I was just about to write a message expressing the desire to see a jersey reveal photo-op when I came across this here photo of new Mets catcher Brian Schneider, his cuteypie wife Jordan, and the No. 23 jersey he may wear next season.

As related by Larry in the comments secition of the Matt Wise post below, issuing 23 to Schneider leaves Marlon Anderson in temporary digital limbo: The 18 he wore in his first Met go-round blongs to Moises Alou, and the 8 he wore most frequently (though never exclusively) in his career is itself in mothballs for Gary Carter. (The New York Post, you may recall, reported the Mets had designs to retire the number back in 2006 but never got around to it).

(December 19, 2007)

A little late to be bringing this up, but had Bud Selig and the Players Association any sense at all, they’d have declared amnesty for all PED users with the introduction of the new CBA, admitted there was a steroid epidemic and asked for forgiveness and fresh start long before Washington got involved. With the Mitchell Report due to drop Thursday, they’ll wind up doing that anyway, only with dozens (hundreds?) of reputations ruined and a whole new layer of suspicion upon baseball.

Surely this report will only serve to further muddy up the entire whodunnit, witch-hunt aspects of the investigation, and will likely leave a false impression of the supposed “innocence” of those ballplayers whose names don’t appear. What we won’t hear nearly enough is the idea that for the guilty parties, PED use was a matter of course. If the pitcher is using, so must the batter. With millions on the line in a game where performance is obsessively quantified, a player who does not use obviously ran the risk of losing his job to one who does. And so on. That’s the nature of an epidemic.