Baseball musings

Since it's in my blog name, I figure I should talk about baseball every once in a while. Today I will.

First, this season has taken a disastrous turn for my beloved St. Louis Cardinals. Pujols goes down and the team goes straight into a tailspin.

Second, MLB Commish and his pals thought they'd cleaned up baseball's black eye over steroids, then the Feds nabbed Jason Grimsley. Jason who? Jason Grimsley -- a 14-year veteran relief pitcher who's bounced around from team-to-team with moderate success. Why is he MLB's worst nightmare? Many reasons, but chief among them is that he was caught with HGH (human growth hormone) and apparently he was very open about the fact that he switched to HGH after MLB instituted it's "draconian" steroids policy because THERE IS NO RELIABLE TEST FOR HGH! This represents a candid admission that players are still doping and they're consciously choosing new substances that aren't/can't be tested for. Baseball is becoming track and field!

Oh, maybe even worse for MLB is that Grimsley apparently is singing like a canary. Yep, he's "naming names" and he's played with A LOT of players over the years. Over at ESPN, Jayson Stark does a nice job detailing just why this is such a blow to MLB:

No, he hasn't been a teammate of everybody. But ...

He connects the late 1980s, when steroid use was just getting trendy, to the post-testing age we now live in.
...
So Grimsley's All-Teammate Team would go on longer than his federal affidavit. It would be a roster hundreds of names long -- many of them really famous names, players who have never been associated with any kind of drug use.

In other words, if any player in baseball were to start naming names, Grimsley would be one guy who would scare the spikes off the many silent users who thought they would escape detection forever.

If there is any sunshine in my baseball world today it is that my alma mater, Ole Miss, is hosting a super regional in the NCAA baseball tournament. Though they're matched up against perennial power Miami, I feel good about their chances. I'm confident -- the Rebs will make it to Omaha this year! Now if I could convince them to stop using those damned aluminum bats I'd really be happy!