Johnny Damon is an innocent man. I believe that there’s been a plan in place since the last out of the 2004 World Series to destroy Johnny Damon’s reputation and credibility. Baseball has had it in for the Boston Red Sox since day one.

I helped broker the deal that got John Henry’s ownership group in place in Boston. Part of the deal was that John Henry was going to sell the Marlins to Jeffrey Loria, who was going to sell the Expos to Major League Baseball, who were going to contract the Expos and funnel the profits through an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands to Wayne Huizenga’s real estate interests. The real estate interests were going to capitalize on the housing boom and buy and sell real estate for a few years until they earned enough money to buy nuclear warheads on the Soviet black market, and from there, who knows what would happen.

There are some very bad people behind this. I met them on a speedboat off Key Biscayne in the summer of 2000. It was myself, Bud Selig, John Henry, Jeffrey Loria, Wayne Huizenga, and various silent men in expensive black suits who stood at each corner of the speedboat holding enormous suitcases and submachine guns. The contents of the suitcases were never revealed to me.

And the deal almost went down. Major League Baseball could right now be funding the interests of al-Qaeda in the former Soviet republics, were it not for the shootout that ensued between us, the Coast Guard, and representatives of one of the major Colombian drug cartels. By the grace of God, none of us were harmed, and we made it back to Miami, where we swore never to speak of it again.

After the World Series, though, everything changed. I happen to know that Bud Selig has had a personal vendetta against John Henry ever since he took over in Boston. The Expos never got contracted. Wayne Huizenga never got his money. And don’t think that Wayne Huizenga’s political connections don’t matter in baseball; I’m sure there were unmarked vans parked outside Mr. Selig’s office almost every night. There is a certain Senator who is very much interested in removing baseball’s antitrust exemption.

In November, Commissioner Selig called me into his office. I never saw his face; he sat with his back to me, smoking a pipe and stroking an enormous cat like Dr. Claw in “Inspector Gadget.” He told me that I owed him a favor, since he saved my life in that speedboat shootout in the Florida Keys; he gave me a pair of night-vision goggles and a vial of anabolic steroids and told me to sneak into the Red Sox clubhouse and take down their most visible player, Johnny Damon, as a lesson to John Henry.

I said, “In the words of Bill and Ted, that is totally bogus.”

He told me to wave goodbye to our stock price. And then a funny thing happened. When tickets went on sale last year, all calls to the Red Sox ticket office were rerouted to my home phone. I, myself, and my lovely wife personally filled more than ten thousand season ticket orders.

The Red Sox have a long mutual history with the San Diego Padres; Larry Lucchino and Theo Epstein both worked for the Padres in the past, and a number of their front-office cronies did as well. Before John Henry owned the Florida Marlins, they were owned by the same Wayne Huizenga who was cheated out of his end of this conspiracy.

And something that’s very interesting about the Florida Marlins is that when you rearrange the letters in their name, it spells “FRIAR AILS DAMON.” And the Padres, of course, are also known as the Friars. So I think if you looked behind the curtain, you might find that this conspiracy has been in place for many years. Perhaps Theo Epstein himself is so far in MLB’s pocket that was the one who donned those night-vision goggles and snuck into his own locker room in an attempt to taint the legacy of his own All-Star center fielder. This is truly a black day for baseball.

Patrick Byrne is the Chairman of the Board & President of Overstock.com®. With one exception, Byrne has never even seen cocaine in his life so in case you’re wondering, no, he’s not a cokehead.