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Just when I think the Clemens v. McNamee madness has reached a new low, another one emerges.  At least when Barry Bonds went down his people stuck with him.  Judging from the first couple months of Mitchell Report aftermath, we’re in store for plenty more ugliness and public relations-jockeying between The Rocket and his erstwhile trainer (and alleged supplier of performance-enhancing drugs).

It was amusing to hear on Thursday that McNamee had saved used needles and bloody gauze from more than five years ago to use as evidence against his former client.  The general consensus on this twist is that it hurts McNamee to have the public know he kept used drug paraphernalia and the investigators know he withheld evidence from them in his initial disclosures.

But if some of the items test positive for Clemens’ DNA and for steroids, it could also strike a powerful blow against the pitcher.  My guess is his lawyers will do all they can to avoid having Clemens’ genetic material collected for comparison to the new evidence.  We may never know if the needles were even used by The Rocket.

Next the allegations extended to Clemens’ wife, Debbie.  McNamee now claims he injected Ms. Clemens with Human Growth Hormone before she and her husband appeared in a swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated in 2003.  What the relevance of this accusation could be I have no idea.  It came out during McNamee’s deposition on Thursday but wasn’t leaked until Friday.  It seemed to signal the gloves had been taken off.

Clemens’ lawyers responded to this affront with a leak of their own.  It has now reached the public that evidence exists that will prove the pitcher never attended a party at Jose Canseco’s house in June 1998.  McNamee had claimed Canseco and Clemens had spoken during the gathering.  Shortly after this event, Clemens approached McNamee for help using performance-enhancing drugs, McNamee contends.

The public relations experts behind Clemens clearly think it advantageous to try to cast doubt on McNamee in the public’s eyes.  They’ve picked a very minor point to exploit, which feels a little desperate.  Heck, I can’t remember half the parties I’ve been to over the years, much less who was at each one.  I hope sinking to this level doesn’t backfire on them.

In case you’re keeping track, we’re way past ridiculous at this point.

Last week this video was released of Pedro Martinez, the All-Star hurler for the New York Mets, participating in a cock fight with fellow Dominican native Hall-of-Famer Juan Marichal.  [Note: if you follow the link please expect a bit of violence although none of the actual fight is featured in this version of the video]

The incident took place in the Dominican Republic where such activity is legal and apparently not uncommon, which provides a test for cultural relativists like me.  Can we condemn Pedro for facilitating an event causing needless harm to innocent chickens?  Or should we chalk it up to cultural differences and merely insist that he not attend a similar event on U.S. soil?  And why do sports heroes suddenly seem to be getting into the animal cruelty business?  Shouldn’t they be endorsing sports drinks or something?

PETA didn’t have any qualms about sending this judgmental letter.  It might carry more weight in my mind if they weren’t asking me to vote for the Sexiest Vegetarian Next Door 2008.

Martinez has never shied away from confrontation himself.  He famously threw Don Zimmer, the 72-year-old Yankees bench coach at the time, to the ground during a scuffle on the field in 2003.  I think I’d prefer him tossing around confrontational old men to him committing any further cruelty to animals.  But I’d like it best of all if he just stuck to tossing around the baseball.

The M’s ain’t messing around this year.  After falling six games short of their Southern California rivals last season, the Mariners have made a significant investment in pitching this offseason.  Considering they had a strong showing last year with a pitching staff that ranked in the bottom third of baseball in ERA and strikeouts, the payoff to these moves could be a trip to the playoffs.

First thing to note is that adding Erik Bedard to Felix Hernandez officially gives the Mariners a vicious top of the rotation.  Both have the potential to win Cy Young Awards and may be competing with one another for the honor sooner than we think.

More importantly, however, the Bedard deal changes the whole make up of the staff.  It enables the recently acquired Carlos Silva to drop in the rotation; he’s a much better (if highly overpriced) number three or four than one or two.  Also it takes pressure off the young Felix Hernandez.  Bedard will assume the role of ace, lessening the attention on the budding star.  A further benefit is that Bedard might be able to act as a role model and secondary pitching coach for the baby-faced Hernandez.  If the two work well together, you might be looking at a very strong Mariners’ pitching staff for many years.  This is especially true if Putz remains as effective out of the pen as he has been the past two years.

With the A’s seemingly in rebuilding mode—having dealt Dan Haren and Nick Swisher among others—and the Rangers playing the role of the perennial losers , the AL West looks to be a contest between sunny Anaheim and rainy Seattle.  As a Braves fan, I’ve come to value a good top of the rotation more than any other part of a team.  Perhaps this is an irrational preference; I won’t delve into that now.  But I will say, keep your eyes on those Mariners.

[Tone: Heavy sarcasm]

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard Erik Bedard had been traded to the Mariners on Saturday.  I believed all the hype when the Orioles denied reports that Adam Jones had been recalled from Venezuelan winter ball to take a physical, an apparent preparation for a trade involving him for Bedard.   I even bought the line that Jones had been asked to stop playing because he had “met his goals,” whatever that means.  I mean, why would they deny the existence of a trade that was nearly complete?  What possible motivation could there be?  There’s no way team owner Peter Angelos had anything to do with this unusual behavior.

[Tone: Sincere]

Angelos has a history of interfering with the baseball ops side of his franchise, despite supposedly delegating authority of those decisions to a general manager.  In 1996 Angelos nixed an exchange of established veterans for an infusion of young talent.  Last offseason he refused to trade Brian Roberts because, “I just thought that Brian should stay an Oriole.”  So it was an issue of concern when the Bedard trade hit unspecified snags following its initial disclosure toward the end of January.  Angelos, it seems, is never at ease trading a known quantity (i.e. Bedard) for young talent (i.e. Jones et al.) that carries a risk of failure in the majors.

For his risk-averse efforts Angelos has been rewarded with six different general managers and a decade of losing teams.  He has also earned the ire of at least one group of fans, Free the Birds, who has called for new ownership.

Maybe he should learn to take a page out of Lewis Wolff’s book and trust his GM to run the show.  Billy Beane has made the A’s into a cost-effective and smart franchise.  You can bet there was none of the haggling with ownership over the Dan Haren trade earlier this winter even though it meant 2008 would be a rebuilding year for the club.

Unless you want to spend a fortune on payroll like the Yankees and Red Sox, the only way to win is with smart, forward-looking deals like this one. And getting five players for one is a pretty good way to lower your risk. Someone congratulate Angelos on letting the world do its own spinning this time.

As Jason Stark reports on ESPN.com, there’s still a glut of unsigned, experienced free agents looking for work.  And this close to Spring Training you can bet at least a few great deals will emerge.  The erstwhile-Braves GM John Schuerholz used to love making low-risk, high-reward bets on players just like this.

One recent signing that deserves attention is the Red Sox signing of Sean Casey, a productive bat over the past 10 years, for the measly sum of $700,000.  Casey won’t be much more than a back-up at first base, but he’ll be a talented, modestly priced option for the World Champs.  What happens if Casey has a resurgent year or spells the team during an injury to Youkilis?  The deal will look like a stroke of genius. If Casey bombs, no one will remember it.  It’s win-win for Theo Epstein.

Returning to our cocaine comparison, you can see that Casey’s value doesn’t even approach the immoderation seen in the bigger-name deals.

Of course the Red Sox are not known for their thriftiness and there’s very little chance that this deal will end up being important for the team.  But we should keep our eyes on those unemployed players over the next few weeks, because chances are some team is going to bring in a big prize on the cheap.

In baseball there has never been more lust for the marquee players and consequently there have never been larger undeserved paydays.  For some extraordinary players, the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in salary can be justified or at least rationalized. Whether the Yankees should have offered anything close to the staggering $275-million contract they used to lure A-Rod back is open for debate.  But, the logic goes, that’s the sort of gamble you can make on a man currently on pace to be the greatest homerun hitter of all time.  (It’s also the sort of exuberance with a checkbook that only the bottomless-bankroll Yankees, and a couple other teams, can afford.)

These wild spending habits have bled over, unfortunately, into the hunt for lesser players too.  Witness the recent Mariners acquisition of the middling Carlos Silva for the bargain price of $48 million.  Sure he doesn’t walk people (36 BB in 202 IP in 2007) but he also doesn’t stop them from scoring (4.31 career ERA), hitting homeruns (1.3 per nine innings over the last three years), or getting base hits (226 hits last year).  Why pay an average of $12 million a year for, at best, a number three or four starter?  Why give him such a large pay boost from the $4.3 million he made in 2007?  Sounds a little desperate to me.

But just how out of proportion is this spending?  Well consider the rising price of cocaine.  In November John Walters, director of the drug policy office, reported that depressed supplies of cocaine had led to a rapid increase in the price of the product.  Coke formerly cost $96 a gram in the U.S. but has jumped to approximately $137, an increase of 44 percent.  Which calls to mind the obvious question: are baseball players worth their weight in blow?

My highly scientific analysis used the average annual salary of these players and compared them to what their weights would fetch, on average, were they pushing weight instead.

What does this tell us?  Maybe that the mutually abusive saga between Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees, with its operatic highs and mind-bending lows, owes more than I thought to that strange New York addiction to winning—tolerance of greatness causing intolerance of anything less.

Regardless the fact that the spending habits of drug addicts are closely mimicked by sober-minded baseball executives is unsettling.  A little salary cap sanity might be a good thing.

Andy Pettitte vs. Roger Clemens.  Here’s a fight I never thought would happen.  Until recently both these guys represented pretty much the same thing to me: fiery competitors who anchored several Yankee pitching staffs together.  But as Andy Pettitte’s deposition date Monday approaches, a couple of AP sportswriters suggest Pettitte’s account of how he came to use Human Growth Hormone in 2002 may in turn implicate Roger Clemens.

Clemens has been at the center of a firestorm of accusation and speculation since the Mitchell Report first emerged in December.  He is by far the most prominent player accused of using performance enhancing drugs in this round of investigation.  Clemens has sought to clear his name through a bizarre series of stunts that includes an interview on 60 Minutes and the production of a secretly-taped phone conversation between him and, until now, his only official accuser, Brian McNamee.  None of this has quieted his critics.

Pettitte, on the other hand, has admitted to malfeasance.  He acknowledged his past use of HGH, in part confirming McNamee’s account, and has agreed to testify about it before the House committee investigating this mess.  Now the speculation has turned to what Pettitte might say about his former teammate and the role Clemens may have played in Pettitte’s dalliance with chemical supplementation.

If we’ve learned one thing over the years of these painful and painfully slow investigations into the integrity of baseball, it’s that players will never turn on each other.  They are phenomenally gifted and tremendously hard-working, but they are also the world’s richest frat brothers.  And you have to protect your brothers.

When it comes time for Pettitte to bare his soul, expect gaps to appear in his memory or certain facts or events to have faded with time.  He’ll know what he did, but he won’t be too sure exactly where everyone else fits in.

Even if he weren’t put in a position to protect his long-time friend he’d still be under intense pressure to forget.  Pettitte has signed a deal to pitch for the Yankees again this year, and no one wants a snitch as a teammate.

I hope I’m wrong about this.  I hope Pettitte doesn’t have to rely on an unreliable memory to get through his testimony tomorrow.  But whether he does not or not we should thank him for advancing this dialogue about performance enhancing drugs in baseball.

My friends and I have revered Chuck Knoblauch for years now.  Maybe it had something to do with his scrappy demeanor—the way he often seemed overmatched on the field but never let that bother him.  The thrill of the underdog is one of those great features of following athletics.  Still I’m guessing it was mostly how fun it is to say his last name: knob-lock.  Go ahead.  Try it. I’ll wait.

Well, we’re all in luck.  He’s been out of the game for more than five years until recently.  In December his name appeared in the now infamous Mitchell Report on the use of performance enhancing drugs in professional baseball.  Knobby then took the most logical course of action and failed to respond to an invitation to testify before a House committee investigating the Mitchell Report.  He was hit with a subpoena and then conceded to appear.  He made his first appearance this past Friday in a closed-door session to answer questions in preparation for a Feb. 13 hearing before the media and general public.

While details of Knoblach’s testimony were not revealed, he did make some comments after leaving the session.  “That’s why I have [my son] here today, to learn a very valuable lesson: If you do something in life, be prepared to talk about it open and honestly,” offered a harried-looking Knoblach.

I hate when people read more into statements than is warranted, but I can’t help myself here.  If Knoblauch had not admitted to some sort of drug use, why would he have said that?  If he told the committee that he had never taken performance enhancers, what sort of lesson is he insinuating that his son should learn?  That it’s OK to talk about having played professional baseball once you’re done?  Who would be ashamed of that?  If I’d ever been called up to the Bigs, even just for a day, you’d never be able to shut me up about it.  No, those sound like the words of a guilty but unburdened man.

If I’m right, Knobby has reclaimed his spot in my heart.  The only way to restore integrity to the sport is for its ambassadors, the players, to take some responsibility at last.  In return we fans must offer our forgiveness too.  Absolution takes two.

My uncle is a communist.  He is also a Yankees fan.  I guess we are all full of contradictions, but this is one I don’t think I’ll ever be able to square away.  How can a man whose guiding principles in life center on the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, capitalism and all its associated strictures be such an ardent supporter of Steinbrenner’s ruthless crew of financiers?  How can he stand behind the main cause of salary inequality in baseball—the team that makes competition between New York and Tampa Bay as impossible as a game of nuclear war between the U.S. and Iceland?
 

Even their GM is named Cashman for goodness sake.
 

All these questions came to mind this week after reading through Maury Brown’s insightful piece on the 2007 year-end payroll numbers from MLB.  In comforting analytical tones Brown sets out to determine which teams spent efficiently (and inefficiently) this past year as measured by wins.  Unsurprisingly those free-spending Yanks came in last in efficiency, spending roughly seven times more per marginal win than their division-mates in Tampa-St. Pete.

Congratulations goes to the Rockies and Indians who each performed best in their respective leagues in cost per marginal win while still making the playoffs.  They also give me hope that profligacy is not the only way to get business done on the diamond.
 

But there’s still nothing sexy about smart moves made with marginal players and young talent.  It’s much more fun for the fans when you land famous free-agents with their attendant hefty contracts.  This is a habit of sad desperation. Once a team is saddled with the flashiest player on the market, the situation, in the words of Norman Mailer assessing Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full:
 

“resemble[s] the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated.”

Given difficulties stemming from the original subject matter of this blog, an executive decision has been made to change its content.  Coverage of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals will now cease, and coverage of Major League Baseball will begin.  See if you can keep up.