* 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.

* 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.

* RK Review: American Icon

The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime, by Teri Thompson, Nathaniel Vinton, Michael O’Keeffe, and Christian Red. Knopf, 2009.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the topic du an in baseball lit is steroids/PED. No less than four major titles consider the science and those who use performance enhancers and several others have it as at least a main theme.

American Icon kind of flew in under the radar. A collective work by a quartet of NY Daily News reporters cobbled this research-intensive expose on Clemens and his “partner in crime, ” Brain McNamee, who supplied and injected him with the drugs. Clemens denied all the allegations long and loud.

In the opening author’s’ note, they write

We stand by the sources, both on and off the record, we’ve chosen [emphasis mine] to believe. And we feel strongly that anyone who reads this book carefully and objectively will come to the same conclusion.

Sorry, no.

This book preaches to the choir. Those who believe Clemens guilty have no need to read, save to claim “conclusive proof” of the pitcher’s guilt and lies;  those who still have faith in his innocence and those on the fence will not be convinced.

The writers — who form a macho-sounding “sports investigative team” — spend the majority of the book in McNamee’s corner. Sure, he may have supplied the drugs, just doing what his boss (Clemens) wanted him to do, but he was just trying to get along, not really doing any harm to anyone. It’s not like he was standing on a street corner dealing crack…. Several times the authors refer to McNamee’s time as a former police officer, as if that alone would indicate what a standup guy he is (what, there are no crooked cops?).

Like Selena Roberts in her biography on Alex Rodriguez, American Icon relies too much on unnamed sources, those who might have a professional or personal axe to grind against Clemens. They also have a tendency towards the over-dramatic: “McNamee had become a drug delivery man on the same streets he’d once policed as an undercover cop.”

The book follows a chronological format; the latter chapters cover in great detail Clemens’ appearance before Congress in February, 2008. Much of the information was covered in great detail at the time. The biggest revelation for me came in the Congressional testimony part of the book. That the federal government has nothing better to do with its time and our money is appalling, even for one who loves the game so much and wants to see justice prevail. But that the politicians would use this as a means to build their own agendas is even worse (although not, unfortunately, surprising).

Recently sports pundits such as the crew at Pardon The Interruption, have opined that it comes down to an age thing when discussing how to handle Clemens and all these players under the steroids cloud. Those over forty, they say, are much more strict as to who to let in while those under 40 just don’t care.  American Icon tries hard to be the definitve book on Clemens, the fallen hero. If it becomes so, it will only because the fans just don’t care any more to warant further discussion.

* The Clemens book: A sneak peek?

Not really, but a funny take on what might be, courtesy of Jon Bois on Fanhouse.com.

* Review: American Icon

From Publishers Weekly, this small review of the latest Clemens fiasco.

Full disclosure: I used to do freelance work for PW, and at the risk of losing any kind of future assignments, reviewers are instructed to write generally positive assessments.

Richly detailed, the muscular narrative often reads like a thriller, though numerous subplots don’t always connect. Relying on hundreds of on- and off-the-record interviews and access to public and private documents, this is an intricate and compelling case in which there are no heroes, but a notable villain—the League itself….

I beg to disagree, but the book does not read like a thriller; a thriller leaves you guessing until the last minute. The information here has been public record for quite some time now. Also, it’s easy to condemn the baseball hierarchy for turning a blind eye for the sake of the almighty dollar, but I don’t know how or why the reviewer doesn’t include Clemens as an obvious villain here.

* Roger Clemens, auteur?

Move over, Jose. Roger Clemens wants to join the band of ballplayers turned … well, words fail me.

According to news reports, Clemens is considering writing his own book to answer allegations about his use of PED.

During an on-line interview on Houstonist.com, the question was asked, “Do you believe that you will get a chance to present your side of the story in a court of law? And if you do not, what will be your recourse, if any? Will you write a book?

To which Clemens responded:

I sure hope so. I think that’s the only place that we will be able to fully and fairly tell our side of the story.

If I don’t get that opportunity, I’m not sure how we’ll go forward. That is something to be handled if, or when, the time comes.

I’ve already written one book earlier in my career with Peter Gammons, and I enjoyed that. At this point there have been many conversations about me sitting down to write another one, and I guess that is a real possibility.

If I were Gammons, I’d be booking my plane ticket out of the country til this thing blows over.

* Bits and Pieces

Time to play a little catch-up:

• From Pressboxonline.com, a Baltimore-sports oriented site, a review of Bert Randolph Sugar’s new coffee table book about the Hall of Fame. “[The author] left nothing out and I can’t think of a better way to educate those whom are grasping for a better understanding of baseball’s history than to give Sugar’s account a long look.”
• From the Magazine History blog, this entry about early articles on  the new national game.
• From the Illinois-based Beacon News, a profile of first-time author John O’Donnell and his new book, Like Night and Day: A Look at Chicago Baseball 1964-1969.
• From NewJerseyNewsRoom, this Q & A with Curt Smith, author of the new Vin Scully biography. Smith will be at the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls on Sunday, June 28, at 4 p.m.
• Via a roundabout path, here’s a great piece by Robert Lipsyte on the spate of new books on baseball and steroids, including the usual titles (American Icon, The Rocket That Fell to Earther, A-Rod, Cooperstown Confidential, The Yankee Years, and more).
• Mark Lamster reviews Michael Shapiro’s Bottom of the Ninth in the Los Angeles Times. “Shapiro… does an admirable job telling this complex story. His biographical sketches of Rickey and Webb are especially compelling. But a sausage story is not always the most compelling of reads, and to inoculate himself against that reality, Shapiro has larded up this one by interspersing a second narrative, the story of Stengel’s final years with the Yankees, which is of little relation to the primary action of the book. It’s less than ideal, but Rickey, always an optimist, might have put a positive spin on it: Two stories for the price of one.”

* Review: American Icon and Cooperstown Confidential

Allen Barra, author of the new biography on Yogi Berra, gives his considered opinion on two other titles that deal with the Hall of Fame: Zev Chafets’ assessment of the problem of the Hall of Fame, and the quartet of NY Daily News writers on a pitcher who would have been a lock to earn a plaque, Roger Clemens.

Upshots:

“Cooperstown Confidential” is bold, intelligent, gutsy. Chafets is strongest on what is soon to be the Hall’s next controversy: steroids. There is, as he points out, “No proof at all that steroids . . . improve baseball performance in a way that challenges the competitive balance of the game. . . . I didn’t say there were not anecdotes, urban legends, theories, supposition or accusations. I’m talking about actual empirical data.”

***

The four New York Daily News reporters who wrote “American Icon” should have read Chafets’ book first, because the things he mentions are just about all that make up this book. If you don’t like Roger Clemens – and there are so many who don’t that one questions why the authors would call him an “icon” – the book is a treasure trove of unflattering innuendoes. (For instance: He once threw a pitch high and inside to his own son, a minor-league prospect.)

Beyond this kind of gossip-mongering, the reader will find little new about Clemens’ alleged drug use. The authors even admit that his only real accuser, his former trainer, Brian McNamee, is “not a perfect witness.” That’s more evidence than they can present that performance-enhancing drugs actually boosted his performance. (Much space is devoted to Clemens’ “freakish, late career surge,” when, as numerous analysts have pointed out, there wasn’t any.)

In a news world that increasingly accepts trial by tabloid, this kind of lazy reporting is accepted as journalism. It’s easy to convince readers what they want to think. Never mind that what they think is based in large part on what the tabloids have already written. One justifies the other, and so the anecdotes and urban legends are transformed into fact.

* More National Pastime Radio

“Three baseball books are discussed: A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez by Selena Roberts, American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime by the staff of the New York Daily News, and The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci.”

You read and listen to the segment here.

* Rocket’s red glare nothing but ‘roid rage?

Jeff Pearlman’s bio on Roger Clemens came out a few months back. Do we really need another? I’m reading American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America’s Pastime right now, so I’ll save my comments on it till I’m done. In the meantime, here are a few items from other sources FYI.

• From NYYankeeRumors.com, an interview with one of the authors, who ends the Q&A with his assessment of why people whould by the book. “It gives you a real detailed look at how the greatest pitcher of our time, maybe the greatest pitcher ever, responded to the allegations in the Mitchell Report. It tells a story about Clemens’ fall from grace in a level of detail that people haven’t seen before. We talk about a specific player, but I think his reaction to the Mitchell Report, and the things that we learned from his reactions, told us a lot about the culture of steroids in baseball. So it tells a lot about an individual player, but there is also a greater social story being told here.”
• The Vancouver Sun goes back and reviews Pearlman’s book. Upshot: “despite its title, [it] is not a smear job on the man known in baseball circles as The Rocket. It just appears that way because of the overwhelming evidence that the subject spent much of his career living a lie.”
• The Mercury News (Silicon Valley) does a dual review wiith both pieces. Upshot: “The Pearlman book is a well-written account of a ballplayer who has not led a well-lived life — and this is an understatement. The Daily News volume is not as well-written (it is irritatingly repetitive and the language less elegant), but it’s more graphic and, in the end, more damning.”
• And The New York Times’ take. Upshot: “American Icon does a nimble job of conjuring up the gym-rat culture in Texas that promoted the use of performance enhancement and anti-aging drugs, and the must-win culture in Major League Baseball that made such drugs appealing to certain players: like superstars intent on breaking more records, injured ones desperate to heal, and aging ones eager to reboot their careers.”

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