Jason Giambi

I couldn’t help but think of the film Dirty Dancing, when news of his ‘confession’ hit the wire. It’s the scene right after Baby providing the alibi for Swayze, admitting that she’d been sleeping with him when the wallets were stolen, only to find out that they fired him anyway. “So I did it for NOTHING?” She cries out at the injustice, and the hefty price she paid for doing the right thing. Does anyone think Giambi wasn’t feeling those very same emotions yesterday and the day before? The Yankees were using his confession to void the stupid contract they signed him to, and the vultures were already nibbling at his flesh.

First impressions of someone like him or Bonds copping to the fact that they used steroids and HGH, for me are like learning that OJ was writing a book about how he killed his wife and Ron Goldman. Though Giambi isn’t as much of a villain in all this as he’s made out to be by the sporting press. After reading a couple articles on him yesterday, it seemed to me that the press had once again lost itself somewhere up its own ass. Case in point: Giambi’s ‘apology’ is full of holes.

There’s a giant disconnect here when it comes to the impact all of this has had on the game of baseball…basically none that I can see (perhaps being part of Red Sox Nation keeps me blind to the outside universe), but for the players it has absolutely had an impact. For the most part they’re a group of lying cocksuckers, for whom the millions of dollars they’ve made over the years doesn’t provide enough comfort to make it possible for them to simply tell the truth. Mark McGuire is perhaps the worst of them all, with the hero-status he achieved in breaking Marris’s record, and that neck of his resembling an unnatural phenomenon rarely found outside of professional wrestling.

He, like Rafael Palmerio, lied to Congress and to all of us. The lust for a lasting positive persona in the world, a reality only to them and the collections of idiots still out there who can’t put two and two together, is apparantly the vice that drives their ongoing delusional behavior. But to be fair, if I were in their shoes, with Pete Rose still kicking around in the world, it wouldn’t be something to look forward to once the truth was finally out there. Painful and shameful and hasta la vista Cooperstown…there is still something to be said about the actual reach of all this, and the fact that no one player deserves to carry the load for everyone. By every account I’ve seen, the use of drugs was widespread within every clubhouse in baseball.

With that in mind, I honestly admire Giambi for coming clean and at least not treating us like we’re idiots. For one player who used the stuff to win an MVP, a home run record or the ability to pitch effectively with a 50 year old body (ahem…Roger), to finally man up and say it, may constitute a reason to hope for the best as this debacle continues to unfold. Because soon enough, Bonds will be one away from tying and then breaking Aaron’s record, and I’m not going to lie and say it won’t matter to me that he cheated. It will. I’ll be pissed off that the guy was able to walk out of the bank holding bags of stolen cash, stroll right past the police and just keep on going. We’re all suckers the day he passes Aaron, and judging by the state of our culture in the year 2007, Giambi will end up being a sucker, while those mentioned previously will ride their silence and false statements into the Hall of Fame.

That sucks! Giambi should be applauded for admitting that he used. I don’t care that he’s a Yankee. I admire his courage. He didn’t do the right thing for a while, but he did do the right thing the other day, and that’s worth something. It should be worth something to all of us. He didn’t have to say it, but he did anyway.