Let's Do Steroids!

Good Morning. Happy Friday. I'm miserable and I have a pounding headache. The only redeeming quality about this day is that it's pay day.

Since I'm in pain and feeling full of hate, let's talk about steroids.

Everyone's favorite liar, Roger Clemens, has been in the news quite a bit lately. This silly ho was indicted on Thursday for lying to Congress about steroid use.

Here's how I feel about steroid use: SHUT UP.

You are making me so crotchety, baseball. As far as I'm concerned, the steroid era is over. It was over when the Mitchell Report came out and everyone had to start fessing up to using PEDs. But here's the thing... I don't even blame half of these players for using steroids. I mean, obviously a select few had to start this whole escapade, but once it was started there was bound to be a snowball effect. What are you supposed to do when half your teammates are using PEDs and start to get better? All of a sudden, you're not the best guy on the team. You're not even in the top ten. You risk being traded, being sent to the minors, or just being completely unable to get a team to sign you. Then what are you supposed to do? No offense to athletes, but these guys have spent their whole lives preparing to play in the major leagues. What else are they supposed to do with themselves? Go be an accountant? Bag groceries? Some athletes just don't have the brain capacity for anything else but hitting a ball. Can you imagine what would have happened to guys like David Ortiz if he hadn't used steroids?! He'd be screwed with a capital S.

What if you spent years of your life working towards your M.D. and all of a sudden other doctors started taking brain enhancing drugs that enabled them to diagnose patients 75% faster and with 99.9% accuracy? What if these drugs were illegal because they had harmful effects on your health and your testicles?! I bet you'd start taking those damn drugs.

Listen, I don't condone taking illegal drugs. Nor do I condone cheating. But PED use is one of those situations where you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Most people that I know would opt to continue making millions of dollars a year.

The good news is that these days you've got guys like Dustin Pedroia and Clay Buchholz. Guys who are highly unlikely to ever be linked to steroid use. The better news is that with drug testing, this is the way that baseball is going to continue to go.

I'll miss the home runs. I won't miss hearing about jerk offs like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. Good riddance.

Samantha Lewis is an on-again off-again sports blogger who remembered it was Friday in time to write this post. Please send gold stars via Twitter. Also Asprin.

RELEASING THE LIST

You can add my voice to the chorus demanding the release of the list.

But my list isn’t “The List,” the one containing the names of 104 players – seven of whom have already been outed - who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in baseball’s ’03 survey. I don’t care who’s on that list, nor, by all accounts, does the general public. The only people who care about the names on The List are media folks, some of whom, like The New York Times’ Michael Schmidt, go to extraordinary lengths - including willfully violating the law - to satisfy their own curiosity.

The 25-year-old Schmidt is the reporter who broke the news last week that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz were on The List (Schmidt revealed earlier this year that Sammy Sosa was also on The List). The Times cited “lawyers with knowledge of the results” as sources for the story and went on to say “the lawyers spoke anonymously because the testing information is under seal by court order.”

What the Times didn’t report is that it’s a crime to divulge information under court seal. In fact, as outgoing MLBPA executive director Donald Fehr stated through a spokesman, it’s also a crime “to actively pursue information that may not lawfully be disclosed because it is under court seal.” Which makes Schmidt as guilty as his sources.

Don’t think leaking evidence under seal is a crime? Tell it to Troy Ellerman, Victor Conte’s attorney who leaked information from the grand jury hearing on the BALCO investigation to reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle. Armed with that information, The Chronicle reporters published a book detailing Barry Bonds’ PED use. Much like Schmidt, they were lauded as heroes by their peers. Ellerman, on the other hand, received a 30-month prison sentence for his crime.

Fehr went on to say that the fact the Times’ informants “are lawyers, is both shocking and sad.” He’s half right. Sad, because we would like to think all lawyers are honest, honorable, law-abiding and ethical. Unfortunately, lawyers don’t exhibit those characteristics in any greater quantity than any other group in society, including bankers, politicians and used car salesmen. Which makes the news that lawyers are at the root of the illegal disclosures anything but shocking.
Disclosure of the remaining players on The List, which would require court approval, would be a meaningless exercise in voyeurism. None of the players on The List will be subject to legal or baseball sanctions. Revealing names won’t tell us all the players who cheated and which ones didn’t. It won’t tell us who was clean pre or post ’03. Nor will it tell us who was taking undetectable drugs or drugs that players weren’t tested for, like HGH. And the argument that knowing who is on The List will preserve the integrity of the Hall of Fame is bogus. You think no one in the HOF ever took PEDS?

Releasing The List will only serve to prove who the dumbest players in MLB were in 2003. Players were told by their union there would be a survey test of everyone on the 40-man roster, all 1,200 MLB players. They were told if less than 5% of the players tested positive, there would be no more testing. And there’s reason to believe that the union told the players to stop taking PEDs prior to the test.

And yet, 104 players either didn’t understand the message or couldn’t resist the urge to continue shooting up and inhaling illegal drugs. In either case, they should be permanently banned from the game. Anyone that dumb and reckless is dangerous, to himself and, as it turned out, to his brethren, the ones who juiced and the ones who didn’t.

Forget The List. The list I want to see is the one with the names of all the lawyers who are spilling their guts to the Times, violating their oath of office (lawyers are officers of the court), breaking the law, and selling out the honest and law-abiding members of their profession. I want to see that list published in The New York Times. And I want to see the people on that list get what they deserve.

Jordan Kobritz is a former attorney, CPA, and Minor League Baseball team owner. He is an Assistant Professor of Sport Management at Eastern New Mexico University, teaches the Business of Sports at the University of Wyoming, and is a contributing author to the Business of Sports Network. Jordan can be reached at jkobritz@mindspring.com.

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The Money Made Me Do It!!!

Alex Rodriguez addressed the report that he failed a drug test in 2003 for the first time and boy did he draw some sympathy. First, he was apologetic and was as contrite as one can be when reading an attorney generated speech:

“And I did take a banned substance and, you know, for that I’m very sorry and deeply regretful. And although it was the culture back then and Major League Baseball overall was very — I just feel that — You know, I’m just sorry. I’m sorry for that time. I’m sorry to fans. I’m sorry for my fans in Texas. It wasn’t until then that I ever thought about substance of any kind, and since then I’ve proved to myself and to everyone that I don’t need any of that.”

But here's the kicker; he cited the pressure he felt coming to Texas after signing a $252 million contract with the Rangers as why he took the banned substances:

“When I arrived in Texas in 2001, I felt an enormous amount of pressure. I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day.”

Well, sure, one could find that reasoning to be somewhat plausible, but here's the problem with that. He stated that he felt "enormous" pressure after he signed a $252million deal with the Rangers, a team that plays in one of the smaller markets in all of MLB. Yet a little over a year ago he signs a $275 million deal with the Yankees, who play in one of the most difficult media markets in all of sport.

Yeah, that makes sense. One situation produced so much pressure to take an illegal substance, so I am going to put myself into a situation that will probably cause me even more stress. Maybe that's why he ran straight into the arms of 50 something pop singers. At least we learned something about Madonna; if she's dating a MLB player, they took roids at one point in their career.