Articles/ Editorials

{This article was originally published on Hot Stove New York.}

Have I got a joke for you. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

Frequently beleaguered New York sports franchise finds itself riding high for the first time in several years thanks to a superlative 2006 season, only to fall flat on its face in spectacular fashion the following year. Franchise suddenly finds itself in damage control mode, faced with an unexpectedly and extraordinarily pissed off fan base that no longer seems to be buying into the sham that ownership is shoveling. What’s worse, the franchise finds itself in enormous debt following the construction of their new billion dollar home, and the only way to recover that capital is by hitting said disgruntled fan base over their collective heads with staggering ticket prices.

But wait for the punch line.

The franchise needs a face. Not the face of a manager under fire, or a boy genius whose rose has lost its bloom. Not the face of a spoiled superstar who doesn’t hustle, or a worn down veteran who can no longer compete. The team needs a new face. A big face. A face that everyone knows. A face that’s already burnt into the nation’s consciousness because ESPN wouldn’t have it any other way. A face that dominates the front page, and a name that’s on everyone’s tongue, on every media outlet’s rumor mill, on every team’s radar, in every fan’s pipe dream.

Ladies and Gentleman, I’d like to introduce you to the newest New Yorker, Johan Santana! Er, I mean, Brett Favre. I mean, Santana. Favre, Santana, Favre, Santana.

Apologies, but my head is spinning. Must be a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Kudos to Jets owner Woody Johnson, who could hardly have orchestrated this grand charade any better. After all, it was a scant four days after the owner announced that the team would be charging its season ticket holders exorbitant Personal Seat License (PSL) fees in their new stadium that Gang Green dropped the F(avre)-Bomb. Now we can put to bed the questions concerning why the team’s partner in their new $1.6 billion stadium, the New York Giants, unveiled details of their PSL program in late June while the Jets remained tight-lipped about their 2010 plans, which will see fans paying one-time fees ranging from $500 to $150,000 for the privilege to buy a season ticket plan. Would it surprise anyone to learn that the PSL was a brain child of the cable company?

Yup, the Jets played this one to perfection, pilfering their subscribers’ pocketbooks while the pickings were good. They learned their lesson from the New York Mets, who in typical Flushing fashion, could not even execute their own greedy scheme properly. Believe me, the Wilpons are not an ownership group that enjoys watching Willie Randolph collecting paychecks for the remainder of his contract’s tenure while taking bows in Yankee Stadium. But the team was left with little option but to fire their skipper when they foolishly failed to coordinate their season ticket brochures with Santana’s arrival. Nice work by the marketing department, which seems to pump out more silly slogans for the team than you can shake a stick at, but failed to have the printing press hot at the franchise’s most critical juncture. Instead, the team had to sit on its 2009 seating chart and pricing tiers for half of the 2008 schedule. Think the Wilpons were happy to see that 10-game winning streak in July? Playoffs? That would just be the gravy.

No, the Jets would not repeat the same comedy of errors. And while the team has indicated that Favre’s likeness will “not be used to sell” PSLs, who’s kidding whom here? Jet fans don’t need to see Favre’s mug on a brochure when half of them are already wearing his number on their backs.

And Woody Johnson saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was training camp and there was preseason, and on the seventh day, he rested. He blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because Woody knew the financing for his stadium had been secured the day Johan Santana walked in the door.

I mean, Brett Favre.

{This article was originally published on Hot Stove New York.}

I’m not a doctor. I’m not even a science major. But I’m a sports fan, and a hockey fan, and over the years I’ve picked up a nugget or two concerning head injuries and the impact of post-concussion syndrome.

The NHL as a league took a long, hard look at head injuries in their sport right around the time that superstar Eric Lindros was clearly losing his battle with the recurring condition – a condition that had already forced his younger brother out of hockey. It’s no coincidence that the league stood up and took notice when Lindros’ career seemed in jeopardy. After all, the NHL had billed Lindros as the next to grasp the baton handed from Gordie Howe to Wayne Gretzky and later Mario Lemieux, much in the same way that the league is currently marketing Sidney Crosby. Nobody cared that Brett Lindros would never play again, but once Eric was felled it was time to take a look at just what exactly we had been doing to these athletes’ brains.

But this isn’t about the NHL. This is about Major League Baseball, and specifically the way the Mets have handled Ryan Church’s latest concussion, his second in three months. Baseball has never had an Eric Lindros. Superstars lost to the stigma of PEDs, yes, but never to head injury. Still, you would think that someone amongst the team’s medical staff would know a sliver of what the NHL has uncovered about concussions since they began to investigate the injury. You would think someone, anyone within the Mets organization would have at least a cursory knowledge of the NHL’s battle with the injury and the measures they’ve taken to erase it from their game.

It is absolutely absurd that only after meeting with a neurologist on Tuesday has the team decided that it’s in Church’s best interest to “stay home, rest and pretty much stay out of the light, daylight,” as GM Omar Minaya told the media yesterday. Church has been suffering from headaches and dizziness since taking a knee to the head from Atlanta’s Yunel Escobar last week, yet despite these tell-tale symptoms of post-concussion syndrome, Church was allowed to travel with the team to Denver and back home, and has even been called upon to pinch-hit on four occasions since the injury. On a recent SNY broadcast, play-by-play man Gary Cohen indicated that Church did not even recall the hit he recorded in the first of those pinch-hit appearances.

Honestly, the negligence is mind-boggling, and it is magnified 10-fold by the fact that Church has now suffered two concussions in three months, and entered Tuesday night’s game tied for the team lead in homers (9), runs (34), and second in RBI (32). It’s nice to see the franchise protecting its assets.

For the record, the NHL would not have allowed Church to travel, practice, or even workout until he was completely symptom-free. Neurologists and concussion specialists have advised the league that any sort of exercise, exertion, or exposure to light and sound can worsen a concussion and/or prolong its effects. They have also learned that each successive head injury tends to be worse than the last, and that with every concussion suffered, the likelihood of a complete recovery decreases. Just ask former Rangers Jeff Beukeboom and Mike Richter, both of whom had their careers ended due to concussions, and both of whom suffered from fatigue and sensitivity to light for years following their injuries.

The NHL had to learn the hard way, and the Mets appear determined to take that route as well. I just hope it doesn’t cost anyone their career.

{This article was originally published on Hot Stove New York.}

More than 80 current and former Major League players are cited as alleged users of performance-enhancing drugs in Senator George Mitchell’s report on steroid use in baseball. The investigation’s key witnesses include Brian McNamee, a former Yankee strength trainer, and Kirk Radomski, a former Mets clubhouse attendant. Both men cooperated with the probe under pressure from the federal government, and as a result of their New York ties, the information they provided reflects particularly poorly on both New York franchises.

For the Yankees, current Yankees Andy Pettitte and Jason Giambi have been tainted by the report’s findings, as well as former Yanks Roger Clemens, Gary Sheffield, Mike Stanton, Chuck Knoblauch, Kevin Brown, Denny Neagle, Jason Grimsley, Ron Villone and David Justice. For the Mets, while the team’s current roster has largely escaped untarnished, the recently departed Paul Lo Duca is a featured case study in the report, while former Mets Todd Hundley, Todd Pratt, Mo Vaughn, David Segui, Matt Franco, and Lenny Dykstra figure prominently as well.

While the players listed above represent quite an eclectic group of stars and scrubs, you may have noticed that what they don’t represent is a whole lot of diversity. Amidst a sea of familiar faces, the faces of Miguel Tejada, Jose Guillen, Benito Santiago, and Fernando Vina stand out. They are part of only a small handful of Latino players that appear on Senator Mitchell’s list of cheats, and comprise approximately 5 percent of the athletes exposed today (depending on the list you’re consulting), despite the fact that as of 2005 nearly 30 percent of Major League players were Latino.

Does this mean that Americans are more inclined to juice than their Southern neighbors? Of course not. In fact, there are indications that just the opposite may be true given the density of Latino surnames that have popped up in drug violations since the instatement of MLB’s stringent testing policy in 2005. Just as we can logically conclude that the NY-centric clientele of Radomski and McNamee is not an accurate representation of an affliction that clearly spans coast-to-coast, likewise the niche that these petty peddlers had carved for themselves is surely not the beginning and end of baseball’s illegal drug trade.

The fact of the matter is that if a Latino player is interested in using steroids, there is little reason for that player to seek those substances in the United States when it is readily available in his native country at half the cost and without the paper trail. Pharmaceutical regulations are looser in places such as Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. Various steroids can be purchased over-the-counter and substances banned in the U.S. are frequently ingredients in legal supplements sold in Latin America.

In fact, in May 2007 Red Sox slugger David Ortiz notably told the Boston Herald that he has no way of knowing whether or not he unwittingly ingested a banned substance in his youth since he used to regularly buy protein shakes in the D.R. with little to no regard for the ingredients. Now Ortiz says he doesn’t even dare visit a GNC back home for fear of what he could be purchasing.

“I tell you, I don’t know too much about steroids, but I started listening about steroids when they started to bring that sh*t up,” Ortiz told the Herald. “I started realizing and getting to know a little bit about it. You’ve got to be careful.”

So while it comes as some surprise that so many members of the ‘99-2000 Yankees made the Senator’s list, it should surprise no one that the most notable Met name attached to the scandal is that of the recently jettisoned Lo Duca. I mean, who were you expecting? Ramon Castro? Carlos Delgado? Ambiorix Burgos? Surely not. With a roster that is a whopping 54% Latino as it stands today, the pickings were slim.

Given what we know, it is a virtual certainty that we will never see any sort of comprehensive list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. However, in the instance of the Mets, it was better to be lucky than good.

{This article was originally published on Hot Stove New York.}

There are several phrases that we as Americans tend to toss around with reckless abandon, using them as blanket defenses against tough questions and even tougher answers. “Innocent until proven guilty” is one such phrase – a sentiment embedded in the country’s vernacular that, shockingly, doesn’t solve all our problems. It’s this phrase that Commissioner Bud Selig invoked in his recent statements concerning Barry Bond’s pursuit of Hank Aaron’s career home run record, hiding behind the words rather than voicing an opinion that is etched across his grimace at each crack of the slugger’s bat. It’s a sentiment that many have expressed, embracing the warm comfort of a nation’s mantra rather than facing the reality of a situation wherein the most sacred record in sports has been broken by a known cheater.

I say “known” because I prefer to keep my head well above the stifling blindness of the sand. I understand that while this country was founded on certain principles, they were written down by men of reason, and therefore were not meant to be read and interpreted without the influence of our own reason. For surely every murderer caught red-handed is not innocent in the eyes of his captors until a court of law vouches for his guilt. Clearly the public did not presume the innocence of a man like O.J. Simpson given the furor that erupted in the wake of his acquittal.

I don’t mean to compare Barry Bonds to the likes of murderers and thieves. I mean only to explain that the concept of innocence without legally-binding guilt is not one that I can embrace. Why should any one forestall their own verdict in the absence of that of a jury? Aren’t juries, after all, compiled of people like you and I? People that are asked for their opinion, and asked to make a decision. If we were in the shoes of that jury, we couldn’t very well say, “I’m sorry, Your Honor, I can’t condemn this man. He’s innocent until proven guilty.”

In short, I, like many fans, believe Barry Bonds cheated baseball, using anabolic steroids to promote unnatural protein synthesis, increasing his muscle mass while reducing the effects of wear, tear, and perhaps most importantly, fatigue on a 40-year-old’s body. I believe that perhaps as many as 50% of all major league ball players were using in the mid-to-late 90s, that Roger Maris remains the single-season home run king, and that many of the heros of my youth may one day be tainted by the same spectre that now hangs over McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. So be it. It is too late to change history and restore the record books, but it is not too late to proceed forward with open eyes. I, for one, choose not to perpetuate the cycle by continuing to ignore something that’s staring me, mockingly, in the face.

If the glove fits, Barry.