The worst thing about all this failed PED test business is that ESPN becomes even less watchable than usual. “SportsCenter” and “First Take” are in the veritable sports news kitchen, baking up their usual recipes of speculation and conjecture, which is kinda redundant for us since I wrote about this yesterday, you read about it yesterday, and it just feels like the monolith is a day behind on this.
And the big angle that ESPN is taking deals with Ortiz’s denial and subsequent tough talk with regard to his thoughts on punishing players that test positive for PEDs. But what else would he do? If he’s on them, he’ll talk the talk and act like he’s not, like his one of the guys whose legacy was besmirched by this whole thing. If he’s not (and since nobody knows for what the players were being tested in 2003), he would have spoken out in much the same way.
By the way, today is baseball’s trade deadline, though it doesn’t seem that Blue Jays pitcher will be leaving Toronto (the Jays are asking for too much). Hey, I know! Let’s talk about steroids some more! Or beat in the side of my skull with an aluminum bat. I can’t tell the difference. Don’t forget to turn that right hand over.
I’ll soon be making the trek to Cedar Mountain, North Carolina, because that’s the only place in America that I know of where you can play golf with a llama. I said A F-CKING LLAMA! How badass is that? Apparently the llamas will be ready to carry your bags at Sherwood Forest Golf Course for $40. And it’s two to a llama, people.
Some say the llamas are the perfect caddies because they don’t critique your swing or say how bad your shot was. But if you are seeking advice, the owner of the llamas say by stomping on the ground the llama agrees with your club choice. via.
So you’ve got that going for you. Which is nice.
Saint Andrew’s Net is With Leather’s daily link dump. Today it’s a little loose because we were drinking whiskey all of last night.
Got a hot story tip? Give us a hot news injection at withleather-tips@uproxx.com. Don’t make us a beg for it, you tease.
It’s been almost a week since the closing ceremonies of the Maccabiah, the international olympiad held in Israel for athletes of the Jewish faith. But don’t fret; if we can cover the CFL here, we can certainly do a half-assed recap of the Jewish Olympics:
The Maccabiah Games, which began in 1932, are intended not only to encourage athletic excellence, but also to foster a sense of Jewish belonging and pride among the participants.
So alongside running hurdles, swimming relays and cycling in the Negev, the 8,000 athletes who gathered in Israel for the 18th Games from nearly 60 countries also toured the country and visited historically meaningful sites such as the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Masada. They even took part in mass bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies— some have never had one, others simply wanted to join along. via.
Perhaps the most notable athlete at the Maccabiah was Jason Lezak, the 4-time Olympic Gold Medalist swimmer who missed the World Championships in Rome to make the trip to Israel. He participated in the swimming and was then nagged by a cadre of Jewish mothers to find out when he was going to get married.
Here’s a video covering the Lingerie Football League’s Philadelphia Passion, and I gotta say that this is a good-looking team. No, really, check out the video: these girls seem to be solid in executing their gameplan. I credit the coach with the Hello Kitty playbook. This might be the only league where a team wears MORE equipment to practice than they do to games. I guess the weight of the extra clothing helps with training. Yeah, that’s it. via.
People are clamoring for the list of the 104 Major League players that tested positive for steroids in 2003 to be made public, but it will never happen. Because the “lawyers with knowledge of the results” are surely getting his rocks off by leaking these names in such a piecemeal manner, as they’ve now done by leaking David Ortiz’s and former Red Sox outfielder Manny Ramirez’s test results from 2003.
Never mind the fact that the list was simply an audit to determine whether or not MLB would implement any legitimate testing, and not an actual test itself. Never mind that the list was sealed before being seized by federal regulators. Never mind that there are still 97 players on that 2003 list that are still anonymous, giving armchair pundits plenty of pasture to speculate about “who was dirty.”
We don’t know who was on what, or when, which makes these “revelations” completely worthless. Is Big Papi’s legacy in question now? It depends; do you assume that every pitcher he faced in 2003 was clean? Do you assume that only a select few of Ortiz’s rival hitters were illegally medicated? It doesn’t seem to matter now, because “lawyers with knowledge of the results” decided to point the invisible finger at Ortiz, and outlets like the New York Times and ESPN are going to suck that finger until milk comes out of it.
This whole thing is just out of hand. You can’t stick the syringe back in baseball’s ass and suck all the PEDs out of the game, and yet that’s what everyone covering the game is trying to do, and will continue to do, even as these guys become eligible for the hall. How can you point a finger and ostracize one guy when, as far as anyone knows, everyone sharing the field with him could be doing the exact same thing?
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