Rangers' owner Tom Hicks is not the brightest of bulbs. It was Hicks, you may recall, who, a little more than a year after inking A-Rod to a $250 million contract, and mere months after signing Chan Ho Park to a $65 million contract, sat on the deck of his luxury yacht in San Diego Harbor and said "For the good of baseball, we need to have cost-containment."Hicks is out there saying dumb yet revealing things again, this time about Juan Gone and steroids:
During a wide-ranging taped interview with Channel 11 sports anchor Babe Laufenberg last week, Hicks was asked about the Rangers’ deals he most regretted making. First he mentioned wasting $65 million on pitcher Chan Ho Park. Then he referenced the two-year, $24 million deal the Rangers gave Gonzalez to come back to Texas in 2002. Juan Gonzalez, for $24 million, after he came off steroids probably . . .we just gave that money away.”
As usual, the folks at Baseball Think Factory are having a field day with this, with Primate Rich sarcastically voicing his confidence that "Bud will threaten Hicks with a suspension if he doesn't agree to meet with Mitchell within two weeks." If only. Unfortunately, we all know that the Mitchell probe is nothing more than an exercise in ass-covering PR that would never think to investigate such statements from Hicks lest it threaten to scuttle the owners' neat little conceit that it was the players and the players alone who knew anything about steroid use in baseball pre-BALCO.
Primate AROM, however, sees something far more sinister and notes that "Hicks' statement implies that the money might not have been wasted had Gonzalez remained on steroids. Surely that's worth a question or two."
Indeed.
