Oh My Goodness Gracious
My official reaction to the indictment of Roger Clemens is that I don’t like perjury charges that are an outgrowth from “OMG baseball players use different kinds of PEDs than the good, clean ballplayers of my youth did” witch hunts. On the other hand, something bad has happened to Roger Clemens, so you can see my dilemma here. Maybe the feds can get him to name Jeter so we never have to hear about steroids again…
UPDATE: No Clemensy!
Only lies about torture are allowed.
Who is lying about torture?
I thought everyone is admitting to that?
Nice Suzyn Waldman reference, there.
No Clemensy!
word.
This guy is always smithing words and phrase-turning and stuff.
I’m green with one of those deadly sin-like things.
I agree that a perjury charge stemming from an investigation that Congress had no business conducting in the first place is disturbing; and one would hope that both Congress and the DOJ has better and more important things to occupy their time with. Still… Clemens was never under subpoena. Even if he had been, he would have of course had the choice to plead the 5th. If he indeed perjured himself, he did so willingly, so, not a great deal of sympathy here.
Huh. So lying to Congress is actually illegal? Why isn’t Karl Rove behind bars?
Politics has to look forward not to the past. Baseball has to look to the past, not forward.
Quick! To the cemetery to dig up Cy Young!
Maybe now Barry Bonds will stop being considered History’s Greatest Monster.
You sir are a Communist to think such things.
And a godless Communist at that.
F— Clemens, now and forever. He’s like A-Rod, but even less likable, and will stand forever as an indelible mercenary stain on the soul of the greatest organization in sports. Trading away Boomer for him was the day Cashman truly decided to sell his soul to Satan, instead of doing it the way that won them the WS in ’96 and ’98.
(And at least A-Rod had himself painted as a Centaur, which, aside from being the greatest thing I’ve ever heard, shows a hilarious charming combination of child-like lack of self-awareness and next-level douchebaggery. Clemens is just a deranged shit.)
Clemens is by far creepier, if only for his seduction of a sixteen year old teenage country singer WITH the consent of her parents.
he greatest organization in sports
The Lakers, Canadiens, Manchester United and Real Madrid would like a word with you.
Or maybe you meant “the greatest organization in sports on Manhattan”?
Manhattan? Why wasn’t I informed about this move? I follow these things pretty closely.
Anyway, I have no ability to judge the soccer teams, but the Yankees are certainly a greater organization than the Habs, who haven’t had a great team since the Carter administration, or the Lakers with their comparatively piddling 16 NBA titles. I loathe the Yankees, but please.
Well, the Yankees have won more titles, but they’ve had like 60 years more to do it. As a Celtics fan it pains me to say, but the Lakers’ record of appearing in roughly half of their league’s championship contests and winning a majority of the time is pretty impressive.
The Lakers are a pretty good match IMO. Besides the championships and title game appearances (if you can say Western Conference champs is like being AL champs), look at star players: Mikan, Baylor, West, Chamberlain, Abdul-Jabbar, Johnson, O’Neal, and Bryant is not too shabby. The undisputed best ever point guard, two of the top 5 shooting guards ever, one of the best 5 small forwards ever, and 4 of the top 6 or 7 centers ever. I’d put that up against Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra, Mantle, Jackson, Rivera, and Rodriguez, who are the Yankees on the “best ever” lists, though maybe I’m forgetting someone.
Except it is basketball, which means it pretty much doesn’t matter.
Professional basketball management, strategy, and execution is as complex as any sport. Perhaps maybe even more so.
Am I fair to equate this statement to fairly racist “Rap isn’t music” comments that I hear fairly commonly, or do you have some other reason for saying that basketball doesn’t matter?
You also have to look at the constitution of the various leagues as well.
Comparing the Yankees to the Lakers and Celtics or the Cowboys and Steelers is about impossible, as the MLB allows for HUGE natural comparative advantages. And even the Yankees heydays in the 1920s were largely a result of the leagues antogonistic position towards Harry Frazee. The 50s Yankees may have been an exception, but the Yankees throughout their history have basically been good at securing unfair advantages, rather than managing their ballclubs well.
Say, for example, the Jets and Knicks were protected within their market as they are by the NFL, yet were not subject to the stricter cap and revenue sharing rules of their respective leagues, I have little doubt that their financial dominance would lead to even greater performance.
Imagine an NBA where the Knicks had five starters earning $15M/yr each, while at least half of the teams were operating with payrolls of about $30M total.
Even the Bulls of the 90s would pale by comparison in talent.
No. Just a reaction to the shear boredom of the game and the lack of history compared to the other leagues mentioned. The back and forth is about as much fun to watch as tennis, which is to say not much at all.
To each his own.
It’s “sheer,” not “shear.” But don’t worry, it didn’t hurt your reputation at all.
Right, the NBA certainly couldn’t compare to the two hours of inaction they manage to shoehorn into a MLB or NFL games.
Self-correction: The World Series is only 44 years older than the NBA Finals.
The 50s Yankees may have been an exception, but the Yankees throughout their history have basically been good at securing unfair advantages, rather than managing their ballclubs well.
This just isn’t true. The Yankees n their great periods have been very, very well-managed, and as we’ve just seen big markets retain large advantages in a salary cap system. (BTW, the Knicks in fact have had a huge payroll edge over most of the league, and have been terrible anyway.) I also don’t think that advantages gained because you’re willing to put money into the team rather than stuffing it into your pockets are “unfair” anyway.
On a personal note, I am one of thousands of people who bought a home with chinese drywall, and am now loosing my home and a lot of money. The homebuilder who sold the home to me and the manufacturer of the bad drywall both knew of the problem and were suppressing news of it until they could sell of inventory. There were billions of dollars of bank fraud, defrauding home-buyers, putting people’s health at risk, and could I get local, state, or federal officials even a little interested in criminal charges. No. But I am so glad that they have all of that time to go after Roger Clemens.
I am aware of all the internet traditions, but you cannot loose a home like you can an arrow. I think linguists of the future are going to have a hard time figuring out why “lose” became “loose” by virtue of internet speak. All other words become shortened.
Yeah, I am a homeless bad speller. There was also some bad punctuation. I am surely going to hell.
It’s an internet tradition to ignore the entire context of your comment and focus on some very small incidental thing.
You really think no one was misspelling ‘lose’ as ‘loose’ before the internet came around?
This. So long as there is freshman writing, there will be misspellings replacing “lose” with “loose.”
Not on business signs where misspellings and stray apostrophes are very common due to the lack of an editor.
I honestly see loose when the author meant lose more often than the correct fashion. It’s a pet peeve of mine, especially since it seems to have infected the younger generation. The tech and gaming forums are stock full of loose spellings of lose.
Yeah, well I am 62 and I know the difference between loose and lose. The only reason that word was misspelled is because this comment software has no editor and I hit submit before I proofread. That, and the fact that it is more than frustrating to read about the Justice Department spending years investigating Clemens or Martha Stewart when they can’t be bothered to investigate people who steal billions and destroy lives.
But you keep monitoring the intertubes for bad spelling. It is important work.
We just didn’t have to see it as often.
As long as baseball wants to retain its anti-restraint of trade laws exemption granted to it by Congress, then Congress has the right to haul them in now and then and pepper them with questions. There is also plenty of evidence that in late 1990s, team and league management deliberately looked the other way re: illegal steroid use and in doing so abetted the commission of crimes.
How does prosecuting Clemens have anything to do with the arguable institutional failure of MLB to self-police? There were labor law implications to baseball’s PED policy, after all. Perjury is bad, and Clemens has only himself to blame for his current problems– the players who ‘fessed up mostly seem to have weathered the storm, proving once again that Americans will forgive anything except a lie.
I watched all of Roger’s Sox career. I was at the game that broke his long (14 game? I’m too lazy to look it up) winning streak in the mid 80′s (84?), when Canseco and I think McGuire took him deep back-to-back with two of the highest, deepest, farthest homahs I ever saw. Like pretty much everyone else in New England, I was listening to the Celtics on the radio, life and death with the 76ers, on the night he struck out 20 Mariners.
Roger was just electrifying to watch in those years.
But everyone, including the media, knew he was a cement-headed dick.
He had this incredible talent and skill, compensated for by an astounding lack of brains and sensitivity. I’m sure to this day he can’t spell “subtle.”
Having said that, I think all this PED handwringing and pantybunching should just. Stop. Now.
One of the most important criteria for HOF election is that a player was among the best OF HIS ERA. Thus Yaz won a batting title in ’69 with a BA of .301, in the YEAR of the pitcher.
So, let the BBWA voters just assume that EVERYONE was doing PEDs from, say, ’87 to 2005 or so. PED Clemens was better than all the other PED pitchers against all the PED hitters; PED Bonds hit more homers than any other PED hitter against all the PED pitchers. See how easy this is? Vote them in. Otherwise we should kick out every white player who played before 1947, don’t you think?
That Yaz batting title was ’68. Typo.
The year of Denny McLean’s 31 wins and Gibson’s 1.12 ERA.
Otherwise we should kick out every white player who played before 1947, don’t you think?
Pam Gellar, is that you?
I think its a valid comparison, if one the BBWA is never going to consider. Or maybe a mirror image is a better description.
We have a group of players (the PED boys) who had an unfair competitive advantage for about two decades.
We had a group of players (all of baseball before 1947) who’s records were clearly better than they might have been, because some superior talents (non-whites) were kept out of the majors.
In the latter case, all of the pre-1947 guys were measured against their contemporaries who were actually in the league. I’m sure no-one on the panel said “well, Bill Dickey was terrific, but was he really better than Josh Gibson?” Ditto, say, Red Ruffing vs. Satchel Paige, and so on. No, they measured each guy against the other players who were actually in the majors in the period.
Similarly, lets just assume that everyone in the PED era was using, and measure each candidate against HIS contemporaries.
That’s all I’m saying.
I’m sorry if I was unclear at one in the morning, so I’m trying not to resent the comparison you made.
Clemens insisted on testifying before Congress, purely for the purpose of perjuring himself. There has to be a special prize for that kind of bullheaded cluelessness.