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Auto Parts Airports is many Carquest locations. See stores for details. Welcome, everybody, to the local hour, it's the David Samson show, as it usually is on Thursday, lots of interesting contracts being handed out in Major League Baseball. I do want to talk to you about the transactions going on, but I want to lead with an NBA transaction that was pretty fascinating. I was led to believe that John Wall had one of the unmoveable contracts in that sport.

And now I have learned with certainty in the NBA there is no such thing as an untradeable contract. What's your take away from the Russell Westbrook for John Wall and a first round draft pick trade that just went down?

Well, first of all, I was laughing at Tommy Shepherd, who works for the Wizards. The old GM was a guy named Ernie Grunfeld, by the way, who taught me how to shoot free throws when I was a little boy. He was a Jewish player from married a Milwaukee, Wisconsin girl. And so I knew him because I was a Milwaukee guy. So I've known Ernie Grunfeld forever. And what Tommy Shepherd said, I don't know why, but we could talk about Ernie for a whole show because there's some great stories, you know, with the Bernie and Ernie show is, by the way, either of you, Mike, do you know Bernie and Ernie know?

Can we can we not talk about Ernie Grunfeld for a great deal of time? I feel like during my career I spent too much time talking about and thinking about former Knicks GM Ernie Grunfeld.

So I view him as a player, actually, as part of the Bernie Ernie Show. But anyway, Tommy Sheppard of the Wizards said, hey, John Wall is not going to be traded. And the minute I read that, I went on to nothing personal and I made that a full topic. Because you don't ever say that about a player. You say everybody could be traded, but some are less likely to be traded than others. The reason John Wall was not likely to be traded.

He's coming off a ruptured Achilles. He's been hurt and he's overpaid by so much. So what do you do in sports when you have that is you go around the league when your owner tells you to get rid of this guy and you look for another guy that another team has been told by its owner that it has to get rid of. So the Westbrook wall trade is actually a trade from heaven because it's two teams who wanted to get rid of two overpaid players who have not helped their teams win at all at any time.

So what it shows you is that any time you sign a player, I would say this to the owner all the time, we'll sign him. Don't worry. We'll be able to trade him no matter what. Even if we have to pay a little bit of the contract down, we'll be able to find somebody who thinks they can do better than we did with that player. And that's what happened in the NBA. And as Pablo so perfectly put last night, there is no such thing as an untradeable contract, whether it's basketball or baseball.

But these two guys stink, Mikey.

Both of them, I do have to sort of stink is too strong and saying never help their team win is also to Russell Westbrook was an all star MVP here. Well, well, well.

And John Wall helped his team win. But if you want to look at it right now, I understand their stock is low, especially considering what most people just sort of naturally project Russell Westbrook's game to be. These are two players that had tremendous athleticism and relied on it. But Russell Westbrook was an all star this year on merit for Houston. David. Right.

So, again, we don't focus when you're running the team. That's a very fan thing to say. Right? You look at whether he's an all star, you look at how many points per game he scores. I'm talking about what happens when he joins a team and whether or not that team gets better. That's how you evaluate players. And I do not view the rockets as a better team. You complaint. You can blame D'Antoni if you want.

You can blame the offensive system if you want. But there simply weren't better. And the Wizards, what do you. I don't understand what you're saying. The Wizards. What if they ever won? Well, ever.

You sort of checkmated me here because I agree with you, but I need to present the other side. There are plenty of rational human beings. I would point to wait. He wasn't voted in by the fans. This was a merit based argument in a sport that it's really difficult to actually make the all star team there. Several great players like Mike Conley Junior never made an all star team. It's hard to make the NBA all star game based off of merit and not fan vote.

And they did.

It's not saying my team, you don't care about that. You don't care about guys who make your all star team, except it's fun for the all star poster. But other than that, when players make all star teams, you just have to pay them more in bonuses and it doesn't give your team one more victory.

In fairness to John Wall, though, when he was health the Wizards, this isn't saying much. It's grading on a curve, David. But the Wizards had their highest seeded playoff teams ever. Like they didn't. They weren't. That's a bad franchise for a long time.

I think there were a game away from the Eastern Conference and they were a four or five seed. I know it's middling, but it's not irrelevant. Like, it's not both players.

He did this thing, but this is a player that relied on athleticism that was one of the fastest players in the NBA and he had an Achilles injury. That's that's a big injury. So they had to staple the first round draft pick. But it's weird.

Unlike Major League Baseball, bad contracts have a tremendous value, like the Miami Heat signed Meyers Leonard to a deal that really upset every Heat fan because they didn't think he was worth nine million a year, two years.

But there's a bizarro thing in the NBA. And now I know that there's like a no trade thing kicked into at least part of. His deal, but bad contracts in the NBA because it's a cap sport, have a value because the salaries need to match up.

So that's exactly what what the point is, though, so you cannot then evaluate a trade, you have to do it based on money. This was a complete money. It's not there's no money dumps right, in basketball because you have to match up salaries. There can be year dumps where you are gaining years and you're gaining flexibility in future years on your cap, unlike baseball, where you can just do a straight money dump. And I used to love those because that was your favorite.

That was your favorite. I would say, how could it not be you? Do you object to the appraisal? You're the king of the money dump. I wouldn't say I'm the king, but I'm certainly the prince. I don't want to say I'm the king, and because in order to be the king of the money dump, you have to demand the money that makes you the king. The prince of the money dump gets to do the dumping. So I'd always rather do the dumping.

There's a lot of interesting contracts being handed out in Major League Baseball. Is this everyone just sort of in a holding pattern because of the pandemic? Because I'm seeing a lot of one year deals right now, David.

Well, you're seeing that from players yesterday. Last night was called the non-tenured deadline. That's the deadline by which a team has to offer a player a contract who is eligible for arbitration, because if they don't, that player becomes an unrestricted free agent. Now, let's take a look at the Chicago Cubs, because I think we're being informed now as to why Theo left. Theo Epstein left the Cubs because he saw this cut in payroll. He saw players getting non-tenured.

He saw his employees getting fired around him and or furloughed or whatever the case may be. I don't buy any of that is the reason why Theo left. But all of that said, the Cubs have their window. Remember the Cubs dynasty that was being built? Is it a dynasty when you win as many World Series as the Marlins? Wait, I'm wrong. Fewer World Series than the Marlins did over a six year period. Is it is it a dynasty that Theo built with the Cubs?

No, not at all. Not at all. And remember, when they were winning in 15, 16, the thought was, this is the dynasty with Bryant and Baez. And Shorebird, remember, warb was so amazing. By the way, he's a free agent right now. And someone's going to sign him because an owner right now is saying, hey, this is a home run league. I love home runs. Let's get Schwab and pay him five million with incentives to get him back to what he would have gotten had he gone through arbitration and let him match for us.

But they haven't lived with Schwab and realized he's a defensive liability and that he hits too high a keg softball player.

That's right.

But he's a millionaire doing it. Yeah. So that makes him quite a few steps above a keg softball.

He also looks like he fronts a new metal band from the early 2000s a little bit. I mean, who who rocks the chinstrap right now? So he's the type who, if he were playing football right, would he have the face mask, the one bar across the Mark Moseley face mask? Do you remember Mark?

No, he's a type of football player that was an MVP. We talked about this the other day that he somehow won MVP of the league the scab season.

He's a type of football player that will have two cans of beer attached to his football helmet.

Not a single ball talked about Mark Mosley like within the last five days. We do this all the time, David. We get nostalgic and old around here. What might not be last five days? How long ago was it, Mike, what, 10 days ago talked about Mark Mosley?

I know we talked about the kicker that won MVP in the NFL. It's Mark that we talked about him like they want to say three weeks ago.

OK, so three weeks ago I asked me laugh because I haven't I haven't thought about that name in probably two decades.

We haven't thought about it in three and a half weeks. Yeah. That's just how we get down here. Talking to David Simpson, host of Nothing Personal. You know that by now, I'm sure. And all right, David, I've had this filed the way I write this, my record. Let's talk about the BALCO congressional hearings.

Oh, we're getting to that. After all this time. We are finally. Do you have any notes on that, David? Where are the notes on the congressional hearing? Do you have any notes on that? Not in my current location, but they're certainly in my brain. That was a very interesting time in baseball. But I thought you were going to start to talk to me about steroids and our players.

Well, I have talked to I've talked to you about about Pudge, obviously.

And we had some fun conversations about that. But what I've learned in talking about you is like you were, you don't want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. You are necessary. I don't know.

I hate to paint you this way, but evil in Major League Baseball, you described how influential you were in getting commissioners elected.

I was sort of stunned at how much say you had in that, because the impression that I got from you was because of the revenue sharing that other Major League Baseball owners didn't really like you and your team. However, you seem to be necessary. So I'm wondering how much influence and say you had over the steroid controversy.

I feel like David I feel like David is the human cartoon manifestation of this is how sports business has to be cold.

And you need some David Stimson's. But I am reading the room right now, and I think you might be taking exception to some of the things I'm saying and painting it.

So please, evil's evil evils a little strong. I said I said I didn't want to frame it that way unnecessarily.

John Wall and Russell Westbrook suck, but evil is pretty strong for David.

One of the verbal foibles that you have, Mickey, that that is interesting to me, as we've been doing these local hours, is you try to preface something and you caveat it and then you say it anyway. So what that means actually you're on to me listening to this, is that that's really what you think. Yeah, I like the phrase, to be honest. Yeah. And then you go on and talk, which is such a joke.

You never should say that because it means all the other time you're talking to and you don't qualify. You're not being honest.

No offense, but I'm going to offend you.

Sort of no offense, but this doesn't need to be said. But well then don't say it. I think that you throw around words. And my problem with you, Mike, is that you throw around adjectives that people who are listening and you've built such a huge audience and they believe that you choose your words carefully because that's what they want to believe, because when you say something, they then believe it to be true. So when you throw around, we're like evil.

Of course, I'm giving a look right here off camera because that's not the case to me to be evil. I'm not a sociopath. No one. And the calculating that I used to do before making moves while running the team was not based on the difference between good and evil. It was based on the reality of profit versus loss. Well, and those are not what you cut through it, though.

But one of the reasons that I like talking to you, one of the reasons that we enjoy the content farm that you are, is because you have a way of just cutting through the bullshit in a way that's cold and surgical. And people don't do that with their mythology. Like even as they say, sports is a business like they get appalled by how bare and naked the greed is right now when you're seeing a football game in the NFL at three forty five in the afternoon and baseball playing this lopsided, ridiculous, distorted season pin a champion.

Right. But that's not evil. But in sports, when you're the mythology buster with cash, that it's it's the worst thing, like the greatest divide in sports to me between the fan and the player, is that gulf of you don't have to work for your money the way that I do. It's money. It's the biggest gulf between the customer and what he's consuming, he or she is consuming.

Do you view that in the other areas in which you do business when you're on when you're on a flight, do you view yourself as having a huge gulf between the people who are running the airline and you who are using it as a customer and flying it?

Well, yeah, because they're sitting in the back and I'm I'm in the front. I don't want to I don't want to get bogged down here. Let me just apologize to you for calling you evil, but also audience.

You know exactly what I meant and what I was speaking for there so you can watch it like that.

No offense. No offense. I am sorry for calling you evil. The audience knows what I meant by that.

Let's move on.

OK, all right. So is your question. How much influence? How so you know exactly how on a scale from one to ten, exactly how evil are you? So you had you had this power that was very surprising to me just because of how you were perceived in the media. OK, is that we all in agreement with the language that I just you evil.

Evil is strong, but evil would be the I was I was surprised that the owners leaned on you so heavily because the impression that I got was that you were just stealing their money via revenue sharing and you were a thorn in their side.

OK, so let me tell you, steroids works because I think that you're confusing steroids with the other inner workings of baseball. Steroids were something that when I got into baseball, they were it was full fledged. Everyone was taking steroids and and everyone that that's a bit of hyperbole. So very many a majority of players were taking some sort of performance enhancing supplements or drugs. And it was so out in the open because it was in the clubhouses, it was it was not being distributed by the team.

When I first got to Montreal, we did not actually you don't go to the training room and then we give you drugs. What we did is we basically turned our back when we saw what the players were doing, as long as the players were getting the results actively, like actively you saw it.

Is there a time you remember seeing something and saying, I shouldn't be seeing that? Never mind. No, because I would never look at it that way, so so by definition, if you listen carefully to what you said, that would assume that when I was looking at it, I would know it to be so wrong that I want to turn my back on a violation so I can have plausible deniability. I didn't even think in those terms back then because I didn't need plausible deniability because I was in a ship with 30 other captains, all of whom were doing the same thing, except everyone was lying about it.

So the thing about steroids that always interested me is that it only became a thing. When the PR got so bad that baseball was forced into under Bud Selig to address it because the union knew about it, the owners knew about it, the players, the executives, the GMs, when you were signing players, it was one of the questions. This is sort of pre analytics in a way. You thought to yourself, OK, this player who we're about to sign, does he take steroids?

And if so, will he want to continue to take them once we sign him? Or are we not getting who we're paying for because he's going to take the money and then decide he wants to stop doing the protocol? Does you want to get his wife pregnant? Is he getting hurt? More so those are the types of things we were looking at with signings as opposed to some of the other factors like war or launch angle, which have now become.

So it's funny.

It was just as plain as day. It was a part of your evaluation when looking to acquire talent. Is he on steroids right now? How would you vet that? You would just look at his would just look at Dan Uggla.

You would just just stare at it and and then you'd be like, yeah.

So, Dan, it was an interesting one. And anyway, I don't I don't think that that is necessary to go that way.

But we certainly don't leave there. Don't leave. Hold on. You had something for us that might be a little bit interesting there.

So he is my first introduction to Dan Uggla was, as a rule, he was a pickup back in 06 when we had traded away all the players from the five team trying to rout him for nothing.

You got him for nothing. One of the great deals in the history of the Rule five draft. Well, so here's the funny part. It's not that he was a great steal. It's there was a difference when we had him versus when the other team didn't want him. So that is always a risk during the steroid era that you are going to be sometimes you're the bug and sometimes you're the windshield. Right. That's just the reality with Dan Uggla, who to this day, to this day is one in the top five of the players who I'm close to and actually friends with.

And we do communicate and we talk about the money he made both with the Marlins and with the Braves because he is set for life. I'm a little bored now, maybe, but set for life.

He must laugh about it. He must laugh about it. With the fight of the fifty million dollar contract where you guys were offering something, I don't even remember the details. But he knew he was going to get more years. He knew he was going to get his money somewhere, and he did. Well, that that's that's a totally different story where he was just honest with me, he told me what Atlanta was offering and I told him that we didn't have the money to get to that.

And we sort of had a tear and then a laugh and we said, good luck in Atlanta. And David, get the extension, if I may.

Were you doing sort of some of the older evaluation? Because Dan Uggla is like one of these guys that many people just assume by looking at the size of his forearms that there's not a lot of precedent for? Well, in that sport what there is. But it's rare for a guy to be rule five. Not this highly touted guy burst onto the scene and be one of the historic power hitters at his position. Were you applying some of that? Well, I don't know for sure if he's doing this, but there seems look at his forearms.

There seems to be a drop off coming.

I don't know for sure. And I'm trying hard to know for sure.

Right. It's it's just hard. I mean, you you learn what to look for. You learn for body changes. You learn for you learn to look for acne. You learn to look for mood swings. You learn to look for behaviors. So it's really not that difficult. It's the same way. It's funny you're mentioning this, because when your people talk now about character, you want certain characters in your clubhouse. You want to make sure that this is not going to be a quote unquote.

It's a horrible expression. I hate that we used it, but cancer in the clubhouse, you don't want those things. And when you've got steroid guys, you are in danger. You're walking perilously close to that being in your clubhouse. I have heard stories, you know, about the Orioles back in the day, you know, with David Ciggie, let's say, and Brady Anderson. Brady Anderson is the example I want to bring up. He did steroids because he wanted to get paid and then he didn't want to keep doing them.

So he did steroids, got paid, stop doing steroids and went back to being Brady Anderson. And back in those days, owners were so enthralled with the possibility of having someone signed who was doing steroids, who would continue to use steroids, that the biggest differentiating factor in evaluating talent was in deciding whether or not that player would continue to take them. That became a difference maker between a good signing and bad.

So I kind of want to stay here and maybe do a larger overarching BALCO congressional hearing episode because there's a lot of avenues I want to follow right now. I do find it funny that your steroid task force was basically what it is to us sitting at home. Well, look at the size of this guy.

Look at his head. Look at his head is different than he is. Wait a second. This guy looks surprisingly jacked.

So we would speak to players and speak to agents when agents would try to tell us. And there were a bunch of agents who were really funny about this. Hey, listen, my guy my guy works so hard this off season, he is ready to take the next step in his career. And he spent the entire off season working on his body. He was doing three days. And I would just laugh because in baseball, the off season is basically October.

If you don't make the playoffs, November, December, January, and then you go to spring training in February. So it's not like you have an off year and off season is a year. It's a third of the year. And I've not been able to ever meet a player who can transform his body during an off season other than starting to take steroids or stopping to take steroids. But the other little nugget about steroids, it's not just about the biceps that's not accurate.

It's about injury and avoiding injury and recovering from injury. When you go back and look at the Andy Pettitte to the world, the gaudens of the world, that what they were trying to do, they were trying to either get better, faster, or they were trying to stay on the field and not have aches and pains. The reason why players do steroids was the same reason why they all did amphetamines. It is it is much harder than football.

And I get I get added that all the time for this. Being a football player is way easier than being a baseball player.

Travel the hours you're putting in the every day of it like baseball is brutal. A game one hundred and forty. If you're a catcher who's just gone through a summer in Arlington, like it's brutal, it's the worst.

It's so bad. And we watch these players physically and we see what happens to them. For example, when we had players gaining weight during a season at Pro Player, we knew that that was an indicator that there was something going on because you can't play in the old Marlins where the Dolphins currently play without a roof and ever gain weight, because we would weigh these guys every single week and so we would follow their weights. And there were some players.

Gaby Sanchez is a great example who I love, Gaby. He's the only player I ever came across who gained significant weight, ironically, without doing steroids, because he had had that issue in the past. So he wasn't doing them with us and he gained weight.

A pro player, Jose Miguel Cabrera, also gained weight at pro player, not steroids. That was alcohol. That was abuse.

I also gained weight. And so I think I think we all got soft serve. Yeah, I think we all did. It's funny that you mention the the staying on the field stuff because we'll fullard. I just got hit in the NFL with a suspension for performance enhancing drugs, and he was oddly healthy if you followed his career. This guy was always bothered by nagging injuries, dynomite, when you could actually get him on the field, home run threat, but he could just never stay on the field.

And he played 11 games this year, which seemed a little surprising. Maybe he figured something out and then he's hit with a performance enhancing drug thing. But you followed the corporate chain and you realize the strength and conditioning. Assistant coach is Brian Cushing, who, I mean, looks like a walking poster boy for performance enhancing drugs, and he himself got hit by it by the NFL. So it carries weight. What I'm trying to say saying on the field is actually one of the underrated things.

Oh, Kerry's I didn't that underrated at all, by the way. It is, by the way, no pun intended, staying on the field is how players get paid. It's that simple. And so, you know, I did a full segment on him on nothing personal last week or whenever he tested positive because he said something that was so ridiculous in his statement that he had met with a medical professional and he got a professional opinion about what he was taking and he was lying because that's not how it works in any in football or in basketball or in baseball.

There is nothing these players take. No matter what they tell you, they know exactly what they're putting in their body. It is never a surprise, but they always pretend as though, oh, my God, I had no idea that was not an approved substance. And that's a union based PR strategy in order to elicit some sort of sympathy. And from management standpoint, we would just laugh at that.

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Dan Uggla was one of these second baseman that you could sort of kind of make your own assumptions just by looking at him. However, the first ever guy that got hit by the steroids, oh, well, the performance enhancing drug violation was this guy named Alex Sanchez. And you want to know by looking at him, Dee Gordon, we've talked about him in the past.

You look at him, Omoto looks like it was like a stick figure. Yeah.

Brian Roberts, another guy that had the surrounding them. And you would look at their bodies and be like, well, I don't really see it, but with Dick Gordon, he still didn't look like it. But you have to go back in the years and see that he's put on about 30 pounds, that he was actually lighter.

So Dick Gordon had a body, a lot like one in a uniform. You think that they do not have good bodies, but when you see him in the clubhouse without clothes on, that totally came off wrong.

But whatever they're saying, I mean, that's what you saw them in the clubhouse without clothes on. And I have seen on how one pair is actually the one guy that worked so damn hard that that body was that body was earned. Like there could not be any questions about steroids with that dude because everybody saw the way that guy was.

And also his arm from centerfield. And by the way, he's got a great body, Swampers not in the uniform. He liked wearing baggy uniforms. That was his thing. He would always size up. There's some players Derek Dietrich would size down.

And so what would happen with Uggla also size down if he wanted the shirts to be the uniform jerseys to be tight?

Yes. And so what happens is the players actually communicate with the clubhouse equipment manager and you get to know when you acquire a player, one of the questions you ask when there's a communication is a what number are you going to wear? Here's the numbers are available, but also what your sizes what do you prefer to wear? Because when you walk into the clubhouse, you have a full rack of clothes, you have workout clothes, you have batting practice clothes, you have uniforms both home, road and alternate.

And so we one of the inquiries is, all right, here's what your size is. What size do you want? And there were certain players who enjoyed Giancarlo Stanton. Did you ever notice how he does all of his press, his postgame press availability?

Does he do it with his arms crossed? He does it in a sleeveless, tight workout shirt. Take a look back.

Oh, sexy as hell. No, he should what he should do is slather up in oil and just do it shirtless, emerging from a Jacuzzi to remember the Sports Illustrated cover stand when he was a marlin that was body painted.

Do I hang it up over here?

So is he. He signed it. I have it somewhere around here. He signed that to me to check out a picture, got it framed. And he said, David, I know you would have wanted to have applied the paint yourself.

Maybe next time, love Yankalilla. And I said to when he gave that to me, I said, I'm sorry. I don't understand. Have I somehow given vibe that I want to heal your body?

Like, where did you get off that? I know that an evil or the two vibes you got.

David, so what about your evaluation process? You said it was pretty blunt, you would say, well, does this guy do steroids? Look at him, is he going to fall off? Does he want to get his wife pregnant? But obviously somewhere along the lines, it had to be come a little bit more scientific than that, didn't it? In terms of the steroid evaluation, yeah, because it actually became a thing that you had to deal with, it became like policy.

You sort of you saw the sea change in the sport where it was something that was sort of like, yeah, we we talk about it openly. Mark McGwire has a performance enhancer hanging up in his locker. It's sort of like one of these known things all of a sudden, like, oh, man, we have to be worried about it because we're having congressional hearings now.

So, yes. So the congressional hearings were something that if you people who don't remember that that's when some of the biggest names in baseball were actually can you imagine this is what Congress was doing. People say that there's some sort of waste going on. Now, the reason why it became such a big deal is that what was happening is, is that kids, the worry from Congress is that kids were going to do steroids thinking that was their best way to become a professional athlete.

And steroids are just bad for you and they're bad for you, not because of the actual steroid. They actually break your body down.

Yeah, kids were you and kids were absolutely doing this. You probably know from evaluating high school talent. I went to a school that had a good baseball program and you kind of knew. It was it was it was not it was not hidden, right, it was not a big deal. And so one of the things we do, by the way, while drafting before we draft a hurricane's player, like before we draft Gabby Sanchez, we went through and talked about, OK, this is what Gabby was in college.

Is there a reason to believe that that's only steroid based? And you talk to the coaches who lie, the college coaches lie on behalf of their players. You talk to the teammates, they lie. You know, Gabby Sanchez's best friend and roommate was Ryan Braun. And you go through all of those all of those different thought processes and you just have to it's not scientific at all. You try to do your homework knowing that you're getting lied to by everyone who's talking to you and you just make a decision.

You're going to be wrong once in a while. We were wrong a ton about players who we thought were totally kosher and were not or players who we thought would remain unkosher and then became kosher. So the examples have been wrong for every team. It's not just the Marlins, it was every team.

I have a couple of questions. I know you guys have talked about some of the Gordon stuff, but I remember thinking to myself when you guys signed him that that was a poor signing and I was wrong because he had a great season. Do you know going into that? Hey, he's doing steroids. This is why his body's changed, this is why he's a little bit different as a player and a little bit better. Do you know? Right.

Did you know right there with him? Because I know you guys have covered the you know, all the excuse me making he did after he was caught doing it. No, that's that's one of the biggest disappointments of my career in a in a long list is the fact that D was signed to that deal and he felt the pressure to do steroids without because he wanted to live up to the contract. And that is one of the great examples where I misread the room where I didn't realize because of his past, because of his family history, because of the pressure that he felt with that deal.

Most players, when they sign a deal like that, which was completely deserved and not an overpay because of what we thought he was and would continue to be.

It's a destination for a lot of players. So we finish line because for him, he got crazed after that. And that's what he and I talked about, that he felt as though that he had to continue to be at that level. He was when he won the batting title, et cetera, et cetera. And I we missed it. We absolutely missed it because I didn't think he'd be that type of player. And it's such a huge disappointment.

Do you simply assume, given that history, given that you are a realist and given that Tom Brady and LeBron James are aging in a way that you don't normally see, do you assume that human growth hormone has now replaced throughout sports that human growth hormone, which is much harder to trace and test, that it's just as rampant as steroids were?

There has been no change in the amount of players using PEDs. And and I'll say it and I and I think that that people in the commissioner's office will be angry and upset, but I'll say right now there has been no change. They are always ahead of the testers. That is just the definition of they are always a step ahead. It's like the way I view steroids, the way I view counterfeit currency. The people who are good at counterfeiting are always ahead of the changes that are made to the bills, which is why there's always counterfeiting.

And that's the same with PD. Well, let me pin you down so you have to be right. You're guessing, but you have to be right. Tom Brady, human growth hormone, PEDs.

There's no question when you when you look at Tom Brady, to me, it's very simple. What you're seeing now is a a sort of gnawing away of his skills as a QB, not as his ability to be on the field week after week and snap after snap. You are seeing the fact that as you get older in a position like that, it simply becomes harder for your arm to do what your brain has known your arm can do for two decades.

So you have to get out and be right. LeBron James. So LeBron James is 36, about to turn 36 if he's not already.

Yeah, I would not say that that he is has to do that yet. But it's going to. It's going to come. It's going to come. This is going to be an interesting season. If there were ever a year for LeBron James to start taking supplements, this would be it, because he wants to repeat, because he wants to catch Kobe and Jordan and to do it in a season of 72 games with no off season. He doesn't like load management, but he's going to have to do that if he does not sit out eight games out of the seventy two because of load management, then I would start suspecting if his minutes stay the same, because at that age you simply cannot be on the court that much.

It's very brave of you to go out there. I care about you. You say it's going to be an interesting season. It's going to be an interesting reaction to this episode. But given your Tom Brady opinion, you say that.

But people who are in the sport or people who are knowledgeable about how HGH works and I've spent a lot of time learning about whether because don't forget, my history with HGH goes back way before I was in sports.

I'm 55. It goes back to being a child and having it been suggested by my doctor that I should have HGH, it goes back to suggesting that my son should take HGH.

Well, that's one of the reasons it's stupid. And the way we monitor all this cheating is stupid. The idea that it would be OK for a five year old to help growth, but that people who are professionals and adults and are treating their body for pain, endurance and for everything looking messy, messy, had to take human.

It's just stupid the way we judge this stuff. It really is. But I hope you're not confusing that. I'm not judging Tom Brady in the league.

I don't. You. I don't I don't hear a judgment.

Don't, because Tom Brady, with what I judge is I love Tom Brady's ego. Ego is what makes Tom Brady tick always. And in order to succeed at the level he succeeds, whether you are a football player or a radio host or in business or whatever, you do that drive when you no longer have the skill to be at the level you want to be at. But there is a tool you can use to stay at that level for longer.

Of course you're going to do that is that's not judging in the history that you've had around sports.

Was there any denial that had you convinced maybe there's something more to this? Because if I were to highlight one not being inside the sport that you were, but I got fooled and I know Dan sort of got fooled by Ryan Braun.

I felt like such an idiot because he just when he was so hard, he pressed the gas so hard and he went out of his way, like if he wasn't telling the truth, he was willingly ruining the life of some poor person, some poor urine collector. And he actually did do that while that was going on. You were skeptical the whole time. It was any part of you being like, well, if he's this aggressive about it, I knew exactly because of the relationship he had with someone.

I knew so and I knew exactly what was going on. And inside baseball, he knew what was going on.

It was it was so pathetic what he did and it literally changed. He could have owned Milwaukee in a way that Yelich does now. And if he stays in Milwaukee, which he will through this extension, he will become to me, potentially the most famous brewer of all time. Ryan Braun was the chosen one. This was before Yoni's. He was the athlete in that great sports town of Milwaukee. And it's done it's done forever because all he had to do was say, you know what, you got me.

I've made a mistake. I'm sorry, I won't do it again. But he doubled down on taking out somebody. He did a Jeff Luhnow blaming people below him who are just working for a living on something that he did and he instructed others to do, which is the lowest type. You want to talk about evil. To me, that's evil. If you are taking people who have no money, they're in no position to do anything in terms of their own sort of perceived self-worth, both financially and their their lot in life.

And you squash them in order to cover up what you've done. It is disgraceful. I've never I actually got rid of all the Ryan Braun. So I had a, you know, a signed ball and a bat. And and Ryan Brown to me became the perfect example of someone he and Roger Clemens, Roger Clemens ruined. We had that great moment in 03 when I gave him a standing ovation for his last pitch when he was going to retire.

It was like it was it was one of the greatest moments in South Florida sports history where the sports fans, even though we we just filled the football, we just got we wandered over to the stadium by accident on the way to the club.

But all 70000 plus knew exactly what was going on in that moment and respected one of the game's greats. And he took it away from us.

It was it was looking back on it, I remember I was on the. What's that? Oh, my God.

The voluntaries pro player where you walk around on the outside the spirals staircase spiral walkways.

It's not there's a name for it, but I'm totally blanking. I knew I was walking from the suite level down to the field level because I wanted to be down at the field level to give Clemens I knew was going to be happening. And I wanted to make sure I was down there to give him a standing ovation to respect what he had done. Final game in that game was that game was decided by an Alex Gonzalez home run anyway. So give the standing ovation.

Everything's great. And then years later, I look back and it actually still sickens me. It really does, knowing what he did after that in order to keep his career going. And then he by the way, he said it was my wife's. Can you how does that conversation go in bed when he says, listen, honey, here's what we're going to do. We're going to say that you're the one who's doing steroids and that I it just was addressed to me for mailing purposes.

But then it was really yours. And you're the one who shot it in your own ass.

Well, I mean, if you follow Al Jazeera's reporting, it's certainly something that has been used several times. Thereafter, an excuse that has been used before. Among the most impressive things I've ever seen on a baseball field, weirdly, one of them is outfielder Kevin Mitchell, making a catch in his with his bare hand over his head of a fly ball while running to catch a foul ball. And one of the others, though not as flukey, was you mentioned Clemens.

And what I think of is him brushing back Miguel Cabrera and then Miguel Cabrera going opposite field in that stadium where no one went opposite field at 20 years old. It's literally one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in baseball, where you're that witness to, holy shit, this kid is going to be good.

He didn't know who Roger Clemens was. Masad is great.

Are you are you kidding me? He didn't know who he was. He was just a pitcher.

So he had no idea how bad that moment.

What he didn't know the standing ovation out there.

Why any of that was why why is everyone celebrating this guy that is so funny? You have this amazing of people, of players focusing on this kind of stuff. We would have to beg the guys to come out of the clubhouse in when when another player was being honored, when there was a retirement ceremony for a player or when he signed a player to retirement. Whatever the case may be, you have to go in and beg these guys to come out and respect and clap because they just don't know.

Miguel Cabrera grew up in Venezuela with with not a penny to his name.

It's the right. You're wondering whether he knows Roger Clemens, the rocket.

That's so ridiculous. It's the rocket was not nonsense. It's about things like it's like baseball is odd to hear someone say they're facing Hall of Famers standing ovation. Twenty years in baseball, Roger Clemens. It is rare for I know it was true of Luis Castillo and some other guys. It's still rare to not have any idea who Roger Clemens is. Why don't you ask some people who are 20 about people in the radio or TV industry, ask them about certain shows they will not have heard of so many people that to you were Bob Newhart.

I know people know Bob Newhart in your industry who are coming out of college.

Look, we talked about Fred Mertz yesterday for about 50. This would be if you want to draw that analogy, this would be like an aspiring teenager that wants to be a sports talk radio host that has no idea who Jim Rome is.

So it's language and education and poverty difference. I mean, it's what it's what Sampson is saying, like Miguel Cabrera might have grown up without Major League Baseball available to him in any way. And it's not just that. What do you think they have, like satellite TVs and Directo? But I do think in the minor leagues you learn something like you spend a little time in the minor leagues, you do learn some things.

Well, our specialty was keeping people in the minor leagues for such a short period of time that there's not time to learn anything. We were calling them up. Miguel Cabrera, he was 20. He was a. OK, I want you to find on your show today, find a sophomore in college. That's what we're talking about here.

These are kids. It's funny that you guys think that he was facing Roger Clemens talked to a lot of 19, 20 year old soccer players, they know, like some of the guys I watched growing and they were from all sorts. We don't need to argue about this. And I know I believe him. He would know better. It's just amazing. It's like he shouldn't make us feel like fools for finding that out.

No, no, don't. I find it it's funny. I don't want to make you feel like a fool. The reason I don't find it funny is that Roger Clemens is not the greatest example. Let's think about the most famous Venezuelan baseball player.

That is someone Miguel Cabrera knew very well about because that's who he's trying to emulate. He's trying to get out of Venezuela. He's trying to make a career and get his family out and get money. Those are the people who are the idols, right, in the Dominican. You go back, Puerto Rican players are looking at a Tony Perez. So it's it's very different. MLB, American white players are not the heroes of those young kids in Venezuela or the Dominican.

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State Farm is there. All right, David, we're wrapping up here. Let's get to your review for the week. You told us what was going to be before we started recording. I'm very excited to hear your review of this Bellucci doc.

So there's a blue shaddock on Showtime any time. So it just came out. And here's what it is that I'd never seen a documentary like this. It was all based on interviews with people, many of whom are dead now, like Penny Marshall and and others. Harold Ramis is very prevalent in this documentary and he's unfortunately passed away. It is first person accounts of John Belushi's life. And there are people who have not heard of John Belushi, by the way.

There's people who don't realize that John Belushi was Chris Farley before Chris Farley was Chris Farley. And this movie for an hour and 50 minutes.

It was so artfully done, David. It was so. It was so it just had a really nice sculpted touch. That movie. What the common thread for Belushi.

If you don't know anything about him and you even don't like Saturday Night Live, it's still worth it to watch because it continues the threat of recent documentaries about figures who died and who we sucked the life out of. And I'm talking about Come Inside My Mind with Robin Williams. I'm talking about Chris Farley documentary. We suck the life out of these guys, not realizing the pain they were in, not realizing it's exactly like steroids. If you want to go full circle, John Belushi does cocaine.

I don't care. He makes me laugh. He entertains me. And if it's going to kill him at thirty three, you know what? I hope he doesn't die. But man, I love being entertained by him. We are all complicit. So I watched the movie last night feeling like crap, feeling like I was one of the people who forced him to be a drug addict, who forced him to die alone with heroin at the Chateau Marmont.

And it felt a way that I had never felt before about John Belushi. I felt tremendous guilt about what I had done.

I like that the filmmakers didn't go into sort of, you know, Robin Williams gave him the blow or what that night was like or any of the stuff that was a, you know, paparazzi mess back when this happened. Because you could have made the argument for you're talking about people in our audience who don't know from the past, like John Belushi was at the very top of whatever the entertainment ladder was like.

He he was considered at the time, the funniest man in America.

I think this was big font death. Right. That's how you judge it when you looked at see where that is in the paper and what the font is when it happens. This is back in eighty two. And so it's a long time ago. Some people, thirty year olds do not know who John Belushi is. They just don't. And so this was a what I called the big fan death because it was so shocking that someone would die that way.

Now, of course, you had Marilyn Monroe and some of the other people who died, young James Dean, et cetera. But James Belushi's death started a the epiphany of people that maybe these artists and entertainers have problems that we're not willing to address and don't care to address. And this is how it's going to end. That's what, by the way, when Christopher how about Philip Seymour Hoffman? There's a long list of people who are tortured and we ignore it because we want to be entertained by John Belushi.

That's what he meant there. You said James. He was still with us, but I met John.

I do wonder, though, David, because I just really liked so many parts of that movie. One of the things that struck me is how good both Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis were on the subject of death and how heartbroken Akroyd was without spoiling too much of the movie at how close he was as a friend to getting to Belushi before he died and having to live with the weight of that.

Now, did you go see not ready for primetime when I played Lorne Michaels? Yes. Did you? OK, so that a lot of that play was was based on what this movie was about and some of the things with Akroyd and Bellucci and that in their relationship that they had feel like they were forget best friend.

The audience does need some context, some context. It's like you just went so inside on our conversations that you dropped into the middle of this. The the fact that a lot of people might not know that you played in a play in a Saturday Night Live play that I attended. OK, well, thank you for buying a ticket. Yes, there's a play called Not Ready for Prime Time and in a theater in Miami called New Theater. And I tried out for and got the part of Lorne Michaels.

And it was about the start of Saturday night when you went through a tryout process. It's an audition.

Once you get a role by being David Samson. I mean, you've got a role on the Three Stooges. Did you go to an audition?

No, I paid for a charity. All right. Well, advantage, Mike. What do you mean that was nonspeaking role?

Well, there are examples of people influence getting roles in things.

I'm just surprised that you tried out for a play as a team president of the Marlins. I'm right here. What?

It was very small. It was a small like I remember like it was it was really dedicated to the craft because it was not an easy role. And he he treated it with great care.

It was three hours a day, six days a week of rehearsal. So I would work a full day and then rehearsals would be from seven p.m. to 10 p.m. and it was six days a week and it was eight weeks of rehearsals. It was I loved it. I loved every minute of that experience. I think The Miami Herald did a review and I think they said that they were surprised at how much I didn't suck, though they were not willing to say that I was good and it was small.

Just so people understand, sort of at the core of David, like some of the creative artist in him, those were small gatherings. You were busting your ass. And those crowds were, what, 50 people like.

Theater capacity was 50. And we had every show is so that we did 18 performances and they were with real actors and actresses and I loved it. It was great.

So Marlon Scrub. Oh, nice. But I'm not proud of it. Are you done with the Bellucci? I feel like I need to apologize to David for this. Not at all.

So at the end of the situation is Belushi and Aykroyd people, Mayview, Dan Aykroyd differently.

And a little nugget from Bellucci that people don't talk about enough is that Ghostbusters was written for or Bellucci or Boligee died before he could take the role, then went to Bill Murray.

Correct. That was the role. Yeah, which is ironic, right.

Because Venkman, that's exactly who Bill Murray and, you know, John Belushi would be and the tragedy of his death. But the movie's not about the tragedy of his death. The movie is about the journey which was headed toward death from the very beginning and the fact that people could see it. What was interesting to me is that when he took the year off for one of my favorite movies, Continental Divide, he was sober during that movie and people thought that he was cured and fine.

And that's not how it goes. It's well worth seeing if you haven't seen it. Mickey, I will check it out.

Showtime. Any time. As a platform man, I got so many subscriptions right now.

That one's falling to be something. Right now, there's some good stuff on Showtime right now. All right. I'll check it out, David. Your recommendations are always good. Make sure. Speaking of recommendations, let me recommend David Simpsons podcast. Nothing personal. There's nothing in it for him outside of this promotion. So I do it every week and I implore you to check it out. It is a great podcast. And we saw with this Tom Brady opinion, he's not he's not afraid of Tom Brady.

Shocking, shocking commentary on topics shocking David Simpson. Someone is aging differently than anyone has ever aged. And David Simpson has dared to guess that that person might not be doing it naturally.

The joke is that you think what makes headlines is me saying stuff that everybody else well, but isn't willing to say.

One last thing before you go. I was wondering if there was any fallout from the coming episode that we did. Did you hear from people in Major League Baseball? Did you hear from people Marlins? Did you hear from Kim?

So I did have some conversations with some people in in the commissioner's office about that. And it was one of those things where the preference would be not to say things that everybody knows is true. And my response was, I have no interest in being that because I'm not trying to get back into baseball. And that's why nothing personal works.

And I'm not going to stop any blowback on saying that. Theo Epstein has is on a commission or track that he wants to be the commissioner of the sport. Any any feedback on that.

So you don't get blowback when everybody on the inside knows and feels the same thing. So, again, you're wondering whether I get blowback with things I say you won't get blowback on the topic or the subject. You'll get blowback. People saying, man, David, really? And I said, really?

David, thank you so much for joining us.