Giambi must admit
taking steroids

Nothing with Jason Giambi is easy, not even a series of press conferences called for no apparent purpose other than to allow him to tell everybody how sorry he is for things he doesn’t want to talk about.

The separate sessions with print and electronic media were conducted under extraordinary rules. The Yankees decided which media outlets could attend and how many people they could send. The team also declared that there could be no live transmissions of what little Giambi said.

Even the Bush White House hasn’t tried so hard to control the media. But these are the Yankees of George Steinbrenner, who every year becomes more convinced he invented baseball. And it’s Giambi, the only player implicated in baseball’s steroid scandal who has, in secret grand jury testimony leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle, admitted that he used both steroids and human growth hormones.

Instead of using the forum he and the Yankees so carefully managed to clear the air, spill his guts, and get off to a new start, Giambi used it to say nothing that couldn’t have been boiled down to two sentences in a press release.

He knew he wasn’t going to address the only issue anyone cares about – steroids. He had to know that no one particularly cares how sorry he is for embarrassing the team and creating a distraction. So why bother with a news conference?

He even said he never read the Chronicle story to see if his testimony was accurately quoted. Nor has he read excerpts from Jose Canseco’s self-serving book in which Canseco claims to have introduced Giambi to steroids.

To read those things, he said, would be a “distraction,” and his only focus is on getting ready for the season. He called Canseco “delusional,” as if that’s some sort of revelation.

If Giambi thinks this concludes his obligation to Yankee fans, he’s sadly mistaken. He has to understand that he is no longer a hero in pinstripes, but rather a failed promise. His numbers have gone down in each of the three seasons he’s played in New York, from a .342 batting average his last year in Oakland to .208 last season and .250 the year before. Last year, he hardly played at all, afflicted with a benign pituitary tumor and what was described as an exotic intestinal parasite. In 21 postseason games with the Yankees, he has eight RBI.

Right now, he’s not a distraction, he’s a failure. Worse, he’s a cheater. The cheating part Yankee fans would probably put up with if he had tacked big numbers on the board. But cheating and still playing lousy is unforgivable.

I don’t know what his lawyers told him he could and couldn’t talk about. But if he was going to use the opportunity provided by the media sessions to start to make things right, he at least could have said, “I’ve done some things, and we all know what they are, in the past for which I am deeply sorry. I feel I’ve broken the trust of the fans. I want to use this opportunity to apologize for that and move forward.”

But you can’t move forward until you get out of the place you’re stuck in. Giambi was stuck in the steroid mess when the day started and he’s still there. The only way out is to address it head-on, admit you did it, and vow to go on and sin no more.

Instead, he goes to spring training still carrying his story with him. His teammates are going to be asked about it. He’ll be asked about it. Every time he fails in the field or at the plate, people will ask if it’s because he’s no longer on drugs. If he succeeds, they’re wonder if he found a new drug that can’t be detected.

He can win back the fans, many of whom are disgusted with how little he’s given for a contract that still has $82 million and four years left on it, by becoming something resembling the old Jason Giambi. Go to Tampa, hit the snot out of the ball, play every day, make the team better. Success makes people forget very quickly about past transgressions.

He didn’t need to call a press conference to do that, especially one at which he refused to talk about the only issues that people care about. And he absolutely didn’t need to impose a lot of ground rules that just added to your conviction that this guy has no humility and no sense of exactly how seriously he’s damaged his reputation and that of his team and his game.

We thought he was going to clear the air. All he did was make it murkier.

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