Sox In - Tribe Out

It's to be the Red Sox and Rockies in the World Series this year.

You have to feel for Indians fans. Watching your team score only five runs in the last 3 games of a series is bad enough, but watching the Red Sox score 30 runs in the same span must make you want to war whoop your way off the nearest cliff.

In other baseball news, Cleveland pitcher Paul Byrd has been outed by the San Francisco Chronicle as the latest player caught using human growth hormone.

According to the report, Byrd purchased $25 000 worth of HGH from 2002 to 2005. If you guessed that his supplier was from Florida, as seems to be the case with everybody else getting caught with HGH, you would be correct. According to Tim Brown at Yahoo Sports, it's the same clinic that the Feds are investigating for the illegal distribution of performance enhancing drugs.

Byrd's excuse? Surprise! He was taking them under a doctor's supervision, and he never took anything "that wasn't prescribed to [him]." This is the standard defence taken by most of the juiceheads that have been outed in the past couple of years. It's the "doctor did it" defence.

Let's get this straight: a professional athlete that knows drug testing may destroy his career is willing to purchase $25 000 of HGH, and not once does he ask his team, agent, lawyer, or the league if it's all right? Not only that, he wasn't visiting the "doctor" to get his injections. His shipments of HGH came with a do-it-yourself supply of syringes.

The timing of Byrd's HGH shipments is akin to the Troy Glaus case which I wrote about last month. Byrd says the HGH was prescribed because of a pituitary gland problem, yet strangely won't confirm if this problem cropped up before or after he started taking HGH. Tim Brown reports that, "In spring training 2002, Byrd was so alarmed by his lack of velocity that, fearing the end of his career, he radically altered his windup."

Funny that his 2002 fear of a declining career coincided with the 2002 receipts of HGH, and continued after he had Tommy John surgery in 2003, then the receipts dried up in 2005 when the league banned HGH. Funny.

Byrd's excuse of a doctor's prescription grows even more shady, as the Chronicle reports that one of the prescriptions was filled out by a dentist whose license was suspended in 2003 for fraud. That does not sound like the kind of high-end doctor that teams provide to their players. I'm not an anatomist, but I do know that the last time my dentist asked me how my pituitary gland was doing was never.

Photo: AP/Elise Amendola