In the interest of full disclosure and with the idea that Big Brother (or at least George Mitchell) is watching or that everyone else is into that whole cleansing of the conscience thang (yes it's a thang) after being accused of being a doper, I decided that I'm coming clean. From now on whenever I write about the Mitchell Report, USADA, WADA, Rep. Waxman, or perhaps even baseball, I am going to submit my morning performance-enhancing buffet.
Here's what it took to get me going this morning:
- 20 ounces of Starbucks Colombian coffee - my stash of Kind Coffee is gone
- 1 ibuprofen tablet (my hamstrings are killing me)
- 1 Clif Bar (crunchy peanut butter)
- 64 ounces of Brita filtered water
- 20 ounces of Turkey Hill diet green tea - since it tastes like it's loaded with chemicals and has no green tea flavor whatsoever, I figure it's on the IOC list of banned substances. While we're at it, does anyone remember the old Turkey Hill iced tea and good it tasted? Of course that was back in the good old days when Turkey Hill was a local dairy and neighborhood "minit market" and not a soulless corporation.
I also had a banana and some pad Thai with tofu from Trader Joe's, but tofu is hardly an enhancer.
Anyway, the point is that if a Congressional subcommittee wants to question me or pick on me for one reason or another, I'm ready. I have witnesses, too, which may or may not have been a good deal for Bud Selig, Don Fehr and Major League Baseball. You see, these days Congressional committees convene for the sake of moral proclamation - kind of like Senator Geary's grandstanding in The Godfather when he got it on the record that America has no better friend than the Italian-American community.
And then he excused himself so his colleagues could attempt to bust up his sugar daddy.
Bud Selig, Don Fehr and Major League Baseball are used in the same manner by Congress. They are easy pickings - a moral carwash if you will. Whenever Congress members are feeling low or their conscience is bothering them, who better to call in than the dirtiest bunch of dudes around? Even more than Alberto Gonzalez or the current group of criminal minds in the executive branch, Bud Selig is the best verbal punching bag out there for the moral miscreants on Capitol Hill. It's gotten to the point where Bud doesn't even fight back any more - he just sits there as if he's a character in a Biz Markie song and takes it.
When asked by Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind. if they were "complicit" in fostering the culture of drugs that has defined this era of Major League Baseball, Selig and Fehr shrugged the affirmative. Yes, they said, there is a lot of blame to go around. Both men accepted and conformed that their legacies will essentially be defined as the drug era - one in which the results must be set aside in order for the game to maintain its cherished historical perspective.
Speaking of perspective, the best of that lot and perhaps even the most indicting of Selig came from Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., who stated, "Fixed games played by drug users that illegitimately altered the outcome of the games. It's my opinion we're here in the middle of a criminal conspiracy that defrauded millions of baseball fans of billions of dollars."
Can you say, "Class action suit?"
Better than that, McCollum asked if there really was any difference between baseball, Britney or pro wrestling? But that's the million-dollar question isn't it? For some reason sports fans have it buried into the locus of their minds that their form of entertainment is on a higher level than other elements of the entertainment business. It's like they are evolved or advanced or something because the carry a stick and whack at a ball instead of watching a movie or digging the latest dish.
They can't all be the same can they? No, of course not.
But that didn't stop McCollum from asking:
"If baseball is simply another form of entertainment like going to a concert or attending a professional wrestling match, in which an audience attends solely for pleasure and they do not attend under the presumption of some form of fair athletic competition, then there would be no difference between Barry Bonds and Britney Spears.
"But in fact Major League Baseball is sold as a legitimate competition. ... This demonstrates to me fraud to millions of baseball fans."
Did Major League Baseball knowingly allow players using illicit substances play in games in front of paying customers? Yes. Yes they did. Is it consumer fraud? That's for the lawyers to decide, but at the very least it's very mean to present juiced up ballplayers as authentic and ask hard-working families to shell out big money.
It's very mean.
And that leads us back to Bud, Don and Congress and Tuesday's dog-and-pony show. The point is we get the point. We don't need grandstanding or televised hearings in the place of revenue-generating TV shows to know that drugs are bad and kids copy the things that pro athletes do.
But until baseball and the players' union decides to take the lead to develop proper testing - as opposed to more investigations and witch hunts - Congress is going to keep calling in Bud and the gang for more checkups. Yeah, there are more important things to do and sure, they can pick on someone their own size, but Congressmen and women like knocking them out of the park, too. In this case Bud and Don are throwing the meatballs to the juiced up folks in Congress.