FanHouse PEDs

Orlando Magic general manager Otis Smith said Thursday that he was not shocked when a league official notified him this week that Rashard Lewis was being suspended for the first 10 games of next season for violating the NBA's Anti-Drug program.

Lewis tested positive for the testosterone-producing steroid commonly referred to as DHEA (Dehydroepiandrosterone), which was part of a supplement he started taking late in the season. The chemical is banned by most sports leagues, including the NBA, but it is contained in several over-the-counter supplements.

The positive test stemmed from a urine sample provided by Lewis during the playoffs before they reached the NBA Finals.

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As Tim Povtak wrote earlier, Magic star Rashard Lewis has been suspended for 10 games by the NBA for testing positive for dehydroepiandrosterone, a substance on the NBA's banned peformance enhancing drug list.

But what is dehydroepiandrosterone? Is it anything like the steroids baseball and football players have been disciplined for?

The Daily Jolt is a dose of baseball reality every weekday morning.

Baseball will carry on. It always does. If it can survive the fixing of the World Series, it can certainly survive the "revelation" that the once and future home run king juiced. That may not be what people want to hear as they huff and puff and blow indignantly about the shame Alex Rodriguez has brought upon the game and himself. But it is the truth.

Even as Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens have been unmasked, Major League Baseball has set attendance record after attendance record. Everyone talks tough, but at the end of the day, most of them wind up back at the ballpark

We now interrupt our playoff programming to bring you an update on baseball's greatest villain: Barry Bonds.

In case you forgot about it, Barry Bonds is getting ready to go to court as part of that whole BALCO investigation we used to hear so much about. Bonds faces possible jail time if he's found guilty of perjury for lying to the grand jury during the investigation, but he did get some good news on Friday.

Tammy Thomas is a former bicyclist who was on trial for the same crime in the same BALCO investigation, and she won't have to serve any prison time even though she was found guilty.

In U.S. District Court in San Francisco, Judge Susan Illston sentenced Tammy Thomas to six months of home confinement on her four felony convictions for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Some experts said the decision was a hopeful sign for Bonds. He is scheduled to go on trial in Illston's court in March, accused of the same offenses as Thomas and facing the same prosecution team. He has pleaded not guilty.

The prosecutors had asked for Judge Illston to sentence Thomas to 30 months in prison, but the judge said that would be incredibly unfair considering that Victor Conte -- the man who ran the BALCO lab -- only had to serve four months in prison.

Of course, as some legal experts point out, this doesn't necessarily mean that Bonds will be dealt the same fate. Thomas is essentially a nobody -- had you heard of her before reading this? -- while Bonds is a very well known athlete. Sentencing Bonds to jail time would send a very loud message to anybody thinking about lying to a grand jury in the near future.

We now return to our regular playoff programming.

There was a bit of perhaps unsurprising news yesterday -- the Associated Press very quickly ran the numbers, and realized that the number of home runs this year was at its lowest point for fifteen years. Then, they asked Torii Hunter about it:

"I think the steroid testing has something to do with it," he said. "If there were any guys who were taking it, they're not taking it anymore. I'd say it's a small percentage, but of course it's going to have an impact."

Well then. Of course that's the obvious answer, and it's the one most people would immediately cite, but is it the only one? Hunter mentions ballpark size, too, which, in the inverse, is one of the steroid era's great unsung causes. But there's also the issue of pitchers. If we assume pitchers were taking steroids at roughly the same rate as hitters, then wouldn't home runs stay relatively steady?

I don't know. And that's the whole point -- without actual calculation, instead of my liberal arts-enabled quasi-scientific ramblings -- we don't know. Until that stuff gets done, neither Hunter nor I nor you really know how much steroids are at work here. That's why steroids suck. Even after all the nonsense, we still don't know what we're talking about.

You mess with the fat old bull you get the fat old horns!

Today the Dugout continues its Spring Training tradition and its center-of-the-Earth-like journey through the NL Central with the Houston Astros, a team so into media coverage that you'd almost forget they play baseball.

I like to think that Clemens is just a fan of Larry David and is doing this as an artistic homage to getting in trouble at work, quitting dramatically, and then just showing up the next day like nothing happened. Either that or he is just SO GUILTY that his body can't handle it and his guilt is seeping out of him and turning him into a giant Tetsuo monster. Either way, "hey guys, the Astros."

After the steroid hearing, Roger Clemens received a lot of grief for claiming that Andy Pettitte "misrembered" things or that how dare he say that Pettitte was lying. Though Pettitte's affidavit seemed pretty unequivocal, as Will Carroll notes at Baseball Prospectus, his deposition did have a lot more wiggle room in it.

On page 20 of the Pettitte deposition, he discusses the conversation where he says that Clemens told him that he was using HGH. He says he remembers few details about the conversation.

Then on page 28 of his deposition Pettitte says:


On page 91 of his deposition, Pettitte states:


Adversarial proceedings, even when everyone claims that is not what they are supposed to be, are terrible ways to try to find "the truth." Nobody at that hearing was really interested in "the truth."

Show of hands. Who here believes that baseball was free of performance enhancing drugs? Nobody.

I am fine with baseball spending its own money getting the Mitchell Commission to investigate PEDs in baseball. What I'm not terribly happy with is Congress spending my money looking into it, especially a swearing match between two individuals who nobody completely believes.

Actually, it makes me Lewis Black angry.

During the hearing, Rep Bruce Braley among others kept on reminding us that this is all about the children. For the children????? (Insert profanity here of your favorite sort). How about not saddling our children with a debt so large that the made up word ginormous is still too small sounding to describe it?

Here's a US National Debt clock website. It claims that as of the moment that I'm writing this, the US National Debt is $9,253,534.982,739.89. Here's a news report that says the President just recently submitted a budget for $3.1 trillion dollars.

With numbers like those, no wonder Congress, with few exceptions, has no problem spending money having staffers track down details about Roger Clemens' butt abscess or the Jose Canseco's party attendees.