MLBeat

If you're curious to gauge the baseball-fan populace's level of anticipation for the 2005 season, look no further than the practice draft rooms at ESPN's fantasy baseball section. These mock live drafts are mere outlines of the real thing; they only last seven rounds and your positional flexibility is low, meaning that if you take Teixeira in Round 2 then you can't take any more corner infielders, even if you want to steal Daryle Ward in Round 5 just to get a rise from the crowd. In the final round everyone scrambles for a catcher because it's the only unfilled position, meaning the guy with the last pick ends up with A.J. Pierzynski or Paul Lo Duca.

And yet these rooms are constantly filled, with roto-heads and general enthusiasts who can't wait a moment longer for things to get rolling. (Naturally I only know this because I'm one of the top five or ten most offending parties. Full disclosure as always in the MLBeat house.) But there's still 5-6 weeks left to whittle away, so we have to put up with the usual STOBS articles (that would be Spring Training Optimism BS, to coin a new term) that serve no purpose other than to attempt to stir up interest in semi-fans who haven't really been paying attention and thus don't know if their team really has a chance this year.

It is out of a desperate need for distraction from these wimpy fluff pieces that I hereby declare: Thank God for Steroids.

I'm not even kidding. Steroid use is something else to talk about, it's interesting, and there are any number of thoughtful sides to take on the issue. Some folks think steroid use has marred the game and its records (I don't), some folks think MLB's cleanup attempts are insufficient thus far (I don't), and some folks even think Barry Bonds should decline to pursue Aaron's home run record (I don't, and this is the best reason why). Some of us even found ourselves sympathizing with Bonds when he delivered his now-infamous press conference this week. I did, except for this one little digression from his otherwise cogent defense to the sports media:

All of you guys have lied. Should you have an asterisk behind your name? ... Yeah, I lied to my parents when I was growing up. Lied to my friends. Have I lied about baseball? Yeah, I told a couple of stories that I hit a couple of balls places that I really didn't.

Clearly Bonds was getting carried away with himself, as he is wont to do in these situations. The analogy is deeply flawed. None of these reporters are arguably the best ever to pick up a pen or laptop; there is a difference between fibbing about a homer you hit and lying to a grand jury (or a ravenous sports press for that matter); and if members of the press corps have lied in print then they deserve fates worse than asterisk-ing. Bonds was asking for it here - I felt myself actually cringing while watching him say it. He seems to get reamed by the press at least once every year, and this year we were getting an early start.

Which means it simply blows my mind to read Gwen Knapp's column today in the SF Chronicle. She admits to lying about Bonds and steroids! This is ballsy because 1) sportswriters have an understandable bias against Bonds on account of he treats them like feces, 2) Gwen has nothing to lose by holding the party line and playing sound defense of her sound reputation, or by even refusing to acknowledge the accusation at all, and 3) she shifts the focus to Mark McGwire, and properly so since his (and Sosa's) home-run chase attracted much more unadulterated fanfare while being, in retrospect, more suspicious. I'll say it here and now: the MLBeat shall duly recognize all sports columns that are ballsy enough to attract the attention of our editor, who also happens to be our writer, who also happens to make the endless business decisions to boot.

Unfortunately the column is not without a few traps. Things start to fall apart around here:

I have lied about Bonds, too, but not in the way he meant when he went after the media at his spring-training debut on Tuesday. The first time I saw him in 2001, I said to myself: "He's juiced.'' I didn't say it in this column because, again, I didn't have proof. But I was sure of it.

I have committed several more lies of omission since Bonds was implicated in the BALCO case a year and a half ago. I covered his 700th home run and never once mentioned that maybe, just maybe, he didn't reach the milestone naturally. I had plenty of excuses -- a brutal deadline, a reluctance to draw a cloud over the celebration, an inability to introduce such an important topic without letting it become the entire story. It was cowardice as much as anything, but it was a lie, too.

Actually, it's wasn't a lie. If you choose not to go to the public with information you don't have on a scandal that may or not exist, then you're not lying, you're simply being a journalist. Many journalists do lie by omission - enough in recent years to justify the WMD analogy a few paragraphs later - but Gwen wasn't lying here, she was just suppressing her own personal opinion. That may be tantamount to dishonesty for an opinion columnist, but I still think it's a big difference.

So we're left with the feeling that she's bending over backwards to defend Bonds here, in the face of a thousand reasons to let go of the handle, open the drawbridge, and let in the wolves.