A Cup Of Coffee And A Link Dump

Top of the morning to you, Fackers. I'm going to be tied up for the early part of the day, so I thought I'd brew up some links to keep you busy while I'm gone.

According to Buster Onley, the Yankees put a waiver claim on Brad Penny earlier this month and have interest in signing him now that he's asked for and recieved his release from the Red Sox. Hey, he's better than Sergio Mitre, right...?

Brendan as IIATM,S looks at Josh Willingham as a potential offseason trade target for the Yanks. He's having a a great year, but isn't the kind of player the Nationals are likely very attached to considering he's 31 and about to hit arbitration.

Great post from Mike at RAB looking at Joba's pitch selection, namely his reliance on the slider. When he first came up, hitters simply couldn't identify it, especially when contrasted with his 98MPH fastball. Now with his velocity sitting considerably lower and full scouting reports on his tendencies, the pitch is loosing its effectiveness.

With Derek Jeter climbing in the Yankee record books in seemingly every category, Jonah Keri takes a look at where he ranks among the greatest Pinstripers of all time.

Mr. Cashman makes life a little more difficult for the Red Sox. Matthew Pouliot looks at how it might harm the career of the player involved.

Did you know THIS is what Kate Smith looked like? If you were part of our live chat yesterday you did.

Another voice of reason from WEEI. However, I think Jim Rice could carry Derek Jeter's jock... very intimidatingly.

Last night, Nick Green did his best Nick Swisher impression.

So now it appears that the list of positive tests in 2003 never should have been seized the the government in the first place, which means that the names on it never would have been leaked. Our pal Craig reminds us that calling for all of the names on the list to come out is a fool's errand, and thinks that the names may continue to leak.

Lar from wezen-ball takes a deep (as in cavernously deep) look at walk-off wins over at The Baseball Analysts.

John Dewan takes a second shot at the ability of first basemen to scoop throws.

Another tough break for the Mets...

A list of the 12 best Mets quotes of all time. Amazingly, "He has lobby myself" didn't make the cut.

It's football, but take a look at the scrap heap.

More football... Another beat writer bites the dust. Damn you Gannett! /shakes fist at the sky.

A poisonous pitcher plant that eats rats? Bad. Ass. Now when are they going to start growing some in the NYC Subways?

More science... Are we descended from aquatic apes? Carl Everett certainly doesn't think so.

That's it for now. Matt will have some thoughts on Phil Coke shortly and we have some bigger stuff coming this afternoon, hopefully. Catch you later on.

"Let's Move On"

Yesterday, I dropped the sentence above at the very end of the Manny and Ortiz post. It was met with some friendly disagreement in the comments so I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the point.

The overriding sentiment from the commenters was that the Sox fans had their fun with all the steroid controversy surrounding the Yankees and now it's time to give it back to them.

Sox fans were merciless with Jason Giambi until the day he left, no doubt. They got various steroids chants going for Andy Pettitte on the heels of the Mitchell Report, but those have largely subsided. They were anxious to point out that they had the "clean" years of Roger Clemens' career. But let's see how aggressive with the "You-Took-Ster-Oids" chants they are next time A-Rod comes to Fenway. Like any other fanbase Red Sox Nation has it's fair share of dickheads, but most people with a reasonable amount of frontal lobe activity are going to realize they are now the pot calling the kettle black. If any of the fackin' Sullies and Murphs do start to get mouthy, Yanks fans can counter with "So-Did-Pa-Pi". What are we going to do beyond that?

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't an element of personal satisfaction and Soxenfreude involved in all of this. There more certainly is. Aside from the Yankees, it's the most central theme of this blog, for fuck's sake. But any of the idiots who were foolish enough to point the finger at the rest of the league, and really thought they were going to skate away with no stars on the Red Sox being implicated in PED use, and thought that 2004 was a gift from God, pure as the driven snow, just took a shot to the solar plexus. And that's good enough for me.

This news doesn't change what happened in 2004 from our eyes, though. The '04 roster of the Yankees included A-Rod, Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, Jason Giambi and almost certainly some other guys who haven't been outed yet. Their cheaters were a microscopic amount better (or just luckier) than our cheaters.

What we are heading towards is a realization that almost nothing is free from the stain of PEDs, one player and subsequently one fanbase at a time. Very few individual accomplishments and absolutely no Championships in say, the last 15-20 years or so are going to above reproach.

Like always, the Yankees are at the forefront of this, like they are in almost every aspect of baseball. We as Yankee fans are again ahead of the curve. Whether you like dragging people into the mud with you is a matter of personal preference, but it don't get a whole lot out of it.

Welcome To Club 103, Fellas

Back when the news of Manny's positive test in 2003 came to the forefront, I asked "why couldn't it have been Ortiz?", but I must admit that this isn't nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be.

Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, the sluggers who propelled the Boston Red Sox to end an 86-year World Series championship drought and to capture another title three years later, were among the roughly 100 Major League Baseball players to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, according to lawyers with knowledge of the results.

First of all, thanks to the lawyers (Yankee fans, presumably) who chose two leak these two (and only these two) names out of the 98 or so that were still under wraps. If only the guy who conducted the Mitchell Report had any connections within the Red Sox organization, you might not have had to risk being held in contempt of court!

I think we can cast aside the notion that Manny's most recent test was an isolated incident. In light of this new information, given how steady his career numbers have been, it's hard to imagine when he was clean. With Ortiz on the other hand, his transition from Minnesota to Boston (in 2003) draws a pretty clear line. Whatever. Here's the fun part....

Hey David, are you ready to taste your own medicine and take a voluntary one year suspension?

"I would suggest everybody get tested, not random, everybody," he said. "You go team by team. You test everybody three, four times a year and that's about it."

And if a player tests positive for steroids?

"Ban 'em for the whole year," the slugger said.

Oops.

Objectively speaking, there is something pretty despicable about the fact that these guys were told the tests would remain anonymous, and now, one or two at a time they are leaking out like death by 1,000 papercuts. It's not fair, but like Omar Minaya would say, you can't put the cat back in the bottle.

The moral of today's news isn't that the Red Sox Championship is tainted, it's that we now understand the entire sport to be slightly more dirty than we previously assumed. It's not a good thing for the sport to have the accomplishments of the best players of an era systematically knocked down one by one. It's not going to be fun to look back in 10 or 15 years, when what timeframe actually defined the "steroids era" begins to crystalize, and realize that very few of the remarkable accomplishments we saw were as they seemed at the time.

Let's move on.

I Don't Want To Speculate, But...

Tim Marchman, who's writing I truly enjoy, put up an... interesting post last night. Apparently there's another list of the supposed positive tests from 2003 floating around, and Tim, a respected mainstream journalist linked to it.

He goes out of his way to say that he's not "passing any judgment on whether the list is accurate or not" and adds parenthetically:

Maybe some time when I'm about to stick my head in an oven I'll cobble up a 2,000 word post on journalistic ethics and the 'it's out there' principle, but I think for now it's enough to say it's out there.

And by "out there", he means that it was proudly displayed on RotoInfo.com. Not exactly on Deadspin, you know?

I didn't go to journalism school, and I know it's just his blog, but when you link to something, you are giving it a new audience. And when you say things like...

A thorough but not comprehensive spot check reveals that these players all seem to have been in the majors in 2003, for instance, and if it's fake someone did some real work on it. I note, as an example, that in one of the multiple similar but not identical versions floating around one player is listed twice, in among two different teams he played for that year. That's detail. (Or really shoddy work, of course!) This also is not the fake list that got out the morning the Mitchell report was released, by the way—that's here and is entirely different.

...it sounds like you are trying to give it some credibility.

Marchman also wonders aloud:

Should this list or something reasonably close prove real—and there are some names on it that would genuinely shock and even disappoint me, which is saying something—it would be a good thing for baseball.

He spends the rest of the post, dare I say, speculating what it would mean for baseball if this list turned out to be accurate.

Here's what Marchman said about the whole Jerrod Morris/Raul Ibanez/John Gonzalez/Ken Rosenthal fiasco when it came up:

I should really add that as far as I can tell, 99.9999% of the time when you see professional journos talking about 'controversy' that's arisen because some random guy no one reads has said something, it's a backdoor way of bringing up something they don't think they're allowed to bring up but think is worth talking about.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this doesn't fall into the other .0001%.