March 9 - Steroids on St. Patrick's Day?

House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis (R-VA) gets my hero of the week the award. A week ago, Davis announced that he was inviting seven baseball players to Washington to testify about steroid abuse in baseball. Based on published press reports, it didn’t seem like Davis’ St. Patrick’s Day party was going to be too well attended. Mark McGwire, for one, told the Committee he was staying put in St. Louis and would be spending next Thursday watching hoops and enjoying a few tall green ones. It seems like Mac and the rest of the invitees were not too excited by the prospect of testifying under oath and potentially sullying their already damaged reputations. So what does Davis do to save his soiree? He goes nuclear and instructs his staff to start issuing subpoenas to the reluctant party-goers. With that said, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmeiro and Jose Canseco better clear their schedules next Thursday because they now have a mandatory 10:00 A.M appointment in Washington D.C. I am sure this is one St. Patrick’s Day McGwire will always remember.

As I pointed out in this space last week, the affected players are now in a terrible predicament. They have been subpoenaed to testify under oath and that means the players run the risk of criminal sanctions if they are not truthful. And here is the kicker. I would guess that the players are planning to show up and invoke their Fifth Amendment protections, but what happens if the committee - in cahoots with the Justice Department - offers the invitees immunity for any past drug violations? At that point, the Fifth Amendment cannot be invoked and the players have an affirmative obligation to answer the committee’s questions. This is checkmate as far as I am concerned and that is why I cannot wait to tune into C-SPAN next Thursday morning. Go ahead Mark, let us hear about all your drug free exploits. Tell us how you went from a 35 home run guy in the early 90s to a 70 home run guy later in the decade. Sammy, please tell us about the ways you took that slender frame and turned it into something that belongs in a WWE cage match. But before you guys dazzle us with your weight room exploits, you should be warned that perjury is a fairly serious crime and you have no idea what lengths Davis and his friends at Justice will go to determine whether you are telling the truth. I got to admit that I love what Davis is doing. This hearing has nothing to do with gathering any facts. Instead, it strikes me that Davis sole intent is to embarrass the players and I doubt he will take kindly to any of the invitees trying to turn the tables and embarrass the Committee. So go on Mark and Jason and Sammy and Rafael. Tell the world the facts as you see them. But remember, the immunity you have in your pocket does not protect you from perjury. You lie to these guys and they might just do something worse then write a negative story in tomorrow’s paper. God do I wish I had gone to law school, run for Congress and been assigned to this Committee. I don’t have a whole lot of interest in Government Reform, but I sure would love five minutes of Q&A with Mr. McGwire.

Pinch me because I must be dreaming. Based on some very preliminary exit polling from the west coast of Florida, it seems possible that the Big Unit may have lost a couple feet off his fastball over the Winter. This isn’t as good as Johnson blowing out his cartilage-starved knee, but I’ll take anything I can get. Last night, in his first Spring Training start with the Yanks, Johnson topped out at 94 on the radar gun and press reports suggest most of his fastballs were in the low-90s. I realize that this is just a Spring Training game and it is possible that Johnson was taking it easy, but I have my fingers crossed. This guy is going to be 42 this summer and it has to come to an end at some time. So why not now? There is no doubt Johnson is a freak and as such, normal rules and precedent don’t apply. But who is to say that Johnson won’t suffer the same fate as Warren Spahn, the man many consider to be the greatest lefty of all-time. Spahn was a forty-something horse in 1963, going 23-7. But he fell off a cliff the next year and was out of baseball two years after his 23 win season. Things can go in a hurry and I am just wondering if we are about to see history repeat itself. It is obviously too early to tell, but I am going to keep an eye on those radar splits this spring. Johnson is all about power and if he has indeed lost something, he is going to have a hard time earning the $48 million the Yanks owe him through 2007. And how do you think the cranky unit is going to respond to questions that he his gas has lost some octane? Such questions drove Pedro Martinez crazy last year and the bet here is Johnson will be even less diplomatic.

It’s only March 8th, but Viking coach Mike Tice has surged to lead in the race to be 2005’s biggest jackass. It’s being reported by Sports Illustrated and the Minneapolis Star Tribune that Tice is somehow involved in a fairly profitable Super Bowl ticket scalping ring. According to the reports, Tice collected scores of Super Bowl tickets from Viking players and then proceeded to scalp the tickets for hefty profits. Scalping a limited number of Super Bowl Tickets is reported to be pretty common in the NFL, but Tice’e efforts seem to be a little more far reaching then normal. As such, the NFL has sent a couple of gentlemen to Minneapolis to investigate. Listen I know that Tice was the lowest paid coach in the NFL last year at something around a million per, but is he really hurting so badly that he needs to scrape up another 100 grand. The cost of living must be staggering in the Twin cities. First, Spree says he can’t feed his family on $14 million per and then a million dollar head coach feels pinched so he starts moonlighting as scalper. The odd thing about this case is that Tice’s cover was blown by an informant. Jesus, I wonder who that could be. Perhaps deep throat in this case is a humble wide receiver who was not too pleased that Coach Tice and the Viking front office sent him off to football purgatory.

Former Boston Red Sox General Manager GM Lou Gorman told the Boston Globe yesterday that back in 1993, he was a heartbeat away from trading Roger Clemens to the Houston Astros for Craig Biggio, Steve Finley and Pete Harnisch. This was right before Clemens went into a four-year funk and Biggio emerged as one of the leagues top run scorers. With that said, this was certainly not a slam dunk trade. However, had it been made, Gorman would have recovered some of the credibility he lost in 1990 when he traded Jeff Bagwell for Larry Anderson. If Bigs and Finley could have been retained, which is a big if in today’s free agent era, the Sox would have looked a whole lot more potent in the late 90s when Pedro arrived. After all, Biggio and Finley represent a major improvement over Offerman and Darren Lewis. I am not saying the Sox would have taken out the Yankees in the 1999 ALCS with these guys, but it sure would have been more competitive.

What is it about disgraced New York front office types that they are able to destroy their ballclubs and still catch on as television analysts? This all started a couple years back when Met destroyer Steve Phillips as able to somehow catch on at ESPN. Phillips, in case you forgot, was the architect of some trades that netted superstars Robby Alomar, Mo Vaughan and Jeremy Burnitz. It was pretty clear that Phillips didn’t know a ton about talent evaluation as a GM, but that didn’t stop ESPN from bringing him in do to do a little “fact or fiction” on Sportscenter. Following in Phillips steps was the highly esteemed Mike Jarvis who did wonders for the St. John’s basketball program. Jarvis left St. John’s on the precipe of extinction when he was fired last year, but ESPN came to the rescue with an offer that allows Coach Mike to share his wisdom with the entire basketball universe. The only show Jarvis should anchor is one in which he and Isiah Thomas explain to the audience how one goes about ruining a basketball program without taking an ounce of responsibility. Finally, we get to Scott Layden. The last time we saw Layden, he was busy accumulating bad contracts for the Knicks. Layden’s moves crippled the franchise and laid the foundation for a truly mediocre decade. So how is Layden rewarded? Well, I see him last night hosting a show for the NBA Channel. Granted, this isn’t exactly ABC, but it is a job related to basketball and that seems a bit curious to me. Hey, I guess the NBA Channel saw that Dave Bliss, Jim Harrick and Elgin Baylor had jobs so they went out and picked the next best option. All of this shouldn’t be too surprising given the fact that in other fields, the disgraced generally have little problem catching on as commentators. After all, prosecutorial whiz kid Marcia Clark is a legal affairs commentator and you can’t watch a Sunday news show without catching Henry Kissinger share his incoherent views on the state of the world. I guess next up will be Bernie Ebbers talking telecom on CNBC.

Is it time to break-up the Knicks? Since Isiah Thomas shocked the world with some brilliant moves at the trade deadline, the Knicks have won 5 of 6 games, including a ten point win at home last night versus the Wizards. However, before we go crazy and start talking playoffs, lets take a closer look at what the Knicks have really accomplished. On trade night, they beat an undermanned Philly team that had lost their outgoing mail to Sacto but had not yet signed for Chris Webber. Marbury and company then beat a Pacer team that has given up and the slumping Lakers. The Knicks then went down to Orlando and got killed before returning home to beat Golden State and the Wizards – sans Antawn Jamison. So in a nutshell, the Knicks won five games at home, four of which came against teams that I think will miss the playoffs. The fifth win came over a team that was missing its best player. (Kwame Brown had a great game subbing for Jamison – 0/8 in 30 minutes.) There is no doubt that the Knicks have begun playing with more intensity but this is not going to be a rehash of the 1977 Bulls. Lest you forget, and I am sure everyone has, that Gilmore-led team was 23-32 at the break, but finished 21-6 and ended up making the playoffs. The Knicks have just gotten through a soft patch in the schedule, but things now turn brutal. Over the next sixteen days, they have Miami twice, Seattle twice and San Antonio. I would be surprised if they win one of those games, although Seattle at home is a maybe.