* Because you can put a list on your bookshelf

New York Times story: “Court Rules U.S. Seized 2003 Tests Improperly”

A fat lot of good it does those players who were outed. Not that they deserve too much sympathy for abusing the public trust, but even so.

* Piazza: Did he or didn’t he?

Use PED, of course.

That’s one of the topics of Murray Chass’s Aug. 16 column, in he he ponders the advisability of a Mike Piazza auto-bio. I quote, at length:

Several months ago I heard that Piazza may be doing a book. The publisher, Simon & Schuster, I was told, had signed a contract for the book.

However, there was a hangup with the deal going forward because the publisher, before signing the contract and giving Piazza the huge advance, hadn’t pinned down exactly what he would say in the book for the hundreds of thousands of dollars Simon & Schuster was paying him.

Piazza’s dilemma: If he didn’t tell all in the book, the publisher would not get its money’s worth. There are only so many Piazza fans, and how many books could they buy? But if he did agree to tell all and all included his alleged use of steroids, he would jeopardize, if not flat out destroy, his chances of getting into the Hall of Fame.

The content of the book apparently is in the discussion stage.

“The contract hasn’t been canceled,” Bob Bender of Simon & Schuster said. “The book’s agent, David Black, was talking to Danny Lozano, Piazza’s agent.”

Black and Lozano did not return calls seeking comment.

(Subsequent to the posting of this column, Black, who said he sold the book proposal to Simon & Schuster for Piazza, called and said he had no direct knowledge of what Piazza planned to include in the book but said Lozano told him, “Mike’s going to talk about everything.”

Does that mean Piazza will write about steroids? “I would assume so,” Black said. “I was told he has nothing to hide.”

That, of course, does not mean Piazza will admit to having used steroids. He could write, “I have nothing to hide because I never used steroids.” But many would not believe that, including one prospective author who withdrew from the project because he had no guarantee that Piazza would be forthcoming about steroids. (emphasis original))

I asked Bender if the book would include a Piazza confession of steroids use. “We’re certainly hoping for a candid book,” Bender said without answering the question directly, “and based on a meeting we had with him we expect we’ll get one.”

The puzzling part of this tale is why does Piazza need a rich book contract when he made millions playing baseball. The contract he signed after the Mets got him in 1998 was worth $91 million.

* The steroids books backlash begins

According to a press release from the Gibson Law Firm, distributed by PR Newswire on Aug. 10:

The publisher and authors of a book about steroid use in major league baseball were sued today by a Texas man who says they falsely claimed he was “pushing” steroids to professional athletes and using his gym as a front for selling drugs, according to The Gibson Law Firm.

Former gym owner Kelly Blair, of Deer Park, Texas, alleges that the book — “American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime” (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group) — falsely linked him to an “underground steroid network,” a convicted murderer and drug dealer, drug smuggling from Mexico and Canada, and the preparation of “collections of drugs” shipped to professional athletes.

Blair also is scheduled to testify on Tuesday before a federal grand jury in Washington.

Blair’s attorney, Jason A. Gibson, of The Gibson Law Firm, stated, “As the lawsuit alleges, Kelly Blair was maliciously and recklessly defamed by the authors and publishers of this book and at least one dubious source whose false allegations they published. Kelly looks forward to his day in court on this matter. In the meantime, he looks forward to testifying tomorrow before the grand jury in Washington.”

The defendants in the lawsuit are authors Michael O’Keeffe, Christian Red, Teri Thompson, and Nathaniel Vinton, all of whom are reporters for the New York Daily News; Robin Dobbins, a Deer Park, Texas man who was a source for the book; and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, of New York.

The lawsuit, which includes claims of defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, seeks damages, exemplary damages, and attorney’s fees.

The case is “Kelly Blair v. Michael O’Keeffe, et al.,” in the District Court of Harris County, Texas, 11th Judicial District, Cause No. 2009-50671.

Here’s a report from MLB.com.

You hear about this all the time: The parties are outraged by the slander and libel and threaten to bring suit, but we haven’t heard much about it lately. Is it a question of the wheels of justice grinding slowly? Stay tuned.

* Just out of curiosity… (cheating in baseball)

I was finishing up my run this afternoon. My thighs were clenching, still sore from yesterday’s workout. I started thinking about the latest product that Shaq endorses (the actual name of which escapes me at the moment): a combination ace bandage/heat wrap that you can cut to size.

So I was thinking: if a professional athlete were to use this product, would the intended result provide an in-game benefit? And if so, would that give said athlete a leg up (so to speak) over an opponent who didn’t use the wrap, thereby giving him a performance enhancing effect? Compression shorts and “under-armor” clothing provide a similar heat retention/ support benefit and they’re okay to use.

If David Ortiz’s claim that he used over-the-counter supplements without really knowing what was in them is true (and Lord knows that we’ve been duped too many times by such assertions), I’m willing to accept his explanation. How many of us take “stuff” — vitamins or supplements advertised in health or athletic publications — without really knowing what’s in them or how they work? And no disrespect intended, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say the overwhelming majority of pro athletes weren’t science majors in school.

Joel Stein also addresses this issue in his current Time column.

* CYA for NYT?

Last week, Charles McGrath had written about “The Red Sox Nation, Betrayed.” This week, In The Public Editor column in Sunday’s Week in Review section, Clark Hoyt seeks to explain how the Times did the correct thing in its reporting that David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez were part of the 2003 list of players that tested positive for steroids/PED.

[Player union leader Donald] Fehr told me that if The Times wanted the names, it should have gone into court and asked the judge to lift the order. The newspaper did just that to get a front-page story last week about the pharmaceutical industry’s hidden influence on medical literature. Reporters and newspapers don’t have the right to substitute their judgment for a court’s, Fehr said.

Michael Schmidt, the reporter who got the baseball story … said he did nothing wrong. “I believe it is legal and ethical for me to ask questions of people who may be covered by court orders,” he said. “It is the choice of the source to talk.” Schmidt said that as many as 200 people know who is on the list — some of whom may not be covered by the judge’s order, which is itself sealed — and he set out systematically to talk to as many of them as possible.

Hoyt goes on to provide other examples that back his assertion that his paper was in the right in reporting what was supposed to have been sealed records.

What you decide to do with information after you get it can be the hard part….

“It’s a newspaper’s job to seek information and then, if it’s interesting, to publish it,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor.

Hoyt disagrees with those who say the names should have been kept private.

Ramirez, now with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Ortiz are still stars. [Sammy] Sosa, who hasn’t played since 2007, is hoping to make the Hall of Fame. Baseball may not be national security, but it is big business and a rich part of American culture. If the game and its records have been corrupted, people need to know.

For what it’s worth, I disagree with Hoyt, insofar as the information was intended — through legal channels — to remain undisclosed. Just because you can do something — in this case publish the names — doesn’t mean you should.

* On the horizon: The 2003 List?

Don’t you think that some intrepid reporter or team will work on uncovering that list of ballplayers who tested positive for steroids for publication sometime soon?

* Too much, too late?

This two-page overview of three Yankees titles — The Yankees Years, by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci; A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez, by Selena Roberts; and American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime, by Thompson, Vinton, O’Keeffe and Red — appears in this weeks New York Times‘ Sunday book review section. And I have several problems with it.

For one thing, the timing. These books were released so long ago, relatively speaking (Years in February, the other two in May). Now in my day job at a weekly publication, I’m pretty liberal in the book review policy as farm as timing goes. But because we’re a speciality publication and the books we consider are pretty narrow in scope, we do what we want. We are not The New York Times, which should be concentrating on the cutting edge in all things newsworthy.

So why these books and why now? Each of them had been reviewed when they were originally released? With all the complaints about shrinking book sections, why did the editors decide it was worth re-examination, considering they were pretty much panned the first time around by the general reviewing public.

Second — and with all due disrespect — who the heck is Touré? The Times‘ bio describes him as “an on-air contributor to NBC and the author of “Never Drank the Kool-Aid,” a collection of essays.” Does a reviewer need any expertise in the topic of e book he or she is critiquing? When it comes to this genre (of which I’m obviously not very objective), I would say yes, but Touré doesn’t seem to have any. According to his MySpace page, he’s had a lot of experience covering the Hip-hop world, but when it comes to sports,

He has often evoked the participatory journalism of Tom Wolfe and George Plimpton, for example, playing high-stakes poker with Jay-Z, two-on-two basketball with Prince, one-on-one basketball with Wynton Marsalis, tennis with Jennifer Capriati, or writing illegal graffiti with known graffiti artists.

Sorry, I don’t get it. Nicholas Dawidoff, author of a couple of highly-regarded baseball-themed books, reviewed A-Rod, while the other two were handled by NYT staffer Michiko Kakutani.

Thirdly, Touré brings nothing new to the table, nothing we haven’t already read, as he infers in writing about American Icon, “[It] mostly covers ground that serious baseball fans already know, but it may answer some lingering Yankee questions,” he writes. I beg to differ: at this point, I don’t know if they even care any more.

You folks know me. I read anything about baseball, even bios on the Wheaties boxes, but given the publishing situation these days, I wish more thought would be given about needless duplication.

* Wait til you have grandkids of your own some day

According to Bill James, those science fiction books we’ve read for generations about “building” superior humans is never far from he truth. In this blog entry by Dan Steinberg on The Sporting News website, James opines that “steroids serve the function of prolonging youth, that fighting aging and death has been one of civilization’s greatest goals, and that therefore, steroids will be like bread and water within 50 years.” The story links to the ACTA website offering a preview of the 2010 Bill James Goldmine that includes a PDF download of the essay. For the sake of convenience, here it is.

On the positive side, Steinberg note

Having read and digested all of that, which is truly one of the most interesting arguments on the topic I’ve ever encountered, this is what I’m left with: we’re all going to live to be 300! Hot damn! After retiring at 65, I’m spending the next 193 summers playing golf on the coast of Florida, and that still leaves 42 years to yell at roided-up neighborhood kids for hitting wiffle balls 400 feet into my roided-up tomato plants! My two-year old soon-to-be-juicing daughter better start saving for my greens fees fund right now, and also for my stash of Deca-Durabolin! Oh, and buy Denny’s stock now, while you still can; imagine their bottom line with a country full of 200-year olds! If Barry Bonds is acting like such a grouch in his mid-40s, what will be like in his mid-240s? I don’t know, and I don’t care, because there’s an early-bird special with my name on it!

Can you say “Nietzsche“?

* Author interview: Zev Chafets

With the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies coming up, look for Chafets to be even more in the limelight.  This Q&A comes from the current edition of The Jewish Week and this one comes from The Forward, another Jewish publication.

* “How do you like me now?”

We might hate the man, for what he did to himself and what he did to besmirch the (relative) cleanliness of the game, but give Jose Canseco his due. He was right about about a lot of things, including players who used.

Jonathan Eig, author of a biography of Lou Gehrig — the anti-Canseco — published this op-ed piece in the July 5 edition of The Washington Post:

He’s not The Natural. The Un-Natural is more like it. But in his own clumsy, hormonally imbalanced way, Canseco has done more than any player of his time to help baseball overcome the errors of its recent ways. The worst of the Steroid Era appears to be over, and Canseco deserves a fair chunk of the credit.

and

His 2005 book, “ Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big,” called attention to the abuse of steroids. He confessed in the book to using steroids and named other suspected users when no one else was doing so.

His testimony before Congress that same year was forthright and straightforward, when others around him ducked and lied. Steroids, he told lawmakers, were as prevalent in baseball in the late 1980s and 1990s “as a cup of coffee.”