The Alex Rodriguez-Scott Boras Saga

Great cartoon by Paul Trap at Baseball America:

Roger Clemens Will Use 60 Minutes as His Forum

ESPN is reporting that Roger Clemens will attempt to clear his name on the CBS show, 60 Minutes (which A-Rod was recently on).  Clemens will certainly speak on the steroid allegations that have plagued him and his baseball standing for the past few weeks.

In a video posted on his official Web site, Roger Clemens said that he has become “almost numb” to the steroid accusations against him in the Mitchell report and that he has granted an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an effort to clear his name.

I guess 60 Minutes is the place to go right now for troubled ballplayers when a forum is needed.  Hopefully we’ll hear some real evidence as to what went on with McNamee and not some fluff piece with no substance.

Here’s the actual video released by Clemens on his website that details how he currently feels about everything.

Early Morning Reads

The New York Times featured some interesting texts today, one by Murray Chass and the other by George Vecsey. The first by Chass makes absolutely no sense to me. As the title suggests, Chass is questioning whether or not the steroid use of players under Joe Torre’s managerial tenure (specifically those who won World Series titles) should indirectly compromise Torre’s HOF standing and reputation as one of the greatest baseball managers in the history of the game. Chass also calls into question the legitimacy of the early Yankees dynasty, built on the backs of workers like Pettitte and Clemens, that we have all come to know and love.

It may be far-fetched to question whether Torre could be tainted by the steroids fallout, but there are critics who say baseball should do something about records possibly enhanced by steroids use, so why should a team be any different from a player? If you want to question many of Bonds’s 762 home runs and Clemens’s 354 victories, look at teams’ achievements, too.

It’s simply impractical to even get into this argument. So, we’re going to call into question an entire team’s achievements, as well as the manager of the team? I mean, where does it end, really? If a few members of a team are PED users, then, one cannot simply write off the efforts put forth by others who are not using PEDs. How fair is it to discredit an entire unit after the failure of a couple of cogs? One could argue that players like Clemens or Knoblauch were integral players, but, again, baseball is a team sport, won through a variety of different aspects that shift throughout the course of a game. Then we can get into semantics, because defining “integral” and giving substance to that word (how important is one guy in comparison to the next) is a crapshoot in itself.

Should the 2007 Red Sox be penalized completely due to Brendan Donnelly being on their team? He did earn 2 wins for the Sox and without those 2 wins, the Yankees would have been tied for first in the division. What about Gagne? He wasn’t great at all but was an important part of a World Series bullpen. Sound like nonsense? Well that’s because it is, even though, according to Chass, we should be very worried that even former Yankees used steroids. Come on now. Chass said it’s far-fetched and his journey into this argument should have ended there.

Of course, Chass wondered about Torre’s standing as well. Truth be told, there is a lot of blame to go around on everyone in baseball, but somehow, I fail to see the connection between Torre and steroid use or PED use by any of the aforementioned users. As far as we know, Joe Torre never encouraged his players to take steroids. Joe Torre never called anyone to collect HGH for a pitcher on his team. Managers are only complicit in this if they witness something of an anomaly or some form of actual PED use and fail to report it or question the user. The man is a manager, not a babysitter. He plays the guys he gets and if they’re effective they play more. If not, they play less. You cannot, in the aftermath of the steroid scandal, point fingers at a successful manager, simply because he was successful. What stops you from blaming the batting coach? What does he see when he practices with guys? What about the instructors, clubhouse officials, trainers, and the list goes on and on. Again, it’s just impractical to point fingers at a lone Joe Torre figure.

The media enjoys blaming a single entity or a small collective of related figures. Packaging a problem and creating distinct boundaries and outlines gives us a more organized perception of it all. It makes things easy for us to understand. However, as George Vecsey indicates in his text, situations and more specifically, human beings, are inherently complex configurations. Complexities are allowed in baseball, and we must embrace that. There is no single user or manager or towel boy to blame for the steroid boom. Here, in this context, wondering if Joe Torre will be indirectly tainted is invalid. We must look at it all as a collective failure, yet we must also understand it to be what it is: a mistake or flawed judgement by flawed people.

Vecsey points out that fans, writers and everyone else, tend to treat baseball as a sport of innocence. Baseball is often thought of as the sport of the child, and they treat it as such, criticizing anything that remotely resembles an adult action that can also be classified as a human mistake. Instead of treating baseball players like monuments and holding them up as high as politicians and international diplomats, we really must, as Vecsey says, “admire them as athletes,” nothing more and nothing less. Believe it or not, doing this could probably ease the pressure off of the players and probably, in turn, break down steroid use among those in the game. Sometimes, people simply forget that baseball, although a business, was initially created as a game and not a role model maker.

Check out both articles, good reads for these slow baseball days.