Marked Man.

Because it was the House Government Reform Committee that decided to anoint itself the investigator of steroids in baseball, I'm exercising my option to deconstruct the testimony of Mark McGwire yesterday. First, imagine the scene: He's sitting just a few chairs down from Jose Canseco, the guy who has fingered McGwire and other players as steroid users in a book that is clearly the direct cause of these hearings. After some obligatory preliminaries about his "love and respect" for "our national pastime," McGwire gets down to the business of drawing a direct comparison between himself and his arch-nemesis, Canseco. "I have never been a person who has spread rumors and said things about my teammates that could hurt them," he says. Two clear implications: Canseco did, and I could, if I felt like it. Well, exactly what kind of "rumors" and "things" are you talking about, Mark? "I do not sit in judgment of other players, whether it deals with their sexual preference..." Excuse me? "Sexual preference"? You tell me exactly what McGwire's saying--and who he's saying it about--in this non-rumor-spreading statement of his.