An interesting Yahoo article on the new Yokohama BayStar outfielder Larry Bigbie about his involvement in the Mitchell Report (he was featured on only 1 less page than the Rocket!) He plans on burying his baseball bones here in Japan. I haven’t bothered looking into how many years he used steroids and HGHs, but his career lines of 267/331/395 in the majors and 292/368/421 in the minors aren’t very inspiring. Though the fact that he didn’t see too much of a drop off in the minor to major transition is somewhat promising, and playing home games in the bandbox Yokohama Stadium (308’/93m to both poles and 387’/117m to centre) in a hitters league (Tokyo Dome, helped by its peculiarly straight power alleys, and tiny Hiroshima Stadium are both notorious hitters parks as well) may be his saving grace (the Tamura effect?) especially if he’s used at CF.
An interesting excerpt from the article:
Larry Bigbie’s name appeared 93 times in the Mitchell Report. Seven full pages were devoted to him, one fewer than Roger Clemens. Mitchell attributed much of the information accusing Baltimore Orioles second baseman Brian Roberts of steroid use to Bigbie, his former roommate, and did the same with Jack Cust, the slugging outfielder now with Oakland.
In news reports, Bigbie was placed alongside Brian McNamee and Kirk Radomski as Mitchell’s informants. He stewed. He had talked, yeah, but says he brought up neither Roberts’ nor Cust’s name and only confirmed information with which Mitchell’s investigators confronted him.
“They had everything,” he says. “They knew. It wasn’t like I had to sit there and spit names to them.”
I’ve read somewhere that borderline major leaguers are most likely PED abusers, and this makes sense economically because the the financial incentives to stay in the majors is astronomical, with the crevasse sized gaps between major league and minor league salary as well as in the pension system.
And I guess he won’t be seeing Cust in person when he arrives in Tokyo for a pair of exhibitions against the Tigers and Giants, and the season opener agaist the Red Sox.
