Mark Kreidler
In so many words.

Note: Here’s my latest for ESPN.com.  The link: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?page=kreidler/100510

JaMarcus Russell to another NFL team?  Absolutely.  No doubt about it.  If not today or tomorrow, then soon, and for a while longer, at least.

You see the beauty here to the other 31 teams in the league: Russell has been pre-disastered.  He could only ever derail one franchise, and that deed is done.  Taken strictly on the basis of whether or not he might someday contribute to an offense, evaluated solely as a free-agent signing with no special portfolio, Russell will get a look.  Several looks, possibly.

It’s smooth running from here on in.  The storm has passed.  Low buzz equals low risk.

And low risk almost always equals NFL curiosity, which is all Russell will need, really: a team with enough curiosity – and precisely the right amount of ego – to want to take a gander.  It’ll happen.  That’s how the NFL rolls.

Oakland’s release of Russell last week was noted primarily for the astounding rate at which the former LSU star was paid to fail, which is both the glory and the blood-spatter of fame.  At $39.1 million over three lost seasons, the cash-to-heartburn ratio was historically high.  Of course, that’s the Raiders’ problem, right?

Exactly so.  When Russell was made the No. 1 overall pick in the 2007 NFL draft, he could only become a titanic failure for one organization, and that was the team that drafted him.  Sure, the NFL itself might wear a shiner resulting from Russell’s face plant – and in fact the QB’s career “arc” already is being held up as Exhibit A in the case against the current rookie salary structure.  But that’s the risk you run with any top draftee, be it more or less obvious.  (Don’t forget how many experts rushed forward to authenticate the Raiders’ selection of Russell as a great one on draft day ‘07, though I know how much those experts wish you would.)

As for the remaining teams, not so much risk.  The worst that can happen to any GM or head coach now is that he lobbies for the right to bring Russell into camp for a few days or weeks, and the thing goes bad.  At the rate they’d be paying him – having cleared waivers over the weekend, Russell now can be signed at the NFL minimum for a fourth-year player, which is $620,000 for a full season or any pro-rated portion thereof – he stacks up as a minimal risk.  He’s just a guy you bring in.

People are looking for a natural fit for Russell right now, which is crazy.  There is no natural fit for a guy who just flamed out on a potential $68 million windfall (he “only” collected the $39.1 mil).  But that’s not to say that, eventually, some pieces won’t fall into place.  They certainly will.

There are a couple of great factors working here that people may fail to take into account.  First and foremost, you could never go broke overestimating the ego of pro personnel people.  Ego is what they do.  The history of sports is absolutely choked by cases of players – baseball, basketball, football, hockey players – getting cut by one team and almost immediately picked up by somebody else.  Occasionally it’s a simple matter of need vs. availability, but just as often it’s the He-didn’t-perform-for-them-but-he-will-for-us hubris that drives so many executives through their days.

JaMarcus Russell almost ate his way out of the league while cat-napping through team meetings?  Yeah, maybe, but that wasn’t when I was in charge.  I’ll get his attention.  (Clap your hands if this means you, Coach Shanahan.)

Second, and this is critical, don’t forget the Raider Discount.  This is a much simpler premise.  It holds that, since Russell was in Oakland and not anywhere else in the NFL, you can’t really tell much from the fact that things ultimately went blooey.

People around the Raiders are used to hearing this.  Randy Moss was terrific in Minnesota, hideously terrible in Oakland, and then suddenly fine again in New England.  DeAngelo Hall was a Pro Bowler in Atlanta, a colossal eight-game bust in Oakland, and then suddenly a solid contributor again in Washington.

None of that has much to do with Russell, really.  The Raiders, it’s true, had a lousy offensive line and a suspect receiving corps for much of the time Russell was around, and they switched head coaches and offensive coordinators.  But all of that adds to less than half the responsibility for the Big Fail, and JaMarcus – undermotivated, late to meetings and generally lacking anything resembling field leadership – is on the hook for the lion’s share of the blame.

Still, that may not be how it’s perceived around the league.  The equivalent of Operation Save Ferris already is under way.  Former Raiders coach Lane Kiffin, who did not want to draft Russell, nevertheless called him “a great kid” and told the L.A. Times that being cut from Oakland “could be the best thing for him.”  Russell’s former college coach, Les Miles, and his offensive coordinator, Jimbo Fisher, have sent ringing good wishes across the country via interview.

When the point of departure is the Raiders, that is, ye olde discount comes into play.  Combine it with a healthy splash of executive ego, the absence of any real franchise risk and a cost factor that is more than reasonable by NFL standards given Russell’s skill set, and you’ve got the makings of an easy invitation to camp.  See you down the road, big fella.  Your story doesn’t have an ending yet.

Mark Kreidler is a longtime contributor to ESPN.com.  His most recent book, <a href=http://www.amazon.com/Six-Good-Innings-Became-Little/dp/006147357X> “Six Good Innings,”</a> was named one of the Top 10 Sports Books of 2009 by Booklist.  Reach him at mark@markkreidler.com.

Note: This piece appeared at ESPN.com.  Here’s the link: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?page=kreidler/100503

By Mark Kreidler

Special to ESPN.com

The great thing about the Raiders is that they can still surprise you.  Well, not you.  But they can still surprise someone.

“Someone,” for purposes of today’s discussion, would be erstwhile Redskins passer Jason Campbell, who got off the phone with Raiders officials a couple of weeks ago feeling quite certain that they were trading for him in order to make him their starting quarterback.  That may yet happen.  It certainly should happen.

But if Campbell expects a smooth transition from the JaMarcus Russell “era” to whatever comes next, he reveals himself as a person who – and I’m strictly guessing here – has never read, heard or discussed one thing about the Raiders in the modern history of the franchise.

In other words: Sure, it’s a circus.  You saw the big top as you approached the grounds, right?

Nobody does distraction like the Raiders.  It is a calling card.  They’re incredibly good at it.  When the trade for Campbell went through, the immediate assumption was that Russell’s career in Oakland was over – and it was just a daffy assumption on every count.  Again, you’ve got to know your Raider history.

One: Al Davis still owns the team.  Two: Davis has uttered virtually no words critical of Russell, whom he made the No. 1 overall pick in 2007.  Three: Davis publicly backed Russell over Lane Kiffin in 2008, famously intoning, “He is a great player.  Get over it and coach this team on the field.”

And four: Al Davis still owns the team.  We did mention that, didn’t we?

Cutting Russell, who has a $6.45 million payday coming if he stays on the Oakland roster, makes too much sense for it to actually happen in what football people might consider a timely manner.  Memo to Jason Campbell: You’re on Raider Standard Time now.  Things happen when they happen, or they don’t happen at all, or – well, use your imagination.  Take your top pizza dream, amplify it times a dozen or so, and you’re still scratching the surface of the essential strangeness that is Davis’s organization right this very moment.

When Tom Cable answered a question at the end of last season by making it clear that he thought the Raiders were a playoff team if only he hadn’t been saddled with Russell at quarterback, it was widely assumed that he’d get whacked.  Nope.

When Cable subsequently survived weeks of speculation with his job intact, it was widely assumed that he had won the JaMarcus argument with Davis, or at least won over Davis to his way of thinking.  But there was Russell at mini-camp last weekend, ostensibly competing for the starting job.  And Tom Cable was the one who had to stand there and say so.

It was amazing burlesque, the whole thing.  Russell, rumored to be tipping the scales at close to 300 pounds during the off-season, showed up looking close to his normal weight of 260 or 265.  He had a good enough first day to stir a little buzz among the cognoscente, but those who stayed for the rest of the OTA slowly began to recognize the Russell they knew, saying he regressed a bit with each practice session.

And the Raiders managed to make the situation 20 times more bizarre than it needed to be, because that’s what they do.  They assigned Eddie Anderson, a former safety and current assistant, to basically bodyguard Russell from the media, with Anderson swatting down almost every relevant question that came Russell’s way.

It was a surreal scene, with Russell beginning to answer questions only to have Anderson jump in and cut off the conversation.  When a reporter asked about the possibility that Russell would agree to restructure his huge contract, Anderson quickly replied, “We’re not discussing that, either.”  But Russell tried to answer anyway, saying, “No,” loudly over Anderson’s protesting voice.  When a question turned to Russell’s weight, Anderson simply ended the interview.

Where it goes from here is unclear, although the educated guess is that Oakland will eventually make the call to cut Russell and save the cash.  But don’t bank on that.  Al Davis runs this show, and he is contrarian to the core.

P.S. This is your team, Jason Campbell.  Don’t waste a minute: Start getting used to the strangeness now.

Mark Kreidler is a longtime contributor to ESPN.com.  His most recent book, <a href=http://www.amazon.com/Six-Good-Innings-Became-Little/dp/006147357X> “Six Good Innings,”</a> was named one of the Top 10 Sports Books of 2009 by Booklist.  Reach him at mark@markkreidler.com.

Note: This column is posted at ESPN.com. Here’s the link: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?id=5112672

General rule: When you hear the terms “bounce” or “lift” applied to hockey, chances are good to excellent that you’re not specifically talking about the game itself anymore.

Since the Olympics concluded, though, “bounce” has been a trendy word.  As in, “The bounce from the Olympics should take the NHL to greater heights.”

Well, no, now that you mention it.  At NBC, for example, ratings for its hockey telecasts are up 13 percent overall this season – but they’ve remained flat since the Olympics, this despite Canada’s pulsating overtime victory against the U.S. in the gold-medal game.  No lift.  And while the Versus numbers have jumped recently, most of those in the business agree that it has more to do with the network finally getting its issues resolved with DirecTV and once again becoming part of that widely exposed package than anything else.

The Olympic “bounce,” in other words, is a myth.

But wait: That’s business as usual.

Hockey shouldn’t take this personally.  Almost every Olympic quadrennial produces a “breakthrough” sport or event that, upon further review, doesn’t wind up breaking all the way through.

That’s a comical concept when applied to a history-rich sport like hockey anyway, but you understand the root of it.  When the Canadians were playing for the gold medal in their own country, with the U.S. as the designated black hat, it made for grand theater and killer ratings.  More than 27 million people in the United States watched the game, and roughly the same number did so in Canada – astonishing, considering that it accounted for nearly 80 percent of the entire population of that country.  Surely great things loomed.

But the reality is this: The NHL playoffs, which began this week, remain one of television’s ultimate niches.  The Versus and NBC numbers, at their tip top, rarely make a serious run beyond about a 1.0 rating, which equates to roughly 1.2 million viewers.  Not precisely Olympian.  (On Versus, its 52 regular-season games averaged 297,000 viewers.)

But, then, people get heavy into the Olympics for reasons that have almost nothing to do with sport – any sport.  For that matter, they get into phenomena that often have nothing to do with sport.  Ask the people who tried, mostly in vain, to track any real bounce for the sport of golf from the sensation of a young Tiger Woods (beyond the obvious hike in television ratings when Woods was in contention on the weekend).  It barely tracked.

The NHL has made some strides that suggest a brighter future — and, overall, these have little to do with the Olympic experience.  Its marketing arms are doing good things in digital media, and the decision to promote big events like the Winter Classic has been golden (more of that, please, by the way).  Some are suggesting that it’s the Classic, not the Olympics, that could drive a pricier new TV deal.  Corporate sponsors, meanwhile, got more interested after the Olympics, according to NHL executives, but how that translates into actual money remains to be seen.

It’s interesting that NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman makes that very distinction when it comes to the Olympics.  Bettman is already on record as saying the league will consider not participating in the 2014 Winter Games, which disrupt the season, mess up the schedule, X-out the All-Star Game, and in general – in Bettman’s estimation – don’t add the kind of value that a league can cash.

Though it’s a mistake to abandon the Olympic model – hockey is, after all, a genuinely international game – Bettman has motivation to search for the bottom line.  His league is in a desperate and ongoing search for revenue streams.  The attempt to mainstream the sport in the United States continues to be a difficult sell.  And while television ratings are not scripture, the numbers are certainly bleak enough to tell part of the story.

During the Olympics, as Sidney Crosby and the Canadians drove toward their gold medal and the U.S. team stood in its path, it was easy to want to jump on the enthusiasm and predict a league-wide bounce.  After all, the Olympics are really cool.

They’re also galvanizing in a way that the NHL playoffs, for obvious reasons, could never be.  The bounce didn’t go away; it simply never happened.   And Gary Bettman probably noticed it first.

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(Note: This piece is posted at ESPN.com. Link follows the column. /mark)

Great dramedy lately from Victor Conte, the former Balco baddie who is inexorably being re-cast as a “noted authority” on all things cheatable in sports.  Really?  I thought he was the guy who engineered some of the most audacious athletic rip-offs of the past half-century.

But when Conte speaks to such things as the efficacy of a test designed to stop the short-cutters, the world sits up on its hind legs and takes notice.  And when Conte stops just this side of telling the purveyors of that blood test for Human Growth Hormone that their father was a hamster and their mother smelt of elderberries … well, you get the idea.

Conte was everywhere this week, laying waste to the notion that a single positive outcome – in this case, of a British rugby player – could possibly validate the science behind the test that both the NFL and Major League Baseball quickly announced they would closely study and consider implementing.  And in interview after interview, the man did not mince words.

“You’ve caught less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the athletes you’ve tested,” Conte told the Los Angeles Times at one point.  “Do you truly believe that’s the amount of total users out there?”

Well, no, now that you mention it.  In fact, the very test that authorities used to pop poor Brit Terry Newton has been in play for six years already and been imposed upon hundreds of athletes (including Olympians at Athens, Beijing and Vancouver) without once coming up with an official positive result.  Confidence is not high.

For that reason, among others, Baseball commissioner Bud Selig is already reported to be backing off his initial enthusiasm for the blood test even at the minor-league level, where there is no union protection to ward it off.

And for that reason, among many, many, MANY others, you may expect the Major League Baseball Players Association to stand firm against this one.  As little fun as it may be to line up shoulder to shoulder alongside the Victor Contes of the world, this is one of those necessary moments.

For years, baseball’s union was run by a man, Don Fehr, who was respected and reviled in roughly equal measure.  Fehr and his top assistant, Gene Orza, struck some observers as the sort of water-muddying interlopers who would always stand between the sport and a more placid future – say, at just about every negotiated turn.

But on matters such as drug testing, Fehr always had the right idea.  Before he would even consider asking his union members to agree to urinate in a cup, he wanted to know why it was necessary, what it was meant to accomplish, who wanted it done, who would protect the chain of events, and how anyone could be truly sure about the results.  Fehr was constantly and appropriately skeptical of any claim of testing validity that came from the person who was trying to sell something.  And he could get very lawyerly and aggressive on the subject of individual rights.

You have to hope that Fehr’s successor, Michael Weiner, will remain just as vigilant about – and resistant to – the kind of knee-jerking we’ve seen this week, with poobahs rushing in to declare victory in the HGH wars and insisting the test be put in place here.  There may yet be enough science compiled to persuade that the HGH test really works, but you sure can’t prove it by what we’ve seen so far.

Newton’s positive outcome defeated the odds.  For one thing, as the MLBPA explained in its own statement, HGH is said to clear the human system in 18 to 36 hours, meaning you’ve really got to slip that blood test through a small window of opportunity to catch a thief.  For another, most HGH users who are willing to speak on the subject have said they do their cheating out of competition.  In other words, if Sluggo Magee wants to beef up in the off-season, he’s free to use, unless his union agrees to some type of year-round testing.

Beyond that, “This rugby player did not challenge the scientific validity of this positive HGH blood test in any way,” Conte told the New York Daily News.  (I told you: The man made the media rounds this week.)  “If an MLB or NFL player ever had a positive HGH blood test, there would be a team of defense lawyers to challenge every step of the scientific as well as legal processes.”

Not only is that true, it doesn’t come close to being the bad news.  As much as sports leagues say they want clean athletes (and multi-level marketable stars), jumping in with a questionable test and trying to force it into the rotation is no way to go.

One of the reasons HGH has been so popular among sports cheats is that it is, in fact, really difficult to test for – but that isn’t baseball’s or football’s problem.  One thing Don Fehr did exceptionally well, during his exceptional run as the head of the baseball union, was refuse to yield to hysteria.  A little of that would go a long way here.

Link to ESPN.com page: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?id=4948218

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(Note: This piece appears currently at ESPN.com. A link to the site can be found below. — mark)

No need to feel pity or outrage for Tom Cable despite the terminally weird image of Cable walking around the Senior Bowl this week with no portfolio, not so much as a you-da-man for next season from the Raiders’ front office.  After all, as of this writing, Cable is still getting paid by Al Davis despite:

(a) popping an assistant coach during a pre-season exchange;

(b) going 5-11 with a Raiders team that produced 17 offensive touchdowns in 16 games;

(c) having his ugly past domestic issues splayed about the local tabloids for grins and giggles;

 and, far most egregiously,

(d) saying JaMarcus Russell stinks.

Well, Cable didn’t say that.  He mostly only thought it last season, as Russell danced along to a 50.0 quarterback rating and 11 interceptions against three touchdown passes.  But it was still widely seen as a firing offense in the Wonderful World of Al when Cable, in a rash burst of honesty, replied to a question by saying “you know that we would have” made the playoffs with even an average performance at the quarterback position.

That’s a direct shot at Russell, to whom Davis not only guaranteed a franchise-crippling amount of money as a No. 1 draft bust but, however incomprehensibly, remains committed despite what everybody saw out there in 2009.

Yet several weeks beyond Cable’s verbal hara-kiri, nothin’.  Cable isn’t technically the head coach for next year yet, but he hasn’t been fired, either.  Davis has added assistants – Mike Waufle on the defensive line, Hue Jackson to coordinate the offense – without much in the way of Cable-grams.  (As Jackson noted, he spoke almost exclusively with Davis, not Cable, during his interview process.)  Yet there is Cable, in Mobile, for some reason or other.  And the thinking now is that Davis may well retain the man so long as Cable isn’t, you know … calling any plays or getting in the way of anything important.

Maybe Davis is happy with the job Cable did under the circumstances.  Maybe Al, always a players-first owner, took note of the support Cable enjoys within the locker room.  Perhaps the old man doesn’t want to pay Cable money for nothing, and can’t figure out how to enforce the “for cause” part of a firing procedure.  Maybe Davis is simply playing the role of the contrarian, which rumor has it he invented back in the day.

This just in: It won’t get better.  Not for the Raiders.  Not for Cable.  And certainly not for the dwindling Oakland fan base, which is bestowing new meaning upon the sporting term “hard-core.”

If you’re waiting for Al Davis to change his way of doing business, here’s hoping you packed a lunch.  While Davis in his dotage has struck some observers as enigmatic, the larger truth is that he’s a fairly linear football guy.  No matter what the realities of the era that surrounds him, Al likes certain things to almost the precise extent he always did.

Davis favors, for example, the downfield pass and the quarterback who can throw it, which explains why a guy like Russell could parlay a nice Sugar Bowl performance and some really cool pre-draft tosses from his knees into a $61 million payday ($32 million guaranteed, for those crying at home).  Davis favors is the “athletic” receiver as opposed to the truly professional one, which explains Darius Heyward-Bay, another draft-day Titanic.

And, very notably, Davis favors the order of command.  That’s the one with Al up top and everybody – and I do mean everybody – well below the observation deck.

A friend recently committed unintentional humor when he asked if there were a way for the Raiders to “humanely” move Davis out of his role as the club’s top executive, as if Al were a stray pet in need of a new start.  In a word: nope.  There is no informed reading of the situation that would lead anyone to conclude Davis is prepared to surrender control of his franchise.  If seven straight seasons with 11 or more defeats hasn’t done it, nothing will.

All of which brings us back to Tom Cable, the man who might have thought he turned a corner with Davis during the Sahara march of 2009 when he finally persuaded the owner to allow him to bench JaMarcus Russell.  The move was nearly outright applauded in the Raiders’ locker room, where teammates had long since concluded Russell wasn’t ever going to be the guy.  Russell’s replacement, Bruce Gradkowski, was hailed as a conquering hero for coming to work prepared.  It was a giddy minute or two.

Comes now the winter, and Al Davis’s primary move has been to hire a man, Hue Jackson, who – after his many conversations with Davis – speaks enthusiastically of getting Russell “playing the way we all wish that he can perform.”  In other words, it’s back to Square One, with JaMarcus at the helm – just as Al Davis would have it, which is the same thing as saying it will be done.

Memo to Cable, for 2010 and beyond: When you cash the checks, it means you forfeit the right to act surprised.

ESPN.com story link: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?page=kreidler/100128

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Wondering just now about separate but connected questions:

1.)    Why anyone feels compelled, on the subject of Mark McGwire, to “give the man credit” for finally acknowledging his obvious, ongoing, career-enhancing, career-wrecking abuse of performance enhancing drugs; and

2.)    Whether Barry Bonds understands he’s just been placed on the clock.

I’ll go ahead and guess the answer on Bonds, because it certainly goes to the heart of the man – and perhaps because it delineates his character from McGwire’s, too.  Under almost no circumstances can you expect Barry Bonds to come clean.  It’s just not him.

Mark McGwire, though – that’s different.  From the start of the steroid talk, I understood McGwire to be almost catastrophically humiliated by his own actions and by getting found out.  That humiliation seemed to inform his every action, from McGwire’s widely mocked ducking of Congressional questions in 2005 to his retirement into an utterly private post-baseball life, where no such questions were forthcoming.

McGwire is talking now for one reason: His friend and baseball mentor, Tony La Russa, convinced McGwire to return to the baseball spotlight as a coach, and La Russa helped his former player understand that he had to come clean in order to be forgiven (or, more significantly, to forgive himself).  Sounds highfalutin’, I know, but that’s the La Russa way.

I have a hard time giving McGwire credit for this, because he had to be talked into it.  At any rate, he’s merely acknowledging what those in the sport have long since dismissed as yesterday’s news.  His PED use was simply a given, as were Sosa’s and Bonds’s.  It helped McGwire reach historic heights, and it almost certainly contributed to his awful demise as a competitive athlete.

If it brings the man peace, I’m all for it.  But there can be no pats on the back for a person who had so many, many chances over the past several years to positively influence kids by admitting his mistakes, but declined.  Wish him well, but, please, no hero’s welcome.

(By the way: Forget the Hall of Fame.  Mac’s credential for being on the ballot was his career home-run total, which we now know to be significantly achieved via under-the-table, back-room cheating.  That doesn’t make McGwire unique, but it does bust his HOF balloon, no matter how quickly anyone rushes in to forgive him.)

Still, his admission puts McGwire a long step ahead of Bonds.  And this is not a distance you should expect to be closed anytime soon.

When McGwire said Monday that he wished he hadn’t played in the steroid era, it was a thought to hang on to.  You can understand: McGwire, who probably thinks of himself as a very different person than Bonds or Sosa or A-Rod or even Jason Giambi, nevertheless is destined to be grouped with those men when people discuss the drug-cheat years in the sport.

But where McGwire was shamed into silence, Bonds has taken a different tack, especially privately.  His take, boiled down to its essence, has always been, “I gave you people a show.  Isn’t that what you wanted?”  This image of Bonds as a defiant one is grounded in fact and observation, not demonization.  Defiance is the man when it comes to Bonds and his baseball life.  He’s not going to apologize for trying to be the best in the game.

For that reason among many others, some of them legal, the wait for a come-clean moment from Bonds is bound to be a long one.  If you’re into confessionals, Mark McGwire will have to do for a while.  Hope it’s enough to sustain.

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You have to love the timing: In the same week that Six Good Innings is released in paperback, the town in which the story is set starts making Little League news again.

Toms River, New Jersey, is a place that takes its Little League seriously.  Very seriously.  Scare-your-children seriously.  The Toms River teams have gone to the LL World Series in Williamsport just enough times over the years for the townsfolk to assume they’re always going to produce killer ballplayers from 12-year-old DNA, and it is that pressure – to win it all and add to the legacy – that I wanted to examine when I spent the summer of 2007 there.

The result is Six Good Innings, a real-time account of what it feels like to be in sixth or seventh grade and expected to peak physically … on behalf of your town.  I met great kids, well-meaning parents and honorable coaches, but the overall pressure – from wherever it comes – was still with my team on every step of its journey.  It’s a burden I wouldn’t wish on my own children, and yet my book is very much a story of how gracefully those players existed in their unique space in the world – in a baseball factory town.

This week, with the book’s release in paperback (Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Six-Good-Innings-Became-Little/dp/0061473588/ref=ed_oe_p), I checked in on the latest edition of the Toms River Little League All-Stars – and sure enough, they’ve won their first three games in district competition.  Are they on their way to Williamsport once again?  The odds against it are incredibly long, but don’t tell anyone in Toms River about it.  They’re already dreaming.  After all, Little League championships are what they do.

Visit our website, www.markkreidler.com, for more information on Six Good Innings, and enjoy a great summertime read about the joys, vexations and – sure – multiple-flavored snow-cones that make Little League the treasure it is.  Then brace yourself for the usual ESPN onslaught of kid baseball on television.  Beginning a few weeks from now, you won’t be able to avoid it.

Thanks to all for the wonderful feedback on my ESPN.com tribute to Wayman Tisdale, the former Oklahoma and NBA star who passed away last week.  The story link is here: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/columns/story?columnist=kreidler_mark&id=4170151

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Pete Rose says he’d give Alex Rodriguez a second chance, because, hey, good guys do bad things, right?  Or at least things that other people see as bad.

You know: People who don’t get it.  Who never played the game.  Who aren’t jocks.

My favorite snippet from Rose’s radio interview with Dan Patrick is his assertion that using steroids is a worse transgression than betting on your own team to win, as he admits he did.  I love the passage for the beautiful economy of Rose’s lies.

Pete is counting on you to be either too lazy or too young to get to the truth, which is that he was a degenerate gambler willing to bet on anything from a pro game to which of those spiders was going to get to the top of the fence-post first.  He bet on all sports.  He bet on baseball.  He bet on the Cincinnati team he was managing, about which he had the ultimate insider’s advantage – everything there was to know about his players’ injury situations, states of mind, etc.

If you choose to believe that Rose only bet on his team to win (according to Pete, he loved his scrappy Reds so much that he would only bet that way) then, by all means, enjoy yourself.  Just don’t confuse that with chivalry.

Rose denied all of his gambling issues until he got ready to write a book and profit from the admission.  He then acknowledged most of the allegations, but adamantly denied betting on baseball.  For that admission, he waited nearly another 15 years, until it was time to write another money-maker.  A hit on the talk-show circuit, a sure thing at autograph-whore sessions, Pete Rose became one of the most accomplished liars in American sporting history – not long after concluding his career as one of the greatest players ever.

In so doing, Pete created the template that almost every disgraced athlete has used since then: deny, deny, deny, to the point that the people who love you and want to believe you actually start doubting the mountains of evidence against you.  And when push comes to shove, at least find a way to make a buck off the sleazy truth.

So, yes, I suppose it’s fair to say that Rose won’t be getting my Hall of Fame vote if he’s ever reinstated to the game.  (That sound in the background, you hope, is A-Rod wincing at the thought of being “endorsed” by the most notorious gambler in baseball since the Black Sox scandal.)

See the Dowd Report at http://www.dowdreport.com/.

News summary of Rose’s radio appearance May 14: http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=4166083

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It feels foolish, doesn’t it?  It feels foolish to even venture a guess anymore about who’s using in sports and who isn’t.  It’s a sucker’s bet every time, trying to find the clean stars.  Manny Ramirez isn’t a shock, exactly, but he is one more guy you have to cross off the list.  Just ludicrously careless.

Still, I’m a parent, and parents don’t give up so easily.  They know the truth in a way that makes it unavoidable: Their children love, love, love having sports heroes.  It’s got nothing to do with what Charles Barkley thinks about being a role model.  He is one.  LeBron is one.  Peyton is one.  Manny is one.  And every time one of them goes off the rails, he ruins something for a kid in a way that leaves a deep, lasting impression.

It really is that simple.

So baseball is loaded with losers and louts, but you knew that.  The more interesting thing, by far, is figuring out where you’re still willing to go with your hopes on behalf of your kids, the ones who still love pro athletes and want to believe in them.

In the wake of Manny’s news, I thought immediately about Derek Jeter, as follows: Please be clean.  (He’s at the top of one of my sons’ lists, with David Wright at the top of the other’s.)  And I decided that Jeter almost certainly is, that it’s going to be okay.  He’s a safe hero, comparatively.  A sucker’s bet, I know, but we’ve all got to invest hope in something.

Herewith, a quick, shoddily researched but heartfelt list of bona fide winners who I think my two baseball-playing, baseball-loving sons can believe in:

• Derek Jeter.  Punch-and-Judy hitting never looked so appealing.
• Albert Pujols.  Says he’s clean – and, I admit, I’m begging to believe him.
• Evan Longoria.  Nice, short-to-it-and-long-through-it swing.  Natural power.
• Justin Morneau.  Gotta be straight-up talent.  Just got to.
• Adrian Gonzalez.  Gold Glove flexibility; good but not unbelievable power.
• Troy Tulowitzki.  So fun to watch in the field.
• David Eckstein.  I mean, come on.  Gives hope to little kids everywhere.
• Jason Bay.  For the lovely irony of it.
• Josh Hamilton.  Already admitted everything, and no steroids on the list.
• Ichiro Suzuki.  Best pure hitter of his era.

 Now go out there and don’t make me look stupid.

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