Two more Dunce Caps to hand out, and for pretty much the same reason.
Oakland A's pitcher Bartolo Colon, 10-9 on the season, was scheduled to pitch today vs. Tampa Bay. It's not happening, because, for all intents & purposes, Colon's season is over, suspended by Major League Baseball for 50 games for the same exact reason that Melky Cabrera drew the ban last week. Colon tested positive for testosterone, and this is from a guy who had a stem cell treatment done a couple of years back, and made a comeback last year with the Yankees.
When this season began, I questioned why the Yankees didn't keep Colon around, as they made pretty much the same mistake the crosstown Mets did three years ago, opting to retain Freddy Garcia over Colon. Garcia has bounced between the starting rotation and the bullpen, and has not had a good season overall. Colon, we thought, was doing great guns, keeping Oakland in contention for at the very least a wild card spot. HGH and its ilk are actually legal in Colon's native Dominican Republic, and Colon was treated by a physician there. He should've seen it coming after Cabrera, scam aside, was tagged a week ago.
The sad part about all of this is, Cabrera & Colon are veteran players who should've known that taking such shortcuts would no longer be accepted in baseball, and should've pursued other, legal avenues.
Closer to home, ESPN pundit Skip Bayless, a long time columnist for the Dallas Morning News and contributor to ESPN2's First Take, took a blind man's leap of faith Wednesday when he accused the Yankees' superstar shortstop, Derek Jeter, of using PEDs to explain his increased numbers this season. Jeter has 13 home runs, more than double his 2011 total, but everyone knows that Jeter has never been a power guy to begin with. Maybe Bayless is reading too much into Jeter's stats this year and tying it to the drug suspensions of ex-teammates Cabrera and, as it was announced later in the day, Colon, I don't know, but considering that another teammate and fellow tabloid magnet, Alex Rodriguez, owned up after the fact to using PEDs earlier in his career, maybe Bayless is thinking there's an underground culture in the supposedly sainted Yankee clubhouse that not even the scandal-obsessed New York media has dug up. Yeah, right, and chickens have lips.
I'm not a Yankee fan, but I will give Jeter credit for what he's accomplished this year. He reached 3,000 hits last year, he hit career HR #250 earlier this week. If he'd been on PEDs all along, as Bayless seems to be implying, don't you think Jeter would've had double the HR numbers?
Maybe it's because Bayless has to put up with the self-absorbed know-it-all Stephen A. Smith at the debate table on First Take most of the time, instead of grizzled, self-absorbed Woody Paige (Around The Horn), who used to occupy Smith's chair, but he has lost his mind on this one. For that, he gets a Dunce Cap, along with Colon. Maybe he'll be like that moron in the DiGiorno pizza ad and double his IQ.......
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