taking a break from obsessively checking tomorrow's weather report
On Wednesday, Theo Epstein and his wife had a baby. Congratulations to them! Still, I can't help but notice that little Jack Epstein's birth was, uh, very opportunely timed. Let's see -- just about a week after the end of Winter Meetings, but still as far as humanly possible from the start of Spring Training? Theo, did you schedule the birth of your first child around the baseball season? That's dedication.I guess now I should talk about the Mitchell Report. The problem is that the Papelblog finds the steroid controversy to be really, really, really boring. The notion that steroids are threatening the sanctity of the game is boring, because it suggests that steroids are the only thing that keeps the game from being played the exact same way it was in 1907, which is both boring and untrue. Tommy John surgery has dramatically changed the career trajectory of many players, but nobody thinks we should put an asterisk next to the accomplishments of a pitcher who went under the knife at some point in his career. And anyway, the only thing that's more boring than things that threaten the sanctity of the game is the sanctity of the game itself. You really think the same players who threw spitballs and corked their bats and stole signals and bet on their teams wouldn't have taken HGH if they'd had the chance?
And we won't even get into the fact that all achievements prior to 1947 are tainted by segregation, but really what I am trying to say is that steroids are, you know, bad for your body and if the steroid controversy has proved anything, it's that most of the time they don't even work that well and when they do work, it's only for a little while and then you suffer a bunch of painful and ultimately career ending injuries and the league should dedicate itself to reducing future use of steroids through an independent testing program as well as prevention education (perhaps by hanging a poster of Jason Giambi in every clubhouse, with the caption "Do you really want to end up looking like this?"), but I can't really get that worked up about whether a particular period of baseball history was tainted by steroid use.
But the Mitchell Report? We LOVE the Mitchell Report. Anything that makes Bud Selig look like an incompetent geriatric and the last ten years of Roger Clemens' career look like a seedy gay pulp romance novel is a-okay with us.
posted by always thinking about papelbon @ 2:27 PM
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