Archive for Steroids

A must-read feature in the Philadelphia Daily News today, relaying one anonymous players’ experiences with steroids: ONE TIME, the former major league pitcher recalled, the package that arrived in the mail looked like it contained pastries. The label even said something like Johnny’s Bakery on it. Puzzled, he opened the box. Sure enough, he found […]

Jason at IIATMS has a major post up this morning about how the baseball press missed the steroids story. There are many good points there, and the most comprehensive cataloging of reporter mea culpas on how they missed the story that I’ve seen to date. At the moment, however, it is this passage that has […]

Darryl Strawberry on steroids: “Hell yeah I would have used them,” Strawberry said. “Are you kidding me? I mean, c’mon. Some things are part of what athletes go through and they happen …We’re competitive creatures, and we have tremendous drive, a high tolerance, all these things. I’m not saying that it was the right thing […]

The prosecutions’ appeal in the Barry Bonds case is on the accelerated calendar: The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco said in a filing today it’s expediting the government’s appeal of the ruling. The judge barred positive drug tests and other evidence unless they are supported by testimony from Greg Anderson, Bonds’s former trainer, […]

ESPN’s legal expert Lester Munson comes down on the Bonds’ appeal quite differently than I do. Regarding the prosecution’s chances on appeal: Their chances are good. Many legal experts were surprised at Illston’s rulings. The prosecutors offered clever and creative arguments for the use of their evidence. The major obstacle, of course, was personal trainer […]

No makeup date scheduled: And so the Barry Bonds saga rages on. With little end in sight. What once seemed like closure on the horizon — a perjury trial for baseball’s home run king set to begin Monday, nearly six years after the BALCO scandal first erupted — now has been put on indefinite hold. […]

We knew this would happen, but now we know what Illston is going to do about it: Greg Anderson, Barry Bonds’ former personal trainer and the government’s most coveted witness in the perjury case against baseball’s home run king, still refuses to testify under oath. As expected, Anderson, through his lawyer, today told U.S. District […]

George Vecsey writes today about “the incredibly shrinking ballplayer.” There’s a lot of fun stuff in this article, but there’s a lot I’m skeptical about as well. So rather than sharpen some single point about it, I thought I’d change tack and just riff a little bit. Hey, it’s casual day: Out of the roughly […]

Polls and baseball, together at last! Quick! Someone light the Nate Silver signal! Sixty percent of baseball fans are bothered by steroid use by players, and 44 percent say Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez should not be allowed in the Hall of Fame, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll . . . . […]

I’ve been beating this horse for some time now, but I link to Dave Zirn’s takedown of the Bonds prosecution because (a) it’s good; and (b) no one likes to feel alone: Novitzky was given the green light by President Bush and Ashcroft to go for the jugular. In 2004, accompanied by eleven agents, he […]