So, the BCS National Championship Game was played tonight, and still all any one can talk about is this Roger Clemens story. To respond to the lone gunman's comment on last night's post. It is an interesting point that Clemens could have been injected by a team doctor or trainer if he weren't receiving an illicit substance. However, I would counter that by wondering aloud what sort of nitwit pays someone to do something illegal with a check?

I disagree with the notion that Clemens put himself in the position where he has to prove himself innocent. When he stayed silent, every moron with a press pass wrote, talked and shouted that Clemens had to answer these charges. Had he not gone on 60 Minutes, would that somehow have gone away, or would the CHB and Jay Mariotti and Bill Simmons have screamed more bloody murder?

And if I'm not mistaken, Brian McNamee was an employee of the Toronto Blue Jays when he met Roger Clemens and injected him with whatever he was injected in 1998. It was only later that he served as Roger's personal trainer.

Then, there is the CHB's dismal insult to his readers' intelligence masquerading as a column in this morning's Globe. The press conference this evening where Clemens played the tape of his phone conversation with McNamee should have been stage managed better. If you read Jay Mariotti's "thoughts" on the situation, you might get the impression that Clemens ducked the question McNamee posed frequently "what do you want me to do?" I thought Clemens was crystal clear in his answer "I want someone to tell the truth."

Perhaps one can assume that Clemens meant the Pope or Mike Huckabee or Dallas Cowboys nose tackle Tank Johnson, but I was convinced that Clemens was telling McNamee to come clean. Perhaps there are those people out there who would have been more explicit in language and in tone, perhaps responding to McNamee's curses with similarly strident language. I wonder, though.

The worst thing Clemens could have done was been harsh with McNamee. He would have written a even less favorable story against himself for the legion of press drones out there. After all, McNamee introduced the topic of his dying ten year old child. The media would have burnt Clemens at the stake if he'd spoken harshly to the father of a dying kid. So I had no problem with that particular answer.

I'm not sure what taping that conversation gets Clemens in the long run. It makes him look a lot like Richard Nixon. Now, I'm as big a fan of Nixon as the next guy, but he did have a few issues with paranoia. And embroiled in a he said he said scandal like this, looking like Nixon probably isn't the way to go.

I don't see a problem with Clemens comments that Andy Pettitte's case is a separate issue. Why does it necessarily follow that because Pettitte admitted that received HGH injections from McNamee on two occasions in 2002 then Roger Clemens must have also been injected by McNamee? The transitive property only applies in algebra class, and it is not admissible in court as evidence, as far as I can tell.

This section of Shaughnessy's analysis of the Clemens interview bothered me most of all:

Asked what McNamee gained by lying, the best Clemens could do was, "Evidently not going to jail."

In fact, "not going to jail" was McNamee's reason for telling the truth (McNamee cooperated with Mitchell as part of a deal to avoid federal prosecution). McNamee faces going to jail only if he lied to Mitchell. Wallace then asked Clemens why McNamee would go to jail and the Rocket responded, "Well, I think he's been buying and movin' steroids."

Wallace then failed to ask a follow-up.

Not going to Federal prison, or any kind of correctional facility is pretty high on just about every sane person's list of priorities. Or maybe the CHB hasn't seen OZ. Perhaps the Massachusetts Department of Corrections could let him take a look at their facilities in Concord or Cedar Junction to educate him on what life in prison even in these enlightened times is like. Let's just say there's a good reason the Red Cross won't take blood donations from people who've spent more than 72 consecutive hours behind bars in the past year.

Maybe the CHB has seen the Untouchables or perhaps On the Waterfront a time or two too many. Not every person who oversees investigations into various crimes, misdemeanors and other such violations of the public trust is an altruist. Say McNamee stretched or bent the truth a time or two but provided the information to put some people behind bars and earned a few headlines for the occasional ambitious civil servant, might that not influence that ambitious civil servant to help McNamee out in return? That's how the justice system works in this country.

And closing his little piece of drivel with this cute little epigram: "And we've heard too many lies from those who came before and wound up guilty as charged" did very little to calm me down. What bearing does any other person accused in the previous round of Congressional hearings or in the Mitchell Report have on this case? It doesn't matter one bit for Roger's case whether Mark McGwire or Rafael Palmeiro lied or told the truth. For that matter, it doesn't have any impact on this case if Mark McGwire dressed in a damn tutu and stood outside an elementary school punching every seventh child in the face or jumped on Oprah's couch like Tom Cruise. Good work with the responsible, honest journalism. I bet Grantland Rice is real proud.

I'm getting kind of tired of prefacing each of my increasingly rare posts with an apology. But it gets kind of old after a while, sitting here in front of the computer trying to invent reasons why a given team has a chance to beat the Patriots. And should I indulge in speculation on what team will give up which prospects and position players to get Johann Santana away from Minnesota? It's just not all that interesting to me at the moment.

I suppose I could take a sort of grim satisfaction from the fact that the Patriots have become everything which they were not supposed to be two years or so ago when every talking head and his brother insisted on holding them up as the model of virtue and excellence in professional sports. But even that gets old after a while.

I must confess, I was disappointed to see the way the Patriots reacted to Anthony Smith's "guarantee." It was disgusting to see Tom Brady go out of his way to get in his face after the first TD pass. Brady is, regrettably, a Hall of Fame quarterback on a record setting pace. Anthony Smith is a second year nobody whom the media exploited to generate more interest in a non-story.

There was a time when Brady was supposed to be a paragon of how to succeed with class and dignity. There is very little that smacks of class and dignity in going out of your way to put down a guy who barely even ran his mouth. Could you see Joe Montana or Terry Bradshaw doing that? Hell, Bradshaw never seemed to go out of his way to talk trash to Hollywood Henderson, who said considerably more insulting things about Bradshaw than any one has ever said about Brady.

Now the Patriots are playing the Jets again. Thankfully the media has an easy angle courtesy of the whole taping signals scandal to justify hours of coverage devoted to a very mediocre game. Conventional wisdom tells us that the Jets have no chance to win this game. Unfortunately, I can see no reason to disagree everybody and his brother for a change.

In other news, George Mitchell has finally delivered his report on steroids in Major League Baseball after 20 months of what surely was a exhaustive and ethically conducted investigation. In a blaze of vindication for those who have dragged Roger Clemens' name through the mud on this issue for the last two years or so, his name is at the top of the list of high-profile players who are named.

If you had told me earlier that losing to an unknown despite running not only as an incumbent but the sitting Senate Majority Leader to boot would end up not being the most embarassing professional failure of George Mitchell's career, I wouldn't have believed it. And then he had to go and release this report.

If sources like discredited and terminated former Yankees strength and conditioning coach Brian McNamee are at all typical of the informers who are expected to provide the Mitchell Report with its substance, then I am willing to bet guys like Clemens, Tejada and Pettitte will have little to fear from these proceedings.

This report which tells us many things we already knew (like MLB dragged its collective feet on the steroids issue) amid its hearsay and innuendo about respected players and choice nuggets about players who have already been caught cheating like Giambi, will likely go down in the annals of justice with hard-hitting and epoch shaping events like the Red Scare, the Army-McCarthy hearings and the Salem Witch Trials.

Curiously, outside of Eric Gagne, no one of consequence from the Boston Red Sox was named in this document. Thankfully, and perhaps conveniently, Brendan Donnelly was not offered a contract today. Interesting....

I wonder now, whether this season's inevitable pennant looks ever so slightly less inevitable now. It might only be one game, early in a long season, but cracks might just start appearing in the facade of the 2007 Boston Red Sox. It would have been much easier if the Red Sox had just sent the Yankees a memo that the home team was expected to lose the game under the standards of modern decorum. How dare they find a way to win?

I have a habit of noticing things before they become apparent to Red Sox Nation. For instance, is it terribly unreasonable to wonder whether this series might mark a turning point in the respective fortunes of the Yankees and the Red Sox? Sooner or later, old age and summer heat will take their toll on Mike Lowell, Sox fans can only hop that his mother's little helpers can continue to make miracles. And on the horizon is the inevitable return of Roger Clemens.

Think about the series the two teams played last month. The Yankees were the ones scrambling to put together a series of spot starters; now the Red Sox are wondering if Josh Beckett's finger boo-boo might place too great a burden on the collection of spare parts waiting in the farm system. Granted Gabbard pitched the single greatest five inning start of this generation, but Sox fans must be sweating the fact that blisters and loose skin might stop their young ace from winning 30 games.

I think every one who is any one realizes that tonight's pitching performance from Chien Ming Wang was, if not exactly a miracle, then a good sized country wonder. He still has a long way to go before he will have earned the right to buy property right behind the Great Wall (on the good side, of course). Mike Mussina is allegedly healthy, and it might be possible that he could pitch to form for the first time in a long while. God knows he'll have to, nothing but the finest effort of a quality pitcher can beat a horse like Julian Tavarez.

The Schilling vs. Pettitte matchup on Sunday shapes up to be very interesting, since Pettitte probably should have beaten the Sox twice already this year. There was the bullpen collapse in the first game between the two back at Fenway, and then the short relief stint when I felt he had another inning in him, even though it was his side day. I know Andy's not as young as he once was, and it's a long season, but he seemed like the best chance the team had for winning that game when the Yanks needed to slow down the Red Sox momentum.

But even more than Wang's performance, the fact that Hideki Matsui could not have been worse today unless he used his bat to throw a beating on the entire Yankee pitching staff shows me that the Yanks just might have turned a corner as a team this season. I got the feeling as I watched them in April and earlier this month that if one guy (e.g. Abreu) went cold, the entire team would panic if he came up in a big situation. Then they'd go into a funk, and every player went cold.

Tonight, Matsui went 0-5 and left 7 on base. That was the type of performance that would have crushed morale and crippled momentum at any point prior to tonight. But his teammates picked him up, they put up 6 runs. Wang scuffed, shined and spat his way to holding the Red Sox to two runs (You know he must have cheated to keep that potent lineup to under 30 runs in 6.1 innings of work). If these Yankees can pull together as a team, with help on the way, I think we'll be looking back on this lead the way paleontologists look back at the dodo.

It is entirely possible that I'm seeing signs that aren't there because this recent Red Sox winning jag has been depressing me to the point that I have to clutch at straws, but I get the feeling that the Sox lead will be back down around 4.5 games come June 15th. This is the biggest lead in the division the Sox have had since what? 1995? The Red Sox were foundering until a late trade in 2004, so maybe this lead on May 21 isn't a good thing.

In other matters, why didn't some one tell me that Sunday was the 10th anniversary of Bill Simmons' first online column? Truly that was a date which will live in infamy. His recent "effort" to explain why he dislikes Dane Cook actually made me begin to like Cook. So what if Dane Cook showed up to a Crank Yankers taping wearing a Yankee cap, even though he came from Arlington, MA?

Obviously, I'm not going to criticize any resident of New England who doesn't feel obligated to root for the Red Sox on account of a coincidence of geography. But I do wonder when Bill Simmons became the arbiter of what attire from which teams residents of particular areas can rock in a free country? Then there is an issue stemming from a visit Cook made to the Jimmy Kimmel Live set while Simmons was a writer, where Dane struck the Sports Guy as a hypocrite and a fraud for being scandalized by bathroom humor before going on to carve out a niche for himself on film with similar material.

I find that particularly shocking, considering Simmons seems to love ripping guys like Isiah Thomas and then wilts when Isiah threatens him with a street beating. And when the Sports Guy plays the victim with aplomb when blogs like Deadspin and the Big Lead treat him harshly, it sends him lamenting the state of the internet. Alas that the internet allows people to do to Simmons what he has done to so many others as he built himself into the institution he is.

And then there's this story, which I devoutly hope is false. There is a rumor kicking around that Donovan McNabb might become a Chicago Bear. While the part of me that hates the Philadelphia Eagles would like to see them make a mistake like turning the team over to Kevin Kolb, who just might become the worst second round pick of all time, the part of me that become emotionally invested in the Bears NFC Championship season last year knows McNabb devotes most of his pregame preparation to fashioning a plausible excuse as opposed to finding a way to win. More on this later in the week...

Bad times. Bad times, indeed. The Yankees couldn't get it done against the Red Sox at any point this weekend. But if I had a choice presented to me over the weekend where the Yankees could have won all three of the games against the Sox but Dallas would win game one of the series against Golden State, I would have taken the Red Sox sweeping the Yankees.

I hate the Red Sox much more than I hate the Mavericks, but they have over one hundred and forty more chances to lose this season. The Mavericks are much closer to an NBA championship than I ever want to see them. I don't think Golden State has any kind of a chance to keep this pace up against the Mavs, but the longer this series last, and the more competitive the games are, the less likely the Mavericks are to be at full capacity against better and deeper teams than the Warriors down the road.

I just don't see why Joe Torre went to Proctor to start the 7th inning. I thought Pettitte could have gone another 9 pitches. I think Proctor has been overpitched more so than any other Yankee reliever (even though overpitched isn't a word). I was pretty impressed with Chase Wright, though.

It would have been nice if he hadn't let up that epic barrage of home runs, but I have to respect his poise and class. There is no way on God's Earth that a team could hit four consecutive homers against the Red Sox. After the third straight homer, that next hitter would be better served wearing a suit of medieval plate mail armor to the plate. One or another of the gutless frauds pitching for the Red Sox would throw at his head.

That is another instance for the hypocrisy and fundamental dishonesty of Red Sox fans to rear its head. When a Red Sox pitcher throws at an opposing batter, it's part of the game. When some opposing pitcher hits one of the Red Sox, it is time for benches to clear and the Olde Towne Team goes to DEFCON 1 like they saw missiles in a satellite photo of Cuba. One would hope that a team with the unpleasant memory of the incident that essentially ended Tony Canigliaro's career in its past would show more sensitivity, but then what do I know?

I was very impressed with the overall quality of the play in the Devils-Lightning game this afternoon. Outside of one ill-advised pass by Brodeur which resulted in the second goal for Brad Richards, he was great. I know that after he's won 3 Stanley Cups, climbed to second all time in playoff wins and shutouts, I'm not breaking this story to you. But it's also the second time I've mentioned the NHL in this blog so bear with me.

Two things that bothers me about the Devils going forward. First, three Devils had breakaway opportunities on which they did not convert. Second, I still don't know why Lou Lamoriello fired his coach and took the team over (again) in the last week of the season. Last year, the team was sputtering when he did it. This year they had 102 points and the inside track on the two seed in the East. But they have the best playoff goalie currently playing pro hockey anywhere out there. Outside of Patrick Roy, I can't think of another guy I'd rather have in net, including Hasek.

Finally, I felt badly for the villain from the Chris Tucker film Money Talks. He did every thing he could to get the Tampa Bay Lightning to stave off elimination today. They came out with good energy in the second period, down 1-0 against Brodeur, who was great in the first. They almost came back and won.

I suppose I ought to apologize for my long silence to both of the people who read this blog regularly. I had a pretty bad cold, so I was either goofy from cold medicine or miserable (more so than usual), so I didn't get around to blogging. Too bad that I didn't, what with all that happened over the last week or so.

First, the Red Sox signed JD Drew. I could not be happier about this. Yes, Drew has produced fairly impressive numbers for each game he plays. Too bad for Red Sox Nation that Drew is good for somewhere on the order of 30-40 games on the shelf in any given year. And there's the fact that fans in every city he's played seem to hate him, as well as Philly fans where he was drafted but refused to play.

Throw in the two highlights from 2006, when he was the second guy thrown out at the plate on one play in a playoff game and when he stabbed the Dodgers in the back after they let him out of his contract. He'll be a perfect fit with the culture of greed and incompetence that have been the hallmarks of this Red Sox team since its birth. He'll fit in quite nicely, and Red Sox Nation will hate him for it.

Unfortunately, this just might be the last mistake Theo Epstein ever makes as GM of the Red Sox (or perhaps ever). Dan Shaughnessy called for the Manny trade at the top of his lungs. Theo didn't make a deal. You do the math. Not even a gorilla suit will protect Theo from the wrath of the CHB. I mean the deal made perfect sense (if you're the CHB). Think about it. Trade him and you make the team worse, so the CHB won't have to break a sweat to rage against the dying of the light. There was no way the Sox would get anywhere near what they'd lose from any of the teams.

Even though the young players on the Dodgers will make Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig look like chumps, there is just a small chance that they might not deliver. Manny will have a psychotic episode or two during the next season. He will be maddeningly inconsistent while he is maddeningly consistent at the same time. He'll hit 35 homers, drive in 120 runs and bat .300. So keep him, and deal with him. Manny is, at this point in his career, pathologically incapable of being happy anywhere. Better to have him on your side and unhappy than anywhere where he has a chance to hurt you.

Then there is the Andy Pettitte saga. It's not a big deal that he's going back to the Yankees. It is unclear, however, exactly why the Red Sox showed little interest. Part of it might be that Theo is currently hiding in a safehouse somewhere until the holidays lest the CHB tear him limb from limb for missing a golden opportunity to weaken a nation, Red Sox Nation that is. Then there is the fact that the Red Sox are all set in the starting rotation. They don't need a lefty. Schilling, Beckett and Papelbon have it covered. I know they're all righties, but they are just so awesome that each could throw lefty and dominate if the situation should require it.

Then there were the college football awards this week, culminating in the presentation of the Heisman as I write this. I missed most of the award show, not because I didn't have a chance to watch it but because I tuned in and within 3 minutes had to change the channel. Chris Fowler might have broken the record for most awful jokes made in the shortest conceivable time. Troy Smith won the Heisman, as we all expected. I wanted Brady Quinn to win, not that he deserved to beat out Troy Smith, but because I am a Notre Dame fan.

I also think it's time to shut it with the BCS complaints. College football is a business, and the powers that be decided Florida would be a more interesting matchup for Ohio State than Michigan. That's the way it goes. Michigan should take care of business against USC and wait for Florida to lose to OSU before the complaints start. Lots of teams cry about being jobbed out of a big time bowl. Many of them are humiliated in the game they played, making them look doubly ridiculous. Think Oregon last season, crushed by Oklahoma after crying that they were shafted by the BCS. Prime candidates this season include Michigan and BC.

BC felt slighted that they have to play Navy in the Meineke Bowl. Also, Tom O'Brien has left the team to take the coaching job at NC State. All this seems to set the Eagles up for a fall. As for the team being slighted, perhaps wins over Central Michigan, Maine and Northeastern simply weren't impressive enough to offset losses to NC State and Miami. I think Michigan might learn to focus on the task at hand and forget what could have been the hard way when they run into USC who might be very, very angry after brooding on the UCLA game costing them a berth in the BCS championship game.

In other news, I don't know if you've had the chance to see the new TBS show My Boys. If you haven't, don't worry you missed very little. It seemed to me a combination of Sex and the City and Sports Night. If you liked either of those shows (or both), then you might like My Boys. If you hated them (as I hate them), then you might agree that just as two wrongs don't make a right, two bad shows don't combine to make a good show. Rather they combine to form a Rosemary's Baby of bad shows.

I think we need a moratorium on the idea that sports is a metaphor for life for a generation or so. Sports is entertainment, life is life. Another thing to think about is the underlying premise of the show, at least in so far as it has 0ne: the ultimate object of desire for the average American middle class male is a beautiful woman who is one of the guys and really knows sports. Perhaps that is the case, but it's not what the smart man wants.

Think about it, each person needs personal space and their own interests. It's good to have things in common, but if you share all of the same hobbies it will be bad in the long run. Most people don't seem to like themselves very much, so why would you want to live with a partner who is very much like yourself? Plus a woman with more male friends than female friends is a bit strange. Either she can't get along with women, or she has a ready made stockpile of people with whom to cheat should the opportunity arise.

While I am putting moratoria on things, I think it's time we gave man-child a rest. It's not clever, or funny, or even remotely intelligent to use that when referring to a football or basketball player. So no more man-child, please, and a few less man law ads.

On a sad note, we have a tie for tool of the week. The reasons for this author's inclusion should be readily apparent on reading this. What a loser this car is. If the style of this essay is at all representative of the author's mannerisms and conversation, all I can say is I want to party with this guy. Consider this sentence:

I believe the mass media place under attack our capacity for self-reliance by
emptying out our capacity to experience our childhood as our own; that is, a
childhood that provides us with memories and associations that take total
precedence over the fabricated nostalgia of movies and television.

Would it have killed him to break that claptrap down into two or three concise sentences? It might have killed the spirit of the piece, since everybody might realize that the author has no point but tries to conceal that sad reality in a haze of awkward constructions. Here's an idea, don't try to write like some great figure of the dimly recalled past until you show that you can write like a normal, average person.

And I have to include myself in the tool of the week category for reading this piece and understanding it. I am afraid that I can get carried away with that kind of writing in my own blog. I really hope not, but I'm too lazy to go through the past posts to check it out.

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