Before you undervalue a Royal thumping...

...Keep in mind that the Jays were 3-4 against the Royals last season. So the opportunity to beat down on one of the few teams that you can look down upon in the standings should be greeted with as much joy as pulling out a squeaker against the Sox, Rays or Yanks.

(At least that's what we're saying now. Come back and ask us again when the Jays get into the AL East portion of their schedule.)

No, really though. Who can't get behind a Run the Table on the Royals rallying cry?

Who doesn't love Jo-Bau?
A couple of days ago, we were whingeing about José Bautista' struggles at the plate as much as any Jays Talk caller from Woodbridge or Barrie. But two swings of the bat later, JoBau's OPSing over .840 and is second on the team in RsBI and everything is all good.

Or maybe, just maybe, this is a reminder that it is still early in the season, with more than 90% of the games yet to be played. We might not want to shove some guys who've had a bad two week stretch off the plank just yet.

Afternoon blogging? We really hope not.
So this thing about a "semi-big" player getting dinged for PEDs is sitting out there, and our mind races as we start to think of the Jays who might fit that description. We're so sick of talking about PEDs that we really hope that the news comes out and it's some guy that we don't care about on a team we never think of.

Because we're not sure that we've got the stomach to go over it if it turns out to be one of our own.

Baseball books offer unending stacks of misery

It probably shouldn't come as any great surprise that Selena Roberts' A-Rod takedown has floundered and fallen off the sales charts, only weeks after its debut.

Last month, we had some time to kill at a Chapters megastore, and being the incorrigible baseball fan that we are, we couldn't help but saunter over to the sports section of the store to see what books we could add to our mounting pile of shamefully unread tomes. What we were met with was depressing enough to make us literally (and I mean literally) recoil and walk away.

The baseball section was a wall that was almost completely filled with books focused on steroids, fallen superstars, and fallen superstars who took steroids. It was more than a little depressing, and it really made us wonder if book publishers truly think that there is such a huge market for these exposés on performance enhancers and their users that they would focus on this one small aspect of the current state of the sport to the absolute exclusion of everything else.

It's not to say that we want to stick our head in the sand and pretend that PEDs are not present or that they are not relevant. But do we really want to spend any more of our time digging into the foibles of Alex Rodriguez or Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or José Canseco or Kirk Radomski when we've heard and read so much about them and their disgraced brethern over the past five years that we couldn't possibly stomach anything more?

Some of the best sports writing of all time has been done on the sport of baseball. The game lends itself to poetic and thoughtful discussion, whether if it be on the history of the game, the changes in how we look at the game through statistical analysis, or the endless debates on the relative merits of players and in-game strategies.

That's not to say that you can't have interesting books that look at the impact of steroids and other performance enhancers: Will Carroll's The Juice still stands up as a must-read for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion on what these subastances do (and don't do), and what is their place in the whole baseball dialectic. But what distinguishes Carroll's book from many of the others is that it approaches the topic with a genuine sense of wonder and intellectual curiosity. Most of these other books seem start with the notion that steroids have ruined baseball, then set out to point fingers, assess blame and castigate the players, the game and, ultimately, the fans for being mindlessly complicit in the disintegration and demise of the grand old game.

On the contrary, we've found over the years is that baseball fans, by and large, are contemplative and intellectually curious people who like to dig deeper and learn more about the game. It strikes us that it would take a certain level of self-loathing to sit down and read volume after volume on how the sport that you're passionate about is a cesspool full of frauds.

And so, as we look forward to our summer reading, we plan on digging into our pile of unread books and reading a classic baseball book that truly captures the essence of all that is great in the game: Jim Bouton's Ball Four. We're looking forward to it.

Oh Manny...

Oh Manny.

You took something bad without thinking.

And they've sent you away.

Oh Manny.

Baseball's other unnatural advantages

We've gone through years of peaks and valleys in this whole festival of affected and overly sanctimonious outrage around performance enhancers, with the awkwardly scripted admissions from A-Rod providing the latest jumping off point for the sports talkerazzi.

The outrage seems to stem from a belief that these enhancers give the current generation of players a leg up on their current competition, and moreover, skew the sacrosanct history of the game as it is written in the numbers they produce. If we were ever to turn a blind eye to this sort of behaviour, the argument goes, we'd be left with record books that diminish most of what has come before, and a game that is radically different from what we have come to love. With apologies to Fukuyama, it would be the End of History. And we'd all be poorer for it, or so they say.

But with all this talk of the unnatural advantages that modern anabolics and growth hormones provide to the nefarious and disreputable, we've been left to wonder about the place in baseball's dialectic that is occupied by one of the most ubiquitous and increasingly perfunctory procedures: ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, or Tommy John Surgery.

While we drive ourselves nuts in trying to push back against medical science in some areas of baseball, Tommy John surgery is tacitly accepted as part of the game. Once a career-saving procedure and a last resort for pitchers, going for a "TJ" is so commonplace at this point that players seem to be going for this surgery as a preventative measure. Give up next year, the thinking seems to be, and get back five years on the other side with a brand new arm.

Nobody really thinks much about the competitive advantages that TJ surgery provides, and most view it in the same context as having a knee scoped or a labrum tear repaired. These surgeries and procedures are generally acceptable, it seems, because they are the pound of cure applied after someone has suffered an injury. That's the way we like our medicine.

The question is: Does this surgery, or even the knowledge that it is readily available, affect the competitive balance of the game? Do pitchers throw harder or throw pitches that they may have avoided in the past (e.g. sliders and splitters) because of the safety net that TJ procedures provide?

How conservative will a young pitcher be with his arm when he knows that, at worst, he can have his ligaments yanked out and replaced with stronger ligaments from his leg? And moreover, if there is any truth to the notion that pitchers eventually throw harder after having their UCL replaced, does this not constitute an unfair advantage?

Will Carrol and Thomas Gordon noted in a Baseball Prospectus piece in 2004 that some speculate that the "dead arm" that ended Sandy Koufax's career was in fact a wonky UCL that could have been fixed with this surgery. This raises for us a question: If we are going to insist on giving the utmost respect to the historical performances of hitters throughout the past century, shouldn't we be considering the number of injured arms throughout those eras?

To underscore the ubiquity of the procedure, that same BP article notes that Dr. Tim Kremchek performs 120 TJ's per year, roughly the equivalent of 10 big league pitching staffs. And he's just one surgeon.

If we find it morally problematic to reward Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds because they enjoyed an unfair advantage over the harball heroes that we see in gauzy sepia tones, then shouldn't we take into account the injured arms that threw only a couple of pitches to avoid pain, and that threw them slow and straight over the plate to Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle or Henry Aaron?

If we're going to heckle an easy target like Alex Rodriguez with catcalls of "A-Roid" and "A-Fraud", what sort of treatment should be given to Shaun Marcum when he returns? Because from our point of view, Marcum's Tommy John surgery seems to fall more in the category of being an ounce of prevention.

Everybody sucks

When the word came out over the weekend that Alex Rodriguez had tested positive for something or other at some point in the recent past, our first thought was: "Grrrreaaat...here we go again."

Maybe we should care more about the sanctity of the game, and fair play, and the inviolability of the game's milestones and records. But at this point, we just don't give a shit.

If there is anything good that has come out of this week's events, it may be that A-Rod provides an exclamation mark onto the end of this era. Maybe now, we can just accept that it is impossible to look at the last 15 years of baseball and pluck out the inconvenient and unpalatable numbers of a few bad eggs, and just accept the fact that everybody was probably doing something.

People have been trying to separate the black-hatted bad guys from the noble and righteous good guys in all of this mess so that they can align themselves with the pure essence of the game. Our souls were all going to be cleansed in seven or eight years' time when Rodriguez (the personally flawed but professionally impeccable slugger) claimed the home run record from the dastardly Barry Bonds. What a relief that would have been.

Except that it was all a load of hooey anyways, and people need to just get over themselves.

We need to stop relying on multiple anonymous sources and ill-gotten grand jury testimony to root out the cheaters, because it will only prove to be an endless and futile proposition to try to separate the good guys from the bad.

(Wasn't there a time when four anonymous sources wasn't enough to forge ahead on a story? If you want to write a piece about how players took the easy way out and circumvented the virtuous path, wouldn't it be best if you yourself didn't circumvent the more difficult path of getting an on-the-record source?)

We need to stop discounting the achievements of hitters from this era, like Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire, because there's really no way of distinguishing their achievements from those who got caught. It's become a fool's errand.

Knowing what we now know, is there anyone who feels as though they could take the information gleaned this week and make the claim that Carlos Delgado rightfully deserves the 2003 AL MVP award since we know that A-Rod took performance enhancers?

Not to imply anything...but we're not about to stake out that supposed moral high ground for ourselves.

Breaking News! Baseball players use speed!

Jeff Blair reports that somewhere in the pages of Joe Torre's grumpy, bitter kinda-bio (with extra salacious bits courtesy of Tom Verducci and Brian McNamee!) comes the news that some members of the Blue Jays in the late 1990's used greenies.

In other earth-shattering news, some players wore leather gloves on their catching hands whilst playing the field, and the majority of players wore wool caps all season long. Stunning, we know.

Paragon of newfound virtue McNamee notes that "Guys were 'beaning up' to play golf after workouts." For shame!

Rios is really ripped

Holy pythons! Check out the guns on Alex Rios!

Apparently, he tracked down some of those prop arms from the Ludacris video.

Let's just assume that Rios worked out really hard this winter, and followed a strict regime set out by a "personal trainer" and a "nutritionist".

In Completely Unrelated News
Andy Pettitte is going to speak at 3 pm today, presumably to explain how his sporadic use of HGH led to all of those extra T's in his name.

We won't be tuning in. We're busy catching up on Season 5 of The Wire. (In your face, Blairsy!)

Back to the Grind

It seems like we've been out of our routine for months, what with our extended holiday break. We're finding it hard to find the motivation to get up and take on that world again, and somehow, our mantra of "pitter patter, let's get at 'er" just isn't as effective as we would have hoped.

Roger Clemens: Wordsmith, Vioxx victim
We hadn't intended to watch the Rocket's lame denials on 60 Minutes last night, but we're glad that we did. We were getting a little soft on the big Texan, sensing that he was going to become the media punching bag for much of the misdirected rage about PEDs.

That was until Clemens spat out that first line: "I'm angry that what I've done for the game of baseball, and what I've done in my private life, that I don't get the benefit of the doubt."

Without question, Clemens career performance (enhancers aside) is amongst the most exceptional in the history of the game. But if you were to remove Clemens entire career and indeed his existence from the history of baseball, the game would have proceeded along pretty much as it did. He's not that important, nor is any single player. The game is much bigger than "all he's done for it". Arrogant prick.

Amongst Clemens other bon mots:

• "If (MacNamee)'s putting that stuff in my body...I should have a third ear coming out of my forehead. I should be pulling tractors with my teeth."
• "I was eatin' Vioxx like it was Skittles! And now, these people who were supposedly regulatin' it tell me it's bad for my heart!"
  
• "I understand that as a public person, you're gonna take some shots. The higher you get on the flagpole, the more your butt shows."
  

(Quick question on that last one: does Clemens generally climb flagpoles while wearing a skirt?)

And now, in a heart-warming turn, Clemens has announced his intention to sue McNamee.

Reed Johnson will run like a girl in a Blue Jays uniform for one more year
Maybe it's the economy of baseball, or maybe it's the Canadian dollar, or maybe someone out there thinks that Reed Johnson's varied facial hair exemplifies his "heart". That's about the best that we can come up with to describe why Johnson got a slight raise after doing poo-poo and pee-pee in the bed all last year. Which isn't to say that we're not rooting for him...it's just that, you know, Josh Towers had one good season too.

How do you solve a problem like Troy?

By now, we've been all over the map in trying to figure out what we think about this whole story with Troy Glaus and his performance enhancers.

We've felt betrayed.

We've made excuses for him.

We've shrugged it off.

We considered that we might just be screwed by a guy with a monster contract and little trade value.

We've tried to square our excuses for Glaus with our indictments of other "cheats".

The whole discussion on PEDs and steroids and HGH should be much more complicated than a simple "he cheated, therefore he's a bad guy" equation. There's a profoundly imperfect sliding scale of what is legal and what isn't in terms of drugs and/or supplements, and how actually effective they are at making a ball player bigger, stronger, faster or - maybe most importantly in this case - healthier.

Still, we've been asking ourselves: how will we feel if Troy Glaus hits a game-winning home run this season? How easily can you exchange a general sense of morality for a passionate love of your team?

Recommended reading
The Juice : The Real Story of Baseball's Drug Problems by Baseball Prospectus writer Will Carroll. If you want a better understanding of what steroids do, and a perspective on their true impact on the players and on the game, this is a must-read.