Glavine And Thomas Call It A Career

Good morning Fackers. While we wait for Johnny Damon and Chien-Ming Wang to officially become former Yankees, two of my favorite non-Yankees of the past twenty years officially became former Major Leaguers over the past two days.

Despite not having played at the Major League level since 2008, neither Frank Thomas nor Tom Glavine had officially announced their retirement. That changed Thursday, as Glavine took an advisory job with the Braves, patching up whatever differences he had with the organization after they callously cut him during his rehab last year.

Later on Thursday, word broke that Frank Thomas, who last played with the A's in 2008, was calling it a career. The Big Hurt confirmed that at a Chicago press conference Friday morning, where the White Sox announced they would retire his number 35, a nice step following his acrimonious departure from the organization after the 2005 season and subsequent pissing match with GM Ken Williams.

Both Glavine and Thomas were excellent all-around athletes. Glavine's fondness for golf has been well documented and for a pitcher, he had some pretty good years with the bat, earning four Silver Slugger awards. He was also a very good hockey player, selected by the Los Angeles Kings in the fourth round of the 1984 NHL Draft, ahead of eventual Hall of Famers Luc Robtaille and Brett Hull.

Thomas, like Bo Jackson before him, was a two sport athlete at Auburn, doubling as a tight end on the Tigers football team before an injury derailed his football career. I, like Aaron Gleeman at Hardball Talk, and Joe Pawlikowski at RAB, was a fan of the Big Hurt despite him not playing for our favorite team. Joe went so far as to imagine what it would have been like had Thomas come up with the Yankees instead. Unfortunately, the closest we ever got to that was his turn as the unnamed rookie in Mr. Baseball, whose emergence prompted the Yankees to ship aging Jack Elliot off to the Land of the Rising Sun.

Both Glavine and Thomas were active off the field as well. Glavine has long been an important and involved member of the Players Association and was one of their central figures in the '94 strike. Thomas was perhaps the most outspoken player when it came to the issues of performance enhancing drugs in baseball, was one of the few witnesses not to embarrass himself at the 2005 Congressional Hearings, and was the only active player to willing cooperate with the Mitchell Report investigation.

But above all, what both will be remembered for is being one of the premier pitchers and premier hitters of the 1990s. Both should be part of what promises to be an outstanding 2014 Hall of Fame class.

Bias? What Bias?

It is with trepidation that I even wade into the cesspool that is the steroids debate, but Jack Cust opened his mouth, and the Yankees are currently playing Oakland, and I don't really have anything else I want to write about right now, so here goes....

For some unknown reason, Cust gave an interview with the AP yesterday, in which he touched upon his name being in the Mitchell Report and railed against the entire investigation, claiming it was biased due to George Mitchell's presence on the Red Sox Board of Directors:

With all the other stuff going on, with a lot of the guys coming out recently — big-name guys — to me it's kind of funny they spent all that money on the Mitchell Report and a bunch of hearsay and the guy who made all the money off it happened to work for the Red Sox. Were there any Red Sox on the report? To me, that's kind of a joke. How does that happen? It's coming out now with guys on that team. The guy worked for the Red Sox — they spent all kinds of millions of dollars — and then no one there had their name brought up.

That's not entirely accurate. Off the top of my head, two players were named in the report for events that took place during their tenure with the Sox: Paxton Crawford and Manny Alexander. Not exactly world beaters there, but it's a start.

I'm not sure where to begin this. First, the report was an absolute mess from the word "go", and will likely stand as the biggest in a series of blunders that has marked Bud Selig's now seventeen year tenure as Commissioner. While an investigation into steroid use in the sport was likely warranted, Bud jumped on that train about fifteen years too late, closing the barn door long after the entire stable of horses had run out. Choosing a principal investigator with a potential conflict of interest was a poor decision*. Sending him out to lead a multi-year, multi-million dollar investigation without any sort of subpoena power or any ability to grant immunity was a poorer one.
*As was naming an owner to serve as "acting" commissioner for six years, then letting him keep the job for an additional eleven and counting...

Without any ability to force people to talk to him, Mitchell was grasping at straws from the start. Exactly two active Major Leaguers spoke with him: Frank Thomas, of his own volition, and Jason Giambi who had the option of either cooperating or being suspended after he committed the cardinal sin of stating that baseball as a whole was wrong in the way they handled performance enhancing drugs.

Without player cooperation, nearly the entire Mitchell Report was based on the testimony of stool pigeons Kurt Radomski and Brian McNamee, who were forced to cooperate as part of federal plea deals. Radomski was a longtime clubbie with the Mets, McNamee a former strength and conditioning coach with the Yankees. Around which city and which teams do you think the majority of the report would focus?

While I do find it curious that there is a general lack of players from Mitchell's organization appearing in the report, I'd imagine that's more a result of the investigation being toothless than it is a function of any bias. If anything, the recent revelations of positive tests from both Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz (illegally leaked by employees of our federal government by the way, who in turn possess that information via a direct violation of labor law) should illustrate that no team, no clubhouse, not the Red Sox, not the Yankees, not anyone, was immune from this garbage.

As for Cust, I can understand his frustration with carrying the scarlett letter of being named in the Mitchell Report. His inclusion was tenuous at best, hearsay at worst. On a daily basis, Cust is likely surrounded by both teammates and opponents who did things as bad, if not worse, and haven't been outed.

That said, Cust was given every opportunity to respond to Mitchell, and like all card carrying MLBPA memebers, he refused to do so. From a legal perspective, I can understand that position. But if Cust, or any other of the accused, punts on his opportunity to clear his name, he loses much of his right to complain about it. And that see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil mentality is exactly how the MLB and MLBPA found themselves in this mess in the first place.

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.

Only A Year?

I hadn't heard of Matthew Pouliot before Circling the Bases was formed, but I've found myself linking to his thoughts pretty frequently as of late. He's got a theory about the Manny revelations today:

However, I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that he started up about a year ago.

I thought Ramirez was done as a superstar last May. His OPS dropped all of the way from 1058 in 2006 to 881 in 2007. He homered once every 12.3 at-bats in 2005, once every 12.8 at-bats in 2006 and once every 24.2 at-bats in 2007. The home run bounced back somewhat in the first half of 2008, but he finished the first three months at .286/.377/.514. It'd be a great line for the typical corner outfielder, but it wasn't typical Manny.

It wasn't just the numbers, though. Right-handers capable of throwing in the mid-90s and unleashing quality sliders were making quick work of him. Ramirez really is about as smart of a hitter that there is in the game, and he was still feasting on mistakes. But to my eyes, the quality pitches that he used to line for doubles were instead resulting in swings and misses. Ramirez was always a guy fans wanted up at the end of close games. However, that's when teams usually have their best pure arms on the mound and Ramirez just wasn't having any luck against them.

Ramirez had to know he wasn't catching up to fastballs like he once did. Maybe that's when he decided he needed a boost. A month or two to kick in, a trade to the easier league, a happier situation… the perfect storm?

Anyway, it's just a thought. It probably didn't go down like that at all. Nothing is going to surprise me.

It's an interesting thought, and it's just as plausible as any other theory you are going to hear thrown against the wall at this point.  

That's the frustrating part of all this PED bullshit. When there is some sort of dramatic reveal, it invariably only leads to more questions. All you get are intentionally vague half truths, which bring out the conspiracy theorists in all of us, trying to connect the dots.

While it's certainly tempting as a Yankees' fan to chalk Manny's .321/.411/.618 line against the Bombers to steroid use, we can't. His 50 2B, 55 HR, 163 RsBI and 448 total bases are all the highest totals against any opponent, and that's probably the reason behind the temptation. I got rightfully called out by Mass Hysteria earlier, for bringing the Sox' World Series titles into it. I still think it's a valid point, given the fact that the Mitchell Report (which is being exposed for the incomplete sham that it was with each passing outed player) named 9 Yankees on the 2000 World Series team, and we had to hear that bullshit too. 

But pointing back to previous World Series titles isn't going to change anything. They are in the record books. The emotions have come and gone and retroactively labeling them tainted isn't going to change them in our memories. I'll never forget going apeshit in Falcone 201 when Aarone Boone hit that home run. I'll still remember walking back to my dorm room on the sixth floor of Collins that night in 2004, and watching every elated Red Sox fan spill out into greenspace, losing their minds. 

It just goes to show how insidiously PED use weaved it's way into the game. It's like an invasive species. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to separate it from what originally existed. You can try to slice and segment what would or should have happened in Played X wasn't on Drug Y, but it's only imaginary, no different from re-playing the season on MVP Baseball 2004.

Even if you are a Yankees fan, I don't think there is cause for celebration. For every player who at one point or another who seemed beyond reproach is tagged for PED use, the less we have witnessed history. If baseball is ever able to get ahead of the drug use, much of this era will be dismissed in retrospect because so many of the best players were not clean.  

Another SS Bites The Dust

Miguel Tejada has been charged with lying to Congress about steroids, the latest baseball player to get caught up in an extensive web of cheating and juicing that has stained the sport. He is scheduled to appear in court Wednesday and expected to plead guilty. The charges against Tejada, who currently plays for the Houston Astros, were outlined in documents filed in Washington federal court on Tuesday.

Remember the Golden Age of Shortstops? Who was the best shortstop out of the group? Jeter, A-Rod, Nomar, or Tejada? Were they the best shortstops ever?

If you have not been hiding in the caves of Afghanistan or in the tribal lands of Pakistan with Osama bin Laden the past few days, you would know that A-Rod, following Selena Roberts' story about him being one of the 104 on the "anonymous" positive test list, admitted his steroid use from 2001-2003 when he was playing shortstop for the Texas Rangers.

Nomah has been linked to steroids, but was not in the Mitchell Report--perhaps because the report was a sham and left out any Red Sox player due to Mitchell's conspicuous allegiances. Garciaparra has been injured often and his skills/numbers has declined since the advent of steroid testing in 2005.

That leaves Jeter. Jeter has not been linked to steroids--whether it be in the Mitchell Report or in casual fan conversation. Given the fact that his father Dr. Charles Jeter, whom he is very close to, is a former substance abuse counselor, I would doubt that he would ever take them. He is pretty lean and there has never been a drastic change in his physical appearance. He is also not a home run hitter (although Alex Sanchez with his 6 career HR was busted and suspended for 10 games in 2005).

Do Jeter's accomplishments, presumably without the use of steroids, make him the best shortstop out of this quartet? How about the greatest shortstop ever? Just some food for thought...

Words/Phrases You Would Never Hear Without Steroids

If there is a positive about the Steroids fallout, it is the new or previously underused words and phrases that have been cemented into our everyday vocabulary:

"Abscess"--Apparently something you after you stick a needle in your ass.

"B-12"--As in "It was only B12, not steroids!". A water soluble vitamin with a key role in the normal functioning of the brain and nervous system, and for the formation of blood. It is one of the eight B vitamins. It is normally involved in the metabolism of every cell of the body, especially affecting DNA synthesis and regulation, but also fatty acid synthesis and energy production.

"Categorically deny"--An absolute denial.

"Culture"--No, not Boy George and his band of ferries. As in it is part of baseball culture to do steroids.

"Everybody was doing it"--No, not teenage sex. Not marijuana or cocaine either. Rather, sticking needles up your ass.

"Inject"--To stick something in your ass that will eventually give you an abscess.

"It is what it is"--Everyone--What is it? How is it? Was it always like that? Most things are what they are, no?

"Loosey-Goosey"--A-Rod. According to the Urban Dictionary, "loosey-goosey" means "
Not following prescribed guidelines or general societal expectations. Very casual. Bypassing certain boundaries." It can also mean a "a very loosely rolled joint or rollie", an individual cigarette sold at a bodega, or a certain body part after a certain type of sex.

"Metabolite" (an actual word)--Jose Canseco. According to Wikipedia, metabolites are the intermediates and products of metabolism. The term metabolite is usually restricted to small molecules.

"Misremember"--Roger Clemens. To forget.

"Performance Enhancing"--No, not Viagra or Cialis!

"The Clear"--No, not the people in The Mitchell Report or that list of 104 names that was foolishly not destroyed by the MLBPA. Tetrahydrogestrinone. THG for short. Most famous users include Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield.

"The Cream"--No, not money, as in "Cash Rules Everything Around Me" as rapped about by the Wu-Tang Clan, or the 1960s British band headed by Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker. The cream is a steroid that is applied to the body to mask THG. The yin to "The Clear's" yang.

"The Truth"--Obliterated.

Pettitte Ultimatum Must Be Issued

I have had it with Andy Pettitte.

This guy thinks he deserves more than $10MM, given his August/September splits and the current state of the economy? Ridiculous. Andy, you have made $108,082,416 in your lifetime (not including endorsements). What the fack is a few million? Seriously. If you truly cared about the Yankees and pitching in the new Yankee Stadium you would have signed by now. But it is now clear that you do not and all you care about is money.

Spare me this loyalty crap. The Yankees handled your HGH/Mitchell report affair with grace. If the Yankees had any true principle, they wouldn't even consider bringing back an admitted steroids user.

If you are so valuable then why haven't other teams signed you?

Screw the Hendricks Brothers. They already made out like bandits from the ridiculous Clemens comeback contract.

Brian Cashman needs to issue an ultimatum. Sign by a particular date or be gone. The emotions of Yankees fans notwithstanding, the team will not be losing much. You can be easily replaced. Anybody can put up a 5.00 ERA, including those who make the league minimum.

[Ed. Note: According to MLBTR, for $2M more than what Pettitte is asking ($16M), you could get two years of Ben Sheets]