The Player To Be Named Later
Signing top prospects from the Dominican Republic has always been a dicey business. The street agents are treacherous and accurate documentation is scarce.
Just ask the Washington Nationals. That hapless franchise gave a $1.4 million signing bonus to 16-year-old Dominican named Esmailyn González . . . who, in fact, was actually 20-year-old Carlos Alvarez Daniel Lugo.
Oops!
Lugo has progressed nicely at the Class A level of the minor leagues - but then again he should excel, since he has literally been a man playing against boys.
Nationals general manager Jim Bowden has some ‘splaining to do. So far, though, team president Stan Kasten has done most of the talking on this matter.
“No teenager executed this fraud,” Kasten told reporters. “There were a number of people involved in it. I can assure you, this is going to have serious repercussions.”
Bowden is in some peril. His buddy Jose Rijo, the former big league pitcher, could also lose his front office post. (Rijo’s recommendation led to this signing.)
Here is how Washington Post pundit Thomas Boswell summed up the mess:
“A Nats franchise that shoots itself in the foot every time it gets a new pair of shoes has taken another painful public pratfall. Get a new city-built ballpark; don’t pay the rent. Get a coveted No. 1 draft pick; don’t sign him. Promise a better team to inaugurate a new park; lose 102 games. Expect sellouts in Southeast Washington; average 12,000 empty seats. Sign slugger Adam Dunn; have a scandal explode the next week.
“Now we have the mysterious case of what President Stan Kasten called the ‘player to be named later.’ It would be farce if it weren’t so mortifying.”
DENY, DENY, DENY
Maybe Alex Rodriguez should have gone this route instead of being sort of honest about his transgressions.
MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE
Questions to ponder while the Illini guards try to regain their scoring touch:
- Will Kyle McClellan be able to pick off one of the five established starting pitchers this spring?
- Will the departure of both coordinators hurt Mizzou football? Or will this change bring fresh ideas to Gary Pinkel’s program?
- Will the Blues get a boost from that overtime victory at Nashville? Can sustain their long climb up the Western Conference ladder?
PUBLIC SERVICE AD OF WEEK
Ron Artest has been one of the NBA’s most volatile players since coming into the league. But that doesn’t make him a bad spokesperson for animal welfare.
RANDOM STEPHON MARBURY SIGHTING
This is the discount sneaker marketer himself, at a LA bus stop, chatting it up with some guy. Who knows why.
Gotta love You Tube.
QUIPS ‘R US
Here is what some of America’s leading sports pundits have been writing:
Mark Kriegel, FoxSports.com: “Just what NASCAR needed in these troubled times: Matt Kenseth winning the Daytona 380.”
Greg Cote, Miami Herald: “Terrell Owens will be starring in a new TV series on VH1. Because it is billed as a ‘reality show,’ I assume that means T.O. will be playing an insufferable, egotistical bore in steep career decline.”
Jim Caple, ESPN.com, on Ken Griffey’s return home: “Griffey never should have left Seattle. He was one of the best players in the game when he left, but his career nose-dived soon after. He hit 40 home runs with 118 RBIs his first season in Cincinnati, but never got above 93 RBIs or 35 home runs again, mostly because he missed an average of 60 games a year due to injuries. Seattle didn’t do all that well, either. Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago, Microsoft stock lost 62 percent of its value and they set ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ here.”
Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle: “Pat Summitt, congratulations on the 1,000 wins. Now it’s time to woman up, girlfriend, and knock down that silly glass door that has kept women coaches out of the men’s college basketball biz.”
Kriegel again: “If Obama is really serious about limiting unwarranted executive compensation, he’ll start with Bud Selig, whose 22 percent raise put him at $18.35 million for FY 2007. By the way, Selig says A-Rod is ‘shameful’ for doing steroids from 2001 to 2003. OK, then what of a commissioner who did nothing from 1992 to 2001?”
MEGAPHONE
“What a horrible example we set, as athletes in general in professional sports, for college athletes and high school athletes. I wish at some point we could talk about the players who didn’t use steroids or aren’t using. That’s what we should be celebrating instead of the ones who have or are.”
Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer, talking to Yahoo! Sports.
Can someone please tell Jamie Moyer, Derek Jeter et al that “No, we can’t not talk about the bums who did steroids.” Burying baseball’s collective heads in the sand is how we got here in the first case. Someday that will come to be known as the Bud Selig doctrine or, simply, pulling a Selig.
If they really want to do away with the issue then do away with everyone who gets caught. Ban them from baseball like they do gamblers. It may be radical but one could argue that steroids tips the balance of competition just as gambling does. And people like Josh Hamilton (yeah, we should really listen to his opinion….great player but still needs a babysitter to stay off drugs and out of jail) who say that “they still have to swing the bat” simply don’t get the fact that steroids don’t give you baseball skills but they do add a rocket booster onto already momumental skills. It’s an unfair advantage.
I agree lance, and would only add that I’d love to celebrate the athletes who don’t use performance enhancers…if I knew who in the hell they were! The problem is no one wants to admit doing it, and we know there are at least another 103 out there who have some explaining to do.
Good win last night by the Note. Anyone who bitched about that contract extension to McDonald has sure been quiet since he has come back and lit a spark under this team. Great power play to win it.
Scott Ostler, in theory that is great, but in reality I don’t see a bunch of 19 and 20 year old kids taking any female coach seriously, especially when she talks about the back-door trap play…
OOPS. No one on A-Roid’s management team checked to find out whether “boli” was available in the D.R. from 2001-2003? His hole just keeps getting deeper, doesn’t it?
It was time for Mizzou to replace their coordinators anyway. Teams have figured out their spread offense and the pass defense has been horrible.
If Stacy Dales were my college basketball coach I would listen intently, in case she hollered “Go to the hole”.
Lance: I assume from your comments that you are a medical doctor with specialized emphasis in sports medicine, and have done considerable research on the performance enhancing effects of steroids in baseball. The truth is, not one qualified professional has brought any evidence that steroids make you a better hitter. Since MLB implemented testing, more pitchers have been caught than position players. The ever-shrinking ballparks, super hard maple bats, and juiced balls had just as much, if not more to do with the home run era as steroids.
I don’t plan to spend any time watching Morales work the count against Vazquez, only to tap into a harmless grounder to Romero, who throws to Ruiz for out number two.
I agree with Moyer. I certainly don’t pretend that steroids didn’t have a major affect on the game for quite a while, but there are mechanisms in place now to screen and punish offenders. At this point, I really don’t care who cheated and what the records should be. I’m sick of it and want to move forward.
Let’s move on to better topics, like who’s gonna hit ninth, what’s on second, and who are the 3 outfielders.
cb, steroids build muscle mass. Muscle mass is what you use to generate strength. For baseball that means swinging a bat from a rest position to as fast a velocity as you can. The stronger you are, the easier it is to swing that same mass (the bat) and therefore the faster you can make it go.
Velocity of the bat is what determines how far the ball goes. Simple pysics. The more kinetic energy that is transferred into the ball, the farther it will go. A pitcher on steroids may also help because they are also throwing the ball with increased velocity, so the ball also has increased kinetic energy. All leads to a pitched ball that can travel further. Suddenly a ball at the warning track sneaks over the wall. Out verses home run.
This has been explained a thousand times over in every sports blog in America. How did you miss it?
Smaller ballparks leading to more homeruns. MLB put in a rule that any ballpark built (or modified to bring the fences inward) after June 1958 had to be at least 325 down the lines and 400 to center. This rule does not apply to the Phone Booth of the West in San Francisco, or at least has not been enforced there.
hey, cb…take brian fantana’s and ron burgundy’s advice to champ…you should just stop talking…maybe sit out a few plays.
performance enhancers make players bigger, stronger, faster and help speed up recovery time…ummmm…i’m not a dr, but i’m pretty sure that makes people better athletes/batters/pitchers.
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