On Steroids, O’Malley and Monkey Juice

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Sidewalks with Tom Deignan

On Steroids, O’Malley and Monkey Juice

December 21, 2007

by Tom deignan

‘TIS the season of forgiveness? Not when it comes to the Irish and baseball! So, if I am going to make a New Year’s resolution, I think it might be to refrain from writing about this topic in 2008.

Back in August, I wrote a column suggesting that it was time for old time Brooklynites to, if not forgive former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, at least consider some evidence that he is not, in fact, Satan.

O’Malley was elected into the baseball Hall of Fame earlier this month. Of course, O’Malley is mostly infamous for moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to California.

For some New Yorkers, this put him in competition with Stalin and Hitler as the most evil person of the 20th Century. That notwithstanding, O’Malley made it to the Hall of Fame this month, and the O’Malley family remains deeply involved in the promotion of baseball in Ireland.

Well, ire, and lots of it, is what I got from Brooklyn fans who just don’t want to forgive.

“What a bunch of garbage,” is how one contributor to the Baseball-Fever.com website reacted to my O’Malley column. Another posted, “Time to forgive John Wilkes Booth,” referring to the gunman who killed President Abraham Lincoln.

One more reader posted, “Tom Deignan isn’t a bad guy,” before ominously adding, “but he is a Yankee fan.”

Guilty as charged!

Anyway, now that the steroids issue is dominating the news, let me be clear — I am not interested in forgiving the players who juiced up, even beloved Yankee Andy Pettite, who claimed to be on steroids for a mere two days.

As for Roger Clemens, let him twist! I always did think he was soul-less.

What I will ask for, however, is a little perspective on this issue.

Consider the case of Irish American pitching great “Pud” Galvin. He came from a section of St. Louis so heavily Irish it was known as the Kerry Patch.

Born James Francis Galvin, his nickname derived from the fact that -– much like Clemens - he was such a devastating thrower that he turned opposing batters into pudding.

How good? Well, he made it into the Hall of Fame. So, when Walter O’Malley is officially enshrined in the Hall of Fame, he joins Pud Galvin, one of the first Irish Americans elevated to that glorious pantheon in Cooperstown, New York.

What is less well known about Pud Galvin is that he was a proponent of ingesting Brown-Sequard Elixir. That’s a quaint-sounding mixture, isn’t it? It sounds like something you might pick up from a bow-tied proprietor at the corner soda joint.

The only problem is that Galvin’s performance enhancer was, in fact, monkey testosterone. Galvin, and many other ball players back in the day, were also on the juice. It was just monkey juice.

Now, maybe that makes Galvin a fraud, maybe not. Either way, the monkey juice helped Galvin become the first pitcher to ever to win 300 games, winning a total of 361 games by the 1880s.

Galvin isn’t the only Irish American linked to this latest baseball scandal. Of course, there is former Senator George Mitchell the (for now) hero of the story. He helped broker peace in Northern Ireland, and now maybe he has swept all of the drugs out of baseball.

If Mitchell is the hero then the villain in Brian McNamee, the former New York City cop and athletic trainer who worked as Clemens’ personal trainer and is now naming names as part of an agreement with prosecutors.

A recent profile of McNamee in The New York Times reads like that of a thousand or so other New York Irish Americans.

“McNamee was raised in the Breezy Point section of Queens, on the westward end of the Rockaway Peninsula, an area with many police officers, like his father. As a youngster, Mr. McNamee was drawn to baseball and became a catcher, playing at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens and then at St. John’s University.”

Are steroids and monkey juice the same thing? Where will this end up? Who knows?

Maybe Roger Clemens will pitch again next year, just to prove the doubters wrong. If does, and he wins just eight more games, he will have a total of 362 career wins, surpassing a lad named Pud Galvin on the all time wins list.

(Contact at tomdeignan@ verizon.net)

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