The locker room crackled with talk of Bynum and the Bruins
and football divisional playoffs. The winter stuff is interesting,
admittedly — New England is inarguably one of the best NFL teams ever.
(Don’t sleep on the ’94 49ers!)
All of the words, though, seemed oddly mis-timed. It’s not really time
to get over-the-top excited about football. Pace yourselves, there’s another story poppin'.

There
are so many layers to the performance-enhancing drugs scandal that the
congressional hearing scheduled for February 13, to follow up the
Mitchell Report that accused several MLB players of doping, could be
one enormous showdown.

Roger Clemens
gave us unbelievable television this week by playing that tape of a
recent phone conversation with his former trainer, Brian McNamee.
(Right up there with the pol who shot himself in the head, only the pitching legend shot himself in the foot.) Now that Chuck Knoblauch’s been unearthed
from the bowels of sports ignominy, things should really be interesting
at that table as other guys named in the report -- Andy Pettite,
McNamee,  Kirk Radomski, and Bud Selig -- get grilled.

At stake for Selig: the fate of baseball’s exemption, if the feds wanna go hardcore on the consortium called MLB.

For
the alleged cheaters: Let’s face it, basically for Clemens there’s a
punishment at work here that’s about as bad as prison. He’s being
publicly stripped of his credibility. He looked like 20 miles of bad
Texas road during that press conference on January 7. And you can
imagine the stress he’s been through. Shoot, AT&T had that cell phone commercial with him out of general circulation while the Mitchell Report was still warm.

Mo Vaughn got given up in the report. But no bigger steroid-era Red Sox star was fingered. Hmm
… In some ways, Mitchell feels like Boston’s ultimate punking of the
Yankees. People have already begun to rightly question the late-'90s NY
legacy.

One of my qualms with the Mitchell Report is that it’s a
mere intimation of what performance enhancers are doing to the game.
(Jeff Kent has some compelling thoughts
on this. Good as he is on the topic, I’d have been a lot more impressed
with him if he had actually spoken up before the report came out. It’s
easy to talk shit after the fact.)

The report is essentially a
bi-coastal sample, with the Big Apple functioning as the epicenter of
it all, because of Balco and Kirk R’s status as a New York baseball
club drug dealer. It's not the whole story of the madness going on in
baseball. That story has yet to be told.