I'm so pissed off these days at Congress I could bite a nail in half, and then they start these stupid hearing about steroid use in baseball, and I'm ready to take up biting off railroad spike heads.  Here's the same worthless assembly of goof-offs who can't even come up with a law dealing with the border crisis and illegal immigration, and they're investigating steroid use in professional baseball.  Yeah, the same Parliament of Whores (I'll love you forever for that one, D.J.) who rolled over on it's back like a whipped hound on the Iraqi war deal, and have lapped up Bush's trail of economic shit for the past seven years, but they're going to snoop into baseball's murky underworld of double-dealings and sleazy alliances.  Come to think of it, Congress might've finally found it's calling.  Since they're not worth a tinker's dam for anything else, they might as well take on the little things- and folks, steroid use in baseball is little thing.

Pardon my French, but baseball is a shitty sport to start with.  If Roger Clemens is guilty of anything, it's nothing more than being a product of what the game itself has become.  Baseball has been given a free pass in years past by lawmakers to screw up the great game of baseball (something they've done a good job of), and the culprit is money.  Yep, big bucks ruined the game, and it may well have ruined Roger Clemens, probably the best pitcher to ever play the game. 

A practical look at what's happening here explains a lot, but it's something you're not likely to hear from anyone associated with baseball or Congress.  When you have baseball clubs (owners) willing to pay players up to twenty million bucks a year to play the game, then you need to get prepared to deal with all that comes with it.  The list of bad stuff associated with big salaries is long, but the one in question right now is the use of steriods, or performance enhancing drugs.  Roger Clemens is accused of taking 16 shots over a period of a few years, supposedly to lengthen his pitching career.  And there's teams out there offering him big money to keep pitching, millions of dollars.  So what do you do?  Say, no, I ain't doing it.  I'm already rich and famous, so I'm checking out and retiring.  Would you retire with that much cash dangling in front of you?

If you remember, he tried to retire.  Who knows what happens with that, but I'm sure plenty of phone calls came his way looking for somebody like him who could still pitch well.  He needed a little boost to get in shape to play again, so he took the steroids.  That's the absolute worst case scenario of what happened, and there's no proof yet that he did it.  All we have is the testimony of this Brian McMamee, who was a trainer.  They get paid pretty well, these trainers, but nothing close to what a guy like Roger Clemens gets paid.  And you know how the instigators are when it comes to things like this.  If they can come up with a juicy story, the sports jounralists have little conscience.  There's lots of operators out there willing and able to coach a Brian McNamee into making accusations for money.  In my mind the big question is:  Who primed up Brian McNamee to start all this talk of steroid use by his former employer and pal, Roger Clemens?  Even a half smart trainer knows there's potential big bucks in shooting your mouth off about something like that, right?

Several things are apparent to me at this time about the steroid use deal with Roger Clemens.  We can be pretty certain that Brian McNamee is not a class act.  Maybe he's lying, maybe he isn't, but we all know he's a turncoat and a back-stabber.  He took the money as a trainer (and as a supposed friend), then turned and bit the hand that fed him.  I have absolutely no respect for that.  We also know that Roger Clemens is no dodger.  He didn't duck and hide, didn't run, and he stepped up and fought back.  You can always say he fought back because he had no other choice, but that won't hold water.  He could've done like Mark McGwire and went into seclusion, but he didn't.  And he's spending a lot of money trying to clear his name.

My point is that I don't know why we should care all that much.  I don't.  Using his words, I don't give a rat's ass what Roger took to lengthen his career.  I think he should've retired early, but he didn't, and that was his choice.  16 shots of some performance enhancing drug to extend a wonderful career?  Are you kidding me?  Even if he'd taken 1,600 shots, I still wouldn't care all that much.  Had I been advising him, I would've urged him to hang it up, go play golf or whatever.  But I don't know what I would've done in his shoes, and if he turns up guilty of taking a few steroid shots, I will not be disappointed in him, and I will not turn my back on a player I've had a lot of respect for. 

And shame on Congress for lowering itself to a standard of sniffing out the dusty basement of a sport gone bad.  Bad doggie . . . bad, bad doggie!

Artie, 2/09/08