Let me start with a couple of baseball items this morning… With the latest revelation that Barry Bonds flunked a drug test for amphetamines last year, can we now assume that he will not be a first ballot Hall of Fame inductee? If Mark McGwire didn’t make it this time, how can Bonds? The steroid cloud of suspicion around Bonds can’t be any less than the one around McGwire; and now, Bonds has indeed failed a drug test, which is something McGwire never did. Don’t send me snarky notes telling me that McGwire was never tested; I know that. But the simple and unalterable fact is that Bonds failed a test and McGwire never did. So, if precedence matters even a little bit… I know that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind; Ralph Waldo Emerson made that clear, but I’m not so sure this would be a “foolish consistency”.
Interestingly, that huge one-year contract offered to Bonds by the Giants remains unsigned supposedly hung up over what remedies the club might have if Bonds were to be indicted or suspended or something like that. Now, purely coincidently, Bonds’ name gets into the public domain as a “drug-test flunkee” but no other name(s) surfaces. Surely, he is not the only MLB player who tested positive for amphetamines all last year, right? Paging Mr. Stone, Mr. Oliver Stone. Please pick up the white courtesy phone…
Analogously, Gerry Fraley mentioned back in December that no player in baseball had manipulated the baseball salary system better than JD Drew. At the time Drew, was supposed to sign a 5-year deal with the Red Sox worth $70M and that would have brought his baseball earnings to “$108.92M for what has been a workaday career”. Go and check the stats and you’ll find that Drew has never been on an All-Star team, has only hit 30 homeruns once and has driven in 100 runs only once. Well, it seems as if the negotiations are done but it’s been more than a month and the contract isn’t signed yet and there are some “problems” with Drew’s shoulder according to the Sox medicos.
Memo to Sox Medical Staff: Drew sits out a lot of time with injuries and/or “injuries”. If you think his shoulder is “suspect”, you just gave him another set of maladies as the foundation for his inability to play on any random Wednesday. Beware!
The Florida Marlins have not had a great winter. First, they fired the NL Manager of the Year because he had the audacity to tell the owner who it was that managed the team and the way it was going to be run. Obviously, the meddlesome owner had the final say in who would manage the team next year, but that was a PR fiasco.
Then, with season ticket renewals sinking from their below their horribly low levels in the first place, the Marlins recently decided to stick it to those fans who wanted to come to individual games. In 2007, if you walk up to the window on game day to buy one of the thousands of unsold tickets to a Marlins’ game, the price will be higher than it was last year and higher than if you bought those tickets prior to the start of the season. I didn’t major in economics, but can someone explain to me how that strategy aligns with the law of supply and demand? Also, isn’t a ticket for a game to be played on Monday a wasting asset in the sense that it has value only until the game is over on Monday and is then worth nothing? So, why the price increase as the value of the ticket is diminishing?
What’s next for the Marlins in terms of price gouging? Maybe people who walk up to buy tickets on game day will only be allowed to buy those seats if they join the Marlins version of the “Record of the Month Club” where fans will have to pay $30 a month to get two albums a month from the club. That membership will entitle them to walk up and buy the game-day tix at their inflated prices. I’m sure the fans in South Florida will be looking forward to those CDs with remastered songs from Abba, Yoko Ono and Sha Na Na…
One more Marlins happening… The team markets its rookies and its prospects; those are the only real assets for the club. Well, their top draft selection from a couple of years ago, Jeffrey Allison, has spent most of his first two seasons in drug rehab for addiction to OxyContin and heroin and now is facing felony charges in North Carolina for drug possession, stealing a van and driving yet another stolen vehicle. Somehow, I don’t think he’ll be one of the staff aces next year.
I know that the Tennessee Titans were not playoff participants this year, but they came awfully close to making it for a team that was 0-5 to start the season. Interestingly, the stats don’t indicate how they made a push toward the playoffs. The Titans gave up 400 points this year; that was the worst in the AFC. Their offense ranked 28th in the league and rookie Vince Young’s QB Rating was only the 30th best in the league. But all Young did was win games; the Titans beat three of the teams in the playoffs (Philly, Indy and the Giants) in the middle of the year. According to reports, the Titans are out from under their salary cap problems and have 10 draft picks in this year’s draft (extra picks in the fourth, sixth and seventh rounds) giving them the flexibility to trade up is they want or to amass more young players at reasonable cap costs. The Titans have a good coach in Jeff Fisher. It’s not clear how the Titans did what they did this year; but for the moment, they seem to embody the old Al Davis/Raider philosophy of:
“Just win, baby.”
In one way, it’s a good thing the Chargers got bounced from the playoffs. Remember back to the 2004 draft when Eli Manning and his family forced the Chargers to trade Eli’s rights to the Giants for the rights to Phillip Rivers. That trade gave the Chargers sufficient quarterbacking depth that they allowed Drew Brees to take a hike. Now, just imagine the Chargers playing the Saints in the Super Bowl. That would mean that Eli Manning would be watching two former Chargers’ QBs play for a championship ring and Peyton Manning would be out of the playoffs once again. That would not be “happy times” in the NFL’s “First Family”…
Well, it surely looks as if Title IX has begun to have its desired social effect; women athletes on campus are beginning to achieve the same stature/status as their male counterparts. Four women on the Colorado State basketball team got misdemeanor citations after they allegedly set off a “homemade explosive device” just outside a teammate’s apartment. No one was injured; the device was made from a soda bottle and household chemicals; it was a prank. However, the gap between the antisocial nature of male athlete behavior and female athlete behavior on campus seems to be shrinking.
Finally, leave it to Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle to put the Barry Bonds amphetamine business into perspective:
“Apparently Bonds thought they were green Tic-Tacs. He wanted minty-fresh breath for the post-game interviews. Seriously, if that was Bonds on amphetamines, the Giants are going to have to allow an extra five minutes per inning this season for Barry to amble to and from his outfield position.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…