TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Crazy Like a Fox!

We think perhaps General Barry McCaffrey, former White House Drug Czar, has been hanging out with Yogi Berra, or maybe the former managing general partner of the Texas Wrangers....his unsolicited advice to baseball was that it adopt stricter standards on steroids enforcement, claiming, and this is a direct quote, "You cannot have the chickens guarding the coop." It's mastery of metaphor like that that produced that big victory in the War on Drugs on McCaffrey's watch...not surprisingly, some actual experts on the real steroids problem in high school have said that the Congressional hearings will backfire, as they've merely drawn more attention to their availability.

What Kind of Crack is Peter Gammons Smoking?

Amidst the perhaps unshocking news that Barry Bonds may sit out the entire year, the always hilarious Gammons wrote an ESPN column touting the depth (!) of the Giants lineup, headlined (originally) "Giants Can Win Without Bonds"....this and other parallel universes coming up on the next episode of Stargate SFG-1....not to be one of those cynical liars of the media Mr. Bonds is so fond of cracking on, but bowing out this season cannot be seen as anything but a McGwire-esque duckout, physical problems or no. If you assume Bonds did steroids, sitting out for a year will prevent him from taking a positive test, or alternatively, testing negative and then coming up a mere shadow of his former self (remember, the greatest season of all time was the 2004 Barry Bonds.) If he stays out a year, he can blame age for his breakdown in production. (I have no idea how long it takes to detox the body from steroids.) If Bonds didn't do steroids, and his production goes down this year, it will still look like he did steroids. The only way Bonds comes out ahead is if he tests repeatedly clean, the results are made public, and he has another monster year -- which with multiple knee surgeries in the off-season, seems unlikely. Bonds is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, and whether or not he's taken the 'roids route, he may have figured this out and just decided to throw his hands up.

posted by The Crank 7:02 PM