War Bonds

Big news day. It's tough to know what to talk about.

For one thing, the Mets apparently decided to start their key series with Atlanta a day late. No worries, fellas, we'll wait for you to get ready. Take your time. Especially you, Ollie. The first three innings never matter anyway.

Oh, and then there's the Head Head himself, Barry Lamar Bonds, passing the big record last night out in San Francisco. Yippee. Clearly, the whole affair is crying out for more commentary. Wait, what's that you say? No? You don't care for vacuous preening and empty moral posturing from the nation's media?

If not, you might want to avoid Mike Harrington in the Buffalo News today (not that you wouldn't have). Being home overnight for a doctor's appointment, I had no such luck. Dude taps into all three of the hack erogenous zones for the piece:

1) The self-importance: "The game’s biggest boor is suspected of being its biggest cheat. Now he owns the most hallowed record in baseball, and perhaps in all of sports. I feel like I need a shower to wash off the stench."

Cheddar: Nobody gives a rat's ass how you feel personally about Barry breaking the record. Nobody. Not me. Not your editor. Not your paper's readers. Not yo momma. Maybe her. YOU ARE NOT THE STORY. And I mean, let's face it -- "Sportswriter Needs Shower" is a "Dog Bites Man" headline if there ever were one, right?

ZING. Down goes Harrington.

2) The incoherence: "Sure, Barry Bonds is innocent until proven guilty. But why don’t we ask what Greg Anderson thinks. Don’t remember him? He’s the convicted steroid dealer — and Bonds’ former personal trainer — who’s been locked up in a California prison for nearly 11 months because he won’t testify in front of a grand jury looking into perjury and tax-evasion charges against Bonds. He makes 12 cents an hour (yes, 12 cents) working in the prison kitchen."

Cheddar: First of all, Mike, you and your copy desk might want to buy a question mark at the end of that second sentence there. Secondly, the fact that you think a guy's testimony to a grand jury might help to result in charges being brought isn't the same as, how do you say, convicting the guy. AT ALL. This is a rather important aspect of the criminal justice system. Good lord, an 8-year-old who watches "Law and Order: Criminal Intent" knows this shit. Mike leans in all conspiratorially with a complete non sequitur, as if Barry's status as a douchebag had been in question since he was a Sun Devil, and anyone wasn't convinced of that one way or another.

But most importantly, what the fuck does any of this have to do with baseball?

3) Just making shit up: "All we can do is start the countdown until Alex Rodriguez — who certainly has personality problems of his own but at least is steroid-free — can claim this record for himself sometime around 2014" ... "Let’s make this point clear: Steroids don’t help you hit the ball. They only help you hit it farther..."

Cheddar: I've got an idea. It's a doozy. On the day Barry Bonds breaks the home-run record, let's go around blindly proclaiming players "steroid-free." That makes a whole lot of sense. Iz hour meedia lerning?

(Do I think A-Rod juiced? No, I don't. But what the hell do I know, or does Mike know? Absolultely NOTHING about anyone's use during the testing or non-testing era.)

And he knows even less about how the things work, falling back here onto the Popeye Principle of Steroid Use. This is a little pet nickname of mine for the sportswriter's habit of falling back onto the most cliched, obvious, juvenile analysis of performance-enhancing drugs. You see, most sportswriter's brains stopped growing at just about the time when the Saturday morning cartoons went off the air. Thus, their concept of how steroids operate never advanced much past "Spinach = Unfair Advantage" in the old medulla oblongata. Also, they tended to like Bluto.

But steroids are not, in fact, cans of spinach -- their role in the offensive explosion of the '90s was interrelated with any number of other factors, not least of which was widespread use by pitchers. Steroids help players recover faster from fatigue, but also cause and determine all manner of weird, shifty injuries. They have, as I can tell you, all kinds of unpredictable side effects on personality, weight, disposition.

What we know is that steroids help to increase muscle mass. Does that help you hit the ball farther? It could be, but we really have no idea. Do steroids help you hit the ball? Shit, they might. A fresher, livelier player is more likely to get a hit, I would think, and a guy coming off a hard workout on something nice and anabolic could be twice as ready to hit as his natural counterpart.

The point is that we don't really know what steroids do to baseball players. Or, rather, the point is that Mike Harrington has no fucking clue what steroids do to baseball players, but is perfectly willing to spout off his ignorance in print and charge the good people of Western New York a cool 50 cents to hear about it. And people wonder why newspapers are going to Hell in a messenger bag.

So, yeah, I've decided not to add anything else to the whole affair. It's great that it's over, though, so as to remove the whole issue from the media's quiver. Maybe now they'll be able to pull their heads away from their own navels and start writing about, you know, the games.

A-Rod, though, won't be so lucky. You've really got to check out this post over at FJM on a column by the criminal Ian O'Connor the chase for HR No. 500. It's unbelievable. Quoting the man himself:

I just want everyone to take a deep breath. Have a seat. Shake out the tension in your arms. And realize what is happening.Ian O'Connor is slamming Alex Rodriguez -- murdering him, calling him a 'fraidy cat, and a choke artist -- because he did not hit his 500th career home run within five or so games from when he hit his 499th career home run.

The man is 32. He has 499 career home runs. He hits one 0-21 patch and he's junk.

"An alarming stagger to who knows where." This seems a little dramatic, sir. Since he's the best fucking baseball player in the world. And since as I write this, he has just hit his 500th HR. So, armed with the glorious righteousness of dramatic irony, I now delve into the rest of this jaundiced journalistic hack piece.

I mean, we here at Y2K certainly love to take our cuts at A-Rod. Certainly, we take low blows and cheap shots and crack dirty jokes as often as possible. In fact, it's kind of our mandate. We take PRIDE in it.

But it just goes to show -- when it comes to being truly unreasonable, unfair and nasty, it's best to leave it to the professionals.

P.S. -- Coming soon -- Why Sip's BFF Eric Byrnes is no more worth a $30 million extension than I am.