Jim Caple is a Hall of Fame voter. Remember that when you read this snippet from a debate between Caple and fellow ESPN baseball writer Jerry Crasnick, where the two debate the HOF candidacy of Mark McGwire:

Crasnick: I’m afraid of saying “yes” on a guy like McGwire only to regret my decision later. Does that make sense?

Caple: Yes, it does, though really, I don’t know what we’re going to find out at this point. I mean, they weren’t specifically banned by baseball at the time. And to me, that makes all the difference. (And no, just being an illegal drug isn’t the same thing as being banned. For one thing, I believe a lot of players who took illegal drugs are in the Hall of Fame.) [italics are mine]

Good point Jim. Except that steroids were banned at the time.

MLB banned steroids in 1991. You should know that, Jim. It’s your job to know that.

Here is a history lesson, courtesy of Houston Chronicle baseball writer Richard Justice:

Commissioner Fay Vincent sent the clubs a memo in 1991 reminding them that players were forbidden from taking any illegal substance. He specifically mention steroids in the memo and encouraged the clubs to take a get-tough policy on players thought to be using steroids.What could a team have done if it suspected a player of using steroids? Probably nothing.Vincent simply wanted to be on the record as letting the clubs know that steroid use was against the rules and that they shouldn’t be afraid to confront a player.There was no testing for steroids until 2003 (after being part of the 2002 labor agreement).The notion that Bonds wasn’t breaking any rules is ridiculous. He was. He knew he was.

So there you go, Jim. Steroids have been BANNED and ILLEGAL since 1991.

But, hey, that means that for the first five years of his career, McGwire was (probably) merely taking illegal substances. But nothing banned, God forbid.

You know, the truth is I find a lot of Caple’s writing funny. But when he goes and writes things that demonstrate a lack on understanding of the game, it just makes it that much harder to stomach the omissions of Keith Law and Rob Neyer from the BBWAA.

PS. If you want to read a really good debate, check out the give and take between Gammons and Stark on the merits of Tim Raines’ HOF candidacy.

In a recent column, Bill Conlin wonders whether the Phillies could possibly do better in 2oo8 than they did in 2007.He says probably not:

So everybody in Charlie Manuel’s core lineup had either a career year or made contributions that ranged between substantial (Burrell) and outstanding (Howard). Third base was and will be a black hole, the least productive offensively in the majors. And whenever Abe Nuñez was on the bench - too often - third was a defensive liability, as well.

And, as I pointed out in a previous post, Conlin isn’t too wild about the Phils’ pitching:

The rotation? Cole Hamels (knock wood) and Brett Myers (make a novena) are set at the top. Then there is Kyle Kendrick and Jamie Moyer and Adam Eaton and Chad Durbin and Travis Blackley and . . .

I’m not so sure I agree with Conlin. I think the Phils have improved their roster this offseason, and their record will be better in 2008. Here’s why.

First, the team’s rotation will be better in 2008 than it was in 2007, by virtue of having Brett Myers on board, and by not having Freddy “Mr. 1.60 WHIP” Garcia (who was 1-5 last season in 11 starts). It’s easy to minimize the impact moving Myers to the rotation will have, since he’s not new to the roster. But he’s a power pitcher with nasty stuff — 18 wins is not unrealistic.

Second, the team’s bullpen could be improved if Brad Lidge proves an adequate replacement for Myers. Also, a full season of J.C. Romero in a set-up role won’t hurt.

Third…is third. Yes, third base is a weakness for the Phils. But for how long? Among the MLB third basemen who will be free agents in 2009 are Joe Crede, Nomar Garciaparra, Hank Blalock and Troy Glaus. You have to believe that a few of those guys will be available via trade. Maybe all of them.

Of course, the Phils lost Aaron Rowand to free agency and it remains to be seen if Shane Victorino can be a capable CF or if the Geoff Jenkins/Jayson Werth platoon will be productive. But there’s no reason to think that either of these experiments won’t work.

What’s important to remember is that, when we talk about “improving”, we’re not talking about turning around a losing team. We’re talking about the Phillies winning 95 games instead of 89. That would be one fewer than the 2007 Red Sox won and one more than last season’s Yankees team.

Can the addition of a stud starting pitcher, an improved bullpen and a late-season 3B addition add up to six more wins? Time will tell. But I say yes.

Kyle Kendrick gets no love.

So little love, in fact, that I bet you’re sitting at your computer wondering, “Who’s Kyle Kendrick?”

Well, let me tell you a little something about Kendrick. He’s a pitcher.

Wait, wait. There’s more.

Kendrick pitches for the Phillies. And, though he wasn’t a highly touted prospect, he’s had a pretty successful career thus far (though, admittedly, we’re talking about a pretty small sample size).

Kendrick started 20 games last season in his rookie year and went 10-4 with a 3.87 ERA, a 1.27 WHIP and a 2:1 strikeout to walk ratio. And still, nobody is counting on Kyle to be successful in 2008.

MLB Trade Rumors, on the Phils’ 2008 staff:

They’re looking at a rotation of Cole Hamels, Brett Myers, Kyle Kendrick, Jamie Moyer, and Durbin (no one’s counting on Adam Eaton). Beyond the front two that rotation is going to be pretty bad.

Old-school journalist Bill Conlin doesn’t think the Phils rotation is so hot, either:

The rotation? Cole Hamels (knock wood) and Brett Myers (make a novena) are set at the top. Then there is Kyle Kendrick and Jamie Moyer and Adam Eaton and Chad Durbin and Travis Blackley and…

That is Conlin’s elipses, not mine. I think his point is the Phils have a lot of options after Hamels and Myers, but not many good options.

And maybe Conlin is right to be skeptical. After all, it’s possible that Kendrick’s 2007 success was a fluke.

But me, I believe. I believe in Kyle Kendrick. And Kendrick, he believes in Santa Clause. That’s just one of the things we learned in this revealing Q & A that’s featured on the Phils’ website.

There’s also this:

MLB.com: How many of Santa’s reindeer can you name?

Kendrick: Uh oh. There’s a song too. I need my sister here because she would know. Let’s see, ‘On Donner, Blitzen, Rudolph, Dasher?’ Dang, this is hard. That’s an embarrassing showing, huh?

MLB.com: Yes, four is disappointing. If Santa added a 10th reindeer, what should its name be?

Kendrick: Philly.

MLB.com: Yay or nay on the giant lawn snow globes? They’re all the rage.

Kendrick: Yay. They’re cool. We just have lights up though.

Way to skip the inflatable lawn ornaments, Kyle. Those things suck.

And don’t listen to the nay-sayers. They’re just jealous. Well, except for Conlin. He has no reason to be jealous. He’s a big shot. He makes ballplayer money.

We UmpBump writers have spent far too much time debating the relative merits of many different kinds of statistics. Does a high RBI total actually signify a skill? Why should we care about a pitcher’s Win totals? Is WARP3 actually necessary?  The list continues.

But this past week, something wonderful has happened. Someone actually created a stat that could finally end the war between the awesome intergalactic sabermetric fleets armed with X-Wing Fighter Jets and the “classic” statisticians with their… umm… vaudeville shows and toothbrush mustaches and 23-skidoos… I don’t know. I wasn’t alive during this time.

Yes, friends, someone has finally created a quantifiable stat to measure GRIT.

<loud applause>

The good folks over at Flotsam Media, a sports blog, actually went through a data set beginning in 1955 to determine who was the most/least gritty player during this span:

I hold that gritty players are those who sincerely want to win or succeed at baseball (determination), but due to a lack of natural skill (talent), are forced to do so through the least efficient means possible, resulting in an excessive amount of dirt on their uniform.

This DIRT factor was created by looking at stats such as HBP (the ultimate form of grittiness) , and Stolen Bases and Caught Stealing. Other factors that were determined through similar methods were:

DETERMINATION

Gritty players want to succeed. They just happen to not have the talent to actually do so. This results in inefficient baseball plays. For example, Jerry Hairston is gritty. He slides head-first into first base. A true sign of someone gritty enough to want to get to first base, but shitty enough to (not) actually get there efficiently.

TALENT

It is my contention that “grittiness” is a subset of talent that cannot translate well statistically. Two players may very well have the same raw amount of grit, but one player may have more tangible talent, making him appear less gritty because the grit is too diluted. Gritty players are those who have the largest concentration of grit. As such, too find the grittiest players, we should look for players who have as little tangible talent as possible.

I’ll stop cribbing because the Flotsam post is really worth reading for yourself (there you can also find out who the grittiest of the gritty were).  But I wanted to simply tip my cap to them. Maybe now, I can stop squirming when people call Miguel Cairo anything more than crappy.

Today, it was announced that the San Diego Padres and free agent pitcher Mark Prior agreed on a one-year contract with a base salary of $1 million (worth a max of over $3 million with incentives).

Any discussion with the 26-year old righty is going to begin with his history of injuries so let’s just get that out of the way. I tried my best to piece everything together in the chart below (if I missed any, let me know) so we can get a clearer picture of what we’re talking about here:

The reasons for concern are self-evident. Over the span of five years, Prior has been on the disabled list eight times, and only once during this time was he able to become active at the end of the 15 days.  What’s even more worrying is that seven out of the eight injuries were related to the his pitching elbow and pitching shoulder. Now I’m no sports physician (and I’ve never stayed at a Holiday Inn Express), but those sound like really important parts of any pitcher’s body. Even now, we’re not exactly sure if Prior’s going to be ready to step on the mound anytime soon.

So why am I actually jealous that the Padres signed Prior?

Because this winter’s proving to be difficult for anyone to improve. Unless you have top-level prospects that you’re willing to part with, bolstering your lineup or rotation considerably is looking next to impossible. But this deal has about as much upside as anything else I’ve seen so far this off season. Sure, one can’t neglect the past injuries, but you can’t ignore these points either:

• Even if Prior’s rehab goes terribly awry, the Padres lose only $1 million.
• He has been a flyball pitcher throughout his career, which means Petco Park will feel like heaven  compared to Wrigley.
• The surgery he underwent that killed his 2007 season was actually the first time (believe it or not) that Prior went under the knife. His previous injuries were”treated” in the “wait-and-see” school of medicine. According to James Andrews (are there other doctors out there aside from this guy?), Prior had a good amount of chips just floating around in his shoulder that were previously undiagnosed.
• He’s not pitching for Dusty Baker anymore and thus won’t be asked to throw 211 1/2 innings in 30 starts as a 22-year old who had never previously come even close to hitting that innings mark.
• He’s still Mark Prior and he’s only two years removed  from a pretty good season despite the elbow injuries. And maybe it’s because the guy’s only two weeks older than I am that I’m saying this, but at 27, he’s still young enough to rebound.

To me, it looks like even the worst case scenario can’t be all that bad. He’s either hurt and can’t pitch (with the Pads out a million bucks) or he’s healthy enough to take the ball every five days and pitch what I suspect will be roughly league average numbers with a good amount of upside.

I don’t think that any team aside from San Diego really had a shot to grab him. Not only was he born in San Diego, he stayed in Southern California for college, attending USC. After the media attention he received in Chicago, a year of reestablishing his market value pitching in the pitcher’s park of pitcher’s parks that just happens to be in your old neck of the woods sounds mighty appealing, doesn’t it?

So I think that the Padres quite possibly have upgraded their rotation by a couple notches, replacing David Wells with Prior. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ll be pulling for Mark to make good in 2008. I loved seeing him pitch a few years ago, and I hope to see it again. Well, maybe the Cubs fans will disagree…

The time for knee-jerk reactions to the Mitchell report has passed. Now it’s time to commence with the backbiting and fingerpointing.  In this post, I think I want to bite a back. And it’s a pretty big back.

My personal approach to the announcement of Mitchell’s findings went something like this: I’ll probably find it entertaining, but at this point, the appearance of anyone’s name in the report shouldn’t surprise me.

I was right on both accounts. I was highly amused, seeing names of former players I hadn’t thought about in years as well as those of some guys whose personalities kind of rubbed me the wrong way (I’m not proud of this, but at least I’m being honest). And none of the names I saw surprised me in any way - until yesterday, when both the affidavits of Jason Grimsley and Kirk Radomski were unsealed.

Grimsley didn’t really reveal anything scandalous unless you used to think of Glenallen Hill as your personal savior. But there was a name in the Radomski affidavit that didn’t make it onto the Mitchell report.

It was El Sid.

The affidavit revealed that former Met Sid Fernandez had written Radomski a $3500 check in February of 2005. Problem is,El Sid last pitched in MLB in 1997, eight years previously.

Sid Fernandez was one of my favorite players growing up. When I was a wee lad, he looked like a mountain to me even on the television screen. He was listed as 6′1 and 230lbs (there’s no way that’s accurate; the guy was at least 250) and was always the kind of guy who was overshadowed, either by Doc Gooden’s arsenal of mid-90s heat and Sir Charles curveball, or by the ladies screaming for Ron Darling to give them a smile. He struck me as an everyman, and I always liked that about him.

He had a very solid career that lasted parts of 15 seasons. He never won more than 16 games and his girth made it difficult for him to stay healthy.  But when he was good to go, he was a very dependable strikeout pitcher. During his peak years that lasted from 1985-1993, El Sid had a great 3.12 ERA to go along with a very good 8.4K/9IP and 2.47K/BB ratio (As a comparison, over the same period, Roger Clemens had a 2.85 ERA with 8.21K/9 and 2.54 K/BB).

But perhaps his greatest statistical accomplishment is the fact that over his entire career, the behemoth of a man only allowed 6.85 hits per nine innings pitched, which ranks fourth best in MLB history behind only Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax, and Pedro Martinez. All in all, not a bad career by any stretch of the imagination. Despite this, in a move that served as a microcosm for how under-appreciated he was, he received a total of two votes in his only appearance on the Hall-of-Fame ballot back in 2003.

But what the hell made Fernandez seek out help from Radomski in 2005? This was 8 years after he last took the big league mound (He tried to make a comeback with the Yankees in 2001 but made one start in Columbus before retiring once more). I don’t have the answer to that one, I’m afraid. We don’t even know what that $3500 check paid for. Was El Sid trying to make another comeback at the age of 42? If not, was there something wrong with him physically that he sought Radomski’s help because his own personal doctor wouldn’t prescribe him with something that Radomski was offering? Did Kirk Radomski also sell Stacker 2, the world’s STRONGEST fat burner? Come on, Sid. You gotta tell us.

Looking for some last minute gift ideas for the baseball lover on your list? Any of these is sure to please!

Books!

Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Dawidoff. This handsome hardcover anthology contains all the classics of baseball writing plus some unexpected, lesser known gems. Authors include John Updike, Gay Talese, Ring Lardner, Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, W.C. Heinz, Don Delillo, even Stephen King.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis. An instant classic when it was first published, it’s a must-own for any true fan. This is the book that made Bill James into a household name and Billy Beane into an icon. And it introduced to the masses the false notion that Kevin Youkilis is Greek.

Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong, from Baseball Prospectus. This book is perfect for the stat-geek on your list. Even seamheads who fear math will enjoy it (as I can attest from personal experience). Nevermind that it came out a few years ago; the questions it considers are evergreen.

DVDs!

Bull Durham, starring Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon. My favorite baseball movie of all time, and one of my favorite movies, period. Love, sex, and baseball! What a charming combination. Plus, one of the great opening monologues in cinema, one of the all-time great angry rants in cinema, and a raft of classic one liners.

Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns. Though this documentary now feels a bit dated–it runs through 1994, and stops short of the strike that year–it’s still a classic, taking viewers from the origins of baseball in the 1840s to the modern era. What better way to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s?

Major League, starring Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, and Wesley Snipes. You’ve got Wild Thing, Willie Mays Hayes, and Rene Russo’s firs-ever movie role. The “Wild Thing” edition includes some cool extras that enhance this cult classic, including interviews with the directors, takes from real ballplayers, and the ending that could have been.

Random Stuff!

Wooden Circa Baseball Game: This desktop game is half baseball, half pinball, all fun! (Okay, I made that up about the “all fun” part. I’ve never played, so I wouldn’t really know. But I’ve seen it in a bunch of catalogs and it does seem like it might be fun! Or at least, like it would be temporary, Christmas-morning fun, before it ends up collecting dust at the back of some closet. Ten years down the line, it would make a pretty good yard sale item, too.)

Norman Rockwell Baseball Puzzle: Who isn’t a sucker for a good puzzle? Rockwell and baseball go together like PB and J. Besides, it will give you and the fam something to do between meals.

Official Gear: Why not get your fan some official MLB gear from his or her favorite team? Aside from the usual player jerseys and team caps, you can get shot glasses, golf towels, lamps, tee-shirts, bathrobes, bobbleheads,  memorabilia, fleeces, jackets, and jewelry. You name the tchotchke, they’ve got it. And they’ll stamp a logo on it and sell it to you.

But what makes the best stocking stuffer? Why, TICKETS! Or, you know, an all-expenses-paid trip to spring training. Okay okay, tickets are fine. Yeesh, sorry.

The time for knee-jerk reactions to the Mitchell report has passed. The time to play devil’s advocate—whether said devil deserves an advocate or not—has arrived. After all, every week must have a new storyline. In this installment of our post-Mitchell report coverage, I’ll take a look at the arguments for legalizing steroid use in baseball.

It became trendy, when the steroid whispers started, to act like it didn’t matter. “Why not take steroids?” these cutting-edge pundits said, “It only increases the entertainment value of the game!” The make-steroids-legal argument has really come out into the open, though, since the Mitchell report became public last week.

At Jon Swift, an apparently satirical blog, they even compared using steroids with the second amendment:

 The real problem is that baseball banned steroids in the first place. It is a fact that when you ban guns, only criminals have guns. The same is true with steroids. When steroids are banned, only cheaters will have steroids…Distributing guns to everyone and requiring everyone in the community to know how to shoot levels the playing field and gives everyone a fighting chance against criminals. In the same way distributing steroids to all baseball players and requiring every  player to take them would level the baseball playing field and give everyone a fair chance to compete.

It’s a good thing Jon Swift is meant to be funny…because requiring any human being to inject themselves with any substance—and especially, in this case, ones that have been demonstrated to cause serious physical and mental problems, including heart problems—is obviously fascist. (And in fact, the communist-fascists in East Germany did require their Olympic athletes to do just that.)

But, to my mind, making steroids legal would have the same effect as requiring all athletes to take them. Even now, any athlete who doesn’t take them is basically consigning himself to a serious disadvantage and leaving millions of dollars on the table. But at least the clean athlete knows he’s not cheating. He’s not risking his health. He’s not risking his credibility or jeopardizing the integrity of the game. If steroids were made legal, all that would change.

Some people say that steroids, like any forbidden drug, would be safer if they were legalized. Look, this isn’t a case of cancer patients growing weed in their basements. These athletes are already perfectly healthy. It is true that messing around with controlled substances under a doctor’s care is safer than squeezing into a bathroom stall with Jose Canseco and a syringe. But that still doesn’t make it safe. And since using steroids is all about getting an edge, I contend that there would still be a thriving black market of all the newest, latest, hottest performance enhancers. After all, if everyone starts using Deca or Winstrol, what’s the point of using them at all? You’d have to find something else, something new and improved if you wanted to keep your edge. The FDA couldn’t keep up.

Some folks say that steroids—like stealing signs or scuffing the ball—are just another way of giving 110%. Isn’t doing anything and everything to win just part of the American way? I can only assume these people are Ayn Rand-addicted psychos who think insider trading and price fixing are okay and believe that Tonya Harding should have been allowed to kneecap however many opponents she wanted to.

Still others point out that sports are, after all, just a form of entertainment. And doesn’t using performance-enhancing drugs make sport more entertaining? Don’t we all want to see everything bigger, better, faster, more? First, considering the health risks associated with steroids, I find this attitude unbelievably callous. For instance, pro wrestling is extremely  comfortable with its status as entertainment, and pro wrestlers are some of the most obvious steroid users. Pro wrestlers also die of heart disease at a rate 12 times the average for Americans their age. This isn’t Xbox. This is real. These athletes are real people, people with families. Expecting them to risk their health, even their lives, just for your titillation? That’s cold.

And maybe the casual fan needs 70 450-foot homers a season to keep himself entertained, but not all of us do. Some of us are more excited by a strike-em-out-throw-em-out double play, a suicide squeeze, a  double steal, a triple play, or the hidden ball trick. Some of us are interested in the strategy that goes into pitch selection, the skill needed to be a truly dangerous baserunner, or the deception of a surprise bunt. And for some of us, it’s not about the highlight reels. It’s about the crack of the bat and the pop of the mitt. It’s about blue skies, good friends, and flat beer.  It’s about history, and knowing that David Ortiz is playing the same game Ted Williams played. And when an old record is surpassed, you know that the player who surpassed it has accomplished something meaningful. Remember, baseball is supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, anyone could do it. It’s the hard that makes it great. Legal or illegal, steroids make baseball easier. And in so doing, steroids make baseball that much smaller.

The time for knee-jerk reactions to the Mitchell report has passed. Now it’s time to commence with the backbiting and fingerpointing. Let’s look at some reactions from a few clean players.

For the most part, the players not involved in the Mitchell report have been keeping their heads down and not saying nuthin’. Those who do speak have mostly stuck to banal comments and harmless generalizations. The players named by Mitchell have resorted to a) silence, b) denial, or c) lame-ass apologies, such as those by Brian Roberts (”I didn’t inhale!”) and Andy Pettitte (”If what I did was an error in judgment on my part, I apologize…I accept responsibility for those two days.”)

The most interesting exception to this sit-down-shut-up-boo-hoo-poor-me spectacle has been the former players who were clean, and who are pissed as hell they had to compete against these cheaters. If there is any doubt that using steroids was cheating (and nasty, no-good, dirty, cheateriffic cheating at that), listen to the words of folks like Joe Oliver and Mike Greenwell. As Oliver wrote in an email  to Boston Herald columnist Joe Horrigan,

I had to vie for a job every year and now I know it had something to do with certain players having a competitive edge on me…I spent all that time in the early hours running and lifting weights, these guys would shoot up and be done and get stronger, faster, and the owners knew who they were and the GM’s knew who they were. Every time I argued for a contract, I was competing with juiced catchers in the same boat looking for a job. They got the higher paying jobs and I got screwed.

That reflects the sentiments of Mike Greenwell, another former Red Sox player. He was never the kind of guy who got the awards or the glory or the big-money deal. He just showed up to work and played hard. (In fact, he turned running into the Green Monster into a kind of art, occasionally kicking the wall in retaliation for some of those bumps and bruises.) He had a couple of All-Star game appearances, over the course of his 12-year career, and then faded gracefully from view. His best season was 1988, when he came in second in MVP voting. And who should happen to have beaten him out that year? Why, Jose Canseco, who just that year had his 40-homer, 40-steal season. Now that Canseco has fully admitted to using steroids, shouldn’t the Gator get the hardware? That’s what he said back when Jose’s first book came out:

“Where’s my MVP?” Greenwell told the Fort Myers News-Press. “[Canseco’s] an admitted steroid user. I was clean. If they’re going to start putting asterisks by things, let’s put one by the MVP.”

[…]

“I do have a problem with losing the MVP to an admitted steroids user,” Greenwell told the News-Press, adding that not winning the award likely cost him millions of dollars.

Even Curt Schilling, whose comments on the subject have been mostly of the don’t-make-waves variety (for a change) admitted that the idea of an uneven playing field disturbed him.

As a competitor, the one thing I can’t help but think is how different, or if at all different, my career numbers would be if I was playing against a level playing field and in an era that was already offensive-tailored and knowing that a lot of guys, well, everybody that’s been named, has done something against me in the past.

As for my part, I’m glad to see at least some players, current and former, standing up for themselves. Maybe it will help the players’ union remember, the next time they’re tempted to stonewall even the most pathetic, flaccid, symbolic steroid testing program, that it’s not just the Cansecos and McGwires and Bondses that they represent. But (heavy sigh) probably not.

PS—Just look at those pictures of Oliver and Greenwell and compare them with this shot of Canseco. Even with his catching gear on, Oliver looks like the proverbial ten-pound weakling next to Jose. And Mike Greenwell is a dead ringer for my fifth-grade homeroom teacher, Mr. Grosky. You have the Incredible Hulk in a mullet, there, versus Mr. Grosky. This playing field has a steeper incline than the Matterhorn.

The time for knee-jerk reactions to the Mitchell report has passed. Now it’s time for deeper analysis, more thoughtful reflections, and, best of all, time to make fun of those knee-jerk reactions. First, we examine claims that the report reflects a pro-Red Sox bias.

I didn’t pay too much attention when the Mitchell report was commissioned. So color me surprised a few months ago to read that the man being tasked with investigating steroids in baseball is also a director with the Boston Red Sox. “Gee,” I thought, “Even if the man’s a saint, that’s a pretty clear conflict of interest. How will he have any credibility?” Well, it turns out that while you might be able to broker peace in Northern Ireland, orchestrating a cease-fire between Red Sox fans and Yankee fans is a horse of a different color.

The morning before the report was due to be released, rumors chased each other around the internet that it would expose key Red Sox players such as beatified captain Jason Varitek, who seemed to lose some size and pop in 2005 when testing began, and Nomar Garciaparra, who got big, fast, and whose connective tissue was never the same afterwards. I was not surprised that Yankee fans instantly pounced on Mitchell’s position with the Red Sox (a position from which he has been on leave lo these 20 months) and to accuse him of bias and call the report a sham. While I am sympathetic to their rage, I think a recourse to the facts throws cold water on any conspiracy theories. The report named 14 players who, at some point, had played for the Red Sox, and quoted from some  unvarnished emails between Sox GM Theo Epstein and scouts on the subject of steroids. The report named 22 Yankees. Taking into consideration that most of the report’s information was gleaned from New York-based steroid dealers with a lot of ties to the Yankees and the Mets, I don’t think that shows any real evidence of bias. George Mitchell himself was the first to admit that his report was far from the last word on steroid use in baseball.

Apparently, however, others take a different view, such as Thurmon Munson Should Be in the Hall of Fame:

Is it just me, or is Mo Vaughn the only Red Sox player (sans Brendan Donnelly) on the list?

Something stinks up there in Beantown, and this time it’s not just the Red Sox.

Jeannie and I were at our favorite Mexican restaurant for about an hour at lunch, and the ESPNation mentioned Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Barry Bonds and Miguel Tejada.

Just those 4 players…

For an hour straight…

The “Mitchell” scroll tab at the bottom of the TV screen reported Clemens and Pettitte ONLY. Over and over and over and over and over.

No mention of any other players, other than Jason Giambi.

Just the Yankee players.

And we’re to believe that this report isn’t biased?

Yeah… RIIIIIIIIGHHHTTT…

First, there are 12 other guys TMSBITHOF conveniently forgot to mention (including Eric Gagne), along with the unflattering Epstein emails. Second, to leap from “Something stinks up there in Beantown” to lambasting ESPN’s coverage of the report and back to “and we’re to believe that this report isn’t biased?” is such a case of the nonsequiturs, I am not even sure where to begin. ESPN had nothing to do with the Mitchell Report. How does ESPN focusing on the Yankee players cast any shadows on the report itself? As to why ESPN would focus on some names and not others, well, ESPN is a New York-based company, first of all, and much like supposed national print outlets the New York Times and the New Yorker, they consider anything that affects the Big Apple to be their lead story. And let’s face it, Clemens is bigger news than Mo Vaughn, who isn’t even an active player anymore. In fact, I don’t even know why I’ve spent this long eviscerating such an illogical and poorly written post. I mean, it practically eviscerates itself! Yet still, the topic has been cropping up on various message boards. And certainly, reporters asked about the conflict of interest at the news conference last week. So is there anyone else out there who really thinks this thing is biased? Have you read anything else claiming undue influence by pro-Sox or anti-Yank sentiment? What do you think?