NewsTrust - Baseball - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Playing Ball With the Pentagon

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Tomdispatch.com - By Andrew Bacevich, - Jul. 30 (Comment) - In this theatrical production, the Red Sox provide the stage, and the Pentagon the props. In military parlance, it is a joint operation. In front of a gigantic American flag draped over the left-field wall, an Air Force contingent, clad in blue, stands at attention. To carry a smaller version of the Stars and Stripes onto the playing field, the Navy provides a color guard in crisp summer whites. The United States Marine Corps kicks in with a choral ensemble that leads the singing of the national anthem. As the anthem’s final notes sound, four U. S. Air Force F-15C Eagles scream overhead. The sellout crowd roars its approval.

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Is 'Roid Rage Affecting the Sportswriters Who Vote Players into the Baseball Hall of Fame?

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 01:53:53 -0800

Reason Magazine - By Nick Gillespie - Jan. 10 (Opinion) - So Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn made it into Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility. That's an exceptionally rare honor but it's one that both players deserve fully. Not so for Mark McGwire, the home-run-bashing, low-average slugger for the Oakland A's and St. Louis Cardinals who made a truly pathetic spectacle of himself a few years back during a ridiculous and illegitimate Congressional hearing on the dread menace of steroids in sports (as former Reasoner Matt Welch, now of the LA Times, put it eloquently, "Congress has no business examining baseball's urine"). I never liked McGwire or the teams he played for, and his blubbery performance (in every sense of the word) was embarrassing to say the least. Yet as Gene Lyons and others point out, McGwire, who used performance-enhancing substances during his career, has never been charged with, much less found guilty of, breaking baseball's rules at the time he was playing. (Things have changed since then.)

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Enough Already

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 14:20:24 -0700

Tacitus - By M. Scott Eiland - Jul. 21 (Opinion) - To the surprise of many, the grand jury considering evidence that Barry Bonds may have perjured himself about the use of performance enhancing drugs--as well as possibly committing income tax evasion regarding income from sports memorabilia shows (the crime that sent Pete Rose away for some time in the federal pen a few years back)--expired today without indicting Bonds. At the same time, Greg Anderson--a childhood friend of Bonds who has already served three months in prison for his role in the BALCO scandal, and two and a half weeks in jail for civil contempt for refusing to testify in front of the Bonds grand jury--was released. The two men are not off the hook yet: Anderson's attorney Mark Geragos has announced that his client has been subpeonaed to appear in front of a new Bonds grand jury on the subject of Bonds' alleged steroid use--if he refused to testify again, he could find himself back in a cell for up to eighteen months.

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