Friday, May 11, 2007

Quick hits...

Stripped...
Pacman Jones gets his appeal today. Of course it has come out that the night before his last meeting with Roger Goodell Jones was at a New York strip club.

He's appealing the suspension based on the idea that the punishment is unprecedented. His lawyers need to look a little deeper into league history. In 1963 Detroit Lions Paul Hornung and Alex Karras both served season long suspensions for gambling on the game.

Spitting the bit...
The Yankees had an opportunity to move above .500 for the first time in I don't know how long this season (...maybe since the first week?). Everything appeared to fall in their favor. They were playing a mediocre Texas squad in the friendly confines of Yankee Stadium. Chien-Ming Wang, last year's ace, was on the mound against a pitcher who's ERA was somewhere north of 6.00.

What did the Bombers do? They bombed. Wang gave up seven runs in less than seven innings, and then the bullpen gave up another seven leading to a 14-2 loss in the Bronx. Currently they are half a game below .500 and a season high seven games behind the Red Sox.

Sure, the cavalry is on its way, but will it arrive in time?

USADA is losing cred...
According to an AP report:

Floyd Landis claims the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency's lead attorney approached his lawyer offering "the shortest suspension they'd ever given an athlete" if Landis provided information that implicated Lance Armstrong for doping.
This calls into question why USADA's rep failed to show for the test of the B sample recently (Landis' reps could only be present at the World Anti-Doping Agency's test of the reserve sample if USADA's reps were present).

If the doping agencies are collaborating to go after Armstrong, whom WADA president Dick Pound views as his own personal white whale, it just makes this whole thing smell like a set-up in order to get Armstrong's one time domestique to offer up...well, anything that might implicate the seven-time Tour-du-France champ. USADA officials have implied that the allegation is ridiculous, however, it would appear that the offer came through Landis' lawyer, and I have a hard time buying that Landis' lawyer would risk his license in a gambit that could potentially have him in front of legal ethics boards with his license at stake.

It should be interesting to see how this plays out.

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