Hello there. My name is David Smithson Michaels, and welcome to DUCK SNORTS. During the season, I’ll go through all the news happening in baseball, pick out the best stories for you, and offer you my expert analysis and opinions on what these stories mean to you, the intelligent fans of baseball. Here are the DUCK SNORTS for Friday, February 15, 2008.

C.C. SABATHIA CALLS OFF CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS, STARTS PREPARING FOR REGULAR SEASON: Cleveland Indians starting pitcher C.C. Sabathia has tabled contract talks in anticipation for the upcoming 2008 Major League Baseball season. I think this is bad news for the Indians, since C.C. Sabathia has been one of the better Indians pitchers for a long time. If a contract isn’t signed, then Sabathia becomes a free agent, meaning he can sign with any team that chooses to offer him a contract. That could come back to hurt the Indians, especially if Sabathia ends up on a team that the Indians have to play against.

On the other hand, it’s good that Sabathia wants to focus on the season instead of talking about however many millions of dollars he wants. As good as Sabathia was in the regular season last year, he was awful in the post-season, especially against the World Series Champion Red Sox. If the Indians want to go somewhere in the playoffs this year, they need Sabathia to show that he’s not a playoff choke artist like Alex Rodriguez.

RYAN DEMPSTER SAYS CUBS WILL WIN THE WORLD SERIES – IS HE RIGHT?: Chicago Cubs pitcher Ryan Dempster was quoted as saying that he thinks his team has a good shot to win the World Series in 2008. It’s necessary for players to have this sort of optimism going into every season. After all, doesn’t every baseball player want to win the World Series? I’m not so sure Depmster should be so bold as to predict a Cubs championship, however. The Cubs are an unlucky franchise with a long history of failing to even make it to the World Series, let alone win it. Some experts claim that the club could be “cursed”, which would explain why the Steve Bartman game of 2003 happened. it’s been 99 years since the Cubs last won a World Series, and people like Dempster are hoping this year’s the year. This is one of many stories that’s worth following this baseball season.

PS: Watch out, Ryan — someone on the reigning World Champions disagrees with you!

ANDY PETTITTE TOLD THE TRUTH, THEN LIED, THEN TOLD THE TRUTH AGAIN: Yankee great Andy Pettitte has been under lots of scrutiny of late, mostly due to his association with notable PED user Roger Clemens. First, it was revealed in the Mitchell Report that he was among many users of PEDs within the major leagues. However, he then came clean about his usage, claiming he used drugs only twice, and it was only to help him recouperate from an injury. Then, in an affidavit made public during the congressional hearings involving Clemens and trainer Brian McNamee, it was revealed that Pettitte used PEDs two more times than he previously admitted. However, it turns out that Pettitte received the drugs (used only to rehab from injuries) from his ailing father, and kept this information secret as long as he could to avoid bringing his father into the media circus. During the hearings, Congressman Henry Waxman commended Pettitte for coming clean.

I agree with Congressman Waxman’s assessment. Throughout his career, Andy Pettitte has been a exemplary role model, a man of religion in addition to being one of the clutchest pitchers in Major League history. His actions in protecting his father just go to show how true this is. Who would want their father, who so selflessly gave to his son so he could pitch again, to go through the same media circus that should be reserved for despicable liars like Roger Clemens? People trying to compare Pettitte’s modified stories to the same backtracking Brian McNamee has employed throughout this ordeal need to get some perspective on life.

Meanwhile, supposed baseball great Roger Clemens is more than happy to use his wife as a human shield against the allegations he’s trying so desperately to avoid, doesn’t even know what a ‘vegan’ is, and would probably stick himself with the blood of aborted fetuses if it meant he could bilk another team out of $30 million while failing to pitch more than 15 games and causing them to lose in the postseason, just like he did for last year’s World Series favorite, the New York Yankees. In my mind, the difference between how these two athletes treat their families and their teams shows me who the real Hall of Famer is. Here’s hoping both Pettitte and Clemens get exactly what they deserve – a shrine in Cooperstown for the former, and a stocking full of coal for the latter.

David Smithson Michaels has bought four of the past six editions of Baseball Prospectus, and is almost finished reading one of them.

Today is a day where we in America celebrate and express our love for our loved ones, regardless of whether it’s through jewelry or chocolate or sacrificing two goats and a dog. And I would like to take this day to celebrate my love for my husband, World Series Champion and Cy Young Award Winner William Roger Clemens, a innocent man that has done nothing wrong that I know about.

It is a travesty, what has happened to our country over these past few days. That a awful lying man like Brian McNamee, a man that me and Roger allowed into our lives, could make up such half-truths about what my Roger did or did not do in regards to utilizing performance enhancing drugs in his capacity as a Major League Baseball player. And that another so-called friend, Andy Pettitte, could do the very same thing. And that the world at large, who could take what this lying man says, and turn it into a witchhunt against what could very well be the best athlete of his or any generation, a sure-fire Hall of Famer, and a fantastic man in general as well. I am ashamed to consider myself an American on days like this. It is only to the credit of Congress that they took time out from their important work for America and the world to give Roger a chance to set his record straight, as well as my record.

I stand by my statement that Roger read to Congress. I read the same article about HGH that McNamee did, and I took the shot when Roger wasn’t home, and Roger said that I should “back off” after that. And I did, and I thank Roger for that. If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have taken that short, or I would have taken the shot, but with Roger there to stop me from taking it, because if Roger knew I was taking the shot the moment I was taking the shot, he would have kept me from knowingly taking the shot. I have seen what HGH has done to baseball, and this country, and I don’t want that to happen to me, especially now that I know more, because knowing is half the battle.

And I don’t want this to happen to my Roger, either. My husband’s life is all about baseball. He trains non-stop every single day. He named our children after strikeouts with the first letters of their names. He sleeps in his jock strap that he only washes once a year. It’s all he ever talks about. Baseball, I mean, not his jock strap. That commercial we did, about him playing golf and then getting a call to come back to baseball and me telling him to not play, is a lot like our life, except usually he gets those calls while at home, usually during dinner, and we fight about it in person because he always forgets about his steak when he gets one of those calls, and then he makes it up to me in lots of special ways that only a husband and wife can understand, and then I reheat his dinner. That is what love is all about, not romance and fancy dinners and frilly lingerie. It’s about fights, and forgiveness, and lots of reheated steak.

As Tammy Wynette once sang, you should stand by your man, no matter how often he breaks your heart or disappoints his children or even lies about what he’s going to do every single year so many times you could set a watch to it. For me, my man is called The Rocket, and that’s why I stand by him. I stood by him when he lost all those important games. I stood by him when that awful man in Boston called him fat and washed-up. I even stood by him when he decided to go to Canada. If you can’t stand by your man through the toughest of times, then you shouldn’t be allowed to stand at all, for anything. And if baseball and baseball fans and anyone else can’t stand by my man, then the same goes for them as well, but double.

On this day of Valentine’s, which is also ironically the day pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training, but don’t hold your breath about any reports, we should be celebrating our love for baseball, as well as our lover’s love of baseball. It should not be celebrating by running my husband through the coals of the media’s obsession with past use of drugs that may or may not improve performance when these drugs weren’t even tested for back when people were using them and if they’re caught now using the drugs they’re punished by baseball anyway, so who cares, even if he used them, which he didn’t? All I know is:

1) My husband is innocent, because he says so.
2) I love my husband.

And that is all that matters in this world. And that’s all that should matter to you. Thanks!

Debbie Clemens’ favorite TV show is Ghost Whisperer.

Hello, baseball fans, from me, Ward York! Welcome back to another upcoming season of Major League Baseball, and another year of semi-regular commentary and opinion from your favorite non-profit place for baseball writing that I edit, Yard Work Dot Org (not to be confused with any other Yard Works that you might find while Googling – ask for the original)! We have some fantastic plans for this year, some of which (or whom) you might actually see come to fruition before your very eyes, as well as ours! But before catchers and pitchers lace them up somewhere within the contiguous United States at an MLB-club-owned facility prior to an official MLB Spring Training game, there is some business that needs attending to.

Long-time readers (and even some random Googlers) know that, in the past, we have criticized, or “taken aim at,” a well-known weblog called FireJoeMorgan Dot Com. (Here is the most blatant example of us scoring lots of points and feeling really good about it.) Ironically enough, that aforementioned weblog is also famous for “taking aim at,” or “pinching a loaf on the chest of,” certain things – in their case, they focus on sports punditry that they believe is full of lies, nonsense, and nonsensical untruths, among other things. While Yard Work Dot Org was originally pleased that the aims of this site were somewhat true and noble, we took umbrage at the way in which they shot their mouths off. In short, we often felt they were using the same sort of fish-in-barrel thug-like tactics that their targets often used, and we took personal offence to that, and we hope that came through in our insults, both in public and private. (Officially, I am not at liberty to discuss whether our attacks on their attacks had anything at all to do with the fact that their web traffic, and public profile, totally dwarfs that of Yard Work Dot Org, despite smart people knowing full well that we are totally awesome and deserve to get interviewed in Sports Illustrated and on various radio shows and do other fame-type things.)

In the last few days, however, new information has come to light that has caused us to rethink our position. According to sporadically reputable websites, the FireJoeMorgan poster known as “Ken Tremendous” is actually a real person called Michael Schur, a writer for the famous TV show The Office. Supposedly, the other writers for the site are famous as well, but I’ve never heard of them, so I’m suspicious of their supposed fame. Everyone here at Yard Work Dot Org is a big fan of the show (especially the ones where the Jim character looks at the camera, and the Dwight character says something psychotic and Amish), and we were shocked to learn that a writer that we thought wasn’t good was actually a writer on a show that is actually good. Suffice it to say that if we knew that “Ken Tremendous” was a famous writer for a funny TV show that actually makes people laugh, we would have taken that into account in our assessment of how great and beyond awesome the writer (and his site) actually are.

To that end, we would like to offer our sincerest apologies for saying bad things about Mr. Schur and anything he’s had part in doing in regards to riding Mike Celizic like a rented mule with a hacksaw in his or her back. And please be assured that, unlike other people whose opinions are changing in light of this news about you being famous, we are totally sincere in our newfound appreciation for your talent and fame, and we (meaning I) would like you to know that if there’s anything you’d like us (meaning me) to do in exchange for, say, a romantic dinner with the Angela character in real life, let me (meaning Ward York) know well in advance so I can buy a discount plane ticket and get my back waxed. Also, if you have any contact with any of the people that work at your, or any, television network, I could help you out in exchange for that as well – I have a proposal for a new Manimal series (starring Timothy Dalton and that pretty girl from Grey’s Anatomy) that is sure to, as they say in Hollywood, “impress lots of people with its verisimilitude.” I know there’s some sort of strike going on between the networks and writers, but don’t worry – I have no problem crossing the picket lines and being a “scab,” so please make sure to mention this when you talk to someone at the networks.

Anyway, that’s all for now, dear readers of Yard Work Dot Org. There’s plenty coming up for baseball in the next few months, including the regular season, and then the playoffs, so stay tuned for that, and for anything else that might happen as well. See you in the boxscore! And at the NBC Studio security gate!

First of all, when I say “shut up,” that goes for everyone. George Mitchell: shut up about your go-nowhere 22-month crusade that turned up nothing more than a few signed checks and Josias Manzanillo. You did absolutely nothing that a high school graduate with internet access couldn’t do in about 1/22nd the time. ESPN: shut up about the “tragedy” that this report brings – this isn’t Hiroshima or Little Big Horn or either one of the towers. Hell, this isn’t even Joe Theismann getting his leg broken. Carl Pavano popping a hemorrhoid has more emotional juice behind it than this pooch-screw. Listening to Buster Olney last week on ESPN Radio claim Wally Joyner was peer-pressured into taking steroids to get his power back almost made me spit up my venti double-mocha caramel latte! (For the record, I was only listening because my idiot brother Hal thinks Mike & Mike are actually funny. It’s pretty clear which of us got our dad’s brains, that’s for sure).

Hell, the whole sports media should shut up. Some guys couldn’t wait to throw former Yankee great Roger Clemens under the magical mystery steroid bus. I’m pretty sure Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel ended up with his stomach in his balls trying to post the first “CLEMENS IS EVIL” column, while other clowns tripped up over each other’s pill-powered boners trying to one-up the overblown rhetoric. All I know is: all you uptight moral Bible-thumpers riding Bonds’ acne-scarred back for the past 3 years in your columns better shit or get off the pot if you’re going to continue to claim that steroid users deserves an asterisk and a Hall of Fame snub and all that garbage.

And you know who needs to shut up the most? The fans! Yeah, that’s right, the fans, with their “oh, we want the game to be PURE and FREE OF DRUGS!” Here’s a newsflash for the fans, the owners, the executives, and anyone else that’s had their head up their ass for the past, oh, 100 years: cheating and baseball know each other in a very Biblical manner. It’s called “gaining a competitive advantage.” If you get caught, you should get punished, but if you can get away with it, who the hell cares?

I don’t care if current Yankee great Andy Pettite shoots up with heroin before every start, stabs stray puppies on off days, and has sex with a Tom Brady Fathead – if he can get us into the 7th every 5th day with a lead, I’m happy, as long as he doesn’t get caught! If 300-game-winner Roger Clemens wants to make yet another June comeback, I’ll gladly welcome him back into the fold if he promises to not pitch like grass-filled dogshit. And if that means more needles in the ass, then I’ll pump him up my damn self! And if you seriously think that jug-eared bow-legged lump Posada isn’t doing something illegal to hit over .300 as a catcher, then I will personally pay for your CAT scan and a Hooked on Phonics CD set. We won with guys on the juice, we won with guys on greenies, and we won with guys shoveling fifteen-foot snowdrifts up their nose. The key thing is WE WON. Wake me when MLB turns into a whiny two-faced bitch like the NCAA, and actually asks for their hardware back.

Winning is never pretty, but fans want to believe that it’s all done with hard work and compassion for your fellow man and being some sort of gutty Jeterian myth of a man. The fact is that winning takes needles in the ass, arms, between the toes, under the eyeball, and anywhere else you want them shoved. It takes knowing that sometimes you need more than what’s under your skin and in your heart to get that winning run home, especially given how much cash these guys get nowadays. Baseball players that just make it to the major leagues get at least a couple hundred THOUSAND dollars just for dressing up & sitting on the pine next to the batrack – they’d better do what they can to earn their pay. And is there really a difference between scuffing a baseball with a beltbuckle and using a little chemstry? The drive behind both acts is the same – the desire to win.

And don’t give me that “oh, these STEROIDS meant that us CLEAN players couldn’t break into the bigs” nonsense. Save it for one of Rosenthal’s ill-informed rumor columns. You want to know why Wally Joyner lost his job? Because he was a first baseball that couldn’t hit 20 HRs a year without a juiced ball, and spent more time on the DL than in the batter’s box. Get in line behind Yankee would-be-great Nick Johnson and about a thousand more talented players, Wallace. And if you, Mr. Joyner, are losing your chance at the bigs to world beaters like Chris Donnells and Mark Carreon, then get your technical school degree already, because you had no shot to begin with. The fact that those chumps needed PEDs to do as poorly as they did to stick around as briefly as they did says more about the quality of their competition than the quality of their character.

So, yeah, Bud Selig should be proud. He spent millions of dollars on a report that didn’t prove anything that wasn’t already known, and also keeps the door open for more bias and speculation to fuel more idiot witch-hunts. You took a growing and thriving sport at the height of its earning powers, and turned it into a crappy episode of The X-Files. And yes, I’m talking about the ones without Scully & Mulder. It takes a man of great and triumphant stupidity, Bud, to continually shit on a business that’s succeeding in spite of your efforts. You could dig up Bart Giamatti’s corpse, and even that dessicated sack of pretentious crap would know enough to just farm out the PED tests & focus on CURRENT offenders, instead of looking into supposed past abuses. Congratulations on giving the sub-moronic sports media more sub-moronic soundbytes to mull over. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be over here, looking the other way when the HGH arrives in the clubhouse, & ordering extra cases of champagne for that next Yankee championship celebration. Stick that in your ass, baseball.

New York Yankees Senior Vice-President Hank Steinbrenner has an Agnostic Front tattoo on his left shoulder.

Hello readers. This is former New York Met Lastings Milledge, coming to tell you his side of the story. In case you’re living under a rock with some terrorists, or you were out shaking what your momma gave you with some fine men or women that are the same age as you, Lastings was traded to the Washington Nationals for two guys that Lastings’ mentor and personal hero Rickey Henderson would call “chumps.” Now, he understands that Ryan Church can hit a little bit. But Lastings has seven years on the guy, and Church is always getting hurt. If he had a choice between an old man that can rake but gets hurt, or a young kid that can rake and isn’t hurt, you can guess who’d get chosen.

Brian Schneider was the other guy in the deal. He’s a catcher, and Lastings’ former GM Omar Minaya makes it sound like he was the key to the deal, since he’s now going to start for the Mets as their full-time catcher. That’s great for Schneider, but I thought the Mets already had a catcher when they traded for Johnny Estrada. Lastings isn’t sure how many catchers you can have on one team, but the Mets seem to have a lot, and it’s not too clear what they’re going to do with them all. Maybe one of them can play in the field in Lastings’ place. That could be the big plan.

To be honest, he was hoping to stay with the Mets a long, long time. Lastings liked New York, and he liked playing in front of New York fans. They know what’s going on, and even if they’re too loud or too dumb, their heart’s in the right place. Lastings has some problem with people in the New York press, because they don’t seem to realize that it’s OK for people to listen to hip-hop and wear certain things, and that doing these things doesn’t automatically make you a bad person or someone that likes to shoot people in hip-hop radio stations. But Lastings understands that old white people don’t like it when young non-white people live their lives without checking in with white people to find out what’s OK and what’s not OK.

What Lastings doesn’t understand is why no one on the Mets seemed to like him. Maybe he made some mistakes (which Lastings already apologized for, by the way), but young people make mistakes. Lastings is only 22. If everyone in the world was a perfect mature person at 22, then we would have socialized medicine, no traffic on the highways, perfect DirecTV reception 24/7, and a Fantastic Four movie that didn’t suck. But people make mistakes – that’s what makes them people.

Lastings doesn’t know what he did to get former manager Willie Randolph so upset that he had to ride the pine all the time while guys like Marlon Anderson and Shawn Green played a lot of games down the stretch. Maybe Willie is jealous of Lastings’ youth and contagious exuberance. Maybe Willie learned how to hate his own people from his former coach, well-known racist Joe Torre. Or maybe he’s just dumb. Lastings heard stories about how Willie would play Jose Reyes in the leadoff spot in spite of a bad OBP, or bat David Wright low in the order because he was too young to be a real RBI guy (whatever that means), or bunt with Carlos Beltran early in games in order to move a runner along. Lastings just chalked those stories up to a rookie manager’s mistakes. Like he said in the last paragraph, people make mistakes. Lastings bought a Young Jeezy CD and that Outkast album where Andre 3000 tries to front like Prince. It happens. But now, with hindsight and first-hand experience in mind, it looks to Lastings like Willie’s just as dumb as those cracker-ass crackers (pardon Lastings’ inflammatory racially-tinged language) Billy Wagner and Paul LoDuca.

What those two guys Wagner & LoDuca ever did to think they know what they’re talking about is beyond Lastings. All Wagner ever seemed to do was blow leads late in the season, and all LoDuca seemed to do was ground into double plays in front of Wright and Beltran. And that’s when LoDuca wasn’t hurt – when he was hurt, he was too busy getting shot down by college girls and flapping his lips about being a teammate to really be a teammate. Lastings wished that more old white ballplayers would just shut their damn mouths.

It’s the same in Los Angeles, where a bunch of cranky old white dudes are mouthing off because younger players – some of them black, by the way – are taking away their playing time. Lastings believes that you gotta earn your time on the field, even if you’re an old-timer with lots of pals on the team. And old white folk that have to stick a tube of Ben Gay up their ass to pull on their stirrups, or need a walker with wheels to go 1st-to-3rd on a hit to right-center, shouldn’t say word one about losing playing time.

But what does Lastings know? He is just a 22-year-old phenom that could have anchored a young and potentially dominant Mets lineup for the next five years. Instead, Lastings is just a 22-year-old phenom that will anchor a young and potentially dominant Nationals lineup for the next five years. Lastings is looking forward to watching Wily Mo Pena hit lots of towering fly balls deep into that river in Washington. Ryan Zimmerman is a stone cold pimp. If Elijah Dukes is as good as folks say, he’ll be the Bun B to Lastings’ Pimp C (RIP). And if they ever get any pitchers that aren’t straight-up garbage, the Nationals could run wild all over the National League. Maybe they don’t even need pitching – if a bunch of slugger dudes like Colorado can make it to the World Series, then it’s not a long shot that Lastings and company could do the very same thing next year, even if they don’t have their own personal dragon slayer.

Anyway, in the few hours since this trade happened, all those bad feelings are now water under that bridge. Lastings is moving on, and he is looking forward to hanging out with Agent Zero and Sheriff Gonna Getcha in the city that will come to know and love him, even if he has to share a locker room with that cradle-robbing Soprano-wannabe LoDuca. If that guy has the sense God gave a chicken nugget, he’ll keep his damn mouth shut whenever he gets near me. Just saying.

Finally, Lastings just wants to say that the 350 at-bats he wasted in New York, for a team that can’t tell a good player from an overrated pale-ass hustle chump, will be treasured memories. And when the Nationals come to visit Shea next year, and Lastings goes deep against that redneck know-nothing hick Wagner to take the lead in the top of the 9th, and that stupid ass apple pops out of that stupid ass hat, Lastings hopes some fans near the foul line will be ready for an enthusiastic and totally respectful high five in the bottom of the 9th. Lastings wishes you a very safe and very Merry Christmas! And a safe Jewish holiday!