No, he's not taking them because he wants to be as big as Jon Miller. He's commenting that the burden of this scandal is on the Player's Association, since it is players who are accusing other players. Fair enough. The paragraphs that made me roll my eyes, however, are these two:

On a radio show recently, Bob Costas said he felt the explosion of power since the 1994 strike has been partly attributed to steroid use. He had aired the same opinion at least once before. When Bob and I were broadcasting the 2000 All-Star Game in Atlanta, he said that both the balls and the players were juiced.

The problem is, how does one know who is juiced? I have always maintained that poorer pitching, smaller ballparks and livelier balls have contributed to the increase in home runs. I cannot consider steroids a contributor without proof.

Starting in 1994, Joe would go around spouting about how the ball was juiced (along with a lot of others in the game) with absolutely no proof! He had not seen any tests of baseball. Although I tried to get ESPN to do an indepth piece on the manufacturing of baseball that would have asked for records of manufacturing changes and results of rebound tests, they never did. When a UMass professor finally did the test for MLB a few years ago, he found what I had suspected all along; balls were legal, but they were consistently manufactured at the high end of the legal limit. I believe this wasn't a conspiracy, but a result of better statistical analysis used in the manufacturing of baseballs making them more consistent.

Before the late 1980's, US manufactures would make millions of whatever they were building, then test them to see if they worked. If they didn't work, they threw them out, fixed the process, and started all over again. In the 1980's, Japan was kicking the US economically because they adpoted a statistical method of quality control that would catch manufacturing defects after a few hundred went wrong, not thousands or millions. To keep from going out of business, American manufacturers started adpoting these techniques.

How does this apply to baseball? Okay, you set your machines up and start making baseballs. There is a lot of leeway in the size and weight of a ball, and how far it's allowed to rebound. You set the machines to make a tight ball, and as time goes on, things don't work as efficiently, and you start making looser balls. So you get a distribution of balls across all legal levels. After you notice you've made thousands of bad balls, you go back and fix the machines and start all over. But now with the new technique, you see 100 balls getting out of whack, and even though they are still legal, you go fix the machine! And since fixing means a tight ball, you get so called juiced balls.

The solution, of course, is to set the machines to make balls at the midpoint of the rebound range. We're seeing less offense this year. I don't know how long it takes balls to work their way through the system, but my bet is something like this has happened.