I need to get this off my mind and then move on.  Clemens and his lawyers make up a vile trinity (photo) of some of the worst qualities in our culture: greed, manipulation, and a complete lack of accountability.

Between Barry and Roger, baseball has been pretty much destroyed for me.  The arrogance of these guys is mind numbing.

Performance enhancing drugs will be a major part of every single sport that has a potential pay off.  It is all about the money and until there is a penalty system that makes the reward not worth the risk, all sports will be affected.  For baseball, there are two options: fine players enormous sums retroactively (full salaries or more) and hold teams accountable.  If a starting player on a team fails a drug test then the team forfeits the next game or possibly loses eligibility for the post-season.   There needs to be a culture of enforcement, not silence.   Until then, just look around at sports with smaller payouts (e.g. cycling) — drugs are everywhere.

The show that the republicans put on during the hearing was so egregious that for the first time in my life I thought about becoming a politician.  These people are an embarrassment.  Ignorance + partisanship is horrifying.

First, Floyd turns off comments. Now, there seems to be some hand-picking going on.  The most recent post has 24 comments (all positive) and comments are now closed.

What a joke. This guy needs to get a press conference with Tyler Hamilton and come completely clean about pro cycling. Stop manipulating your blog.
I am tracking back to the Landis post and I am willing to bet this post won’t be linked.

Tags: floydlandis, tylerhamilton, tourdefrance, cycling

Floyd Landis has a blog that was active during the Tour.  Since his positive test for testosterone, the comments on his blog are closed.  I guess he is not interested in continuing the discussion…

Professional sports have turned into a depressing charade.

Tags: tourdefrance, floydlandis, doping

Down the left column of espn.com, Poker is now listed. You have to chose “Olympic Sports” or “More Sports > Other Sports” to find news of the small Track and Field event known as the World Championships.

I see a new business in the making. Exercise balls for poker players so they can strengthen their lower abdominals during long tournaments. Maybe there can be side bets on the athletic abilities of players. Perhaps even a “hi-lo” for Best Abs or Best Rat Gut.

So, how did Jason do it? He went from unable to hit minor league pitching to 14 home runs in July. He is visibly 20-30 pounds heavier. Did his depression over being outed for steroids in the spring cause him to binge on consolation foods?

I think he has found some great new supplements and has concocted a formula that could be a life changer for all the other cheaters out there. It’s Jiambi Juice. Drink it up before they start testing for it!!

The Palmeiro story just adds to the pathetic state of professional sports.

There is a first step toward a remedy. Make the risk intolerable. Busted for drugs, you are out of the game or out 90% of your salary (generously donated to drug awareness programs). This 10 game crap is nonsense and all this plausible deniability makes me ill. Giambi has nothing to lose, he has no respect, and has all his money, why wouldn’t he take every drug he could get his hands on to play better at least until he is caught again.

I was fortunate to complete this triathlon over the weekend! It is always a thrill to jump from a ferry in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.  The swim is a big unknown but thanks to location based information (coming soon around the planet) some things are being demystified.

How far is it from Alcatraz to the Marina Green beach? Well, it isn’t the 1.5 miles that Tricalifornia claims. Have a look at this GPS activity from Motion Based, a very cool company doing slick stuff with location data.  Would you believe 2.16 miles. Of course, outside of intimidating a newbie, the actual distance is mostly moot due to the tides that are chosen for race day (very friendly, I am an OK swimmer and did it in 44 minutes).

Here is a breakdown of all of the disciplines (it curiously omits the swim data that is available in the first link). Turns out that the run is 0.75 miles shorter than advertised!

Walt Mossberg has officially sanctioned blogging for the masses.  His blog at msn spaces is about baseball (he is a Red Sox fanatic). I hope he updates it frequently because there aren’t that many good baseball blogs out there. The only peril is if he gets consumed by it, loses his day job at the WSJ and is relegated to supporting himself with Google AdSense pennies…

For all those myopic, contrarian, or otherwise ignorant people out there who make light of the problem of steroids and other drugs in sports, have a look at Jason Giambi’s season this year. Jim Rome offers a nice summary:

Yankee DH Jason Gambi continues to struggle and now he’s turned to Don Mattingly to help him out of his slump.  Look, Donnie Ballgame’s the man, but the Yankees couldn’t dig up Ruth, Mantle and Gehrig to give him batting lessons and it wouldn’t make a difference. Fact is, Giambi is the biggest bust in the history of free agency and nothing is going to change that. It appears that Jason was the ultimate steroid phenomenon, who was an MVP with roids and a fringe big leaguer without them. Or worse yet, Jason plays like Jeremy Giambi without roids. And unless Mattingly is going to starting feeding him some more of those horse hormones or whatever he was shooting up, it’s not going to make a difference.

I am officially embarrased to call San Francisco home. It appears that the home crowd gave Barry a standing ovation on opening day.

There is a wealth of circumstantial evidence that he is a drug cheat with no respect for the game of baseball.  One of the more damning articles over the last year referenced audio of Bonds’ personal trainer bragging about being able to beat the tests.

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