By Jim Coffman
Contrition isn’t going to work for Sammy Sosa. And he knows it. The time for admitting mistakes and saying sorry passed him by a long time ago, probably around the same time he was caught using a corked bat and offering up the ridiculous explanation that he had done so without realizing it. And he didn’t stop there. He and the Cubs had the rest of his bats x-rayed (there were more than 70 of them if I recall correctly) and then claimed that because they were still in pristine condition, he had clearly made nothing but an innocent mistake after corking a bat to use “just during batting practice.” No guys, we wanted to scream at the time, the fact that all the other bats were clean made it impossible to believe that Sammy had just happened to grab the one bat with cork. There was no way in hell he had just so happened to grab the one that weighed significantly less than his other bats, the one that had obviously been tampered with, before he went up to the plate.
The fact that contrition – or anything else for that matter – will fail to help is why this is Day 6 or so of no official comment from Sosa in the aftermath of the New York Times story asserting he was one of the players who tested positive for performance enhancing drugs during a preliminary test in 2003. At this point I feel as though a person commenting on this situation has to “declare.” At some point radio man Mike Murphy established a policy on his show on The Score that a person commenting on the Cubs or Sox had to declare their allegiance because of course that colors everything she’ll have to say. So just be aware that I am indeed a cursed Cubs fan. Have been all my life. And I reveled in Sammy’s accomplishments up until the final few years of his career.
The guy has to make a statement at some point doesn’t he? But clearly he is absolutely trapped. And he won’t be able to benefit from America’s love for contrition like Miguel Tejada has this year or Jason Giambi did the season before. Giambi and Tejada didn’t even admit using steroids but they said they were sorry for lying and got a little weepy and that apparently was enough for their fan bases. Sosa and old buddy Mark McGwire (who actually had a much better shot at putting contrition to work when he appeared before Congress to testify on steroids several years ago but then choked it away as he insisted that “he wasn’t there to talk about the past”) find themselves together again, captaining the same ghost ship with Rafael Palmiero as their first mate. I’ve seen several prominent baseball writers recently wringing their hands over the Hall of Fame voting dilemma they say they now face. They argue that they need a new set of standards to decide who should qualify from the Steroid Era.
Rather than wasting time trying to figure out a way to admit some steroid cheats, perhaps Hall voters should try to figure out which members should be dropped from inclusion because their stats were inflated while they played against inferior (i.e. all-white) competition in the 20s, 30s and 40s.
Bulls Bit
Hard to imagine a scenario where the Bulls’ Thursday draft matters much. They have the 16th and 28th picks. There’s a chance the guys they select will help well down the line, but rookies and second-year guys won’t get it done for this team in the next few years. In fact, instead of covering the Bulls’ draft, local sports news outlets would do better to track down individual off-season action. Because regardless of whether Ben Gordon returns to the Bulls as a free agent, the future of this team hinges on its forwards and young center.
So let’s go and find Joakim Noah and see, first, if he is laying off the cognac (he was arrested for slurping it down in public in Gainesville, Fla. last off-season), and second, is he performing a gut rehab on his jump shot. Bulls fans might question the very existence of a Joakim jumper after a season in which he was afraid to take it throughout, but it does exist.
Heading into last season there was a big article in Sports Illustrated about LeBron James and in it, James spoke of re-working his jumper in the off-season. Maybe someone might mention to Noah that if James was willing to make some fundamental changes, it would be more than a little pathetic if Noah didn’t do the same.
Of course, Noah should have never left high school with his terrible shooting form. And Billy Donovan may be a heck of a recruiter at the University of Florida but he had three years to teach Noah how to shoot before Joakim departed Gatorland and didn’t get it done. Not good
Next up we need to travel to Louisiana to see what Tyrus Thomas is up to. Tyrus is reportedly still best of friends with the Celtics’ Glen “Big Baby” Davis, a former teammate at LSU, and maybe the large infant could fill Thomas in on just a few of the things Celtics teammate Kevin Garnett has taught him during his last few seasons (some of those lessons are harsh – Garnett reduced Davis to tears in at least one game last year with a dressing down) about how to excel in the NBA.
Thomas’ tantalizing talent was on display for longer and longer stretches last regular season but his minutes dwindled in the playoffs as he struggled to take his game, and especially his defense, up a notch. If Thomas is going to be a big-time player in the NBA, next season is the time to show it.
Finally there is Luol Deng, still owed more than $50 million on the contract John Paxson signed him to last off-season. Will Deng find a way to toughen up and avoid sitting out large swaths of yet another season next year with injuries that some of the doctors who have examined him have dismissed as minor?
Deng is apparently more interested in playing for England (the country that welcomed his family when it fled Sudan when Deng was a child) this summer in world championship qualification competition than he is in focusing completely on best preparing himself for actually playing for the Bulls for a complete season next year.
Of course, I suppose we should watch the draft just to try to figure out what it could possibly be about Gar Forman that justified his promotion to general manager of the Bulls earlier this off-season. Paxson still will make the final call on personnel moves but Forman, who has never been so much as a ball boy with any other NBA organization, is now the official GM.
Some would say a flagship NBA franchise like the Bulls probably should have at least looked around at other clubs to get a feel for what other sort of candidates might have been available.
In fact many can’t help but suspect the Bulls could have tracked someone down with successful previous general managing experience in the NBA.
Of course, someone like that probably would have been just a wee bit more expensive than Forman.
Whoops, I think I just fouled out.
I get called for one every time I violate one of my off-season optimism laws (they all say basically the same thing – don’t be overly pessimistic about one of your favorite teams in the off-season). That’s all for now.
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Jim Coffman brings you SportsMonday every, um, Monday, except when it appears on Tuesday. Jim welcomes your comments.
Posted on June 23, 2009