Good line about Bennett fearing no evil.

In a more just or more genuine world, if a guy commits a crime, he will be held accountable if caught, whether he be a big shot or small fry. Outside the fantasy land of baseball, laws are not written to excuse the Gary Bennetts, and even bit time jocks like A-Rod and McGwire, while only applying to Barry Bonds. Gary Sheffield is wiser than many of us might expect.

Bonds worked hard to set the all time HR record. He should be proud of this epic achievement. He did not roll over for the investigators and gave them ambiguous testimony. Since they only went after him on perjury, their other evidence must be iffy, for court purposes. Barry achieved his record, so MLB was mostly done with him by the time he was being investigated, whereas A-Rod had many more years of play to contribute. So Bud says A-Rod shamed himself, which is an oral slap on the wrist which leds A-Rod keep playing for the big New York market.

Meanwhile Barry can get prosecuted on behalf of everyone else. Chances are he will beat the prosecution, but if not Obama can give him a pardon, since its ridiculous to prosecute one guy for what so many were doing. Hitting homeruns should not be a crime. And if Bonds gets convicted for lying, Clemens should get a sentence of 10,000 years in the pokey for his crazy whoppers.

Maguire, Sosa, Shilling, Palmeiro, Canceco.
The knew Sammy and Rafael were dirty, as they knew Shilling wasn’t. Canseco stands alone..Maguire may have been a hoped for Pigeon, but he didn’t perjure himself. Considering the A-rod leak, and timing, some are a little slow to recognize Bush administration tactics and behaviors. They accomplished what they wanted. I think Bonds knows he is free to play now. If he is ready he might. Another investigation into the Bonds harrasment may have been threatened?

McGwire’s situation is a murky and difficult topic. Most of us like clarity and closure. I do too. At the same time, maybe being older, I have become accustomed to some things being ambiguous and not neat, as we might like them. Idealism is still important, so I would never wish you to compromise your values.

I will be interested to hear McGwire’s side of the story, if he shares it.

Jumbo – Tony gives honest answers? Give me a break. At best you might say he gives honerable answers in that he often defends players and situations when he knows they screwed up (even if it means lying). My experience is that people with big egos seldom are able to be totally honest.

The only guy called to Capitol Hill who was a past player was Mark McGwire. He manned up, on behalf of everyone else in the industry.

Semper Fideles, MM. Welcome back.

But in doing so, he gave the Congress someone to fulminate over. MLB had to sacrifice somebody to the Congresspeople. And so, on behalf of Bud and the Union, Mark took the hit.

I do not think McGwire was “pretending” not to comment as some sort of excuse. He was not asking to be excused or forgiven. If you think about it, takes some unusual strength too. He did not lie or give dopey excuses like most everyone else. He manned up and took what they had to dish out.

He never made a secret of the andro. And for a generation or more, loads of athletes, across all kinds of sports, have worked to give themselves an advantage. Has taking steroids messed up his health? Lots of people take them safely. Doctors prescribe HGH. This is like a Salem witch-hunt.

Now baseball has added a testing program. This can help protect the McGwires of the future from harassment. He can say that he fully supports the testing program. No one should support it more than Mark, after the garbage that has been heaped on him. Its nice that his spirits are undaunted and he is willing to give coaching a try.

I’m excited about McGwire joining the team and he doesn’t owe me an apology either. I hold him in high esteem, particularly for walking out of his massive contract at the end of his career. However, he could quickly and simply put a rest to the fuss if he’d just state the obvious and stop pretending that not commenting is a clever way to get around this. He already copped to using andro and everyone already knows that he used more. The image of an honest and remorseful ex-roid user is much better than the mess he’s made now.

You Nutlaw like clarity. You want someone to proclaim “innocence”. Well what if McGwire did not feel guilty of anything to have used PEDs just like everyone else? Or you want him to say something goofy and apologize vaguely, and then the matter will blow over, as with Giambi. But this could be cynical. What if McGwire were too honorable to follow the Giambi path?

What if there is, at root, nothing to apologize for? McGwire like lots of other guys just tried to be the best he could be. Should McGwire say, I am sorry to have used steroids like loads of other athletes? This would ratfink on other ballplayers.

I see what you mean about “evasiveness” and going into hiding and showing no regret. I like privacy and do not think a player owes it to fans to tell them what he thinks. If they decide not to like him, this can be their choice, fine by me. What matters now is how he advises hitters.

I do not care if McGwire gets into the Hall of Fame. Thats up to voters and I am not one. If voters want McGwire to make it easier for them by doing a Giambi act, then its up to him to decide whether to help them out. I pay McGwire the respect of thinking he has taken a job as a hitting coach and is not merely campaigning for personal recognition in the Hall of Fame. He has already showed over the past few years that campaigning for himself or making vague apologies are not his cup of tea.

But as DeWitt said, McGwire is going to have to say something, after the Series. We shall all have to wait and here what McGwire has to say. He owes me no apology, but he may need to say something to prevent himself from becoming a distraction, because some fans must be genuinely troubled, understandably given all the information, misinformation, politics, and confusion.

As the original article states, Bonds’ legal problems don’t stem from steriods, but from perjury. McGwire was smart enough to avoid perjury. It wasn’t as if denial from any of these roids guys were particularly convincing in the long run, anyway. He wasn’t smart enough to just Giambi up and admit it and let it blow over. If he didn’t do it, he would have proclaimed his innocence. It’s the insulting evasiveness that gets people riled up. He’s likable enough for people to forgive him if he just says that he is sorry. Hiding showed no regret and gave no chance for forgiveness. He made his own bed.

Bonds may not have a great personality, but I am not sure how bad a guy he is, behind all the media hype. Maybe TLR thinks Bonds could be an ok team-mate. I would have to rely on TLR’s judgment, since he is an insider and fans mostly only know what they hear reported.

Bonds had the bad luck to be playing in the Bay area when a DA decided to investigate Balco. If Bonds played in 28 other cities, he would not have been investigated. If McGwire and Giambi had remained in Oakland, maybe they would have been investigated, not Barry. Luck tends to be unevenly distributed.

The personality and character of a player is a relevant factor when teams make trade and free agent decisions. Some guys are inflexible or hotheaded when they encounter an aggravation. This can hurt them, in terms of likeability with fans and hurt their earning power. If the Cubs had done well in 2009, Bradly might be the toast of Chicago. However, things did not go well for the Cubs and Milton.

As regards science, it is predicated on debate within areas of disagreement. It can be surprising and mystifying how large groups of educated people can be mistaken. Consider all the economists at universities and working for the government who missed the flaws in financial instruments on Wall Street. Lots of smart people lost money to Bernie Madoff’s con. There was a fund that needed a bailout in the late 1990s that bet the wrong way on something and ended up billions in the hole; it had two Nobel laureates in economics on its board of directors.

I agree with you ballplayers work in the entertainment industry. I cannot agree that just because a human being earns money swinging a stick he should be assumed to be just a dumb guy. In reality, he could be a dumb guy, but there is a chance that he might be very smart too. Similarly, he might be a jerk or he might be a nice guy. People are each different and its good to consider each as an individual, on their strengths and weaknesses.

I’m a Vikings’ fan, but I wasn’t bragging to my buddies when they signed Favre. Sure, like many Vikings fans, I was pleased that my team’s play would get better and delighted that the Packers’ fans would be cheesed over the move. I’ll brag about my team’s play, but I won’t go out and buy a Favre jersey (unless I can find a way to really upset some Packers’ fans with it). Favre once again showed himself to be an indecisive, attention-grabbing, manipulative, (traitorous?), lazy jerk this off-season. People will tune in to watch him, but most of them just want to see him beaten into the ground. Vikings’ fans have become despised again, like they were a few years ago with the party boat and all of the arrests that kept popping up. It mutes the fun to root for people you don’t like.

If all of the best players in the world were to suddenly vanish from existence, the next best players in the world would be just as good in comparison to the lower level of talent. They would be just as heralded and just as well rewarded. The money comes from the stadiums and the marketing and the television deals.

Okay, Jumbo. So the fans don’t like Barry and thus he becomes an easier and more acceptable target for the media and some lawyers trying to make a name for themselves, and thus the money he would have gotten instead goes to the next best players, who are probably more likable and bring in more good press and more fans than guys like Bonds or Sheffield. Every ball player comes and goes and the league remains. They are easily replacable because many people out there would choose to play baseball if they were offered 400k a year minimum.

It’s all image and hype to begin with. It’s all imaginary. It doesn’t matter whether the players are perfect or not. They are hyped up as supermen. If the hype fades and they turn out to be jerks and drug abusers, then their image is gone. You don’t have to pay to watch mean drug abusers, you have to pay to watch supermen. You can find mean drug abusers anywhere.

Doctors and scientists will be fired if they don’t perform their jobs well. Baseball players are entertainers. Their jobs are to impress others with their physical prowess and become heroes for the fans that they represent and whose pride hinges upon their behavior. If they can’t do that, then they are just big, dumb guys swinging sticks.

For instance, owners, managers, ballplayers are in the public domain. Teams will lose, fans will get riled, and sportwriters in service to fans will point out or claim mistakes were made by someone. So perceived flaws are going to get worked over and the bigger you are within the game, the more you are going to be an appealing target for someone. Nobody cares if Gary Bennett used steroids. He could take more than ARod or Canseco or Clemens, and no one will care, because he is little known.

One problem is that people are not perfect in every respect. Ballplayers can be held to an excessively high standard of public aspirations about them.

Most baseball players never reach the majors. Most who reach the majors have short careers. For those who really do achieve monster earnings, the choice for society is whether Bill DeWitt and his buddies should keep all the moola or whether the human beings who actually play the game should get a share? I do not have a problem with players getting their share, in part because so many other ballplayers earn little, during their years in the game, and because owners should not just grab it all.

Bonds is not involved with MLB these days, in part because he is being prosecuted and teams would be leery to hire him, even given the presumption of innocence. On the other hand, McGwire knows a lot about hitting and is not being investigated or prosecuted, so can be hired to contribute his knowledge to younger hitters. Bonds and McGwire may vary in likability, but it is their legal differences that puts one in uniform and the other not.

Bonds and McGwire may both be large men. I would not wish to suspect either is relatively unintelligent. And, to keep things in balanced perspective, doctors and scientists can also make personal and professional mistakes. They too are human and thus imperfect.

On the other hand, I don’t feel sorry for athletes or entertainers. Their work isn’t particularly impactful in advancing society as a whole, yet they are showered with more riches than most doctors, scientists, or people making actual differences. Baseball players “earn” millions of dollars for hitting a ball with a bat. The only value in doing something like that is in entertaining others, in making people like you and want to see you. People don’t like cheaters and liars, even if they weren’t technically breaking the rules. People want to root for the honest, hard working underdogs. People feel betrayed with their heroes are exposed as less than heroic.

If you want to make untold riches for playing a game by entertaining others, then don’t get outraged when people no longer want to sing your praises after acting unlikable. Most people don’t like Bonds, so he sits at home. He has no value. McGwire is still marketable, so he gets a job. He can still sell tickets. There’s no moral injustice in the unequal treatment. They’re just big, dumb guys who swing sticks.

Society would have to build a heck of a lot more prisons , if we had to prosecute every single celebrity for their dopey thoughts or for taking some molecule that somebody else does not think they should have taken. There would not be anyone left in Hollywood, not necessarily a bad thing. Every player in the NFL, NBA, MLB, off to the stockade. An Olympic swimmer was toking weed in South Carolina, he would need to be put away. With all the nuttiness among financiers on Wall Street and investment banks, there may have been some naughty molecules involved with some of them, behind the scenes, it would not be surprising.

Its may be tempting to simplify and just focus all the blame for PED use on McGwire and Bonds, because celebrities, and flog them for the foilbles and imperfections within so many human beings, across society as a whole.

Selig got worked over by Congresspeople too. He knows how little fun it is go up to Capitol Hill for the bears to pontificate and splutter outrage as part of their re-election strategies. Bud and McGwire have been veterans within the same faux war, no wonder Bud loves Mark.

Roger Clemens’ mistake was to think he could lie to the bears. They are masters of lies, its what they do for a living. They can detect the scent of another bear 1,000 miles away. And Rog was popular inside Texas, making him especially yummy. Bud does not love Rog, because Clemens was stupid and a dreadful liar.

When the investigators said they found the combined list of names and correlating test samples on a one computer at a lab in SD,,,,,,,,,, they were of course lying in an attempt at setting up an alibi encase court proceeding got out of hand. The 2003 three tests were merely to establish a criteria of 4% or 5% to justify further testing and culpability for abusers in future testing. There would never have been a need to combine those lists, especially for some lab jockey in SD to try an extortion scheme. The Union’s legal pressure created a need to cover the Commissioners ass for suppling that list to investigators. That last A-rod leak came during the White House transition period. A little extra something before you lost the Justice Department and the investigation. Bonds will eventually win a collusion suit.
Keep in mind that there were no secrets for GB and his buddies. The data mining operation that they had from 2003 on meant a simple phone number or e-mail address could produce almost anything you could imagine.

It should be noted that Mr. Hooten is not outraged, as one would expect, since MM has established himself as a golden goose for Mr. Hooten’s foundation. We are not talking about a dummy here. As Boo Boo said, “He’s smarter than the average bear.”