* Whither Barry?

It’s still early in the season, but the pitchers seem way ahead of the hitters. Some sluggers are faring pretty poorly (Carlos Delgado, Prince Fielder, Frank Thomas, among others). Run production is down, as are home runs. Seeing any correlation between this and the Mitchell Report?

Speaking of steroids, Barry Bonds is still “on holiday,” as noted by this piece in The Wall Street Journal. Not that Bonds is George Bailey by any stretch, but as much as you might not want to admit it, his life touched many others. An interactive feature of the article shows what his departure has meant to various people at Pac Bell, including the guy who rents the kayaks for McCovey Cove; the Giants’ media relations and “stadium logistics” guys; the sales vendor (whose sales of rubber chickens used to taunt opposing pitchers is down 20 percent), and the home run seeker and other fans.

* Mad about baseball

The cover of the May Mad magazine features good ol’ Alfred E. Newman as Baseball’s Newest Mascot: Mr. Roids.

The current issue also has a pertinent spin-off on the Roger Clemens AT&T wireless commercial, with Andy Pettitte at the other end of the line. There’s also “Things We’ll Probably Overhear at the Upcoming Barry Bonds Trial…”, including

• From Bonds’ attorney: “The only things my client is guilty of are arrogance, rudeness, adultery and lying in court. Only one of which happens to be illegal.”
• From the prosecution: “And did you personally electrocute the Pit Bulls…oh, wait, sorry, wrong sports scandal,” and “I remind you that you are still under oath, not that you cared the last time.”
• From the judge: “Will the defendant please approach the bench and autograph this home run ball I got off eBay?” and “Overruled. Defendant will answer questions about his massive hat size.”
• From Barry Bonds: “I’m not playing on any prison softball team for less than $8 million.”
• And my favorite: “I’d watch the trial on truTV, but Tim McCarver just won’t shut up.”

There’s also a faux movie poster for The Bad News Bare-Asses, “starring” Clemens, Pettitte and Brian McNamee. Tag line: “Baseball has rules. Not that these a-holes care.”

Perhaps not so coincidentally, The New York Times ran this interactive slide presentation on cartoonist Al Jaffee, who, among other things, has drawn in famous Mad fold-in for years. Among the pieces represented, Roger Clemens “morphing” into a pregnant Jamie Lynn Spears, Pete Rose to Charlie Brown, and football overcoming baseball as America’s number one sport.

NOT the current cover.

* Sure, why not?

From ESPN.com:

Victor Conte will amp up the sports world once again — in a much different way, however.

According to the New York Daily News, the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative is working on a tell-all book that he claims will spill the dirt on athletes and federal gents.

Moneyball vs. Mitchell Report

Revisiting the Michael Lewis opus, which the writer deems “the most influential book of what’s now officially baseball’s Steroids Era,” has become joined at the hip with the recent release of the Mitchell Report.

In this article from Slate.com, Tom Scocca wonders if Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics and the “protagonist” of Lewis’ analysis of front-office management, consider the possibilities of players “using,” when he assembled his teams:

As Beane says elsewhere in the book: “Power is something that can be acquired…. Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don’t become good hitters.” Oakland, with its limited funds, wouldn’t spend payroll to buy power hitters. Instead, it invested in cheaper, patient hitters. And those hitters, it seems, bought the power themselves.

Did Beane have steroids deliberately or explicitly in mind? He was talking about his hopes of drafting someone who could be the next Jason Giambi. And Jason Giambi, the 2000 American League MVP, was juiced. So was his younger brother and Oakland teammate, Jeremy. So, according to Mitchell, was the A’s other MVP, Miguel Tejada, who asked for and received steroids and testosterone from teammate Adam Piatt. And Oakland’s veteran pickup David Justice (”an extraordinary ability to get on base was more likely to stay with a player to the end of his career than, say, an extraordinary ability to hit home runs”). The Oakland locker room, the report says, was an open-air drug market.

But “Where were the steroids in Moneyball,” asks Scocca? “They were out of sight, where the baseball world wanted them to be. This is not a reflection on Lewis’ reporting, even. The book advanced people’s understanding of baseball, on the terms in which people were willing to think about baseball at the time. It accurately named and explained the batting approach that defines this era: power hitting channeled through strict strike-zone discipline.”

The Slate story includes links to other illuminating pieces on the MR, including Bonnie Goldstein’s “Hot Document of the best material in the Mitchell report” and a group of Slate writers and editors who discussed the implications and innuendos of the report.

Authors thank Mitchell Report

As could be expected, the release of the Mitchell Report has nudged publisher Gotham/Dutton to rev up the press for a new run of Game of Shadows, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. Read the Publishers Weekly item.

Gotham publicist Beth Parker said the authors will team up to do a radio satellite book tour… , December 18th, reaching 20 stations over a three-hour period. “It booked in less than a day,” said Parker. “If interviews come in we will book them,” she added. “They are always game to give interviews.”

 

One Man Out? Bonds picks his legal team

There was a scene in the movie version of Eight Men Out in which Albert Austrian, head of the Black Sox’ team of lawyers, describes his colleagues.

“Their names may not sound familiar, but I’d say that these men are the Ty Cobb, the Tris Speaker, and the Zack Wheat of the legal world.”

Buck Weaver, portrayed by John Cuszak, asks facetiously, “Who’s the Babe Ruth?”

“That’s me,” replies Austrian.

I’m guessing these days you can’t say it will take the Barry Bonds of lawyers to get the all-time home run king out of this one.

Bonds and his courtroom strategies are the subject of this Dec. 6 Wall Street Journal article.

 

Ron Shelton to turn Game of Shadows into HBO film

According to a report in Variety, Ron Shelton, who brought the baseball classic Bull Durham to the big screen, has been signed to turn Game of Shadows, the expose on Barry Bonds and steroids,  into a HBO project.

Shelton will write the script with his “Tin Cup” writing partner John Norville as soon as the writers strike ends. The film will be exec produced by Ross Greenburg, the HBO Sports president who exec produced Roger Maris biopic “61*,” and Michael Greenburg (“Stargate SG-1”), who’s now exec producer of Score Prods.

Shelton, a former minor league player, also wrote and directed Cobb, Tin Cup and White Men Can’t Jump.

istorically, it’s been difficult to turn baseball non-fiction into a feature film (See Cobb and the majority of other bio-pics. Most recently, ESPN aired The Bronx is Burning, based on Jonathan Mahler’s book about the 1977 Yankees, to mixed reviews.
No timetable for the project was released in the Variety story.

The Amazon Report: Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports

Bonds

Sorry, you won’t find much here. There are writers far more up on the subject of Barry Bonds, indictments, steroids, ethics, etc.

Suffice it to say that there will be at least one book out in the very near future. Fainaru-Wada and Williams will make the talk show circuit again, which will have the consequent effect of boosting sales of Game of Shadows. In addition, Pearlman’s Love Me, Hate Me will also find a renewed interest.

I also predict at least a couple of new titles on sports and ethics. Some enterprising writer will publish on the steroid generation and how their records are suspect. And they will make (ridiculous) suggestions on how to denote such statistics in the record books. But as Bill Plaschke writes in today’s Los Angeles Times:

Bonds will disappear, leaving behind only a asterisk, although not a literal one.

Baseball will not forcibly smudge his career home-run record of 762.

If baseball starts messing with asterisks, it will have to deal with spitballs and stolen signals and records set during an era in which African Americans and Latinos didn’t participate.

Baseball didn’t place an asterisk on the Cincinnati Reds’ 1919 World Series victory over Shoeless Joe Jackson and the cheating Chicago White Sox, so it can’t do it here.

The real asterisk will be worse. The real asterisk will be a black cloud that will hang over the entire game until we learn to trust it again.

The text of the indictment is available on the The Smoking Gun Web site.

Fainaru-Wada joins ESPN

Mark Fainaru-Wada, who with Lance Williams wrote the devastating indictment of Barry Bonds and the steroid issue, will join the staff of ESPN, according to a report on Marketwatch,com.

Fainaru-Wada leaves his job at The San Francisco Chronicle where he co-wrote Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroid Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports.

ESPN recently launched a newsmagazine, E-60, that offers a serious, investigative take on the world of athletics, similar to HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. For several years ESPN has aired Outside the Lines, which also offers an in-depth look at important figures and topics in sports.

Fainaru-Wada and Williams were the subjects of a PBS  program, “Expose: Becoming the Story” which ran in July, 2007. An excerpt appears below; here’s a link to view the entire program at the Expose site