Where to start...

Okay, so I've been incommunicado for a couple of weeks - that doesn't mean I haven't been paying attention.

Mixed in with all the articles - magazines, the Brewing News and such - there have been a couple of weeks of interesting New England Sports. Jason Bay is tearing it up for Boston, a wounded Celtics team is looking like they might arrange for a date with the Cavaliers, the Bruins are fighting their way out of a hole, and our old friend Manny is being Fe-Maley.

I don't know what's going on with Red Sox pitching, but Josh Beckett looked better in his recent outing against the Rays than he has all season, but he still had the rough inning. Well, rough-ish. Somehow, in spite of less than sterling starts to the season from Beckett, Jon Lester, Daisuke Matsuzaka, and Brad Penny, the Sox still have managed to win 20 games, good for second best in the American League and tied for the third best record in the majors.

Currently de-facto Ace Tim Wakefield, yes, you read that right, is leading the team with 20 percent of the team's wins and a 2.93 ERA. Mixed in there Wake has had the pitching staff's only two complete games.

One of the other encouraging things about the Red Sox - even though they have played almost 25 percent of their games without Kevin Youkilis, with David Ortiz batting a measly .224 and Jason Varitek picking up where he left off last season with a rousing .227 average, the team is second in the majors in RBI's and runs scored in large part to Jason Bay who leads the team and is second in both the American League and the Majors with 34 RBI's. Bay is also tied for third in the AL with nine home runs. Bay hasn't done it without help.

He's been helped by a now healthy Mike Lowell. Lowell is second on the team with 28 RBI's and six home runs.

Good to see in the absence of a functional Big Papi.

Speaking of Papi, it seems I'm not the only one who doesn't buy his former battery mate's explanation for utilizing a female fertility drug/hormone. It seems almost no one believes that Manny was taking HCG to increase his sperm count. An aging slugger whose production had slipped for two and a third seasons before forcing a trade, suddenly goes on a freakish tear with his new team at an age when no one (that isn't juicing) has ever gotten better.

Do the math.

I'm not saying it isn't possible he was juicing before last season - hell, it would certainly explain some of the boneheaded mood swings and inexplicable behavior.

It took long enough, but it was nice to see the Bruins finally show up for another game in their series against the one-time Whalers. Hopefully it's not to late.

Is it just me, or are the Celtics like a zombie movie at this point? Bodies keep going down, but they just keep coming and coming and coming. Who would really have believed that Glenn "Big Baby" Davis, Eddie House and Rajon Rondo would be the weapons other teams had to account for?

I'm still not convinced that the Celtics have the horses to make it to the finals, but I don't know that I would be all that surprised if they do. Chicago pushed them to the brink, Orlando had a chance to stick a dagger in them and couldn't.

Each series thus far the experts have predicted the Celtics' demise due to match-up issues. If they survive Orlando the talk is going to be about how the Celtics are old and tired from their long series against Orlando, and their even longer one against the Bulls. They will talk about who defends who and how the Cavs have been rested and how they have been destroying their opponents. And all of it will be true - they should cause match-up problems with the Celtics, and they should be Boston handily.

I'm just not convinced it's going to happen that way.

I'm not saying that I think the Celtics are going to make it to the finals. I think it's unlikely, particularly given the team's injuries. But I don't think that it's going to be the cakewalk that Cleveland's first two series have been.

A little more dirt on the grave

Well, I guess this means that Barry Bonds didn't come through his drug tests clean like he claimed.

I can't say I'm terribly surprised. The Feds don't go after someone unless they're sure they can nail the person - they have a 95 percent conviction rate. In other words Bonds and Roger Clemens have about a 1 in 20 chance of getting out of their respective situations.

Yup, the longer this goes the more it looks like Bonds is screwed.

I would like to take a moment to bid adieu to John Updike who passed away this week. I was never a big Updike fan, but he still has the best description of Fenway, calling it in an essay about Ted Williams' retirement a "lyric little bandbox of a ballpark" and "a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities."

A Sox lifer, it's nice to know that he lived to see the Sox break through all the years of fan heartache to win the Series in 2004 and again in 2007.

Rest in peace in that great big bookstore in the sky big guy.

On a final note - all I'm hoping for this weekend is a good game. I can't help but think we're looking at a potential blowout. I really hope I'm wrong about this.

Cheating from a different perspective

We've heard the names -

Cheatriots.

Belicheat.

Hate-triots.

The list goes on. And it will.

As I have noted numerous times, there's a certain sanctimony that comes from the fans - a righteous indignation that pretty much can be summed up by, "our team is better than yours 'cause ours doesn't cheat." Unfortunately, that's just not true.

Every team cheats in some way, on some level. Was I surprised by Spygate? No. Disappointed? Yes.

When Arlen Specter came forward with his press conference he revealed that his crusade had little to do with a concern for NFL fans or the integrity of the game. It had to do with the teams of his own home state. Pure and simple.

Consider -

"I have a different perspective," Specter said. "I'm elected by 12 million people., and a lot of them are Steeler fans. ... Frankly I'm incensed about what happened with the Steelers, and I'm incensed about the notes being destroyed. I really am."

So this is about the Steelers?

Not about the fans in Tampa, San Fran, Seattle, or Chicago. It's about his voters.

For all his bluster, he doesn't appear to listen to his constituents. The most important person in relation to the Steelers, Dan Rooney, doesn't think the issue deserves to go any further -

"We consider the tapes of our coaching staff during our games against the New England Patriots to be a non-issue," Rooney said in a statement. "In our opinion, they had no impact on the results of those games."

If the tapes had serious impact, why wouldn't Rooney want a deeper investigation?

Is he concerned what might be turned up that his coaching staff was involved in? Or is he concerned that the Cheatriot nicknames would stop in favor of "Steroid" City instead of Steel City.

For anyone that thinks I'm unjustifiably attacking the Steelers, mind you, it's not because I have a dislike of the team, or that I believe they're engaging in any tactics that other teams aren't already engaged in.

I do think Specter, however, should take a look at the fact that their sideline doctor from their recent Super Bowl was dismissed after linked to the federal HGH investigation in Albany, or that Steve Courson, an offensive lineman from the Steelers last two Super Bowl titles of the 1970's admitted steroid use before his death at the age of 50 giving a lot of credence to the rumors that there was rampant steroid use on the 1970's championship teams.

And let's face it, the mid-1980's Pirates cocaine drug scandal (one of the funnier ones I've read about), just more deeply embroils the city's teams in the rumors of a massive drug culture surrounding the franchises.

As I noted before - I don't think it's anymore rampant than on other teams and in other cities. But the investigation Specter wants, if its for the "fans of the NFL," rather than just for his purposes, needs to look into all cheating in the NFL if the investigation is to be unbiased (the Red Sox did not get left off the hook in Mitchell's investigation with 14 individuals who played for the team at some point and 37 mentions of the team in the report) it needs to be all-inclusive of the NFL. Not just the team Specter wants looked at.

What I think most people don't want to face with professional sports is that cheating is a part of the culture - endemic to the individuals that compete at the highest levels. Doping has historically been a part of cycling. When was the last Olympics anyone remembers that athletes weren't expelled from the games for cheating of some sort? Baseball was ripped apart by the Mitchell Report, and I'm guessing that was the tip of the ice-berg. And football? Performance enhancing drugs, signal stealing (both with and against the rules), and god only knows what else.

Yet, despite all the evidence to the contrary, people believe that these people competing over millions of dollars aren't willing to risk a slap on the wrist and a $30,000 fine. Let's face it...that's just naive.

The Placebo Effect

I don't have any particular issue, as a whole, with the government trying to get to the bottom of a variety of issues in professional sports. There are issues which demand government intervention, and issues which don't.

When athletes, ownership, or front offices cross the line into the illegal, violate federal or state statute...that's when government intervention becomes appropriate.

But sometimes the timing brings into questions the motives of the government officials that are attacking the issues in professional sports quite so fervently.

Based on the timing of a number of even the legitimate issues being addressed by legislators, both liberal and conservative, everything from steroids to cheating is nothing more than a political placebo, the Prestige of a group of second rate magicians that try to distract while they make our education system disappear under a handkerchief. It was the strategy of the Bush Administration during the last election, distract with an inconsequential issue, keep the public from paying attention to a degrading system of education, a health care crisis, and the erosion of the EPA and corporate restraints.

W and his advisers took an action that John Kerry performed in the 1970's, breaking the code of silence after his time in Vietnam, and informing the United States about atrocities committed during the war by American troops, and used it against Kerry. It was one big distraction from any issue of substance that should have been addressed in the election. Away from education, health care, and his administration's mishandling of the budget surplus.

It's not the first time this has been done, but it might be among the most obvious.

Now sports is the distraction.

Arlen Specter who has claimed that he would pursue the president with the same sort of fervor that he is now pursuing the Patriots for possibly filming the Eagles, hasn't. He has shielded an administration that engages in illegal spying on its own citizens, has pardoned criminal activities by friends of the administration, and has been part of a legislative cluster-fuck that has engaged in some of the worst and most bitter partisan politics in the history of the nation.

Now, in an election year, Specter wants to know if the Patriots filmed the Eagles. Not the Rams, not the Panthers. Just the Eagles.

He doesn't want people to remember that Comcast, engaged in a bitter dispute with the NFL Network, is one of his biggest campaign contributors.

He wants you to believe that this is a government issue, in spite of the fact that no law was broken. He wants you to look at his left hand, when the coin is in the right.

While I think the government does have a stake in the issue of performance enhancing drugs in sports, as much as what Specter is involved in, this has become a distraction as well.

All that said, at this point I'm just waiting for one of these idiots, whether Specter, Foxx, or any number of others, to finally pull the rabbit out of his or her ass.

No Excuses

"I did it to recover faster from an injury, not to gain a competitive advantage on the field."

That is the popular excuse being presented by athletes caught using HGH and other performance enhancing substances. "I only used it to recover from (insert injury du jour here)."

This is the excuse that San Diego defensive end Louis Castillo first made popular before the 2005 NFL draft. It is the excuse that Patriots safety Rodney Harrison used (in spite of the fact that records show he initially purchased it during a time that he had no reported injury - no one followed up on that and he offered no additional excuse) when caught, it is the excuse that Andy Pettitte is hiding behind and it is the excuse that former second baseman Fernando Vina.

It is the excuse that any number of athletes I expect will use in the future.

It is a complete crock.

For anyone who thinks it isn't, I put to you the following question - if star player from Team A and star player from Team B suffer identical injuries, and Player A goes through proper (ie: legal and legitimate) physical therapy and rehab to get back on the field and it takes that player five weeks to get back, but Player B uses HGH and is back in three and half weeks, then how is that NOT a competitive advantage?

This smacks of the same argument put forth by Bonds supporters of, "it doesn't help him hit the ball," but, in light of recent studies - they're wrong. There was a recent report stating that HGH appears to improve eyesight. Improved eyesight will help a batter see the ball. The hormone helps muscles rebound faster from workouts - which means that in that tenth straight game, when non-users are fatigued, the user is fresher and more apt to be able to turn on a ball. It helps them get stronger, resulting in balls hit farther, faster.

Make no mistake. None of this is just about "recovering faster." It's all about getting on the field and an unfair competitive advantage.

Just once, I would like to hear one of these athletes say, "I cheated, I was caught and I'm sorry. I have disgraced myself, my team, and my sport. I knew at the time I was doing something wrong, but I want so bad to be the best on the field that it drove me to do something stupid and unforgivable in the context of the sport in which I compete. I wish I could promise that I would not make the same choice had I a chance to do it all over again, but, given my competitive nature, I don't think I can make that promise. I'm sorry."

We'll never hear it. But it really would be nice to hear one of these athletes completely own up to their mistake rather than try to find a way to excuse it that they believe will be palatable to the general public.

Unfortunately, there are many in the general public that are part of the problem - also making excuses for why, when their sports heroes are caught red-handed, we should take their less-than-heartfelt apology at face value. I'd like to thank Lisa at A Red Sox State of Maine for providing a link to the following from the New York Sun -

Corrupt in conception, inept in execution, this is in general a vile report. What decency there is in it comes from, of all people, Andy Pettitte. The ostentatiously religious Pettitte, who deserves and will receive a rousing ovation the next time he takes the mound at Yankee Stadium, will be scorned by many as a hypocrite, but according to the second-hand accounting of this report, he decided to use HGH because he thought it would "speed his recovery and help his team." And what could be nobler than that?

This reporter's defense of Pettitte is that he's "ostentatiously religious." First, I have to question whether or not this reporter knows what the word ostentatious means, or if he's just using big words to try to make people think he's intelligent. Because he comes off as an idiot. Were I Pettitte and truly religious, I would be offended by someone who described me as ostentatiously so.

For people wondering - it means rich and showy: marked by a vulgar display of wealth and success designed to impress people. So this dude is saying that Pettitte is showing religion only to impress people.

But I digress.

His argument (I will leave the whole "noble" thing to Lisa who handled that quite well) is that we should give Pettitte the benefit of the doubt because he's religious and, in essence, religious people would never do bad things. To that I give two names that are just the tip of the iceberg: John J. Geoghan and Ronald H. Paquin.

For those of you unfamiliar with those names, they are both priests - a profession that most would agree has some fairly religious people. These two were part of the Catholic Church's long running conspiracy to conceal child molesters within its clergy. Geoghan died in jail after convicted, Paquin plead guilty to the crime, claiming that he himself was a victim at the hands of a member of the clergy while a boy in Salem.

By reporter Tim Marchman's reasoning, this couldn't be true because these men are religious.

What an idiot.

On a lighter note (pardon the pun) - down to 184 this morning, a total loss of 4.5 pounds.