Five years ago, I called for a cap on the number of reporters who should be allowed to cover Spring Training and tried to define a set of trite story angles that the ones permitted to attend Spring Training need no longer foist upon us.
Needless to say, this reporting cap is not in effect but here is a perfect example of what I meant by recycling of stories and story angles. Put this in terms of good news and bad news; consider:
Good News: We are not – on a daily basis – reading/hearing about what Barry Bonds is denying that he did or did not do and what Federal prosecutors are thinking about doing next to him.
Bad News: We are – on a daily basis – reading/hearing about what Roger Clemens is denying that he did or did not do and what Federal prosecutors are thinking about doing next to him.
From all of that baseball/prosecutorial news stuff, Scott Ostler of the SF Chronicle laid preemptive claim to a great line should things really go south for Roger Clemens:
“If Clemens is sentenced to prison and winds up in solitary confinement, will he be considered the ace in the hole?”
A staple of Spring Training reporting has to do with pitchers trying to make a comeback from injury or trying to eke one more year out of their arms. One such pitcher this year is Bartolo Colon who got himself an invitation to the Red Sox camp trying to become their #5 starter. The interesting thing about that story is that one could marry it with another item in the baseball cosmos this spring. Donald Fehr said that the MLBPA would consider blood-testing regimens if there was evidence that the blood tests were effective. That commits Donald Fehr to exactly nothing, but it is newsworthy because it is a new position for him. How does that relate to Bartolo Colon – who surely does not look like a “Roid Ranger?
Do the WADA chemists have a reliable blood test for chocolate?
I haven’t yet read that angle on the story but we may need to examine it one of these days. If Colon actually makes it to the major leagues this year and you get to see one of the games that he pitches, check out that centerfield shot of him on the pitcher’s mound. Then, ask yourself if he is not the current active player most worthy of the moniker, El Caboose.
Jason Schmidt is trying to come back with the Dodgers. LA paid him $16M a year for three years and got all of six starts out of him in the first year of that deal. Already, Schmidt has been “shut down” this spring. He and the team say this is all part of the rehab and it was planned to be this way all along and you should move along because there is nothing to see here. That could be the case. It could also be the case that the Over/Under for the number of starts that Jason Schmidt gets this season is 2.5 – - while he collects his next $16M installment…
Jason Marquis is trying to make the Cubs as one of the folks at the back end of their rotation. For some reason, he decided to make it known that he wanted to be traded if he wasn’t going to be a starter who fit prominently in the Cubs’ plans. I surely do not understand this one at all. If Jason Marquis cannot make it as a starter in the Cubs’ rotation, why is some other team going to give up any asset at all to bring him in and make him a starter on their team? It can’t be because Marquis showed just how wonderful a person he is with that kind of outburst.
There is an independent minor league baseball team in Atlantic City – - the Surf. They just hired Cecil Fielder as their manager for 2008, which would be a throwaway item in the agate type of most sports pages save for one thing. About ten years ago, Fielder was in hock to the Trump Plaza Casino in Atlantic City for more than $500K. Evidently, one of the local reporters there asked Fielder how this might affect him and Fielder said:
“Gambling has never been a temptation for me.”
What part of that response does not compute? If one is not tempted to gamble, how does one run up a $500K gambling tab? Oh, I get it now. He’s not tempted to gamble; he just does it…
Harkening back to the abundance of Roger Clemens news this spring – which MLB needs like Darfur needs more refugees – there is a piece of the story that did not get a lot of play – much to the delight of MLB. Even considering the tarnished reputation of the source here, Denny McLain said he is “certain” that Roger Clemens is not telling the truth. Denny McLain is the author of an autobiography titled, I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect. Let us just say that is a gross understatement and leave it at that.
McLain is also a two-time Cy Young winner and the last pitcher to win 30 games in a season. So he has some”pitching cred” but the PR machine at MLB wants to keep him at least a parsec away from anything having to do with the game. McLain was suspended in his career for consorting with gamblers; he was indicted and convicted of cocaine trafficking – but the conviction was reversed on procedural grounds; he was convicted of stealing a couple of million dollars from the pension fund of a company he owned and served about 5 years in prison for that. He is not an ambassador of the game by any stretch of the imagination so the MLB gurus had to breathe a sigh of relief when this story happened and then quietly disappeared.
From his “inside knowledge” McLain proclaimed with regard to the Roger Clemens mess:
“There are a lot of guys on death row with a lot less evidence.”
Finally, staying with the baseball theme for today, here is an item from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:
Maker’s Mark bourbon will honor Johnny Bench with 3,000 limited-edition bottles with the Hall of Fame catcher’s picture on the label.
Which certainly gives a whole new meaning to the question: “One or two fingers?”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…