Sports Radio Boston » Sports Radio New York

Sports Radio Boston – Bar Stool Sports Scores!

sportsradioboston — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:55:37 +0000

Bar Stool Sports & Julie Kahn

That psssssst sound you just heard was Julie Kahn pissing herself because she just found out I’m going to be on Toucher and Rich tomorrow at 9am.

Courtesy of Bar Stool Sports Boston

And the first salvo in the Sports Hub Vs. WEEI war for the Stool has been fired!

Advantage Sports Hub.

My guess is that if I dominate this appearence, like I’m sure I will, I’ll probably get my own late night show and have to go head to head against Mikey Adams which would kind of suck since he’s my favorite guy on WEEI.

But what are you going to do right?

I don’t get paid to pick who I fight. I get paid to knock them out.

Boston Sports Radio – Red Sox Nation Betrayed?

sportsradioboston — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:36:56 +0000

The Red Sox Nation, Betrayed

By CHARLES McGRATH - Article Courtesy of: New York Times

SUCH is the gloomy, guilt-ridden New England conscience that within hours after a report that Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz had tested positive for steroid use in 2003, Red Sox fans were already feeling miserable again.

By 6 on Friday morning, the lines at the sports radio station WEEI, Boston’s equivalent of New York’s WFAN, were jammed with breast-beating callers, phoning in to say that the Sox World Series victories in 2004 and 2007 were tainted — too good to be true, and now a source of shame. We should have known: you can’t shake off the Curse in a mere 86 years.

Left, John Bazemore/Associated Press; right, Brian Snyder, via Reuters

SAY IT AIN’T SO Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz have both been linked to steroids.

Related New York Times Articles:

Reflections of a Yankee Fan (August 2, 2009)

News Analysis: If Every Team Was Doping, Why Use Asterisks? (July 31, 2009)

Ramirez and Ortiz Tune Out Allegations (August 1, 2009)

A lot of fans appeared to feel personally betrayed by Ortiz, or Big Papi, as he is known to Red Sox Nation — an immensely personable and popular figure, not to mention the greatest clutch hitter in the team’s history, who had steadfastly denied using performance-enhancing drugs. Almost no mention was made of the flaky and mercurial Ramirez, traded to the Dodgers last season and now just back with them after a 50-game suspension for recently taking a fertility drug banned by baseball. Manny who?

But if the Red Sox record is tainted, it’s no more tainted than that of any other team. In this respect, at least, it’s clear that the field was level. Not every player used steroids, but enough did, it appears, that no clubhouse was remotely a drug-free zone. Not to shift the blame, but the list of Yankees who have either admitted to or are accused of doping includes Alex Rodriguez, Andy Pettitte, Gary Sheffield, Chuck Knoblauch, Jason Giambi, Jason Grimsley and Roger Clemens. And if they did, the juice doesn’t seem to have done much good in the years in question. We played better.

If you’re an ungenerous Red Sox fan, what you’re really hoping right now is that Derek Jeter will get fingered. He’s the Big Papi of the Yankees, the soul of the team, and if he were to get caught using, it would finally end all the sanctimony and the pretense that the problem was confined to a few bad apples. Alas, that’s unlikely to happen — Jeter really does seem to be a straight-shooter — but who can say for sure? No one seems completely above suspicion anymore.

Meanwhile, some of the finger-wagging should surely be redirected at Major League Baseball itself, which, together with the players union, for a long while chose to look the other way when the steroid question came up. The tests in 2003 were never intended to catch people, and the results were not supposed to be made public at all, let alone dribbled out in a way that seems designed to make headlines. Those early tests were an exercise in fact finding; the results shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

Nor should Congress get off the hook. The steroid hearings in Washington were exercises in moralizing and pontification that did little to shed light on the problem. For a start, we don’t know for certain how and whether steroids do much more than retard the effects of aging. And if that is the case, let’s ban them in the clubhouse but make them freely available to the middle-aged! Nor, despite all the horror stories, has it been scientifically proved how harmful steroids are — at least, the way baseball players use them. About all we know is that it’s just about impossible to design a foolproof test.

So what do we do? Hard to say, except that “cheating,” like it or not, has always been a part of baseball — before there were syringes there were amphetamines, or “greenies,” and bats that were corked — and that for the Boston faithful it makes little sense to dwell in the past or don sackcloth and pack up the World Series banners. We fans deserve them, even if the players don’t. And whom should we send them to, anyway? The Yankees? Don’t think so.

Boston Sports News – The View From New York

sportsradioboston — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 19:47:50 +0000

Positive or Negative, There’s No Changing History

By GEORGE VECSEY

David Ortiz Boston Red Sox

They count. For all the instant disillusionment and partisan morality, the Red Sox’ championships of 2004 and 2007 still stand.

What we saw in October 2004 — the eight straight victories by the Red Sox over the Yankees and the Cardinals — remains an epic run.

Johnny Damon really did stand up in the Sox clubhouse on the night they fell three games behind the Yankees and assert that his team was quite capable of winning four games in a row. Which it promptly did. Twice.

This history is worth recalling because the Red Sox are coming to Yankeeland for a four-game series, Thursday through Sunday. No doubt Yankee fans will remind current Sox players and their fans of the tests from 2003 that detected the use of performance-enhancing drugs by David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez.

The results for Ortiz and Ramirez, which were part of what was supposed to be anonymous research into the extent of drug use, were first reported by The New York Times on Thursday.

Yankee fans will conveniently omit the fact that Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, Jason Giambi and even good old Andy Pettitte have been connected to illegal stuff in recent years.

It is unfortunate that baseball — management and union — contrived to duck serious testing until finally forced by Congress and unavoidable evidence. Penalties came only later.

We all have to live with that. There is no going back, no asterisks. Barry Bonds hit his home runs with that magnificent short stroke of his, and, no doubt in my mind, enhancement from Balco. There are shadows over Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, but their home runs count.

Fans should think what they want, but unofficial tests do not count. The same is true in cycling, which avoided credible testing for many years in the face of blatant cheating. But incomplete research tests from 1999 that suggested Lance Armstrong had used EPO for blood doping are meaningless. I believe journalists should reveal details like this when they can be verified, but the Ortiz and Ramirez tests from 2003 do not count.

Three things I know about sports and drugs.

One is that anabolic steroids and EPO are banned from almost all sports, for good reason. Young athletes have committed suicide from the effects of steroids; cyclists have fallen off their bikes quite dead because their altered blood was like sludge. That’s why certain substances are banned. Fans who blithely say they have no problem with sports doping are volunteering to be accessories to death.

Another thing I know is that athletes are almost always aware of what they are putting in their bodies. They may not be able to name one judge on the highest court in their land, or know the words of their national anthem, but they know the ingredients they are ingesting or injecting. It is their life, their livelihood. So I never believe it when athletes say their trainer or their buddy just handed them some stuff. Please.

The third thing I know is that sports fans have to give up this false expectation that athletes should demonstrate higher standards than politicians, bankers, mortgage executives or, for that matter, journalists. Stop expecting athletes to be role models. Caveat emptor.

Athletes can be as overpriced as the soggy and salty $13.25 processed pork sandwich I foolishly purchased at Throneberry Field Forever in Flushing the other night. The real question is, why do people pay outrageous prices for dreck, on the field and in the concession stands?

Still, sports can be a pretty good show. I am not downgrading the derring-do of Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, both of whom I assume to be clean, nor am I erasing the memories of lumbering Papi and mystical Manny, back to back, making Boston the dominant team of this century, so far. It still counts.

In recent years, Ortiz has been the subject of many e-mail messages I have received from self-appointed physiognomists, phrenologists and physiologists, claiming that any fool could see Papi was doping. Just look at the bones in his face. The change in his body. The clutch home runs he was swatting. My response was, Got proof?

The floating suspicion about Ortiz has caused some readers to point out that The New York Times owns the Boston Globe as well as 17.75 percent of New England Sports Ventures, which owns the Red Sox and 80 percent of the New England Sports Network. This tangle of interests could lead The Times to cover up evidence of doping by Red Sox players, readers have said.

One could tell readers that there has never been the slightest pressure to go easy on the Sox and that no matter how hard some of us criticize the Yankees, I have never once heard a Yankees official claim it was motivated by corporate interests. Fortunately, The Times says it is selling its share of the Sox by January, and not a moment too soon.

For now, the news is out that Papi and Manny were part of a dirty generation. I do not have much nostalgia for the singular home-run exploits by sluggers of the past age, but the collective success of the Sox in Fenway Park and elsewhere was dramatic and historic. Just guessing Yankees fans won’t see it that way.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com