Pettitte’s Sensitivity to Doom Him?

In the wake of the Mitchell Report and Andy Pettitte’s subsequent admissions and apologies for HGH use, many media pundits have called this a death nail into any hopes that Andy will have a successful 2008 season. They claim that the attention the microscope the fans and media will put him under will crush him. They say the guilt of his actions will destroy his mental state. While this makes for nice headline fodder for the slow news days of Spring Training, it is difficult to figure on what they are basing this.

Andy Pettitte’s mental toughness has been one of his greatest attributes during his long career.  A pitcher cannot thrive in New York without great inner strength to block out distractions. This city has eaten alive players with far more physical talent, but Andy has thrived in the scrutiny. Perhaps there will be more attention on him than before, but Pettitte probably would not have won 14 career postseason games unless he could block out external distractions and pressure. Some claim that Fenway Park will now be much more hostile, but how much worse can it get for a Yankee? The fans there are ruthless. Andy has not been bothered in the past by insults of his family and questions on his sexuality up there. How much are chants of “HGH” and “Mitchell” really going to throw him off his game?

Others claim that Andy will feel a sense of shame as a man who prides himself on being a good Christian. This might be true, but logic seems to suggest the opposite. Pettitte was living a lie in the past never certain when his indiscretion would come out. That would be the kind of thing that would burden him. Now he has come clean. He has nothing to hide. Christianity is a religion based upon redemption and atonement for mistakes. According to his religion, Andy Pettitte now has unburdened himself.

The fallout from Pettitte also seems to be overblown. After admitting his mistake, Andy has taken the target off his back. The American society is a forgiving one for people willing to fess up to what they have done and attempting to move past it. Look to politics for an example. During his first run for President, George W. Bush was constantly dogged by the media for being evasive in regard to his less than storied past. Barack Obama has dealt with none of the same difficulties because he readily admitted mistakes from his youth. The guys like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens who vehemently deny any wrongdoing get grilled. Guys like Pettitte and Jason Giambi skate relatively freely. Giambi was grilled early on, but the media turned his into a story of redemption the second he got hot in 2005.

HGH did not make Andy Pettitte into a high quality pitcher. He was a top of the rotation starter for this team before he met Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee. He pitched at a high level for the Astros at the end of 2005 while throwing in the low 80’s. He was effective before using HGH. He will be effective again. The biggest worry would have been the effects of cycling off had he used for his entire career and was a product of steroid use. Nobody seems to believe that was the case.

The concerns over Pettitte are typical media fodder. The writers are bored in Spring Training and trying to stir something up to get fans in a frenzy. I personally will never look at Andy Pettitte the same way again. I am grossly disappointed that he would stoop to cheating and lie about the extent of it until he went to Congress. At the same time, there is no reason to worry that this will affect him. There are plenty of reasons why Andy Pettitte might decline this season, namely the effects of age and injury. This whole steroid mess is not one of them.

Mitchell Report Names Numerous Yankees

The Mitchell Report was released to the public today. Numerous former Yankees were named as steroid users. David Justice, Mike Stanton, Chuck Knoblauch, and Randy Velarde are among those named. The two biggest fish were Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte. I will spread out my comments over the next few days. There are numerous aspects of this Report that deserve attention. This coming Wednesday, I will be on a 4 hour train ride, which will give me a chance to actually examine this thing closely. These are my opening thoughts.

*ESPN, the “objective” source for sports news, could not have put Clemens’ and Pettitte’s pictures up more. The talk centered on them, even though a former MVP, Miguel Tejada, was also implicated along with scores of others. This network cannot get enough Yankee bashing. It generates interest. This is like how the network made Clemens’ perks a major news story once he came to the Yankees after he got the same treatment in Houston for 3 years.

*As a fan, most of these names really do not affect me. I have become jaded with the times. Everybody knew that steroid abuse in baseball went far beyond what we knew before today. Very few names would have surprised me. While I loved the championship teams with guys like Stanton, Justice, and Knoblauch, I never really identified with any of them personally. Even though I rooted for Knoblauch, I really could not stand the guy when he was with the Yankees. I never even developed a major fondness for Clemens. I rooted for and defended him, but he was always a great pitcher who happened to be a Yankee. He was not a great Yankee.

*Pettitte is a different story. He is a true Yankees, who came through the system. He seemed like a great guy and a good family man. He has shown time and again that he cares about more than just money, a refreshing change from the egotistical culture of modern professional athletics. He plays hurt and comes up big in huge spots. He is very likable and easy to identify with. He provided me with some of my best childhood memories. I now know how the kid who said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” felt.

*I am really not sure what to believe in the Pettitte case. On the one hand, a person cannot simply ignore these charges. On the other, the case Mitchell laid out was hardly beyond a reasonable doubt. The only evidence against him seems to be the testimony of a man, Brian McNamee. McNamee’s story seems relatively logical, but how can anybody really confirm it? There is something for him to gain by lying. Before today, nobody knew the name of Brian McNamee. Now he can be remembered as the guy who took down Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte. How can one handle Pettitte even if this testimony was true. All that the report appears to indicate (and as a disclaimer, I have not read it closely yet) is that Pettitte took HGH in 2002 to recover from an elbow injury. Mitchell does not suggest steroids turned him into a high quality pitcher before or after this. It claims that Clemens met McNamee in 1998, but his late career resurgence began a year earlier. Nowhere does it say anything about Clemens taking steroids in 1997. Again it seems plausible that the Mitchell Report is accurate. Clemens avoided aging by taking steroids, and Pettitte was his protege. Still, I am not sure there is bulletproof evidence that this took place. I am not comfortable destroying a man’s reputation without that kind of proof. There are plenty of plausible explanations and little in the way of solid evidence beyond McNamee’s hearsay.