddling is allowed. Fremont is dead. Do the MLB owners now want to give San Jose a fair shot? Or not? Earlier this month, Wolff met with San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed to discuss the soccer stadium that Wolff wants to build for the San Jose Earthquakes. At that meeting, Wolff also briefed Reed on the A's situation. Reed simply listened.

Tuesday, the mayor said he would eagerly meet with Wolff about a ballpark proposal whenever and wherever. Yet the first place for MLB to begin, in fairness to the Giants, is with an independent and impartial study by economists and marketing experts. The study would determine precisely what an A's move to San Jose would mean to the attendance, sponsorship and corporate support of both franchises.

My strong hunch is that such a study would prove that the Giants' fears of losing fan loyalty to the San Jose A's are largely groundless. But the sports policy wonks can scientifically back me up.

And then the negotiations could proceed. In his talks with Fremont, Wolff was not asking the city to pay a dime toward building the ballpark. His talks with San Jose need to start with that premise, as well. Would local residents go for a ballpark deal? Depends on the deal. But they deserve the chance to consider a deal instead of being treated as baseball non-persons.

Because let me pound the drum once more: The people of San Jose, not the Giants, should decide whether the A's can move to San Jose. It is way past time for Major League Baseball and Selig to acknowledge that basic principle.

The Bonds Prosecution

Novitzky was given the green light by President Bush and Ashcroft to go for the jugular. In 2004, accompanied by eleven agents, he marched into Comprehensive Drug Testing, the nation's largest sports-drug testing company. Armed with a warrant to see the confidential drug tests of ten baseball players, he walked out with 4,000 supposedly sealed medical files, including every baseball player in the major leagues. As Jon Pessah wrote in ESPN magazine, "Three federal judges reviewed the raid. One asked, incredulously, if the Fourth Amendment had been repealed. Another, Susan Illston, who has presided over the BALCO trials, called Novitzky's actions a 'callous disregard' for constitutional rights. All three instructed him to return the records. Instead, Novitzky kept the evidence...."

It was a frightening abuse of power, all aimed at imprisoning a prominent African-American athlete. Yet despite the landfills of trash, the government's case always rested on a flimsy premise. Bonds's contention under oath was that anything illegal he may have ingested was without prior knowledge. The only person who could contradict Bonds was his trainer and longtime friend Greg Anderson. The government pressed Anderson to give testimony. He refused, citing a promise made by the feds that he wouldn't have to testify after pleading guilty to steroid distribution and money laundering in 2005. The feds stuck him in jail for thirteen months to soften him up, but he didn't crack.

No shortcuts

He is right about the guessing game. It is laughable how people want to draw simplistic conclusions about steroids and home runs. Take Rodriguez, for instance. People want to explain his home runs in Texas via steroids, ignoring the ballpark effects and the youthful prime of his career. Similarly, it is naïve to put those three years in their own lockbox, which would be, for one, to believe a highly suspect person at face value that somehow he did not use before or since, and secondly, to ignore the physiological benefits even from those three years.

Are all lies created equal?

The criminal prosecution of athletes who use steroids may or may not be a worthy enterprise. Notably, however, Miguel Tejada was not prosecuted and has not pleaded guilty to using performance-enhancing drugs. In fact, the government acknowledges that it lacks sufficient evidence to disprove Tejada's claim that he spent $6300 on human growth hormone, only to change his mind and throw it all out. The U.S. government has instead prosecuted Miguel Tejada for lying about drug use -- more specifically, for saying falsely that he had neither discussed nor known about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball . . .

. . . It may be that the most disturbing aspect of the prosecution of dopers for lying, rather than for doping, is the hypocrisy inherent in the government's effectively lying to the courts about what it is really prosecuting while relying on a law that criminalizes lying. If the government cannot honestly and forthrightly gather evidence to prosecute the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, then it has no business expecting players to provide honest answers to questions about such use.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Today at THT