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Bar Chat

07/25/2013

Ryan Braun, Dirtball

[Posted 9:00 AM, Wednesday.]

Baseball Quiz: Name the 8 players in the 300-300 club...HR-stolen bases. Answer below.

Liar, Dirtball, Cheat

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig announced on Monday that Milwaukee Brewers outfielder, and former National League MVP, Ryan Braun, has been suspended without pay for the remainder of the 2013 season and postseason (though Milwaukee isn’t in playoff contention) for violations of the Basic Agreement and its Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program.

Braun said in a statement: “As I have acknowledged in the past, I am not perfect. I realize now that I have made some mistakes. I am willing to accept the consequences of those actions. This situation has taken a toll on me and my entire family, and it has been a distraction to my teammates and the Brewers organization. I am very grateful for the support I have received from players, ownership and the fans in Milwaukee and around the country. Finally, I wish to apologize to anyone I may have disappointed – all of the baseball fans, especially those in Milwaukee, the great Brewers organization, and my teammates. I am glad to have this matter behind me once and for all, and I cannot wait to get back to the game I love.”

“We commend Ryan Braun for taking responsibility for his past actions,” said Rob Manfred, MLB’s executive vice president for economics and league affairs. “We all agree that it is in the best interests of the game to resolve this matter.”

Michael Weiner, the head of the players’ union, said, “I am deeply gratified to see Ryan taking this bold step. It vindicates the rights of all players under the Joint Drug Program.”

Hours after the announcement, I was watching the Mets-Braves game and Met announcer Gary Cohen called Braun’s behavior “disgusting.” Fellow broadcaster Ron Darling said Braun “is a real jerk in how he handled this...The Brewers had a chance to go all in on Braun or Prince Fielder. And now he’s disgraced them.”

“Seventeen months after his defiant denial, Ryan Braun admits he ‘made some mistakes.’ Ryan Braun kept saying he wished he could tell us ‘the entire story.’ We don’t need it now.

“We don’t need all the details. We don’t need any more apologies, or any more vows to get back to playing ‘the game I love.’

“No, Ryan, your flimsy statement Monday will do. The words don’t even matter. Your willingness to accept a suspension without a fight tells us more than enough.

“Go away and serve your time, but understand that you’re never going to escape this. You’ll always be the guy who stood there in the Arizona desert, smugly believing you could play us all for fools.

“ ‘The truth is always relevant,’ you told us that day in the spring of 2012, in perhaps the only true words you spoke in those six minutes that will remain as a stain on your record.

“Braun can serve his time, accepting a 65-game ban that costs him about $3.5 million and frees him from taking part in the dreary final two months of any ugly Brewers season. He can come back next year and tell us that he wants to ‘have this matter behind me once and for all,’ as he said in that statement Monday.

“Forget it. It’s not going away, and we’re far past the point that Braun can even make it go away....

“A-Rod has in many ways become the poster boy of the Biogenesis mess, and the coming suspension will rip away what little remains of his reputation. But some people in the game have always considered Braun to be more offensive because his denials and his lies were so public and so over the top, and because, even more than A-Rod, he was seen as having gotten away with something.

“Braun’s successful appeal of a positive drug test 17 months ago was a bigger challenge to the integrity of the program than anything A-Rod has done, bigger than anything any player has done. His suspension Monday should help restore some faith in that program, but some damage will always remain.”

“Ryan Braun will return to the baseball field in 2014 and resume his career as a Milwaukee Brewer. With or without pharmaceutical help, he’s young and talented enough to hit home runs and add a few more All-Star Game appearances to his portfolio. If fellow PED offender Bartolo Colon could to it with that Buddha physique at age 40, there’s hope for Braun yet.

“But clearing fences and salvaging his dignity are two distinct propositions. Braun’s credibility is shot, and his reputation has been tarnished in a way that 65 games on the shelf and $3.25 million in lost wages can’t begin to measure.

“His baseball legacy will never recover from this. As for the impact on his conscience, that’s a question only he can answer....

“Braun (apologized) to the fans in Milwaukee and his fellow Brewers. He did not mention Dino Laurenzi Jr., the tester whose reputation he assailed in his successful quest to avoid a suspension in 2012. But scores of people rushed to their Twitter accounts to fill in that particular blank....

“Many people have compared Braun to Lance Armstrong, who assembled a long list of lies and obfuscations and steamrolled everyone in his path.... Braun will also elicit comparisons to Rafael Palmeiro, who became persona non grata with a single, ill-advised finger wag before a Senate hearing in 2005.

“But when all is said and done, Pete Rose might be the most apt comparison. I was the Cincinnati Reds beat reporter in the summer of 1989 when baseball was assembling a case against Rose for gambling. On numerous occasions that summer, Pete would trot out some test theory for the beat writers as a way to debunk the latest revelation. The more Pete shared his theories, the more he believed them. The third or fourth time he told a story, I’m convinced that he was convinced it was 100 percent accurate.

“A quarter of a century later, Rose is a walking American tragedy, and the closest he can get to the Hall of Fame is standing on the front steps in Cooperstown and watching his family go for a tour during his (now canceled) reality show....

“(Braun’s) willingness to cut a deal...merely confirms the rampant sentiment that he skated on a technicality the first time around. And now he’ll have to spend the rest of his career walking around with a scarlet ‘F’ for ‘fraud.’”

“The greatest enemy of Alex Rodriguez, as it turns out, is not Bud Selig’s investigators or Yankees officials who loathe him.

“Braun’s acceptance of a season-ending, 65-game suspension damaged Rodriguez’s case in tons of ways none more than this – Braun essentially put Anthony Bosch’s credibility on, well, steroids.

“Braun has been the ‘other’ big fish in the Biogenesis investigation, the other huge star, the other player who had aggravated MLB officials by slipping from their grasp previously. In this way, he was linked to Rodriguez more than anyone else under investigation....

“A serial public liar decided the best-case scenario was to take the best deal possible, which was to sit out the rest of this year without pay in what has been an injury-plagued season for him and a campaign of non-contention for the Brewers.

“It allows him to return to play next year and protect the $117 million he is still owed through 2020.

“And he surrendered without a grievance, an angry public word or any fight when faced with evidence provided almost wholly by Bosch, which is going to make it tougher for anyone else facing allegations...Plus, word around baseball is that evidence against Braun amounted to a Lego block compared to the skyscraper of documentation MLB has amassed against Rodriguez.”

“This is a great day for baseball. The suspension of Ryan Braun is just the beginning of a drug bust of significant magnitude, a painful yet encouraging sign that someday – perhaps in the distant future, but someday – Major League Baseball will be able to say it’s clean, or almost clean.

“This suspension will follow Braun the rest of his life. He is forever tainted. He is damaged goods. His 2011 MVP title is so fraudulent that it should be taken from him immediately. Who will ever trust anything he ever does again on a baseball field?

“What’s more, Braun has become the Lance Armstrong of baseball. After Braun got away with the positive drug test and didn’t have to serve a 50-game suspension in 2012 thanks to an arbitrator’s stunning ruling, he then decided to verbally attack the test collector, Dino Laurenzi Jr. It was an awful thing to do to a man who was just doing his job, and now that Braun has been caught, he joins Armstrong as a proven cheater who did his best to ruin the lives of the honest people who got in his way.”

“There was a moment recently when the shift in the attitude of Major League Baseball players toward performance-enhancing drug cheaters blossomed fully, when the last stages of evolution came into view.

“The players have changed on this issue from the time the first gossip of steroids use in baseball began in the 1980s, moving from ignorance to ambivalence to acceptance to frustration to resentment to the current DEFCON 1 anger.

“A pitcher drilled a hitter in a game this season, and when the inning was over and he returned to the dugout, the pitcher explained to his teammates that he had plunked the guy because he’s a juicer – a cheater, a PED user. The teammates who heard him understood.

“The names of the players involved are irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. What is significant is what an incident like this now signifies: PED cheaters have become pariahs and increasingly regarded as thieves among the brethren because they are stealing jobs and money that rightfully belong to others. A PED cheater is now viewed by the MLB Players Association as something like the college kid who pilfers stuff from the rooms of others in his dormitory.

“For commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball, the bust of Ryan Braun is an extraordinary moment when they can rightfully claim the high ground. Over the past decade, they have increasingly worked to do the right thing in their fight against performance-enhancing drugs.

“But all along – back to the first evidence of steroids use – it is the players’ union that has wielded the ultimate power on this issue because no drug testing nor changes to the agreement could have happened without its assent. For years, the silent majority was more likely to complain individually and privately to sports writers about the rise of steroids than to stand up and say something in a union meeting, but now they are loud and angry, and they’ll drill a guy with a fastball if that’s what it takes.

“This is why Braun will never regain his reputation with other players. He lied to them, and he cheated them – and incredibly, he kept lying and kept cheating even after getting caught, with the positive test in the fall of 2011....

“I am glad to have this matter behind me once and for all, and I cannot wait to get back to the game I love.

“If Braun actually thinks he can put this behind him fully, well, he can forget it; it’s a permanent part of his resume. He is the first former MVP suspended by Major League Baseball for PED use.

“And without a serious apology and sincere contrition, he’s got zero shot of restoring any semblance of a respectable reputation with other players. The lawyer-washed, sanitized statements will not play, because he’s making it clear that the most important thing to him is protecting his money.

“Many of the other players have been rooting for him to go down, and to go down hard. He may be allowed into the union meetings; he may get union benefits; he may even carry a union card. But most of them will never again regard him as one of them.”

And to that end, many major leaguers went off on Braun and his ilk.

Los Angeles Angels pitcher C.J. Wilson: “They’re lying to the fans. They’re lying to their teammates. They’re lying to their GMs, their owners, and they’re going to get caught.”

Skip Schumaker of the Dodgers said Braun let him down. “Watching him talk right now makes me sick. I have an autographed Braun jersey in my baseball room that I’ll be taking down.”

Matt Kemp, the runner-up to Braun in the 2011 MVP vote, said Braun should be stripped of the honor. “We had conversations, and I considered him a friend. I don’t think anybody likes to be lied to, and I feel like a lot of people have felt betrayed.”

[Kemp lost to Braun 388-332 in the voting. Braun received 20 first-place votes to 10 for Kemp.]

Detroit pitcher Max Scherzer: “I thought this whole thing has been despicable on his part. When he did get caught, he never came clean. He tried to question the ability of the collector when he was caught red-handed. So that’s why the whole Braun situation, there is so much player outrage toward him.”

As for A-Rod, the Yankees anticipate he could be accused of using PEDs, over multiple seasons, of recruiting athletes for the clinic, of attempting to obstruct MLB’s investigation, and of not being truthful with MLB in the past, including in discussions over his relationship with Dr. Anthony Galea. Stories peg the penalty at anywhere from 150 games to a lifetime ban.

As the New York Daily News’ Bill Madden puts it:

“Whether he realizes it or not, A-Rod is the Whitey Bulger of baseball.”

But as of today, A-Rod and his team of power lawyers seem intent on fighting whatever MLB hands down.

Ball Bits

--June 21, the Los Angeles Dodgers were 30-42 and 9 ½ back in the N.L. West. Thru Tuesday, they are 52-47, ½-game in front of the Diamondbacks.

--The Texas Rangers won the sweepstakes for Cubs right-hander Matt Garza. Garza is 6-1 with a 3.17 ERA this season, including 1.24 in his last six starts. The Rangers gave up three minor leaguers, with one or two more to be named later in return for the 29-year-old, who is a rental player in the last year of his contract.

--If you think Yankees-Red Sox contests are long, according to Stats LLC and the Wall Street Journal, you’re right. Since 2008, the games between these two average 3 hours and 28 minutes, by far the slowest in the league.

--Nice effort by Tim Lincecum in his first start after his 148-pitch no-hitter. Lincecum went 3 2/3, allowing 8 earned runs as the Giants lost to the Reds, 11-0.

--Dustin Pedroia and the Red Sox reached agreement on a $100 million, seven-year contract extension that will keep him in Boston through 2021. The dollar figure could easily impact the kind of deal the Yankees’ Robinson Cano will get, either with New York or another team. Cano is expecting a $200 millionish offer.

More on Lefty’s Big Win

“Phil Mickelson could have won the Masters in April as well as the one next April, with next month’s PGA Championship win wedged in between, and it would not do more for his legacy than Sunday’s British Open triumph at Muirfield.

“Mickelson’s first British Open triumph – his fifth career major championship – was a game-changer for him in how he will be viewed in the history of the game going forward.

“It elevated his legacy to a height even he probably never dreamt would happen....

“This one might not change everything. It does not erase the U.S. Open heartbreaks at Merion last month, at Winged Foot in 2006 or Shinnecock Hills in 2004. But it changes the perception of Mickelson.

“He is now a mere U.S. Open win away from joining five players in the game’s history to have completed a career Grand Slam....

“Only Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Gene Sarazen won a Masters, U.S. Open, British Open and PGA Championship at least once in their respective careers. All five are at the top of the conversation as all-time greats.

“Mickelson is muscling his way into that conversation.

“ ‘If I’m able to win the U.S. Open and complete the career Grand Slam, I think that that’s the sign of the complete great player,’ Mickelson said. ‘I’m a leg away, and it’s been a tough leg for me, but I think that’s the sign.

“ ‘There are five players that have done that, and those five players are the greats of the game. You look at them with a different light.’....

“ ‘He’s one of those guys that feels like if you stay the same, you’re backing up,’ Mickelson’s caddie Jim ‘Bones’ Mackay said. ‘He’s a guy that really works hard to get better, and he’s gotten better. He’s 43 years old and he’s getting better.’....

“ ‘He’s stronger than he’s ever been, he’s fitter than he’s ever been, he’s hungrier than he’s ever been. You can’t understate how much he wants to compete and do well. I joke around with him all the time that when he’s 60-something years old, he’s going to be on that putting green at Augusta thinking he’s got a chance.’”

Phil Mickelson: “Well, certainly the range of emotions I feel are as far apart as possible in the last month. But you have to be resilient in this game. You have to accept losses and use it as motivation, as opposed to letting it defeat you. You’ve got to use it as motivation to work harder and come back strong, and these last couple of weeks, these last couple of months, I’ve played some of the best golf of my career.”

“He nods that delightful, goofy, big-kid smile of appreciation at least 100 times during every round of golf. When others walk away, he steps right into a gaggle of kids and parents holding programs and hats and Sharpies, and won’t leave for quite some time. Even in crushing defeat, as at last month’s U.S. Open at Merion, he still signs autographs for the fans who follow him off the course.

“That’s Phil Mickelson. We don’t know everything about him. We don’t know everything about anyone on the world stage in sports. Tiger Woods taught us all about that.

“But we do know that the 2013 British Open was won Sunday by the most polite and courteous man in the chase, the one who handled both the good and bad of Muirfield with a shrug and a smile, the man who ended up in one of the most impressive group hugs in the history of both golf and the Mickelson family.

“As you watch him play, you begin to think to yourself that this is a present-day multi-millionaire athlete who actually gets it – who understands that he gets to play golf for a living and who doesn’t treat every shot as if it’s heroic or a matter of life and death or any of the other overwrought rhetoric some in the game attach to an endeavor in which a person hits a dimpled ball around vast stretches of land with various sticks....

“At least for this day, the 21st-century game of golf had found a hero who appeared to step right out of the 1950s.”

--One tidbit I forgot to note last time was that not only was Mickelson at 43 the oldest British Open champion since Roberto de Vicenzo won at age 44 in 1967, but with Ernie Els and Darren Clarke both being 42 when they won in 2012 and 2011, respectively, it’s the first time the Open has been won by a player 40 or older three years in a row.

--In Phil Mickelson’s bag on Sunday...

Fairway wood: Callaway X Hot 3Deep, 13 degrees

Hybrid: PING Anser, 17 degrees

Irons (4-PW): Callaway X Forged

Wedges: Callaway JAWS (52, 56 degrees), Callaway Mack Daddy 2 (60, 64 degrees)

Putter: Odyssey Versa #9

Ball: Callaway HEX Chrome+

--Hard to believe the NFL season is just six weeks away as teams head to training camp over the coming days. Here in these parts there is going to be only one story...Mark Sanchez vs. Geno Smith for the Jets’ QB job.

--Emile Griffith died. He was 75. The world champion boxer suffered from pugilistic dementia.

Back on March 24, 1962, before a national television audience, Griffith fought Benny “The Kid” Paret. Griffith knocked Paret out in the 12th round to regain the welterweight title, but Paret went into a coma and died from his injuries 10 days later. In 2005, Sports Illustrated reported that Griffith may have been fueled by an anti-gay slur directed at him by Paret during the weigh-in. Griffith at various times had described himself as straight, gay and bisexual.

The Paret bout left a stain on boxing for years. NBC stopped airing broadcasts and then-New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller created a commission to investigate the fight and the sport.

Many say Paret never should have been allowed into the ring after he had suffered a brutal loss three months earlier to Gene Fullmer.

Griffith eventually moved up to middleweight and claimed the title with a narrow decision over Dick Tiger.

Griffith would then go on to have a thrilling trilogy with Nino Benvenuti, losing twice, and then lost two to Carlos Monzon, another middleweight great. Benvenuti was one of the first boxers I really became familiar with, aside from Ali, Quarry and Frazier.

--Dirtball Alert: A former U.S. defense attached in Kenya has been convicted of smuggling $thousands of dollars of ivory, just hours after President Obama pledged to fight a crisis in illegal wildlife trafficking.

David McNevin is his name. He was arrested boarding a flight to Amsterdam from Nairobi. Kenya’s outdated laws are such that he was fined only about $300. McNevin had retired from the army at the rank of colonel and was working for a U.S.-based company with operations in Africa.

His conviction came July 1, but was just reported. That day, President Obama had arrived in Tanzania and made a pledge to help fight the ivory trade.

--WARNING: The following is exceedingly gross.

“A British woman returned from a holiday in Peru hearing scratching noises inside her head, only to be told she was being attacked by flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.

“Rochelle Harris, 27, said she remembered dislodging a fly from her ear while in Peru but thought nothing more of it until she started getting headaches and pains down one side of her face and woke up in Britain one morning with liquid on her pillow.

“Thinking she had a routine ear infection caused by a mosquito bite, she sought medical treatment at the Royal Derby Hospital in northern England, where a consultant noticed maggots in a small hole in her ear-canal....

“Doctors tried first to flush the maggots out of the ear using olive oil....

“When flushing the maggots out failed, the medics resorted to surgery and found a ‘writhing mass of maggots’ within her ear, raising concern they could eat into her brain.

“The surgery removed a family of eight maggots. Analysis found that a New World Army Screw Worm fly had laid eggs inside Harris’s ear.”

Harris revealed her ordeal for a new Discovery Channel documentary series called Bugs, Bites and Parasites. I think I’ll skip this one.

--We note the passing of actor Dennis Farina, 69. The cause of death was a blood clot in his lung.

Farina was a Chicago city police officer before turning to acting in his late 30s, appearing in films such as “Get Shorty” and “Saving Private Ryan.” Then he had his star turn on “Law and Order.”

--And Page Morton Black died. She was 97. You have to be of a certain age and from the New York area to appreciate who she was.

Page Morton Black was a cabaret singer who sang the following jingle.                         

Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee,
Heavenly coffee, heavenly coffee.
Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee,
Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy.

William Black, the founder of the Chock Full o’Nuts company, turned to his future wife to sing his new jingle after he heard her at a Greenwich Village nightclub. The commercial ran for 20 years on both radio and television.

William Black died in 1983.   He had started Chock Full o’Nuts in New York City in 1926 as a chain of nut shops, that turned into lunch counters, and then packaged coffee. [Margalit Fox / New York Times]

Top 3 songs for the week 7/25/64: #1 “Rag Doll” (The 4 Seasons) #2 “A Hard Day’s Night” (The Beatles) #3 “I Get Around” (The Beach Boys)...and...#4 “Memphis” (Johnny Rivers) #5 “The Girl From Ipanema” (Getz/Gilberto...high school stage band / wedding background music favorite...glasses clinking...drunks staggering...) #6 “The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)” (Jan & Dean) #7 “Can’t You See That She’s Mine” (The Dave Clark Five) #8 “Dang Me” (Roger Miller) #9 “Wishin’ And Hopin’” (Dusty Springfield) #10 “Keep On Pushing” (The Impressions... now that’s a helluva Top Ten)

Baseball Quiz Answer: 300-300 club.

Barry Bonds 762 HR 514 SB
Willie Mays 660-338
Andre Dawson 438-314
Bobby Bonds 332-461
Reggie Sanders 305-304
Steve Finley 304-320
Alex Rodriguez 647-318
Carlos Beltran 353-308

*If you got Sanders and Finley without any effort, you’re good. Real good.

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