I promise that my name is not on George Mitchell's list.
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Cup of Coffee: December 13, 2007 This entry was posted by SBG
on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 6:40 am and is filed under Cup of Coffee. It is one of 3089 entries by the author.
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Cup of Coffee The melting continues. I'm seeing grass around the trees in the front (north side) of the yard. Roof is ice free. Grass showing up in the back yard. These updates brought to you by someone who is profoundly sick of winter. Citizens Online31 Users Online WGOM Sign InLog InRetired WGOM Jokes
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Race to the Bottom: Highest Loss Totals in T-Wolves History67: 1991-92 Recent Letters to the EditorIn Response to Happy Birthday--March 13, SBG wrote: Santana is just another Latino taking the job of some poor black kid in Detroit. In Response to Cup of Coffee: March 12, 2010, Rhubarb_Runner wrote: Delmon was drafted out of Miskatonic University?? AMR wrote: Oh jeez, don't mention Olive Garden and Beer in the same post. I think I could have had a premium tap, like Killians or Michelob Amber. Milt on Tilt wrote: he's still awesome in The Show. I signed him as the Pirates number one starter! meat wrote: Sorry to hear that, New Guy. My thoughts are with you. Jeff A wrote: Our condolences to all of your family. Milt on Tilt wrote: Tickets came in the mail today. Section 323 row 11 seats 13 and 14 cheaptoy wrote: Worse, I recall seeing the suggestion by a stribbie commentor in the story about Nathan's injury. I'd hate for the front office to be doing things suggested by that lot. cheaptoy wrote: My wife loves it too. I don't hate it to the point where I refuse to go, but I'm starting to wonder about her tastes when she'd prefer to go there than a new… hungry joe wrote: my sympathies as well. and thirded. E-6 wrote: Wow. That's a full life. My … forbid I should live that long. I hear ya. In Response to Cup of Coffee: March 13-14, 2010, Rhubarb_Runner wrote: After weather and mechanical delays (if we'd had a security breach, we'd have had the trifecta) we finally made it home from FL at midnight. In time for me to leave for Omaha Sunday.… In Response to Music Day, Milt on Tilt wrote: hater Milt on Tilt wrote: Pretty sure they do not. Once you make the semifinals you are ineligible to audition ever again. E-6 wrote: That's about 5 too many... AMR wrote: Last song of the day at the … "No W" Rock Against Bush Nice bookends … sound so much better when there's a Bush in the White House to sample from. AMR wrote: Do they allow re-contestants? I know they allow people dumped from tryouts and Hollywood week to come back. I think A_Lambert_2 could work on performing over the year and come back ready to… Milt on Tilt wrote: Or if he had ever performed in front of a group of more than 5 people before. Oh well. Algonad wrote: If he had a better haircut, he'd still be on. E-6 wrote: Maybe if you weren't such a Dope-Smoking Moron, you could find a God Damn Job. I better Go now. I'm starting to Stink. Milt on Tilt wrote: as a bonus, to try to come to terms with the departure of my favorite contestant, a video from Alex Lambert who was unceremoniously dumped by America last night. … CarterHayes wrote: That's what I use our Crosley for, too, though it's Bob Uecker country out here. Nothing quite like listening to a baseball game over AM radio in the summertime. In Response to Cup of Coffee: March 11, 2010, Milt on Tilt wrote: Behind the rest of America I guess? AMR wrote: You mean Aaron, Tim, Paige, and Katie? In Response to Frank Sinatra and Antônio Carlos Jobim -- Girl From Ipanema, brianS wrote: You want to be careful where you say such things. Johnny Fontane Mr. Sinatra has friends. Popular Recent Posts
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Keeping up with the ex-Twins:
The Dodgers signed Danny Ardoin to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training.
Pittsburgh signed Chris Gomez to a one year contract.
Philadlephia released Michael Restovich.
Also, a Twins roster move: Chris Basak was outrighted from the forty-man roster.
Clemens fingered
Stunning. Who would have guessed? Heh.
ESPN.COM:
A-Rod? Jetes? Please let Jeter's name be in there.
Jeter's reputation as a "ladies man" might suggest he stayed away from the juice but who knows.
On the other hand, he never seems to stay with one lady for very long....
Jeter to prospective conquest: "That's not acne, that's herpes. Oh, wait..."
Mark it down. A-Rod will be in there. Then, who will people cheer for to break the Anti-Christ's home run record?
Will it give Selig the leeway to void the Bond's record and strike it from the books? Will Maris be re-named the single season HR champ?
Karl Rove holds the MLB home run record? When did that happen?
Adam Dunn.
That is all I want for Christmas.
Take the source for what it's worth, but the New York Daily News says Pettitte will be on the list as well. Didn't Grimsley finger Pettitte a while back?
He can go hat-size to hat-size with Bonds. But, instead of being indicted, he got to do clever cell phone commercials mocking his annual off-season drama.
This should be an interesting day, no?
I'm really not sure whether I've been anticipating or dreading this day.
Now that Clemens has been named in a league investigation, I wonder if we'll see the media hand-wringing about his records and whether he should be in the HOF, or if the media will continue to pretend there's nothing to discuss here, Roger is a god, move along....
For some reason I imagine it will be the latter.
Mitchell Report wishlist:
THAT'd toss a rattler in their sleeping bags!
From top to bottom, eh? Looks like that last wishlist item is true then.
NPR this morning did seem to imply that Bud does not get off easy in this. He also sounds at least somewhat willing to take it:
Deadspin has a fake list.
Only Twins that I identified are Rincon and Jose Offerman, but I might have missed a few that were not recent contributors (minor-leaguers).
My big hope is not Johan. I don't want his trade-price dropped.
Missed: Matt Lawton
...and Bret Boone
Looks like RonDL is involved - I just started looking at the report, and there are tons of copies of his checks in the back of it.
TONS of Yankees.
Chad Allen. Wow, blast from the past.
Ron-DL. From the report:
RonDL should ask for his money back. Seems he got defective sh!t.
That was my reaction as well. This is proof that steroids don't work.
I did a search on the 409 page report. No "Johan" and no "Santana" mentioned at all.
No Rincon either. I'd guess that means his tainted supplement story was probably true, but hey, tainted supplements are still tainted supplements.
Is the report that definitive? Absence from the report does not necessarily mean anything, right?
There's no way you could ever say that someone did a fully comprehensive report over a time period that large, but not being on the report at least leads some more credibility to Rincon's story.
I guess when I say "probably true," I mean that it's probably true that Rincon was taking supplements and not injecting himself with Winstrol. (Not that I especially find a huge distinction there.) I'm a lot more cynical about whether or not he knew the supplements were against MLB rules at the time.
Gotcha.
Named Twins: (searched the PDF for "Twins")
Knoblauch, Rondell, Denny Neagle, Chad Allen, Daniel Naulty.
Also, Tom Kelly is noted as having had a needle found in the Metrodome visitor's clubhouse reported to him. (For all we know, that could have been a diabetic's insulin.)
For those interested, Knoblauch is on page 225. The information provided indicates he started using well after his time in New York began, around the 2000-2001 time frame.
That makes sense, actually. Knoblauch didn't need to use before that, but started struggling and might have looked to PEDs to get his edge back.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Couple your suggestion with McNamee's tenure as the Yankee's assistant strength and conditioning coach for those two years and I think that hits the mark pretty well.
Actually, the Knoblauch information doesn't really say/imply when he started using. However, the only source they have dates his usage to 2001.
I suspect he didn't use it until later in his career, but who knows. 2001 may have been his first contact with the NY source.
Ok, fair enough point. However, that would bring up the question - why would Knoblauch switch his source if he'd had so much success with a certain supplier already?
All of them after they left except for Rondell (who must have stopped, right? I mean why take them and suck?).
Looks like it. I'm curious about Matt Lawton (and a few others), but no info on any of that as far as I can tell.
Naulty used as a Twin.
Yep, just found that.
To be honest, I barely remember who the hell he was... he was "Danny", right?
No, he always went by Dan as far as I remember. Actually, I think my parents still have a promotion day magnet of him on their fridge....
Speaking of a blast from the past....
I could, as I may have at the time, be transposing him somehow with Denny Neagle... who is also in report. Kevin Bacon.
His baseball cards seem to list him uniformly as "Dan," which explains why I remember him that way. I've probably got 40-50 Naulty commons in a box my dad's basement, which isn't all that strange. Most of the Twins cards of that era are commons.
Well, those were the dark ages... I've blocked a lot of that out.
Paul LoDuca's looking like a major facilitator - both Kevin Brown and Eric Gagne are connected to Radomski via him.
Kind of makes you wonder if that had anything to do with the Mets letting him go.
Didn't Branch Rickey say something about better to let a guy go early than keep him and have him fingered in a drug use report?
Something like that.
I have known of a dirty little secret of LoDouchebag's for 2 years (have hinted at it many times on Baseball Think Factory) from a friend of a friend who just happens to have worked in the Mets front office. Needless to say, this report is just part of the gigantic skeleton in his closet that I hope some day gets pulled out.
(Before you ask, I will not spill the beans because I am not just some rumorslinging jackass on the internet. I want confirmation from somebody in the know in the media before post it.)
Then why bring it up?
Not really sure. I guess this report just further confirms to me that what I was told is true. And because LoDouchebag needs to be tarred and feathered at all opportunities for being one of the biggest pieces of crap in the entire sport.
Does it have something to do with his eyebrow-plucking?
I noticed this summer that he had eyebrow stubble, pretty badly. I'm just happy that I didn't see the interivew in HD. I think he was being interviewed about Rog Clemens signing with the Yankees or something.
...And now we talk about both men in the same breath again.
No Boones, but Boone Logan's non-brother Nook is mentioned.
Turns out his name is "Exavier."
when does his brother Excalibur debut in the majors?
Looks like Rocket was juicing as early as 1998, when he was in Toronto with Canseco and McNamee.
Mmmmm... delicious, delicious schadenfreude...
Jack Cust, according to Larry Bigbie.
Lo Duca
Eric Gagne
Chad Allen
to name a few in the report. and some weird ones (Kent Mercker? Jerry Hairston Jr.?)
I think my favorite is Fernando Vina.
Vina was an analyst for ESPN's 'Baseball Tonight' last year. I wonder what he has to say, for once
More than the names, the interesting thing to me will be to see what happens next. The commissioner, I'm sure, will feel that he has to do SOMETHING. It's clear from the Scott Boras comments above that he isn't about to accept any suspensions of his clients without a fight. I assume other agents, as well as the players' union, will feel the same way.
Further, while I haven't heard anything yet, earlier indications were that front office people were going to be implicated. Will they be suspended as well? If not, why not? If so, what will be the measure of culpability? If they knew about it? If they suspected and did nothing? If they just had players on their team involved? And what about culpability for managers and coaches, who would certainly have more ability to know that front office people?
There look to be some interesting days ahead.
I don't think Selig has to do anything. I think it was mostly a PR thing all along, and that purpose has been more or less served. The press will grill the accused players just as (if not more) effectively than any token suspension.
It's fine with me if he doesn't do anything, but I think every reporter in the country is going to ask him what the point was of getting the report in the first place if he isn't going to do anything in response to it. My guess is that alone would be enough to make him feel required to do something.
I think people generally understand that Selig can't just start handing down suspensions for checks written to the former Mets clubhouse attendant back in 2001. Can the police give me a speeding ticket if someone tells them how fast I once drove six years ago? If reporters hound Selig, I imagine he'll say much the same thing; they'll probably be too busy hounding the named players anyway.
The report was probably more of an effort to transfer the media scrutiny from all of baseball (and Selig) to a group of formally accused players, and to get Congress off of Bud's back. I think it can achieve both fairly easily (the media and Congress aren't exactly the two most thoughtful entities on the subject of steroids).
Haven't read it, but heard that it says that HGH really doesn't do much. So it's like platinum necklaces, only injected and likely to get you suspended. Awesome.
Now go pitch game seven, Paul Byrd.
Conveniently, no Boston Red Sox players are accused.
Thanks for the report, Boston Red Sox Director George Mitchell!
(I feel like making my own report, and in the appendix, I will reprint a check that Mitchell received from the Red Sox...)
Gagne and Donnelly?
If you were to select one member of the WSC 2007 BoSox, which would not really affect the team or the fans, Gagne would be #1.
Thankfully, when all this is going on, my iPod pulls up Vin Scully calling the 9th inning of Koufax's percet game. "Swung on and missed! The perfect game!" I've listened to this may 30-40 times now, and I still get goosebumps.
AMR, care to share that audio file with a fellow citizen?
I sent an e-mail to a yahoo account that seems to be yours asking for confirmation. If you follow the instructions in it, you will get an mp3 e-mailed to you in return.
It used to be available randomly online, but copyright and server loads seem to have made it disappear.
Gagne and Donnelly count as "Red Sox steroid users" about as much as Denny Neagle and Chuck Knoblauch should count as Twins users.
It may not be Mitchell's fault, as their ridiculously small number of sources (2-3) basically restricted their information to a handful of teams and clubhouses. But that too is a serious flaw in the report, if it's supposed to be taken as "comprehensive" as MLB claims. Why bother naming names when a wide swath of teams/years are left unexamined?
The report also cites Chris Donnels, Mike Lansing, Kent Mercker, Mike Stanton and Steve Woodard as ex-Red Sox players.
And if that's your line of reasoning, then why didn't the report name more Twins?
Again, those guys "played" for the Red Sox, mostly briefly, but don't really have a steroids connection to the Red Sox clubhouse. Was the Sox clubhouse just that clean? Perhaps. Did the Mitchell investigation just didn't have an informant connected to the Red Sox clubhouse? More likely. Same with the Twins clubhouse, or any other team that was conspicuously clean according to this "comprehensive" report.
Why bother naming names when a wide swath of teams/years are left unexamined?
Because somebody has to take the fall.
Yes, the cynic in me feels it is peculiar that BoSox players are scant, and that many, many Yankees are included. Man oh Manny, how convenient is that. I notice that Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are not named in the report, either. If you've ever seen them in person, you know that they have to be on the juice. There just aren't that many 6' tall anthropomorphized waterfowl and rodents running around these days.
And after all, Disney used to own the Angels.
Also: Disney owned the NHL's Ducks and currently owns ESPN. Also, Disney markets princesses and fairies to little girls like my daughter, although they really downplay Pocohontas, who is the best. She is an Indian princess. The Indians played the BoSox for the AL championship. Paul Byrd pitched game 7 of that series. He's named in this report.
I'm starting to connect the dots to this conspiracy... If I disappear, you'll know it's Disney who did it.
not a current BoSock, but Mo Vaughn was on the list
Schilling would have been sweet.
As Mark Prior has been non-tendered by the Cubs, how about the Twins try and sign him? Then we could have the #1 and #2 overall picks from that same draft as a battery.
why stop there?
Dewon Brazelton (#3) and Gavin Floyd (#4) shouldn't cost too much to pick up, Teixeira (#5) might take a bit more doing, but he could play 3B and fill a need, and it would make for an awesome in-game trivia question in a few years.
Omigod, Barreiro's head would explode if the Twins signed him on the cheap.
Someone just asked Commish Allan about striking records or asterisking them.
I think they should presented as white text with a drop shadow. (Grey text with a white drop shadow if the background it will be printed on is grey.)
AMR -- the KING of snark.
They just showed Pettite in the weight room on ESPN. He was squatting 165 pounds. How can you be on steroids and only be able to squat 165? This evidence--combined with RonDL being on the list--makes me think the whole report is bunk.
RonDL's not a very good candidate for the basis of any argument. He was never consistently healthy, so we have no way of knowing how effective PED use was for him. As for Pettitte, he doesn't seem like the kind of gambler that would have been on steroids any time recently, and while the report seems to point to HGH - not steroid - use, it seems to indicate from the passage below that Pettitte's drug connection to McNamee tapered after 2003:
If they never discussed the substances again, either Pettitte started obtaining them on his own/from another source, or he hasn't used them in four years.
And Rondell White really was a very good hitter before joining the Twins. As late as 2005, the year before coming to Minnesota, he hit .313/.348/.489 (122 OPS+) in 97 games for Detroit. He just happened to be a bust, for the most part, the last couple years for the Twins--which may indicate that either he stopped using PED's after the league started testing and handing out suspensions, or that his body is just shot now.
I think the fact that he was a perennial injury case actually lends credence to the charge that he took steroids, since chronic injuries to the joints and muscles is supposed to be a hallmark of steroid use.
I wonder if Dick Bremer, who openly vilified Bonds and talked incessantly about how nice of a guy The Insanity is for the past couple of years is rolled up in the fetal position today.
I have the impression that Dick is a big, big fan of Clemens, too.
I'd really like to see Gammons comment/spin on the Rocket's name cropping up in the report.
I did see Gammons on it. His take was that no one has had the opportunity to cross examine this source. No one's cross examined Bonds' accusers either, Peter.
are you seriously trying to tell us that a world-class baseball pitcher as big as Andy Pettite can only squat 165?
maybe he was doing front squats, sets of 50 reps, after having already worked out for 2 hours?
seriously. You know this, GH. there is just no way that 165 is anywhere near his max, even if he was
"working out" at that weight. You sure he wasn't doing power cleans or something? That I would perhaps believe.