The Philly Sports Journal

Pete Rose has been ridiculed for what he said on Dennis Miller’s new show, Sports Unfiltered, about steroids in baseball.

“I never thought anybody would make me look like an altar boy,” Rose said. “I’ve been suspended 18 years for betting on my own team to win. … I was wrong. … But these guys today, if the allegations are true, they’re making a mockery of the game.

“If you’re gonna put these guys that supposedly did steroids into the Hall of Fame, I mean I gotta get a shot somewhere.”

John Dowd, the man former Major League Baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti appointed to investigate Rose’s gambling, dismissed Charlie Hustle’s comments. He said Rose “committed the capital crime of baseball” and is the “king of capital crime.”

Dowd just doesn’t get it.

And others who think Rose is in no position to speak out — they don’t get it either.

Gambling, after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, was baseball’s cardinal sin. Obviously, it cannot be tolerated in any sport, because it strikes at the integrity of the game. Outcomes, numbers, record books and the equality of the playing field can’t be trusted if gambling is involved.

Same with steroids, the new capital crime of baseball.

Pete Rose came by all 4,256 of his hits naturally. You can’t say the same about Bonds’ 762 home runs or Roger Clemens’ 354 wins. You can’t even trust that recent World Championships haven’t been the products of synthetic drugs.

You can trust Pete Rose.

No evidence has suggested Rose ever did anything to throw a game, like the Chicago White Sox did in the 1919 World Series. No evidence has suggested Rose ever bet against his own team, and anyone who knows anything about Pete Rose knows he’d never bet against himself. In fact, the evidence is undeniable that Rose epitomized integrity on the field, maybe to a fault (just ask Ray Fosse.)

Steroids are the new Black Sox scandal. They’re even worse. They’re certainly worse than anything Pete Rose ever did to the game.

Under Bud Selig, steroids seeped into every corner of baseball, from perennial All-Stars to utility players to the most remote ouposts of the minors. There has been disparity in the game’s past, from segregation to the height of the pitching mound, but no era has been so disposable as the Selig Steroid Era.

After the 1919 World Series, baseball appointed its first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to restore and preserve the sport’s credibility. Baseball had an unbiased commissioner — not bound by the players or the owners — for more than 70 years. Then, on the heels of collusion and in a virtual coup d’état that forced out Fay Vincent, Selig took over as commissioner in 1992 while still owner of the Milwaukee Brewers.

Baseball was back to the pre-1919 Wild West, setting the stage for the corruption of steroids.

One of Vincent’s final acts on his way out was a hastily thrown-together ban on steroids, but Vincent would not survive his position long enough to expand or enforce it. What baseball needs now is a new comissioner, a real commissioner.

What baseball needs is a new Judge Landis, and subpoenas and sworn testimony in the meantime. That is how dire a state the game is in.

Laugh at Pete Rose all you want, but he’s old news. Just as Selig and the owners usurped the commissioner’s office, steroids and HGH have usurped gambling as baseball’s unforgivable sin.

Tags: Baseball, Steroids
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The greatest hitter of our time and the greatest pitcher of our time both used steroids.

As anticlimactic, unsatisfying and irresponsible as the Mitchell Report turned out to be, the fact that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens clearly cheated puts an exclamation point on the asterisk era.

Baseball numbers are considered sacred by so many people because generations of us grew up with the game. It linked us to our fathers, who were linked to their fathers, who were linked to our great grandfathers. Although other sports have rivaled or even surpassed modern baseball in popularity, baseball — more than any other sport — not only was a seminal component of America’s culture and growth in the 20th century and further back, it was uniquely intertwined with American boyhood.

Imagine if, when you were a kid, you looked back through the numbers and lure of baseball history — as so many of us loved to do — and you saw that Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson had used illegal drugs to make themselves better players. And imagine if speculation, but not hard proof, existed about numerous other players from that general time. Even a child, given the fact that premier players such as Ruth and Johnson cheated, would know such an era had no integrity.

Like our current era.

The Mitchell Report, which was supposed to be definitive and provide a sense of closure to the steroid speculation of the last several years, barely scratched the surface. Commissioner Bud Selig may have had the best of intentions when he requested the investigation, but like so many other events under this commissioner, the Mitchell Report was a bungling failure.

At least it gave us Clemens.

Former senator George Mitchell had no subpoena power, so instead he used very limited sources (which happened to give his report a New York imbalance), hearsay and uncorroborated anecdotes as evidence. All the speculation, accusations and claims most of us already knew about, and which most journalists would never publish unless they wanted to get sued, Mitchell shed no new light on but simply threw into his report. The Clemens evidence was some of the only evidence with teeth.

The very fact a report on performance-enhancing drugs was commissioned by Major League Baseball and was delivered is significant. The fact that Mitchell skewered Selig and team owners as accomplices to steroids in baseball is significant. The mere fact this report exists — despite its vast shortcomings, which left plenty of guilty players breathing a sigh of relief after not being named — puts an official stamp on the Steroid Era.

Now, it is time for the United States government to step in.

The good that came out of the Mitchell Report was not good enough.

The Mitchell investigation was sanctioned, in part, to keep Congress off of baseball’s back. But what the report revealed (a steroid user at the top of the sport and implications of rampant use throughout the sport) and what the report did not reveal (anything close to a complete picture of who, what, when, where and how) demands the subpoena power of govermnent intervention.

I want names. I want details. I want Bud Selig burned at the stake or I want him to resign.

I want to know what happened, as best we possibly can. I want accountability.

Selig, in the report he ordered, finally has been exposed as the disgrace he is. I don’t care about his achievements (expanded playoffs, record revenues, etc.). Many of Selig’s so-called accomplishments, specifically baseball’s resurgence at the gate, were based on steroids and Selig’s blind eye to steroids. This commissioner failed to do his number one job: preserve the integrity of the game.

I feel sad today. My childhood sport — the childhood sport for many of us, spanning generations — has been irreparably damaged. Baseball, as it always does, will go on. But steroids have created an historic disconnect unlike any the sport has ever seen, and the problem remains inadequately addressed.

In a strange sense, current fans of baseball are left with a sullied feeling for being linked to this era. All of us, who saw records shattered and then shattered again over the last decade, in some form have witnessed the death of baseball as we’ve known it since the days of our great grandfathers.

Tags: Baseball, Steroids
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It’s often difficult to feel bad for a billionaire.

Even if things in your billionaire life aren’t going billionaire well, you’re still a billionaire.

But it was hard not to feel bad for Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, founder of Home Depot, as he spoke at today’s press conference about the team’s latest crisis.

Blank, visibly hurt by Bobby Petrino’s abrupt resignation, blasted the coach for being a hypocrite who had lied to his face.

“The best way to describe the way we feel is betrayed and let down,” Blank said.

On Monday afternoon — before the Falcons’ big game against New Orleans on Monday Night Football, during which Blank graciously visited the booth to discuss how the Falcons would proceed in the future — the owner had a meeting with Petrino to make sure the two were on the same page. He specifically asked Petrino what he should say if the question comes up about coach’s future with the team.

“He stood up, he shook my hand, and his answer to me was, ‘You have a head coach,’” Blank said.

Twenty-four hours later — after Blank stated on national television that the organization, especially Petrino, is committed to a long-term turnaround that would include drafting and developing a new quarterback — Petrino quit and hopped a plane for Arkansas to do the Woo Pig Suey.

Blank, a self-made man who grew up in Queens, N.Y, from all outward appearances seems like a genuinely good guy — a guy people like and a guy people like working for. And, as someone who is not a billionaire, I could relate to Arthur Blank today.

When it rains, it pours, whether you’re talking about the endless turmoil the Atlanta Falcons have faced this year or personal turmoil most of us face.

Blank’s Falcons, who had hopes of making the playoffs before this season began, instead have seen their superstar quarterback revealed as a psychopath who is now in jail, their shell-shocked team go 3-10 and their new coach jump ship with three games left to play to take a job at Arkansas.

What’s next, locusts?

We’ve all been through crises in our own lives, and many of us have found out about real friends and fair-weather friends, patient friends who could see through the difficult times and friends who were repelled by difficulties. We may have been through such experiences with members of our own families.

As you read this, you may be someone who has been bailed on in the midst of hardship, or you may be someone who has done the bailing.

“I think the timing of Bobby’s decision was wrong,” Blank said.

“Bobby had made a commitment to us, and we made a substantial commitment to him,” he said. “Beyond that, there were commitments that were made to many others — the rest of the coaching staff and their families, our players and their families and their children. Not to mention the culture a new head coach establishes, which affects everybody in this building.

“In my opinion … 13 games … is not a reasonable commitment,” said Blank, who also mentioned that he, general manager Rich McKay and assistant GM Bill Devaney had talked late into Sunday night with Petrino to discuss the coach’s list of concerns.

“We went through everything together … and felt everything on the list were ones we could resolve.”

Perhaps Petrino knew for a long time — regardless of the Michael Vick saga and the Falcons’ on-field problems — that he wanted to go back to the college game, that he’d made a mistake by jumping to the NFL. Any of us who have accepted a job only to find out on the first day that it’s completely awful can understand that. And perhaps coaches, who at one time were disposed of as heartlessly as Vick disposed of dogs, are having their day now.

But it’s hard to believe this year’s unique situation in Atlanta played no role in Petrino’s departure. And why he couldn’t have waited three more weeks (Arkansas would have waited for him, even if it is college recruiting season), why he told Arthur Blank before Blank appeared on the MNF broadcast, “You have a coach” — those things are hard to justify.

I’m not in the habit of coach bashing. Although they get paid a lot of money, the media are brutal on them, and the nature of the profession is cut-throat and cruel. So I’m hesitant to vilify coaches who take better jobs, hoodwink reporters or leverage outside offers to get more money.

But something about Petrino gives me the nauseating sense he’s one of those cheesy, fair-weather guys who’s not really made of much on the inside.

Tags: NFC South, NFL
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