3 Men Forged 2 Decades of Labor Peace

Sometime early in Bud Selig‘s celebration of baseball’s new collective bargaining agreement on Wednesday, he wondered if the two sides had needed to go through the pain of 1994 in order to achieve the peaceful — and very profitable — coexistence they enjoy today. It was almost certainly meant as a rhetorical question. Selig answered […]

George Steinbrenner Gets the Love He Always Wanted

There will be an outpouring of love and affection for George Steinbrenner today following the news that he died of a heart attack early this morning at 80. He would have liked that. Truth is, he lived for that. For all the bombast, the attention-getting rants, the mean-spirited attacks of his players and humiliating firings […]

Mr. President: It’s Time to Let Bonds and Clemens Fade Away

Dear Barack, I know how big a sports fan you are, so I’m sure you saw yesterday’s court decision to throw out key evidence in the perjury case against Barry Bonds. Your prosecutors have not commented on whether they will continue to try the case or fold. So before they can decide to waste more […]

Bryce Harper Is Lucky He Doesn’t Play Basketball

What’s the difference between Bryce Harper and Eric Bledsoe? Money. Lots of money. Harper is the 17-year-old phenom taken first in Monday night’s baseball draft.  A latter day Mickey Mantle, Harper skipped the last two years of high school, was home schooled, got his GED and spent the past year at a junior college where […]

Second-Guessing Yankees Decision to Start Phil Hughes

I was talking with David Cone over lunch last June when the subject of Phil Hughes came up. Hughes had been awful as the team’s fifth starter, giving up more than five runs a game and rarely reaching the fifth inning. I asked Cone if the young righthander would ever come close to being the […]

Baseball Union succeeds where John McCain fails

Since Congress won’t protect you—or major league baseball players—from dangerous supplements, the Major League Baseball Players Union has just sent out a list of 104 supplements its players should avoid. The union terms the supplements “dangerous/contaminated,” in a clear an attempt help its players steer clear of substances that would falsely test positive for performance enhancing […]

John McCain Flip Flops With Your Safety

John McCain, who spent millions of taxpayer money chasing after baseball players he believed were taking steroids, has once again buckled under pressure from the real distributors of steroids and other illegal substances—the nation’s supplement makers. McCain, the self appointed champion of cleaning up sports, introduced a bill just last month that would have required […]

Roger Clemens Unplugged: The Rocket Breaks His Silence

“Jon, it’s Roger Clemens. Did I get you at a bad time?” It’s a phone call I’d been expecting for a couple of days—and a conversation I’d been trying to have for about a year—but yes, it was a bad time. Clemens had reached me as I was returning home on the Long Island Railroad. […]

Roger Talks, and the Seamheads.com Team Responds

After new Seamheads.com writer Jon Pessah sat down and talked with Roger Clemens last month, he polled his fellow Seamheads for their take on the Rocket and his place in baseball. Here’s the transcript of the conversation that followed. “I used to be the biggest Roger Clemens fan alive. Then he left the Sox and I […]

Selig, NFL Rushing to Judgment on Blood Testing

Looks like Major League Baseball and the NFL could be headed for a major collision with its players over a blood test for human growth hormone. The Washington Post is reporting today that the NFL has proposed implementing the blood test for HGH that tripped up a professional rugby player in Britain earlier this week. […]

Remembering a Baseball Player So We Don’t Forget the Mistakes of Our Past

A good friend of mine lost a good friend yesterday. My friend is Claire Smith, and her friend was Alfred “Slick” Surratt. Slick was a player for the Kansas City Monarchs, a teammate of Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson in the Negro Baseball League. He died at 87. Claire was one of the first women […]