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I’ve been eagerly awaiting news as to where Bartolo Colon is heading this year. His last full season was 2005, when he dominated the competition and ended up winning the Cy Young. Unfortunately for him, injuries have kept him from returning to that form and left him a relatively unloved free agent. The irony is that numerous teams have been interested in his services, but few have been willing to give him the sort of deal that he feels he’s worth.

This past week, there was a rumor that Colon would be pitching for the White Sox this year. Chicago GM Kenny Williams gave no comment about the supposed negotiations, declining even to confirm that they had taken place. Later the deal was revealed not to exist.

Yesterday ESPN.com reported that Colon will indeed be joining the Sox, the Red Sox. That’s right, Theo Epstein and company have apparently persuaded Colon to accept a minor league deal for his services this year. It’s unclear what the structure of the deal is, but my guess is that it is heavy with performance incentives.

It’s tough to make any meaningful predictions without having seen a single professional inning since last October, but if pressed I’d say this deal is rich with potential. Consider these factors. The Red Sox have lost Curt Schilling for the season. The market is absolutely mad for pitching—the Carlos Silva deal and the five-for-one Erik Bedard swap being two prominent examples. And Colon has been a robust producer for many years, averaging more than 215 innings per season from 1998 until 2005. This could easily shape up to be a pivotal move for the ’08 Red Sox as they look to repeat as division winners in the perennially brutal AL East.

There are many uncertainties of course. What kind of condition is Colon in? He has never been known for his physical conditioning and some people blame his beleaguered state the last two years at least in part on his sub-par exercise regimen. It’s also possible that Colon, who turns 35 in about three months, has been worn out by more than a decade of service and is too old to recover.

But with a deal where Colon takes on most of the risk the Red Sox have tipped the odds in their favor. Plus, for whatever silly reason, I believe Colon will return this year with the drive he was lacking in past years. He’s a recent Cy Young winner with something to prove. That’s often a dangerous combination.

The injury bug didn’t take long to strike some unfortunate ballplayers in the first week of Spring Training. Here is a couple of situations that interested me:

Brad Lidge, a major pick up for the Phillies in the offseason, was destined to anchor the Philadelphia bullpen this season. It was an infusion of talent meant to allow Brett Myers to return to the rotation and keep the aged Tom Gordon from becoming the stopgap closer once again. That dream expired after one batting practice pitch Saturday. Lidge reportedly caught his spike on the mound as he threw and felt a pain in his knee. This is the same knee that doctors operated on last October. Now it looks like he’ll be going under the knife once again to repair this new injury on Monday. The estimate is that he’ll be out between three and six weeks.

In situations like this at the beginning of the season when hopes are high for every club and the beautiful spring sunshine promises renewal and rejuvenation, it’s common for teams to underestimate the time needed for recovery from an injury like this. Surgery is a major event and recovery takes time. My guess is Lidge will not pitch in the majors until at least mid-May. And that’s if he’s lucky.

Mark DeRosa had to be taken off the field Saturday after suffering from an irregular heartbeat. Team trainers examined him, and he was brought to an Arizona hospital for monitoring and kept overnight. The hospital released him Sunday, according to team officials. Apparently DeRosa has suffered from this condition in the past.

On a serious note, I wish DeRosa the best and pray that this condition will prove to be harmless.

More lightheartedly, it’s good to see that he’s still got a passion for the game. Why else would it set his heart aflutter?

So I tried to stay away from Clemens this week, but I failed. I just have to comment on the latest developments. Forgive me in advance.

It was revealed in the media this week that a picture exists of Roger attending the much-discussed party at Jose Canseco’s house in 1998. A neighbor of Canseco’s brought his son to the festivities and took photographs of the boy with various major leaguers in attendance. The father who took the photos felt obligated to call attention to them after the Feb. 13 hearing when Clemens and McNamee squared off.

I’m not sure why this party has become the focal point of the squabbles between athlete and trainer as it seems allegations of much greater substance are at stake in this case, but somehow Clemens’ side decided to use this minor detail to impeach McNamee’s testimony. It seems to me that recalling the attendance at a ten-year-old party is difficult, but the illicit administration of drugs to a famous athlete would be much more memorable. Why attack some minor detail in McNamee’s account? If he were truly lying, wouldn’t it have been smarter to leave out incidental details like a party? That would make it harder to disprove his falsehoods because there would be less invented material to use against him. But if this photo does depict Clemens at the Canseco party, this could be a terrible blow to the pitcher’s credibility.

Now word is out that Clemens may be heading to work out with Astros minor leaguers sometime soon. This information comes from Roger’s son Koby who is a catcher in the Houston farm system. Call me crazy, but I think Roger’s presence would be an enormous distraction to the players. I would be very surprised if he showed up. Plus he may have some more important preparations to do in the near future to defend his reputation.

Andy Pettitte did exactly what I’d hoped for (but was never dumb enough to expect) on Monday when he faced a group of reporters for a press conference to address his use of HGH, his relationship with Roger Clemens, and other aspects of his life post-Mitchell Report. It was a compelling event, unlike anything I’ve seen from a professional baseball player before, and it provided a catharsis of sorts to those of us willing to face the mistakes of our ballplayer heroes.

I’ll admit that before the onset of the Performance Enhancing Drugs melodrama in baseball I was never much of a Pettitte fan. This is not to say I didn’t respect him. His fierce competitive spirit is unmistakable; one look at the intensity of his eyes when he’s on the mound is enough to convince anyone. Mostly it was his presence on the World Series-winning ’96 and ’99 Yankees that irked me—my Braves being on the losing end of both contests.

Yet his frank admissions on Monday really won me over. I can’t tell for certain if he was being entirely honest, but it sure felt like he was. I felt none of the distrust from the week before when I watched Roger Clemens’ angry, evasive display. Here was a contrite man bearing his soul as best he could, trying to answer questions that have no good answers.

ESPN.com’s Jason Stark wrote a column about his impressions of the conference in which he largely agrees that Pettitte did a convincing job and praises him accordingly but also acknowledges the risks that such direct admission carries:

“[I]n doing it this way, Pettitte drew a road map for all the drug culprits of tomorrow to follow. This is how it’s done. Unfortunately for him, unfortunately for all of them, the truth won’t set them free. But it sure beats the alternative.”

Stark is referring to the questions and the scrutiny that will continue into the indeterminate future for everyone, in particular Pettitte, tainted by this scandal. This is an unfortunate truth, and one I can’t help but confirm with my next paragraph.

There was a time during the press conference when I had trouble following Pettitte’s account. This was when he claimed not to consider himself a cheater. His interpretation of his drug use is novel. His position was something like the following: since he was using HGH while injured and only seeking to hasten his recovery, the use didn’t constitute cheating. In other words, he wasn’t trying to gain an unfair advantage on the field. He just wanted to reduce the amount of time it would take to return his body to normal. But in baseball, as in all other sports, we don’t make allowances for injured players. If you’re on the field you have to compete against others in whatever state you are in. The pitcher isn’t going to throw the ball more slowly to a batter nursing a strained oblique. The batter isn’t going to refrain from driving the ball to left just because the fielder there hasn’t recovered fully from a pulled hamstring. Part of having an even playing field is accepting injuries for what they are: limitations as to what can be done. Any unfair advantage you gain when recovering from an injury is cheating in the same way that using drugs to gain a few MPH on your fastball is.

I’m glad Pettitte could admit what he did. I thank him again for his candor and hope his press conference sets a good example for those players whose drug use will be substance of future scandals. But I would still like him to admit that he cheated.

Derek Jeter can be a polarizing figure. Almost too good to be true—sacrificing his body in a headlong dive into the stands to snare a foul ball, coming through at the plate in critical situations, acting graciously toward even his critics—Jeter is beloved in New York and reviled by many others. As much as I know my own reticence to like him is founded primarily on irrationality, I still find myself ambivalent at best.

Why does he do that bothers me? Here is an example. A few months ago he was caught up in a contest over back taxes that the state and city of New York thought he owed. You can read about the intricacies of this particular situation on a tax blog I found. When I heard about a man who made in excess of $20 million dollars last year supposedly dodging taxes, I was appalled. Jeter settled the dispute a few weeks later without having to go to court, likely paying a portion of the sum that the governments were seeking. Is it wrong of him to fight for money he thought was his own? Of course not. But anytime a man worth tens of millions of dollars can’t pay a bit more in taxes, I feel a bit sick inside. And it seems to be worse when the culprit is Jeter. Can’t he just get Steinbrenner to agree to pay his taxes for him? I’m sure the Yankees could afford it.

Yet then he has a week like last week. He took a stance in favor of blood tests for banned substances in Major League players in a brief interview with the AP. This is a position opposed by his own union representative, as the story points out. But hearing a player talk this way gives me hope that baseball can clean itself up. One day I hope Jeter’s sentiment is more widely held, and that brings about an era when baseball’s integrity is considered beyond reproach. Jeter also attended teammate Andy Pettitte’s press conference in a touching show of support for a man doing the right thing, which also happened to be the difficult thing. These are the admirable qualities that make his teammates and managers and fans love and respect him.

Interview with Chaim Bloom the Assistant Director of Minor League Operations for the Tampa Bay Rays Major League Baseball team

This is an interview with Chaim Bloom, the Assistant Director of Minor League Operations for the Tampa Bay Rays of Major League Baseball. It has been edited for running time.

Transcript of the Interview:

Smoltzie: Baseball America recently rated your minor league system number one in all of baseball. What makes your farm system the envy of the baseball world?

Chaim Bloom: I think it’s a testament to a lot of different things. Number one the work of our scouts in finding some of these players and bringing them into the organization. A lot of the players who you’ll find at the top of our prospect list were not first-round picks. And there’s a lot of credit to be given to our scouts for finding that raw talent and then to our coaches for working with those guys and certainly to the players themselves. It’s really a group effort. It’s tough to attribute it to any one thing. There are a lot of things that contribute. But really as happy as we are to have that, to some extent it doesn’t matter until we can translate that into major league wins. We feel we’re always going to have to be a player development-focused organization. We’re not going to rely on free agency as our primary method for building a team. We want to develop our own players. And so it’s crucial for us to have a farm system that’s ranked at or near the top and that has that talent always because we’re always going to rely on it at the major league level.

S: Certainly you’ve got a really highly rated corps of minor league players. But I notice that division rivals New York and Boston are also in the top five on that Baseball America list. Could you comment on how you plan to turn that slight advantage talent in minor league talent into an actual advantage on the major league level, especially when your rivals have what seem like unlimited war chests.

CB: It certainly makes things difficult. We’re not the only team that recognizes the value of young talent. For us we feel that we have a pretty good young corps at the major league level and we’ve got some guys on the rise coming through the minor leagues. We feel looking at the talent we have we are going to be able to match up talent-wise. And then go out in the free agent market like we did this winter and selectively go bring in some guys to bolster that like we did with Troy Percival to help anchor the end of the game for us. And as we get more successful we think the fan interest in this area is going to increase. The other pro teams in this area have really shown with their success that the Tampa Bay area is ready to support a successful team. And that support is going to help us sustain the success further and give us more resources to work with.

S: Could you tell me a little bit about your program in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, about their genesis?

CB: It’s something we’re tremendously excited about. It’s taken place in some sense under the radar. Because these players are a long way off from helping us in the major leagues. But it’s something that you might say is possibly the most important thing our new ownership has allowed us to do. One of the first priorities of our new ownership was to reestablish a presence in Latin America. In the Dominican we share a complex with the Dodgers within the Dodgers’ complex and we have our own club house and our own field within their complex. And we have our own team there that competes in the Dominican summer league. In Venezuela we have our own place. This year we plan on fielding a full team in the Venezuelan summer league. We’ve signed now over 70 players internationally and most of these kids are 16, 17, 18 when they’re signed, and they’re a long way off from helping us. It’s a long journey, but we feel that some of them are going to separate themselves and they are going to make a big impact down the road. Something that we think is crucial to being a successful organization is having the proper kind of presence in an area of the world that’s so rich in baseball talent.

S: So what’s in store for the major league Rays this year?

CB: We’re really optimistic. We feel very strongly this is the best group we’ve had. We have improved our pitching, specifically our bullpen dramatically. We think we’ve improved our defense dramatically. And our guys in camp right now feel the same way. This is a completely different vibe this year in Spring Training than we’ve had in past years. And you’re seeing guys say, “We can do this there’s no reason why we can’t do this.” So we’re looking for a big improvement this year.

S: What do you think of the new colors for your team?

CB: You know it’s a little jarring at first because you get so used to that green. But I think they’re pretty nice. I think it’s great to get a fresh start. I think the colors really reflect well some of the strengths of this area. They bring out a much more positive aspect of our identity as the Rays. And they’ve been really well received by players and fans so far. We had about 7,000 people show up when we unveiled the new colors. The players have really worn them with pride. I think it’s a very clean and polished look. It’s a classic look. And we’re pretty excited about it. It think the colors matter less than who’s wearing them, but that said we’re pretty excited about the new color scheme. And hopefully it’s just one more way we can turn the page and really start moving forward.

S: Well thank you Chaim for joining me today and answering my questions.

CB: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Now that I’ve had time to digest the drama from last Wednesday with all its attendant accusations and speechifying, I’ll join the chorus of amateur interpreters to tell you what I saw when Clemens and McNamee took the stand.

The thing that stood out to me was what Clemens said when he denied using performance-enhancing drugs. Each time he denied using chemical supplements, he accompanied his assertion with a reminder of just how hard he has had to work. Under any circumstances, the inability to answer a direct question with a direct, to-the-point response looks bad. When it’s before a Congressional committee and in front of the country, it can wound your image very deeply.

But that’s not what worries me the most. It’s Clemens’ obsession with his own work ethic that strikes me as odd. Why keep insisting on his commitment to athletic training? How is that germane? Did I miss it when some congressman asked Clemens for workout tips?

It seems Clemens thinks the accusations against him are broader than they are. Last time I checked he was merely suspected of taking steroids and HGH on 16 specific occasions. It’s as if he interprets the Congressional inquiries as suggesting he had no hand in his own achievements—that he is merely the conduit through which steroids and HGH have compiled hall-of-fame credentials.

No one makes it to the major leagues, much less wins a Cy Young award, without a work ethic of the first rank. Anyone who contends otherwise has either never picked up a glove or is in the throes of a fantastic delusion.

Roger, we all know you’ve worked extraordinarily hard. What America wants to know, plain and simple, is did Brian McNamee inject you with steroids and HGH? Until you can pick that question out from these imagined attacks on your work ethic, I’ll find your denials unconvincing.

See Roger Clemens deny the accusations against him in his opening statement and then later in the proceedings.

The much-discussed Mitchell Report has been vindicated once again.  This time Paul LoDuca has issued a statement acknowledging the mistakes he has made in taking HGH in the past.  I never thought as many athletes would own up to their indiscretions as have already done so in the wake of the report. This is doubly the case because the document is based largely on the accusations of a few drug dealers. But I’m very pleased to be hearing these admissions of guilt.

I feel terrible about the damage these revelations will have on the reputations of the guilty.  I’m not thirsting for the downfall of public figures and heroes.  But cleaning up the game of baseball requires an airing of the secrets from the performance-enhanced era, or an uncovering of as many of the secrets as we can.
So I thank LoDuca for having the bravery and the integrity to admit to his mistakes.

And I have a hard time following Al Sharpton’s accusation that black athletes are receiving tougher treatment in the wake of steroid- and HGH-related scandals.  It seems that in the past few weeks the ballplayers most scrutinized and damaged by the Mitchell Report are Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Chuck Knoblauch—all of which are white.   LoDuca is also Caucasian.

It’s true that Barry Bonds has been indicted, and Clemens has not. But give him a few weeks.  After that unimpressive performance before Congress, Roger better ready his defense.

A stroke of good luck has befallen me.  Jerry Crasnick, the ESPN baseball reporter, has written a column quite similar to a post I made last week.  It’s good to know my opinions aren’t all crackpot.  This is almost enough to make me root for the Mariners in ‘08.  Bedard and Hernandez together will be quite a thrill.  Thanks Jerry for the vindication and the touching plot about Mel Stottlemyre.  I welcome him back to the game and hope his health remains as strong as ever.

The Marlins have plans for a new stadium all but wrapped up according to the AP.  No longer will they have to share Dolphin Stadium with their local NFL franchise.  This is great news as it will finally give a fifteen-year-old team that has won two world series (more championships during that time than anyone except the Yankees and Red Sox) a home to call its own.

At last my eyes won’t be wounded each time I watch a Marlins home game.  Say what you will about Dolphins Stadium as a venue for professional football, but its transformation into a baseball field was anything but attractive.  And once the NFL season got in swing toward the end of the summer, the field would inevitably bear the scars of the weekly battles on the gridiron, making the Marlins games look like an underfunded afterthought.

The catch is that the Marlins have been struggling to fill their seats.  They ranked last in attendance in 2007, averaging a paltry 16,919 fans per contest.  As reported in this blog from the Sun-Sentinel, the new stadium, to be placed on the footprint of the razed Orange Bowl, will be difficult to get to and will not be part of a neighborhood with other attractions.  When you put forth half a billion dollars to relocate a struggling team, you’d like the new home to help increase attendance and revenue.  Once the novelty of the new stadium wears off, there has to be something else there to draw in the crowds.  Let’s hope the site of the new stadium is not a mistake.

The unloved Marlins deserve to play with cheering fans at their backs.  I hope ownership can find a way to make that happen.