As long as team owners charge us to watch ballgames, we’re entitled to know the ingredients of what they’re feeding us, no?
And if we’re supposed to believe that the crooked drug era is over — only juice-rotten home run records left as reminders — then baseball must do this for us: Pass an easy smell test; provide some math that comes close to adding up.
Allow us to believe it’s over.
That’s where Roger Clemens lost us. An obsessively well-conditioned athlete, early 40s, still mowin’ ‘em down, still making tens of millions to keep doing it. Logically, he could afford and pursue the finest medical advice and treatment in the world.
Yet, he allowed his athletic trainer — his bend-and-stretch guy, no medical degree, let alone a physician’s license — to inject him, to play real doctor on him, to shoot him up.
Sorry, Rocket dude. And it didn’t matter how often his famous, chicken-fried lawyer Rusty Hardin insisted that Clemens rides tall in the saddle or that Brian McNamee is a low-down rattlesnake, a genuine prairie varmint. Nor did it matter that Clemens visited Congress to distribute autographs before testifying before it (whose see-through idea was that?).
It just didn’t add up. By allowing McNamee to shoot him up with anything, Clemens flunked the smell test.
Now we’re asked to believe that more huge-ticket, athletes-on-the-heal, Jose Reyes, Alex Rodriguez, Carlos Beltran, headed to Canada, where they volunteered to be lab rats — to undergo some far-flung, cattle-extract, blood-swap procedure — for a “pioneering” doctor who later was arrested for dispatching an assistant to haul HGH into the U.S.
Dr. Tony Galea would have made the trip himself, said that assistant, had the border patrol not been on to him.
As police detectives say, “There’s no such thing as a coincidence.” And, as Billy Mays would holler, “But wait, there’s more!”
Dr. Galea, who admits to years of self-use of HGH, also treated record-breaking U.S. Olympic swimmer Dara Torres. Gee, of all swimmers! You might recall Torres poolside at the 2008 Games. She was the 41-year-old with the muscled physique of female (perhaps) East German shot-putters, circa 1984.
How we makin’ out on that smell test?
And because Tiger Woods apparently had no access to credible post-knee-op medical care, Team Tiger chose Galea, without a license to practice in Florida, to repeatedly fly to Florida to treat Woods.
And all that’s supposed to add up, make no-questions-asked sense? Take it, Warner Wolf: Come on!
We don’t ask much. All you’ve got to do is pass a minimal smell test. You don’t even have to score high; anything above an F will do it.
Tino set for season debut today
TINO Martinez, Tampa resident, works his first of six preseason Yankee YES telecasts today at 1 p.m. No sense, yet, whether he’ll be added to YES’s regulars as David Cone’s replacement.
* ESPN has replaced Steve Phillips with Orel Hershiser, but Joe Morgan remains on “Sunday Night Baseball,” which says plenty about ESPN’s sense of both baseball and its viewers’ regard for it.
* Nike checked — all those inclined to buy a LeBron James No. 23 jersey in the Cavs’ multiple uniform styles has at least one of each, so time to change his number!
* Cablevision vs. ABC/Disney? In the 28 years I’ve been writing about TV, Cablevision has been in far more hassles than any other system and/or programmer. And the very best Cablevision has done during such times is to tell a half truth. But if trying to win public support by taking personal, issue-ducking cheap shots at opponents wins the day, the Cablevision/Dolan Gang is undefeated.
* Inquisitive, truth-seeker Joe Benigno, Tuesday dismissed FBI interviews with Alex Rodriguez and Jose Reyes as “nonsense.” Shucks, had Joe Bro been a Congressional committeeman, he’d have thanked Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa for their candor.
* When Mike Francesa refers to Brian Cashman as “Cash,” does he figure listeners admire him as the ultimate, let-us-in-on-it insider, or recognize him as a transparently self-smitten, condescending and status-wishful gasbag?
Way to‘stick’with it
Another entry from the pages of Greatest Stories Ever Told:
As a Post feature story reported, men raised in NYC and retired to senior communities in South Florida, have resumed their childhoods through stickball. Teams were formed, then leagues, then inter-community play began.
A recent communiqué from one senior told of how his stickball league rules mandate that pitchers throw only to their own teams, so they can pitch at a speed and to a location to the batters’ liking.
“The guy on our team who pitched to us pitched a no-hitter,” he wrote. “The other team carried him off the field.”
Gold-medal game sees the light
Many couldn’t help but notice that Sunday’s Canada-USA hockey final was a modern rarity.
Not only was it a great game, it was played during the day, thus watched, start through OT, with family and friends.
This missive, sent from Mick Jones, reader from “Way the hell Upstate,” stood out:
“Our family of four sat down together and watched that entire hockey game. We’re die-hard Yankee fans but didn’t watch an entire World Series game, last fall. Not one.”
(Also from Upstate Mick: “What’s the bigger crime, Gov. Paterson trying to squeeze free World Series tickets or the cost of those tickets? I say the cost.”