The Tenth Inning

Which was one of two parts that really pissed me off.

The other was the Roger Clemens segment. Thank you fast-forward.

 

Yeah - just reread this article he wrote in 2001 on Clemens to show how much much Verducci had his head in the sand:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/flashback/clemens_science/

 

Verducci did more to expose steroids in baseball than anyone in the media except Wilstein (and later, the SF Chronicle guys).

I think we're picking on the wrong guy here.

 

From Verducci Clemens article- 2001:

Throughout almost 18 major league seasons (the first 13 with the Red Sox and the next two with the Toronto Blue Jays), Clemens has been a fitness fanatic. He so refined his training sessions with Blue Jays strength coach Brian McNamee that Toronto catcher Darrin Fletcher nicknamed them "Navy SEAL workouts." Clemens won his fourth and record fifth Cy Young Awards with the Blue Jays and then was traded to New York following the 1998 season for lefthander David Wells, lefty setup man Graeme Lloyd and second baseman Homer Bush. After Clemens slipped to 14-10 with the Yankees in 1999, New York hired McNamee as its assistant strength coach. From July 2, 2000 (when Clemens returned to action after straining his right groin muscle), through Sunday, he'd gone 27-3 over 46 starts.

Between outings Clemens religiously adheres to McNamee's tightly choreographed program of distance running, agility drills, weight training, 600 daily abdominal crunches and assorted other tortures. "One time he wanted me to ride a stationary bike, and I told him I never thought it gave you much of a workout," Clemens says. "He told me, 'Give me 17 minutes.' After 17 minutes I thought my legs would explode."

Clemens takes great pride in having stopped his baseball biological clock. He will tell you that he still runs three miles in 19 to 20 1/2 minutes, that he still weighs 232 pounds, that he still wears slacks with a 36-inch waist (though they must be tailored to allow for his massive thighs) and that he can still reach for a mid-90s fastball at will -- the same specs he had at least 10 years ago. "He's a freak of nature, the kind of pitcher who comes along once in a generation, maybe every 25 to 30 years," says Devil Rays pitching coach Bill Fischer, Clemens's pitching coach from 1985 to '91 in Boston. "He's like Tom Seaver or Nolan Ryan. At 39 the s.o.b. is as good as when I had him. To go 18-1, I don't care if you're pitching for God's All-America team, that's mighty hard to do. He can pitch as long as he wants."

 

Absolutely not. He can't have it both ways. He can't be the guy who breaks the steroid scandal, then perpetuates the fraud that is Clemens' work ethic and never issues a mea culpa. I'm not picking on him for believing in Clemens (though anyone with a pulse should have suspected the guy was up to something the night of Game Two of the 2000 World Series, if not years earlier), I'm picking on him for never admitting he was as hoodwinked by Clemens in 2001 as anyone else was by McGwire and Sosa in 1998.

 

Verducci is a good guy but his ego wouldn't allow that to happen.

 

Seven minutes on Ichiro.

 

I'm about halfway through Part II. Part I is much more interesting.

 

Verducci followed up his 2001 article with another Clemens beating father time story in 2003:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1028873/5/index.htm

For a guy credited with "blowing the lid" off the MLB steroid story his well tuned antenna failed with it came to Clemens.

 

I thought that Ichiro segment was one of the best parts, far better than the Yankee/Red Sox slobbering repeated for the umpteenth time. Ichiro was exactly what MLB needed when he arrived, someone to show that a small ball hitter could still dominate in the era of the juicehead sluggers.

 

I really liked the music for Ichiro as well. A lot of what made the first nine innings great was the music.

To this day I cannot hear "Summer in the City" without seeing Yaz make the throw from the outfield.

I do wish they would have given a little more credit to Ichiro for his defense.

 

In the first two hours, I just winced when Verducci and Costas appeared to be revising their steroids stances.

In the second two hours, Burns tried to give Verducci credit as a steroids exposer without noting his hook-line-sinker swallow of Clemens' charade. Much worse.

Lot less interesting than the first two hours, too. Maybe just because it was most recent stuff.