Good field, no hit. But, he did have to face Steve Carlton
Every little boy I grew up with wanted to be a Major League baseball player. When you are young, you think you can do anything, and you give no thought to being a teacher, or fireman, or, for god’s sake, a journalist. Nobody I know wanted to be a Congressman, that’s for sure.
But, there are only 750 Major League ballplayers at any one time. Any good sized town in Florida has more than 750 kids playing Little League each season, so you figure the chances. So a lot of us end up doing those other things, and some, like Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia, end up as Congressional committee chairmen.
Davis chairs the Government Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he has the discretion to order hearings on almost anything he wants…or not.
This week, his committee will be taking on steroids in baseball. We’re not sure what that has to do with Government Reform, but what the hell. From all reports, Davis is a big baseball fan. We infer that he played as a kid and wanted his time in the big leagues just like the rest of us. But, Davis is now a member of an even more exclusive club (there are only 535 members of Congress–although, if anything is certain these days, it requires no particular talent other than mean spiritedness to get there.)
So, Davis now gets to call people like Jose Canseco, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi and Mark McGwire to do his bidding. (For some odd reason, he gave a free pass to Barry Bonds.) And since everyone over the age of T-ball knows that ball players have been using steroids for the last several years with impunity, Davis has really set himself up to take a really big cut at what amounts to a batting practice fast ball.
But as anyone who has actually played the game knows, the good hitters can hit the real hard stuff–the 90 plus fastball, the slider and the splitter. That’s what separates real big leaguers from the rest of us.
Now if there were an equivalent pitch repetoire in Congress, it might include having the Government Reform committee look into intelligence failures regarding Iraq, who leaked the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, or why our government sends prisoners to Syria to be tortured. That would be hitting one out of the park if Davis got to the bottom of some of those messes.
Unfortunately, none of those matters rated a turn at bat before his committee. We think Davis maybe ought to give Balco a call himself and see if they have any magic creams that would give him some integrity–artificial or otherwise.
Right now, in that regard, Davis is a bit below the “Mendoza line.”
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