The blog “Can’t Stop the Bleeding” has offered some new baseball terminology.
Boston manager Terry Francona reported Sean Casey would miss the Tokyo games, calling it a case of “Southern League Neck” — or a sore neck caused by long bus rides.
“Can’t Stop…” takes it a step further:
“(It) should not be confused with the more modern ailment, ‘Atlantic League Neck’ (i.e. after several HGH injections supplied by … a trusted teammate, a player no longer appears to have a neck.”
Oh, one more thing. “Can’t Stop the Bleeding” struck out the name Pete Rose Jr. before writing “a trusted teammate.”
Ouch.
Of course, the league has gone out of its way to sign players with questionable pasts, including Jose Canseco, John Rocker and Juan Gonzalez.
And quite frankly it continues to risk its reputation by going after these type of players. (See recent Barry Bonds Publicity Stunt.)
If the league really wants to keep signing players with spotty reputations, it will continue to be known as a user league.
York Daily Record/Sunday News Sportswriter Jim Seip has covered minor league baseball since 2001. He's covered the York Revolution since the franchise's first game in 2007.
Another step in the right direction would be making the details of their very vague drug testing policy available to the public.
The fact that nobody seems to know exactly what is and isn’t tested for doesn’t seem to be a good sign considering the cast of characters the league has been known to bring in from time to time…
Couldn’t agree with you more. The league bills itself as a second-chance league, and that’s a good thing. But when several of the players in the league have been suspended from minor league baseball for performance enhancing drugs, you would think the AL would WANT to go above and beyond to weed out users.