Bent Corner

What do the TV ratings for the Washington Nationals have in common with steroids? Both are being investigated by Major League Baseball.

Speaking to members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, Commissioner Bud Selig said that MLB will be checking into the accuracy of published Nielsen ratings. The SportsBusiness Journal reported last week that the Nationals were pulling in an average of only 9,000 households in the Washington area.

That’s pretty bad.

It’s not as bad as the TV ratings the team was pulling when it was still in Montreal. They weren’t even televised the last few years was the Expos.

I was perusing the sports section of Waldenbooks the other day when I stumbled upon this book from former Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly. It’s entitled
Hate Mail from Cheerleaders and Other Adventures from the Life of Reilly. It’s a collection of some of Reilly’s Sports Illustrated columns.

I’ve never really liked Rick Reilly. He always struck me as being kind of a douche.

For instance, he got some attention a few years ago when he called out Sammy Sosa in the Cub’s locker room to go with him to a lab and take a urine test for steroids. Sosa freaked out and Reilly wrote a column about it.

Though he often attacked Sosa (and Barry Bonds) for using steroids, he continuously defended Lance Armstrong against allegations of blood doping and using other performance enhancers. Granted, there has never been any proof that Armstrong cheated. Then again, nobody has ever proven that Sosa or Bonds cheated either.

Speaking of Lance Armstrong, he even wrote the forward to this book.

I flipped the book over to see how much they were actually charging for this piece of drivel. Not that I wanted to buy it. What I saw on the back cover surprised me. It’s a photograph showing Reilly sitting in a chair with the same three cheerleaders from the cover. Instead of looking at him like they were pissed off — like they did on the front cover — it shows them kissing him. One of the girls was actually sitting on his lap.

Don’t they have laws against this? Even if they were supposed to be college cheerleaders and not high school cheerleaders, he’s old enough to be their father. I guess the idea of the photo is to show that though the cheerleaders were quite perturbed at Rick Reilly over something he wrote, they since softened their opinion of him to the extent that they now only want to shower him with their teenage kisses.

Something like that.

I just find it more then a little creepy. In my opinion, men Reilly’s age should be kept away from cheerleaders.

Wondering what Congress is doing about ending the war in Iraq? They are too busy investigating Major League Baseball. Specifically, they are looking into steroid and human growth hormone use by players before such substances were banned by Major League Baseball.

Not only are they sniffing around to find out what former players such as Roger Clemons were taking, they are evidently investigating baseball player wives.

From the New York Daily News:

Brian McNamee told congressional investigators Thursday that Roger Clemens’ wife took human growth hormone before she appeared with the pitcher in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue in 2003, according to a Washington source.

I understand why Congress is looking into steroid and human growth hormone use by baseball players. The Constitution is quite specific that Congress is to provide oversight over professional sports leagues.* It doesn’t say anything about their wives.

* No it doesn’t. I was being sarcastic. I do that sometimes.