The Poster Boy For Bad Behavior

Please listen closely. This is the only time you’ll hear me say this. I feel bad for Jason Giambi.

Don’t get me wrong… I can’t stand him and his beady little eyes, his ferret face, and his sweaty hair. If he were the last man on Earth, you couldn’t pay me to come within 20 feet of him. But he’s going to be the scapegoat in this steroids scandal when there are much bigger fish to fry.

Giambi has come within a hair’s breadth of admitting that he used the ‘roids. Tell us something we don’t know. He looked like the Michelin Man for the past decade, so it’s not exactly like he was fleecing us. More shocking is the accusation that Floyd Landis was doping because we couldn’t see the tell-tale symptoms of abuse. But with Giambi, we figured.

The thing is that no one else is stepping forward to admit any wrongdoing, and yet the one player who is will be skewered by public opinion. He may even be released from his contract because of his comments. Oh certainly, that’s the solution. Punish him so severely that no one will come clean of their own accord, and instead the game will be infested with rats and besieged by witch-hunts.

Baseball needs to clean up the mess, and if there’s a player willing to come forward as an example, we should listen, learn, and then eradicate the problem.

I don’t think Giambi wants to be the poster boy for a “Just Say No” campaign, but he’s doing more than a lot of other people, and I have to have some respect for that, even if I can’t stand him, because all the while, the biggest fish keeps hitting homeruns and I have no respect for that.