Kevin Blackistone Mlb

The best thing that ever happened to sports was television -- unless you officiate sports.

Ask the umpiring team that is handling the American League Championship Series and blew two calls in Game 4 on Tuesday night. Ask the SEC football officials who were suspended on Wednesday. The crew was punished after the conference determined the crew was mistaken on Saturday in flagging an Arkansas player for a late hit on a Florida player. The call allowed Florida to continue its final touchdown drive in a game it won 23-20.

There was a portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that hung in the living room of his widow, Coretta Scott King. It was painted by Curt Flood. There was a proposal introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr., the Democrat from Detroit, to remove baseball's controversial antitrust exemption. It was numbered HR 21 after the Cardinals' jersey Curt Flood wore for a dozen of his big league seasons.

So Flood, as I've pointed out before, has been remembered by the widow of a Nobel Peace Prize winner and in legislation proposed on Capitol Hill. He doesn't need the Baseball Hall of Fame to validate his contributions to greater society or the mere game.

When I find a creepy crawling thing in the house, I reach for something to scoop it up and carry it to freedom outdoors rather than grab a can of Raid or a heavy-heeled shoe. As a kid, I couldn't even zap ants with the sun's rays sharpened through a magnifying glass.

I've just never felt as if I possessed a single sadistic bone in my body -- until now.

Confession: I am enjoying watching what many are describing as the Chinese water torture of baseball -- the drip, drip, drip of names from what was supposed to be a secret list of players in 2003 who tested positive for using performance-enhancing drugs. Big Papi and Manny on Thursday. Sammy Sosa in June. A-Rod just before spring training started. Keep them coming, I say, nice and slow.

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Had Donald Fehr played the game from which he announced Monday he was walking from after 30 years, we'd marvel at his accomplishments like a 700- or 600-plateau home run hitter during that span or a pitcher who managed 4,500 strikeouts. We'd talk about him like a multiple MVP winner and as being one of the greatest ever at his position or any position. We'd talk about him as a surefire first ballot Hall of Fame inductee.

Then we'd throw it all in the nearest trash bin. We'd chuck it all for the same reasons we do the accomplishments of so many of those sluggers and strikeout artists and MVP winners during Fehr's reign.

Four of the last 10 MVPs in Major League Baseball have been from countries outside the United States, including one from Canada, Twins' first baseman Justin Morneau.

Three of the last five American League Cy Young Awards went to two pitchers -- Johan Santana, twice, and Bartolo Colon, once -- born in Latin countries.

Half of the last eight American League batting champions were born in foreign countries, including Ichiro Suzuki from Japan.

The origins of baseball may be debatable. Did it come from the Russian game lapta or the English game rounders? Did Abner Doubleday really invent it or was his story just better than Alexander Cartwright's?

In 1991, Lenny "Nails" Dykstra hammered his Benz into a tree on a road off Philadelphia's Main Line with a Phillies teammate, Darren Daulton, as a passenger. Dykstra suffered a broken collarbone, broken ribs, broken cheekbone and punctured lung. Dalton suffered a broken bone under an eye. The pair was coming from a bachelor party for John Kruk. Dykstra was charged with driving drunk.

In 1999, three years after he last played baseball, Dykstra was cleared of sexual battery and child annoyance charges against a 17-year-old female employee at a car wash he owned. The Ventura County, Calif., district attorney's office that prosecuted him concluded: "While the district attorney believes that the defendant did engage in the conduct as originally described by the victim... the charges alleged in the complaint cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury."

This is what a pimp does: He procures the use of one human's body -- usually from someone vulnerable for a variety of reasons -- for another human with promises to the former and a price from the latter, and retains much of the profit for himself.

Or, in short, it is what the FBI is investigating major league baseball talent scouts for doing in the Dominican Republic, which on Sunday led to the resignation of Nationals' general manager Jim Bowden.

A-Rod graduated from a private college prep high school in Miami particularly renowned for its fine arts and baseball program. Just before he was to go to his first freshman class at the University of Miami, he decided he wanted to become a millionaire instead with the Seattle Mariners, and signed their contract. That by itself was a sign of his intelligence.

He went on, of course, to become the first quarter-of-a-billion dollar player with the help of the savviest agent in baseball, if not all of sports, Scott Boras.

In short, A-Rod was never the country bumpkin he's tried to portray himself as over the past week after fessing up to a report that he used steroids. The ultimate proof: the publication-relations strategy he and his PR team successfully pulled off the past few days without most of us even realizing it.

Publishers Row still hasn't warmed to Jay McGwire's proposed expose on his estranged brother, retired home run slugger Mark McGwire, who Jay claimed was a steroids abuser. A second tell-all by baseball's most-important chronicler of its steroids' generation, Jose Canseco -- Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball - sold just 22,000 hardcover copies last year, less than a sixth of what his first book, Juiced, sold. One publisher told The New York Times a few weeks ago that the public appeared fatigued by baseball's steroids' tales.

Consider me corroborating evidence.