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Friday, December 14, 2007

How My Home Boy Skirted the Baseball Drug Scandal

The "Bats" blog at The New York Times tonight presents an interview with a major league baseball player who, in 2001, inquired about taking steroids -- his potential connection was the man who shot up Roger Clemens -- but turned away. He is C.J. Nitkowski, now hurling in Japan. We have our own connection. He hails from Suffern, up in my neck of the woods, and when I wrote my book about coaching in Little League a few years ago, we corresponded -- back in 1998 he was one of the first ballplayers to "blog" (as it later became known).

We never met but, for my book, he recalled his years in Little League and some of the horrible things coaches and parents subject their kids to. I just dug out one of his emails and see that he advised me to teach the kids real "sportsmanship." I replied, and the last thing I ever told him was, "Good luck on the coming season, I hope you're not headed to Toronto in any Clemens deal." Here's my new column: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003686024

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is precisely why people like Mr. Obama should NOT go into high schools and brag about their drug use. it sends wrong messages to young kids. I am glad this kid was fortunate.