!Judgement Day!

!George Mitchell cleans up baseball!
(America. The world. Universe.)

!Big Report!
!Big surprises!
!Big names!

!Big game heads to mount above the mantel!
!MVPs and Cy Youngs!

In truth: I would have been surprised to be surprised by the revelations.

For example, I already knew ballplaying brothers don’t seem to mind sharing needles: Boones, Cansecos, Giambis.

HERE'S HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE REPORT (and more):

I think maybe all the guys on Mitchell's list used Steroids or HGH.

But maybe they didn't.

We're all assumed innocent until proven guilty here in Baseball America.

And this Mitchell Report is part of the dangerous ongoing trend of documents that get written, released, reported, filter-pumped at netspeed and then taken as gospel...

WITHOUT. LEGAL. PROOF.

All based on information collected by Whittaker Chambers type stool pigeons. (Google Chambers if the name is not familiar to you.)

As Pacino says in Scent of a Woman:
"WE'RE MAKIN' A RAT SHIP HERE!"

In the Court of the Philosophy of Boocock, guys who break rules who then rat on other guys who break the same rules get stiffer penalties, longer sentences. Not special side deals.

AS MUCH TO THE POINT:

Any Baseball Team Owner or US Senator who may or may not have Botox in their forehead (or in their spouse), who uses the steroids soapbox to distract us from more important issues, should find another soapbox.

A LIST OF MORE IMPORTANT SOAPBOXES:

Iraq.
Iran.
Iran helping Iraq?!?!?

AND/OR:

What we do when the next big wave of subprime mortgage rates go variable.

More Pacino: I'M. JUST. GETTING. STARTED!

History tells us that every time ballplayers do something nasty out of desperation/greed - think Blacksox 1919 - owner avarice drives the badboy bus.

As far as the basic lying/cheating goes, it's a wash.

Bad ballplayer boys.
Bad owner dads.

I say the owners are worse.

Because the owners are hypocrites willing to throw ballplayers under the bus to cover their own sins.

They knew their employees were cheating.
Rewarded the ones who cheated best.

And now they're Claude Raines in Casablanca 'I'm shocked, shocked to discover steroid use in this ballpark!"

Corporately managed ugliness at it’s most transparently UN-transparent.

The barely veiled class thing:

People who DO things - play ball, fix your car, write screenplays - are children who should be punished for breaking rules.

People who OWN things - baseball teams, oil companies, movie studios - are the adults who are allowed to break rules because they own things.

And when doers start making enough money to be owners, owners who don't do crack down hard on doers who do do.

(Snicker.)

I see these owners as the shrivel-hearted Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life." Bitter men who never played but saw the profit in selling the game.

Line up the performance enhancing player against an owner.
Worst vs. worst.

Player: San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds cheated his way to the most hallowed record in baseball for $ and mega-status and abused his mistress and paid her off in $9,999 cash-lumps - even though he was already going to the Hall of Fame and had a nice family.

Owner: Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad made his fortune on foreclosures during the great depression and then tried to 'contract' ( = eliminate) the Twins for a BIG ONE TIME ONLY $167M - because he couldn't get Minneapolis/St.Paul to build him a taxpayer funded ballpark.

Pohlad was Forbes Magazine's 245th richest guy in America in 2006. 78th the year before. Rich enough to provide annuities for great-grandchildren he will never live to know.

The player:

Abused some near and dears.
The fans weren't fooled.
Even elected to asterisk his record setting home run ball.

The owner:

Took homes from people who couldn't pay their 1930’s mortgages after irresponsible 1920’s investors overleveraged their decadent lives on highly speculative investments. (Hmmm -sounds familiar.) Then tried to shut down a successful franchise for pure personal profit.

You say the team was Pohlad's property, his business to shut down. I say team owners have been given a special dispensation by congress to run teams at a profit without the threat of competing leagues. So running a baseball team is more like a special civic responsibility and owners have a duty to run the franchise well. And enjoy the priveledge until the owner wants to sell the team.

If you say I'm naive, I'll say you're a sell out.

The player made a plan.

The owner made a business plan.

That business plan:

Pohlad and the other owners hired fellow owner/ Commissioner Bud Selig to hire 'partial' Red Sox owner George Mitchell to do an 'impartial’ investigation of the players and their steroids.

Mitchell promised it wasn't a conflict of interest because he impartially brokered a peace deal between the Brits and Irish - even though he's Irish.

Though I don't think anybody other than James Joyce was ever paid anything extra for being Irish.

Whereas owners do tend to profit from helping fellow owners.

Tell you what.

If Mitchell gets to look into the medicine cabinets of ballplayers, I say we should look into George Mitchell's un-scrubbed files, closets and underpants drawer.

Not so clean and spotless.

Hmmm. Didn't he take money from people he shouldn't have even been talking to when he was a Senator?

Let's re-enter those facts into the court reporter.

While we fully dredge Lake Pohlad.

And by the by: George W. Bush owned the Texas Rangers.
Now W wants to save kids from being influenced by the same players who got noticeably bigger on his watch.

I-Rodriguez.
JuanGone-zales.
Canseco.

“Viagra” Palmiero.

Should we really uncover more of this 'scandal?'

Really?

I think we've all sinned plenty during the short-cut to success era.

Jason Giambi juiced.
John Kerry Botoxed.
Greg Maddux lasixed (lasered his eyes better).

And Meg Ryan bought bigger lips.

I take a variety of 'performance enhancers' every day.

To be perfectly clear:

I'm not totally live and let live move on keep on trucking about everything.

I would like to know more about Dick Cheney's ties to everything wrong.

But what these guys did to their bodies is not my idea of a federal case.

I don't need a list of steroid takers.
I watch the games.
I have eyes.

You don’t want kids to take steroids?
Close the salary gap between rookie ballplayers and tenured teachers.

The players were already being held accountable.
The Hall of Fame will pass judgment.
The juice will catch up to the cheaters.

Many of these guys won't make it past 55.

And we'll all know why.

-----------------------

PS: AP NEWSWIRE March 29, 2008 - (New York, Office of the Commissioner MLB) - The Philadelphia Phillies of the National League recently acquired 10 AAA clinically harvested and stress tested for human use Eli Lilly Baboon Hearts; the ballclub has not yet announced it's plans for the Eli Lilly Baboon hearts. An unconfirmed source believes that the Eli Lilly Baboon Hearts will be transplanted into the bodies of recently deceased middle relievers circa 1947-1973 who will then be optioned by the organization for immediate use by the major league club.

PPS Poem

Tilting against windmills (again).
Always a salmon swimming upstream.
I feel so bruised and clean