Sweet Lou and Sweet Lucy

Normally, when someone int he public eye admits to smoking some marijuana in their youth it makes the obligatory appearance on the CNN news crawl, causing us to collectively shrug our shoulders and go back to wondering why DanRather is camped out on Jon & Kate's front lawn. But in the case of a sports figure, that formula varies slightly. Typically it surfaces on segment 2 of Around the Horn so Woody Paige can recycle a joke he had an intern find on Google and Jay Mariotti can offer an opinion based entirely upon his ability to assign a nickname to the subject. But when Lou Piniella talks about lighting up, you have to take notice.



For me, Lou ranks slightly below Dwight Eisenhower and Kelly Kapowski on the least likely to be a friend of the leaf scale. The man is rumored to have tried to flush a bat down the toilet in anger during a slump during his playing days in Kansas City, is a world class base tosser and does not hesitate to throw down with Rob Dibble. Not exactly the side effects Nancy Reagan and Reefer Madness warned us about.


The good news from this is that the leaf didn't take with Lou, "it didn't do a damn thing for me." Who knows where Lou would be right now if he gave it another try. Would he mellow out a bit and become more a Phil Jackson-style zen philosopher/coach? Or would he have never pursued the managerial track and ended up in the annual Sports Illustrated Where Are they Now issue as the owner of a San Diego surf shop?

I guess we'll never know, but it would have been interesting to see Piniella storm out of the dugout only to lose his thought before he could get to home plate.

Soto and Sweet Lucy

Well, I guess all those stories about the "calming influence" Soto had over the pitching staff make a lot more sense with the news that Geo tested positive for marijuana during the WBC. This also explains his penchant for showing up to spring training on the hefty side - I'm not a social scientist but I'm guessing there's a low correlation between marijuana usage and spending a lot of time in the gym.

Going forward, I think this has two major implications. The hecklers will be coming fast, furious and forever. Remember how that guy sitting next to you at the Reds game in 2002 had that really great "Griffey is injury prone" put down? And remember how that guy sitting next to you in 2008 had that really old "Griffey is injury prone" put down? Well, in 2016 I'm guessing you'll still be hearing Soto marijuana taunts from the stands. But on the plus side I'm hoping that Cubs organist Gary Pressy is hard at work learning to play some Cypress Hill or Sublime tunes to accompany future Soto trips to the plate.

Secondly, I'm hoping "calming clubhouse influence" might enter the baseball lexicon as code for a player that likes to smoke the occasional joint. This could go right up there with:

• "Hardest worker on the team... lives in the weight room" - Which of course is code for being a living example of the benefits of modern pharmacology. Aside from the numerous baseball players this has applied to, I think the textbook case is probably my favorite player from the 1993 ECU Timberwolves.


• "Flu-like symptoms" - They might as well call this Mantle-itis... only the Mick was supposedly legendary for playing in less than ideal condition, lets go with calling this a case of the Strawberries. Or if you're in the NBA, trying to hang with Ricky Davis.


• "Tremendous competitor" - Tremendous asshole. There's a reason these guys end up playing on 5 teams in 10 years.


• "Fundamentally sound" - No talent... when is the last time you heard about a fundamentally sound player sending a ball 450 feet into the stands? OK, now when's the last time you heard of a fundamentally sound player grounding a single between the second and first basemen?

• "Scrappy" - See fundamentally sound. Could also be used to describe any undersized white guy, especially if he plays for Duke and slaps the floor every time down the floor and flops like a European center trying to guard Shaq in his prime.

So light one up for Geo ladies and gentlemen. After all, now we know why Piniella hasn't been kicked out of too many games as the Cubs skipper.