When the report came out most of the guys in the office were not surprised. Two things surprised me about that report.
First was that some people did not have a problem with “juicing”. They pointed out that baseball is a competitive sport and that their job is fill seats. I mentioned but what about betting in baseball? “That’s different. That’s cheating.”
The second thing was one name on the list. Chuck Knoblauch was on the list. I used to pay some attention to the Yankees and Knoblauch was one of my favorite players. He was not a superstar, did not show up in the news dating some famous model or singer, and really just did his job.
I got a kick out out of the fact that when a Yankee’s pitcher hit someone, Chuck was the designated payback. He’d almost always do this twist and get hit in the back and just take the base. When he got traded I thought that was just silly. They made lots of trades and I just stopped paying attention to baseball.
Nothing will come of this report. There will be some sacrificial motions and some players may get tarred and feathered. But as long as baseball keeps paying people multi-million dollar contracts then the players will just find new ways to “become more competative”.
