Alex Rodriguez, one of the best players in the baseball, has been accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs. OK, so nobody’s jaw hit the floor because of that, but be prepared to let it drop for this one: he’s admitted to taking them. The fact that he took the drugs shouldn’t surprise anyone — this was from 2001-2003, and everyone was doin’ it — but the fact that he has taken the high road and stated publicly that he took them is a little surprising. In fact, my respect for Rodriguez actually increased a little because of this whole event, and I’ll tell you why.

Aside: Don’t you hate when people end a statement with “and I’ll tell you why”? Why bother telling me that you’re going to tell me why? Why not just tell me why? Anyway, here’s why.

I’m not a huge fan of A-Rod. He’s probably the best all-around player in the game today, and likely one of the best of all time, but there have been a couple of incidents since he joined the Yankees that have tarnished my image of him. There was the one where he was running down the first base line and slapped at the glove of the first baseman who had already caught the ball. Then there was the incident in Toronto where he was running from second to third and yelled “I got it” while running behind the Toronto third baseman who was waiting to catch a fly ball. The third baseman, thinking the shortstop was calling him off, moved out of the way and the ball dropped. These are both silly and childish, and wouldn’t be tolerated in a Saturday beer league, let alone the majors. You can maybe see some rookie pulling stuff like that, not a multiple MVP-winning superstar who just happens to be the highest-paid player in baseball. Then again, firing his agent and negotiating his own contract with the Yankees was a bold move — anyone who tells Scott Boras to go F himself gets a thumbs-up from me.

There’s been a lot of talk in the past year or so about his relationship with Madonna, but I have no interest in his love life. Maybe he left his wife for Madonna, maybe his marriage was over anyway and he and Madonna hooked up after, I don’t know and I don’t care. I don’t really understand why anyone else does either, but it seems that a lot of people care about a lot of these types of things that have no bearing on anything. If that weren’t the case, what would Perez Hilton do with his life?

As for the steroid thing, my impression of A-Rod didn’t get any worse after hearing this, mainly because it’s almost an assumption that at the time, everyone was taking something, so this is hardly a revelation. But (I’m “telling you why” now) at least Rodriguez had the stones to say “Yes I did it. It was stupid and I’m sorry” which is more than you can say for the likes of Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa. Yes, he was interviewed last year and specifically asked whether he took the drugs, and he lied. I’m not absolving him of that, but you can understand that nobody is going to admit to something like that if there isn’t any proof. But once the allegations came out, he did the same as Andy Pettitte and immediately came clean. With Clemens, Bonds, et al, there is proof, or at least very strong evidence, and still they deny taking the drugs. Who do they think they’re fooling?

Is it possible that A-Rod doesn’t regret a second of it and is just saying this because it’s what people want him to say? Absolutely. But even if his regret is fake, it still takes balls to say it knowing that now that he’s admitted it, thousands (if not millions) of baseball fans will never forgive him. Barring injury, Rodriguez likely has at least seven or eight years left in his career (there’s nine left on his Yankee contract) but is already a lock for the Hall of Fame. For someone in that position, admitting something like this could have serious repercussions on whether he gets in at all (just ask the aforementioned Mr. McGwire, although McGwire was never a lock in the first place even without the drug scandal) — as someone on SportsCentre said this morning, “sports writers have long memories”. For someone who has aspirations of entering the Hall of Fame (and what ball player doesn’t?), this kind of admission takes courage.

Now, it could also be argued that once the allegations came out, A-Rod had two options:

1. Admit taking the drugs and look like a cheating douchebag, or
2. Lie about taking the drugs and look like a lying douchebag since nobody would believe him anyway

so it’s not like he just called up SI out of the blue and said “Hey guess what? I did steroids!” But not only did Rodriguez do the “honourable” thing and admit wrongdoing, he did not blame his trainer or doctor or anyone else. He did not say that someone gave him this stuff without his knowledge or consent, or told him it was legal. He took responsibility himself, saying that he didn’t know exactly what the stuff was (i.e. the names of the drugs), but he knew full well that it was illegal (though technically not banned by baseball at the time) and he took it anyway. He specifically said during his interview that he did not take responsibility for every substance entering his body, and that was his own fault. While I can’t respect what he did, I do respect him for telling the truth, unlike so many of his fellow players.

Twenty years ago this week, Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100m gold medal because of a positive drug test, thus dragging society (Canadian society, anyway) kicking and screaming into the era of steroids. Steroids had already been used in sports for years, if not decades, at that point, but society generally ignored it. It wasn’t until Johnson’s disgrace that it became a topic that people actually talked about.

Johnson became a national hero by (a) winning the gold medal and thereby being informally named “Fastest man alive”, and (b) beating the hated Carl Lewis on the biggest international stage possible. This was another one of those “I remember where I was when…” events — I was just starting second year at the University of Waterloo, and that particular Friday evening, I was at the student bar known as Fed Hall. When the race came on, they put it on the big screen and turned the dance music off, and everyone watched. 9.69 seconds later, we erupted into shouts of jubilation. The joy lasted three days.

The next Monday, we got the news. Johnson had tested positive for steroids and had been disqualified. The hated Carl Lewis was given the gold medal. Canada’s heartbreak was as strong as its joy had been only three days earlier. Some Canadians felt not only embarrassed but ashamed, as if the entire country had failed the drug test. It was then that people started to take drugs seriously in sports, talking about a “level playing field” and all that. It turned out that a level playing field wasn’t the problem — since everyone was on the juice anyway, you had to take the drugs in order for there to be a level playing field. Some even suggested that steroids in sports were no big deal for this reason. Never mind that the drugs made all the records artificial. Never mind that they were dangerous. Never mind that teenage athletes began taking steroids earlier than ever before, because they started to believe that without taking the drugs, they would never have a chance of success.

However, these discussions didn’t really start south of the border until until it was discovered that Mark McGwire was using andro and then José Canseco wrote his book. Not until it became obvious that their sacred game of baseball had been tainted did the Americans become interested. At this point, however, they went nuts, launching investigations and bringing players in front of Congress. MLB had buried its head in the sand for years, never admitting that there was any kind of problem and even now, they administer all the drug tests themselves, refusing to have an impartial third party do the testing (as the Mitchell Report recommended). And since they started “policing” themselves, guess what? No major positive tests. Sure, they nailed Rafael Palmeiro, but his career was over anyway. They do throw the odd minor leaguer under the bus now and again, but since there’s no accountability for the tests, you’re never going to see a significant player get caught, even if they walk around the clubhouse with needles hanging out of their ass. The NFL is just as bad — we all know that there are steroids all over the NFL, but their testing procedures are such that very few get caught and the ones that do are suspended for all of four games. Ridiculous.

These sports leagues say that they want to get rid of the steroids for good, but that it’s just not possible. Well, they’re probably right that it’s not possible to completely get rid of them, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t bother trying. If they really want to, here’s how it can be done:

1. Test each player at least once per season, but possibly more. Have no limit on the number of times a player can be tested in a season.
2. Players are chosen at random and given no advance notice of when they will be tested.
3. Tests will be administered by a company that’s not under the control of the league. The number of positive results should have no bearing on how much the company gets paid. The cost should be borne equally by the league and the players union.
4. Players that test positive for the first time are suspended for half a season. Players that test positive a second time are banned for life. All positive tests will be publicly announced.

The goals are (a) to make it impossible for a player to know when he will next be tested, and (b) to make the risk of getting caught far outweigh the potential gains from using the drugs. Once that’s done, will the game be completely clean? No, but only the stupid players will still be using. Stupid players, by definition, will not be smart enough to avoid getting caught, and so will be tossed from the game in short order. Hopefully, this will allow the game to return to the days where you could watch someone hit 50 home runs in a season and marvel at his athleticism rather than wondering if he’s on the juice.

The unthinkable happened yesterday.

Yankee Stadium, the baseball shrine that has been home to some of the best baseball players, teams, and moments for eighty-five years, is now closed. The Yankees and Orioles played the last-ever Major League Baseball game at The House that Ruth Built yesterday, and that’s the end for this building. The Yankees will play in the new Yankee Stadium next season, across the street from the old one, thus beginning a new era in Yankees baseball. Just thinking of all the great ball players who called that stadium home over the years is mind-boggling: everyone from Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, and DiMaggio to Goose Gossage, Reggie Jackson, Don Mattingly, and Dave Winfield, and now the new order: A-Rod, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera.

I am a huge baseball fan. I have seen countless games at both Exhibition Stadium and SkyDome the Rogers Centre, and I’ve also seen games at Fenway Park in Boston, the now-destroyed Kingdome in Seattle, New Comiskey Park U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, and even one pre-season game in Fort Myers, Florida. But unfortunately I never made it to a game at Yankee Stadium, which I now regret immensely. I even looked into arranging a weekend away for me and Gail sometime this summer, but with our trip to France, we were so busy that it was hard to find time to do it. (It was also hard to find the money to do it, also because of our trip to France.)

I have the utmost respect for the Yankees as a franchise. The logo and pinstriped uniform is probably the most recognizable sports logo in North America, even among people who don’t watch baseball. They are to baseball what the Leafs are to hockey and what the Dallas Cowboys are to football, but to a much greater extent. Having said all that, I’ve grown up a Jays fan, and have even found myself a bit of a Red Sox fan in recent years, and so I’ve always hated the Yankees. Which is why the fact that I was actually rooting for the Yankees to win in their last game in Yankee Stadium is unthinkable.

So the Jays are out of the postseason again, for the umpteenth year in a row. After their 10-game win streak, they did have a small-but-legitimate shot at making the playoffs, so it could be argued that they played meaningful baseball in September for the first time since J.P. Ricciardi took the helm. I wrote back in August that Ricciardi should be fired, and now I’m not sure. It’s true that he’s ultimately responsible for putting together the team, but it really isn’t his fault that Marcum will miss next year, that McGowan missed half of this year, that Accardo and Janssen missed all of this year, that Ryan missed all of last year, and on and on. Ricciardi has put together one of the best pitching staffs in baseball, even with all the injuries. Injuries to Wells and Aaron Hill are also not Ricciardi’s fault. Also on the upside, this Travis Snider kid (drafted by Ricciardi) looks like the real deal as well. If he can keep it up, an outfield of Snider, Wells, and Rios might be the best Jays outfield since Bell, Moseby, and Barfield.

On the flipside, it is Ricciardi’s fault that Reed Johnson is a Chicago Cub (I still shake my head over that move). The Shannon Stewart experiment was a total failure. The David Eckstein experiment didn’t work out either. Is Scott Rolen really much of an improvement over Troy Glaus? The bottom line is that the Jays missed the playoffs again and despite the late-season winning streak, we knew that they never really had much of a chance. From that point of view, after seven seasons of not having a chance, Ricciardi should be fired. I heard the other day that of all the GMs that were in place when Ricciardi was hired, he’s the only one left who hasn’t made the post-season. Every other team that hasn’t made the playoffs in that time has fired their GM. But not the Jays.

But it’s not like the team sucks and has no chance next year — if they manage to resign Burnett (for a zillion dollars, since that’s what it will likely take) and McGowan returns OK and they pick up a big bat in the off season, then the Jays could seriously contend next year. Maybe we should give him one more year. Of course, that’s what I thought last year too.

My ass is getting sore from this fence-sitting.

My annual baseball tournament was this past weekend. We played three games on Saturday (won two and tied one), and then one more game Sunday morning, which we lost. The 2-1-1 record put us third in our group, and our first playoff game was Sunday at 11:30. It was a close game, but we didn’t get the bats going enough and we lost by a couple of runs, so we were done. I’m in some pain today, but I managed to get up on time and after my 50-minute commute, even managed to get out of the car without falling on the ground. And I took the stairs up to the third floor; I didn’t wimp out and go to the elevator. And I didn’t even take any Tylenol today (though I did a couple of times yesterday and Saturday). Go me.

Personally, I played OK in the tournament. I hit pretty decent in the first and second games, not so much in the third, and pretty crappy in the last two. Defensively, I did pretty well, except for one play which is still haunting me. (More on that later.) In the second game, I made a pretty awesome over-the-shoulder off-balance catch followed by a fall and roll, though the runner on second tagged and went to third because it took me a second to get up again. In the playoff game, I was part of two separate double plays. (I play right field and right rover, so I’m not involved in double plays all that often.) Early in the game, someone hit one way over my head, I went to get it and threw it in to Gerald who heaved a bullet home, beating the runner by a step. (Edit: Duh, this wasn’t a double play.) Later in the game, another fly came out to shallow right field, and I guess the runner on first didn’t expect me to get to it, but I did. He was halfway between first and second, and I fired it into first and doubled him off.

I caught at least one other fly ball in that game, but the play that is haunting me was a fly ball that I missed. The batter was left-handed, and had hit very deep to right field before, so I was playing pretty deep. He hit one a mile in the air, and I originally thought it was going deep again. I told myself “This ball is not going over my head”, so I backed up a couple of steps. Then I realized that it wasn’t going deep at all and I was way too far back. I sprinted in to get to it, but those first few steps backwards cost me and I missed it by a foot. I was fully outstretched when I reached for it, so I fell and rolled again, but immediately got up and went for the ball. Luckily, Matt the centre fielder (who has unbelievable range) was right there and backed me up. The batter got to either second or third, and when the next batter hit a single up the middle, he scored, so I put that run squarely on my own shoulders. That was the only run they scored that inning, and we lost by more than one run, so it’s not like that play singlehandedly cost us the game, but I am still angry at myself for blowing what should have been a completely routine pop fly.

So baseball is over for another year, and now I’m in full Mats Sundin mode about baseball next year. Do I continue playing ball next year, or do I “retire” from softball and do something else athletic once a week (eg. hit the driving range, or maybe even go to an actual golf course) or maybe dedicate one night a week to two hours of uninterrupted guitar playing? Or do I just stop playing ball and have some extra free time which will likely be eaten up by common household things like laundry? Lemme tell ya, the laundry thing is pretty tempting, but I think I’m gonna need some more time to decide.

Well, OK, he doesn’t really suck. He had an off night is all. But if he’d had an on night, the Jays would have tied the team record for the longest winning streak in team history at 11 games! Who’d have guessed that Doc would be the pitcher to end the streak? And even with Halladay sucking not pitching his best, they came this close to doing it anyway.

I only saw the last three or four innings of the game, but the Jays were down 5-0 and simply weren’t in the game at all. Then in the 8th inning, Mark Buehrle walked Bautista and Ozzie Guillen inexplicably took Buehrle out. Buehrle looked kind of amused by this, but then Octavio Dotel gave up a 2-run homer to Alex Rios, which I’m sure took some of Buehrle’s fun away. Dotel got out of that inning, and then Chicago scored what turned out to be a critical run in the bottom of the 8th. Toronto came up in the top of the 9th, down 6-2, and facing one of the tougher closers in the AL in Bobby Jenks. Zaun struck out, then Inglett singled, Rolen walked, and Overbay singled Inglett in. Scutaro (what an awesome pick-up he was) then doubled in Rolen, and Bautista grounded out scoring Overbay. Now it’s 6-5 with 2 out and the tying run at 3rd base, and your best hitters coming up in Rios and Wells. Rios struck out (on a third strike that I’m not convinced was a strike) to end the game, but if you can ever be happy about a loss, especially one that ends a 10-game winning streak, this is one of those times. The Jays went from not being in the game at all to needing a base hit to tie it in less than two innings. That says something about this team.

There’s been a lot of talk about this streak and whether is means anything at all. I’m not sure that it does, since the Jays are basically out of the playoff race anyway. They’re 7½ games back of Boston for the wild card with less than three weeks left in the season, so unless they go on another phenomenal streak and Boston loses a bunch and Minnesota loses a bunch too, it ain’t happening. It looks like the end of any one of the last few Leafs’ seasons — wait until there’s no chance of making the playoffs and then start playing really well. Can the Jays simply not perform under pressure, or was it just bad timing that they all got healthy and hot at the wrong time?

Worst of all, does the streak mean that J.P. Ricciardi will still have his GM job next season? After all, if you put together a team that is good enough to win 10 straight games, all against very good teams, you shouldn’t be getting fired, should you? Or is it more fair to say that if you put together a team that good and yet they aren’t contending for a playoff spot, that you should be fired?

Is this streak an anomaly, or are the Jays really this good? Hard to say. We found out this year thanks to Tampa that a team not expected to do anything can be a serious contender, so there’s always hope.

All season long, the Jays have pitched well, but just can’t get any hits. Halladay and Burnett have 16 wins each. Shaun Marcum was sent down to Syracuse recently, supposedly to work through his control issues. They decided to send him down because the Jays “couldn’t afford” to keep him in the rotation if they want to make the post season. This is silly — the Jays have so little hope of getting to the postseason this season that this move really makes no sense. Dustin McGowan wasn’t having a great season before getting injured, and what happens? Two more pitchers step up, just as McGowan and Marcum did last year. Jesse Litch is 9-7 with an ERA around 4.00, and tonight David Purcey pitched a complete game 5-hitter and struck out 11, and lost 1-0. Absolutely brutal.

I really hope that the Jays hitters do some serious batting practice during the off-season, cause this is ridiculous.

Major League Baseball is preparing to introduce video replay, so that the umpires can look at a replay to determine if a ball actually cleared the fence for a home run, or whether a ball that did clear the fence was fair or foul. This stems from a couple of issues they had earlier this season where the umpires clearly got the calls wrong. I think these are the only kinds of plays that they will be using replay for — not safe or out on the bases, not strikes and balls, and not whether a batter who checked his swing went around or not.

The best thing about this idea is that it will take away the whining by players, coaches, and fans about how they would have won the game were it not for that bad call by the ump. With video replay, the umpires bad call can be reversed if it truly was a bad call, meaning that if you lose the game it’s not because of the umpires, it’s just because you didn’t score as many runs as the other team, so quitcher whining.

I was going to make disparaging comments about baseball purists who probably won’t like this. I won’t because while I like the idea of using video replay, I don’t think it should be used for balls and strikes at all. That needs to be decided by a human. I can’t explain why, it just does. I guess this means that the whiners can still say that they lost a game because of a bad call. Oh well.

I wouldn’t have a problem if they also used video replay on things like whether a runner was safe or out. The only problem there is that they’d need to limit how often they did this, or managers would be calling for a replay ten times a game, which would slow the game down. Maybe only for plays at the plate, or maybe managers could not call for a review more than twice per nine-inning game. Maybe give ’em one more if the game goes into extra innings, and then another every five innings after that.

Some are concerned that this will slow the game down too much. As long as it’s not abused by managers wanting a replay of every other play, I don’t think this will be a problem. As Dan Shulman said the other day on the radio, either we wait while the umpires spend a few minutes talking and hope that they get the call right, or we wait while the umpires spend a few minutes looking at the replay and actually get the call right.

There is one thing that concerns me and one thing that confuses me. The thing that concerns me is that umpires will have a safety net. If there’s a bang-bang play at the plate, the umpire has to make a split-second decision on whether the running was safe or out. That decision, 99.99% of the time, is final. But if the ump knows that if he gets the call wrong, the replay will bail him out, he may not worry as much about whether he gets it right. OK, hang on…. before I even finished writing that previous sentence, I realized how ridiculous it was. If anything, it’s completely backwards. It’s more likely that umpires will not want to be shown to be wrong by the video replay, so they’re probably more likely to try to get the call right the first time.

The thing that confuses me is that they will start using this system on Thursday. Shouldn’t they be testing the crap out of it in the minor leagues first before implementing it at the major league level? You just know that there are going to be problems with the system for a while after it goes live for the first time — especially if it’s been implemented quickly. Do you want those glitches and mistakes to be made in September, when the most important games of the season are being played? Or worse, during a playoff game? I’d put it in place in the minor leagues now, and use that plus spring training next year to iron out the kinks before using it for real next season. Changes like this just should not be made mid-season.