THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Huckabay’s outrage may be genuine, but I think that virtually all of his claims are specious. The title of his column is an excellent description of the column itself. For example, he refers to major league baseball as

… a small business, that’s already done a hell of a job cleaning up their act, if you actually look at the numbers.

2)Brian Cashman has been quoted as saying “We needed the help of Congress to push through a drug program ...”
http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2008/01/06/time_is_not_of_essence/
That’s the way I remember it too; owners and players did not agree to the current system of testing and penalties until after embarrassed by congressional hearings and faced with the usual threat of reconsideration of the anti-trust exemption.

Whether the Congressional Oversight committee is merely engaged in grandstanding on the steroids issue is for each person to judge; I found it instructive to look at their website, which has a 3 year documentary history tracing its efforts on steroids:
http://oversight.house.gov/investigations.asp?id=244

You can’t blame O’Reilly because he’s all about “no spin”.

Welcome to the no profanity zone-you fucking bastard…

FOX’s whole business model entails feeding the beast.  They purposefully focus upon a group of close-minded individuals who hunger for validation of their shallow world view in the form of demagoguery masquerading as quick, “intuitive” facts (i.e. no reason to think about them) they can readily parrot as their own thoughts.

One of the best online rants I’ve ever read, thanks for the link.

It bothers me as a fan that some of these guys fooled me for quite some time.  And as a fan, I’ll never know who really was the “best”, or by how much, or anything else.

But as a citizen, it infuriates me that they have lied so repeatedly and carelessly.  I was on a jury about a year ago, in a very intense case.  It was sort of eye-opening to see the process in person - how it’s archaic in the sense that it’s based on a lot of things written over 200 years ago.  Eye-witness testimony is considered evidence - if I believe someone’s testimony, that’s enough for me to find someone guilty.  So if we really want to seek justice and fairness in our society, the penalty for perjury has to be steep - it’s got to be a deterrant.

As a citizen, I want to see Bonds go to jail for a long time for perjury.  And it infuriates me that I have a sneaking suspicion that Roger might commit perjury as well (if the thing he’s getting called to is “under oath”, or whatever).  The article you link to is nice in that it reminds us that in the scheme of things, steroids really aren’t the biggest problem our society faces today.  But I think perjury is a huge issue.

If convicted, Bonds might be the only person in 2009 who spends any significant time in jail for perjury.

Prosecutors don’t seem to think it’s a huge issue.

Just saying....

Isn’t phony outrage as old as politics?