Splice Today: Just Watch the game

New York’s Daily News has been on a tear of late in its campaign to crush Roger Clemens, issuing daily revelations of his reported adultery and pathological hypocrisy, and the rest of the sports media has been glad to climb aboard the bulldozer aimed at the now smaller-than-life Texan. This is not a defense of Clemens’ apparently reckless and extraordinarily selfish lifestyle—and the allegations of his affair with a teenager when he was a 28-year-old Red Sox pitcher are truly creepy—but I’d rather not know the details. Unfortunately, if you follow baseball as closely as I do, in particular the ups and downs of the Red Sox (thumbs up) and Yankees (big toes down), it’s impossible to escape the almost daily denunciations of columnists posing as priests. Another recent unnecessary “news” story was that Alex Rodriguez passed out while his wife was in labor with their first daughter in 2004. Who cares?

The Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell, revered in the sporting world’s establishment, is among the very worst columnists when he writes about the “scandal,” which is often, but at least last Saturday, upon celebrating the careers of pitchers Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, he didn’t touch Clemens’ non-baseball activities. (Boswell, although a snoot of the first order, isn’t dumb: he knows that scores of baseball stars have, ahem, colorful, private lives—just click on the blog “On the DL” to see what I mean—and wisely sticks to the playing field.)