Mark Kreidler
In so many words.

(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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