From the Real World, Here’s One Sincere Plea for Clemens-See

Straight talk from Dear Abby’s less tolerant sister . . .

Dear Crabby:

Whose side are you on in the Roger Clemens holdout?

Do I have to take sides? On the social relevancy scale, this battle ranks just above the one being waged by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Termites.

Yet, I must admit my heart goes out to young Clemens. If he plays this year, he’ll have to do so for a paltry $500,000, no small hardship considering what they charge for a good meal in Boston restaurants.

Would someone please tell this kid, who has had exactly one good big-league season, that all he has to do is win 15 games this year and he’ll get an automatic $1 million minimum in arbitration next season, and so on, up into the stratosphere? Is this such a bad deal, Roger? Can you suck it up for one year, scrape by on a half mill? Do you realize if you sit out the season as a matter of principle, nobody will care, and you’ll be lucky to come back to baseball as a batboy? Earth to Roger! Earth to Roger!

Dear Crabby: You side with the owners, then, in their new policy of holding the line on escalating salaries?

Of course. These poor owners, taken to the cleaners by the players’ union, were steadily going broke until they discovered collusion. Look at the case of the Kroc family. Ray Kroc bought the San Diego Padres for $12 million in 1974. His widow, Joan, just sold the team for about $60 million. Because of the drastic escalation of player salaries during the 13 seasons they owned the team, the Krocs only realized a profit of about $50 million on their investment. Compared to owning a baseball team, their hamburger biz is a hobby.

Dear Crabby: Darryl Strawberry overslept and was late for a spring training practice session, which resulted in a shouting match with Mets manager Davey Johnson. Strawberry said later, “What makes it so bad is that I turn out to be the bad guy.” Is this fair?

I don’t know. How late was Davey Johnson?

Dear Crabby: Gene Upshaw indicates that the NFL Players Union is opposed to a ban on steroids, because he says there’s some evidence that players who go off steroids lose much of their size and power. What do you say?

Makes sense to me. If a player has gained an unfair, unnatural and unethical advantage over other players by taking potentially dangerous steroids, why should the poor guy be punished by making him go cold turkey, forcing him to play football in his real body?

What the players’ union should push for is mandatory steroid injections for everyone, including placekickers, coaches and owners. Hey, sportswriters too, and fans. Let’s face it, we’re a nation of pencil-neck wimps. We could all use another 70 to 80 pounds of muscle, even if it is accompanied by grotesque physical and psychological side effects. If we want to be a great country, we have to pay the price.

Dear Crabby: Those Las Vegas sports bookies! They rooted for the Runnin’ Rebels even though UNLV being in the Final Four took the games off the boards and cost the bookies millions. I have new respect for these fellows. Can you say the same?

If I did, I’d swallow my dentures. What do you think the bettors did with the money they saved by not betting on the Final Four in the Las Vegas parlors? Did they donate it to cancer research? Send it to an orphanage? Pay rent? Or is the correct answer: (d) None of the above, they simply bet the money on some other sporting event, like Australian-rules tobogganing.

Dear Crabby: Are the long-suffering San Diego baseball fans happy now that their Padres have been purchased by an aggressive, enthusiastic local man, giving them new hope?

Sure they are. The last ballclub this new owner owned played below-.500 ball the last 10 years. Any player who learned which hand to put a glove on got traded away. If the San Diego fans think George Argyros will improve their baseball team, I suggest they also hire our L.A. Air Quality Management District to improve the city’s air.

Dear Crabby: Were you shocked by the coke-fessions of former Villanova basketball player Gary McLain in Sports Illustrated?

Only by the part where McLain says of his team’s visit with President Reagan in the Rose Garden, “I was standing a couple of feet behind him, looking in his hair, thinking, this guy has more dandruff than your average man.”

McLain fails to mention that the First Fan also has more hair than the average man, but that’s beside the point. The sobering lesson here is that drugs can drive a man so low he’ll write about the President’s dandruff, without regard to good taste or national security. McLain would have been better off if he’d had white flakes on his head instead of up his nose.