If getting '16 Olympics means fixing potholes, bring on The Games!

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The Bald Truth

I was having a great day Tuesday: Got my taxes paid, had a fantastic workout at the gym, saw an entertaining finish to the White Sox opener on TV (with all-time good guy Jim Thome hitting the winning 3-run homer) and enjoyed dinner with my good Marquette buddy John Lamich.

Then, driving home after dinner, I hit one of Chicago's 8,449,066 potholes. Flat bleeping tire! 

By all means, Mayor Daley, show those Olympic honchos how wonderful you're taking care of "The City That Works."

Arrrrgh!

The Balder Truth

First Comcast Sports Net complaint of the young baseball season: 

They were able to show the mph on the 80-something slop Mark Buehrle was slinging, but when Kyle Farnsworth was throwing heat later on ... nothing.

I wanted to see the speed of Farnsie's strikeout pitch to Carlos Quentin - as well as the speed of the Farnsie fastball that Thome launched into orbit.

Good Point

While everybody was gushing over Thome's homer - and justifiably so - Ozzie Guillen went out of his way to praise an excellent defensive play by new third baseman Josh Fields and a pretty piece of hit-and-run hitting by new second baseman Chris Getz.

THE BALDEST TRUTH

Back in spring training 2005, Nomar Garciaparra, ready to start his first full season with the Cubs, batted something like .900 with a jillion home runs. (Not quite, but you get the drift.)

Many prognosticators - though not this one, thankfully - were picking the Cubbie Savior for NL MVP and his team for the pennant.

The No. 5 jersey was all the rage at Wrigley, and Cubbie Love was at a fever pitch.

Unfortunately for Nomar and his believers, the season started.

Garciaparra wasn't just bad, he was brutal. And a few weeks in, after batting .157 with only one extra-base hit, he tore his groin to smithereens. He was done. So were the Cubs.

Flash forward to 2009. New Cubbie Savior Milton Bradley had a monster spring training. Yes, he was The Answer to the believers' prayers.

Then the season started.

Through two games, he's 0-for-7 and hasn't gotten the ball out of the infield. He has hit four grounders, including one for a DP, popped out twice, struck out once, walked and botched a flyball in right.

One big difference between 2009 and 2005 is that Bradley has a lot better players around him than Garciaparra did. Another big difference is that the division is not as strong.

So please, I'm not predicting that Bradley will bat .157, get hurt and take the Cubs down with him.

I really do expect him to hit. Then again, I expected Nomar to hit, too.

Juicers Hall of Fame

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Got a call the other day from USA Today, which was polling BBWAA Hall of Fame voters about A-Roid Rodriguez. The question:

Will I or won't I vote for him when he becomes eligible five years after he retires?

My answer was a reluctant yes.

And not only for A-Roid but for Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and, starting next year, Mark McGwire, for whom I hadn't voted his first three years on the ballot. (Sammy Sosa is a tougher sell, because he was caught corking his bat, too.)

What's starting to sink in for me is that the use of performance-enhancing drugs was so widespread from 1985 (and maybe earlier) through 2005 (and maybe later) that I probably either have to vote for every deserving ballplayer or no ballplayer at all, regardless of his stats.

It's obvious that we can't trust any of them. For example, Frank Thomas has denied ever taking steroids and was among the first players to welcome random testing. Then again, he was huge, he was muscular, he was moody and his body broke down, all tell-tale signs of juicing. Now please, I'm not saying The Big Hurt was The Big Syringe. All I'm saying is that we can't be sure.

So do we exclude only the guys named in the Mitchell Report? (Don't forget: McGwire and Sosa were barely mentioned.)

Do we exclude only the Mitchell guys and those whose names are about to be made public from the 2003 testing procedure? (That's what sunk A-Roid, thanks to great reporting by Sports Illustrated's Selena Roberts.)

Do we exclude only the Mitchell guys, the 2003 guys and those we're pretty darned sure took steroids?

Do we exclude only the Mitchell guys, the 2003 guys, the pretty-darned-sure guys and the guys we now suspect are taking HGH and other hard-to-detect enhancers?

Do guys who admit and apologize - even if their admissions and/or apologies are as unsatisfying as A-Roid's was - get dibs over guys who deny? What if the deniers are telling the truth?

Do we throw out two decades of candidates - every darned one of them, from frauds like A-Roid to choir boys like Jim Thome - because even if they weren't users they surely knew juicing was going on in their clubhouses and they chose to ignore it?

Or do we say this:

"Hey, there was the Dead Ball Era, the Live Ball Era, the greenies era, the nearly century-long era that didn't let black men play big-league ball and, from 1985-on, the Steroid Era. The Hall of Fame always has been about how players stacked up against their peers ... and McGwire had to bat against Clemens, Andy Pettitte had to pitch to A-Roid and so on."

The latter is where I'm leaning.

Now excuse me while I go take a long, hot, cleansing shower.