Catching Up

• I was really looking forward to doing my first video blog, but a whole lot has come up since then. I’ve had some bad personal problems come up, and I’ve also travelled to New York to audition for graduate schools to get my MFA in Acting. I’m now sitting in the Newark airport getting ready to fly to Alabama for my final audition. There have been some bits of baseball news come up since then, and I have kept a list of them so that I could cover them all in my next blog. Unfortunately, the list is in Kentucky, and I won’t be there until Sunday. So here’s a few tidbits to tide you over until then:
• A whole slew of new information has come out concerning Barry Bonds. First of all, it seems that former Giants teammate Bobby Estalella is going to testify against Bonds at his perjury trial. It’s anybody’s guess what Estalella has to say. He may have direct knowledge of Bonds’ steroid use, or he may just have some more innuendo and hearsay to offer. Either way, he’s no smoking gun, especially if Bonds has good defense lawyers.
  Also, word has come out that both Giambi brothers, Jason and Jeremy, are going to testify. They will testify as to their relationship with Bonds’ trainer, Greg Anderson, and also offer their own knowledge of Anderson’s notes. I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that the government’s playing with fire here, as this is just barely admissible. The government wants the Giambis to talk about their own knowledge of Anderson’s PED notes, so that the feds can lend more credence to the claim that Anderson’s “BB” is Barry Bonds. It probably is, but the Giambis don’t have any direct evidence as to that, and their own dealings with Anderson can’t be used against Bonds.
  More damning is a report that the government has found a drug test of Bonds that is positive for anabolic steroids. Bonds denied outright that he had used anabolic steroids, so the government’s perjury case there is easier. And, to my knowledge, it’s very difficult to take anabolic steroids by accident.
  But this isn’t a smoking gun either. With any drug test or drug sample, testers are very careful to track its every movement. If – at any point since the sample was taken – the sample wasn’t fully supervised and accounted for, then the defense can just claim it’s tainted. I don’t know where the test came from, or what tracking system was used, but the defense can also claim that the computers messed up and paired the results with the wrong sample. Or they can claim that it’s a false positive. Or they can claim that Bonds was truthful in claiming that he never used anabolic steroids; any residue in his urine must be the result of tampering – or maybe he’ll take the “I thought it was a Vitamin B12 shot” alibi that Rafael Palmeiro used.
  What I’m trying to say that even as the evidence mounts, the prosecution is only inching along toward meeting its burden of proof.
  
• The Yankees have signed Andy Pettitte to a 1-year, $5.5 MM deal. This provides good insurance for the Yanks. They’re not counting on Pettitte to carry the rotation like they were last year, and even if he does stumble, the team’s out very little money, and they’ve got Phil Hughes to back him up.
• More to come.