Who would’ve guessed that getting kicked in the head repeatedly would cause brain damage?…

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My first year at Men’s Health magazine was probably the roughest of my entire career. I’d had some success in my six years at Men’s Fitness magazine, which is why my new bosses at MH had hired me and spent the money to move my family across the country. But at MH, everything I wrote or edited was getting smacked around, and I couldn’t understand why.

In December of that year, one of the company’s legendary editors, Mark Bricklin, came in to give our staff a talk. Bricklin, longtime editor of Prevention, may have invented the type of service journalism we did at MH. Several of the magazine’s top editors had started out working for him at Prevention. The talk was a big hit, and did more to help me understand what I was supposed to be doing at MH than all the disparaging notes and comments I’d received from my…

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Here‘s a bit of news that isn’t remotely surprising: David Wells, the beer-bellied pitcher for the San Diego Padres, has diabetes.

But on the bright side, he’s saying the right things about it:

“From the time I found out, I made changes. No more starches and sugar. No more rice, pasta, potatoes and white bread. No more fast food. I’ve cut out alcohol.”

That’s right, Boomer Wells has given up drinking. Well, not entirely.

“I can still have a glass of wine now and then,” said Wells. “I can still run with the guys. But I’ve got to watch what I’m doing.”

But then he says things like this:

“I don’t want this going to Type 1 diabetes.”

And this:

“I’m eating like a rabbit . . . salads, fish, chicken.”

I just hope that none of the children listening come away thinking that what Wells has — diabetes mellitus type 2 — can become type…

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This just may be the coolest story the New York Times has ever published. Just read it. (Be sure to watch the video clip as well.)…

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When politicians get involved in baseball, it’s usually to grandstand about steroids. But in New York City, the controversy is over a very different kind of performance enhancer:

The latest fight over performance-enhancement in baseball isn’t being waged at spring training, and it has nothing to do with HGH. It’s taking place in New York, where a bill banning metal bats in high school games is expected to pass the city council by a comfortable margin Wednesday afternoon. If the measure gains traction, it could change baseball forever.

Or not.

New York is a big town, but it’s still only one, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg might yet veto the measure. Beyond that, chances the manufacturers would sue even before the ban takes effect next fall are about as good as Mariano Rivera protecting a ninth-inning lead. And it’s been an emotional, expensive debate already.

“And I’m a conservative Republican,” said James Oddo,…

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I’m on deadline and had no plans to blog today, but the headlines are just too good.

You probably know about the big steroid/growth hormone bust in Florida.

Two specific names have been linked to the raid: Gary Matthews Jr., who had a career year for Texas in 2006 and signed a $50 million contract with the Angels this offseason; and a team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But what really caught my eye is the new paperback version of Game of Shadows, the book that showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Barry Bonds hadn’t just used steroids, he’d used them in massive doses.

Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci offers some of the fresh dirt in the new version:

My favorite fact: the authors detail in their afterword the freakish growth of Bonds’ body parts in his years with the Giants: from size 42 to a size…

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Spring training is the best time of year for most baseball fans. The rookie with the skillet for a glove is learning to catch fly balls. The manager and superstar have ended their spat. Injuries have healed. The former phenom, the brilliant lefty who crashed and burned, has matured. (Oh, and he’s finally healthy, as well.)

Lifelong fans like me figured out a long time ago that you can’t really believe much of what you read in spring training. The regular season — April through September, and then into October if your team justifies the optimism of its spring-training headlines — is the only barometer that matters. If the players are really healthy, mature, and improved, they’ll prove it over six months and 162 games.

In other words, spring is for optimism, summer is for reality, and fall is for pessimism bordering on despair for most fans.

But
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What a month it’s been for journalists.

We’ve had a procession of superstar reporters (including five Pulitzer Prize winners) take the stand in the Scooter Libby trial. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that the news-gathering business is often the opposite of its sharp-elbowed image. Rather than kicking ass and taking names, reporters revealed that, much of the time, what they’re really doing is kissing ass and concealing names.

Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, two guys who upheld the finest traditions of investigative reporting — and I say that without sarcasm or irony — can finally sleep a little easier tonight, knowing they won’t be going to jail.

Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle exposed the steroid use of a number of prominent athletes, including Barry Bonds, in articles and in the book Game of Shadows. But, because their reporting was based in large part on grand-jury…

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Rannoch Donald sent me this outstanding article on the past and future of illegal performance enhancement in sports, which was published in Observer Sports Monthly this weekend.

There was one niggling little thing that bothered me about it, which I’ll get to in a moment. First, check out this anecdote from the beginning of the article:

Lee Sweeney was relaxing in his office in the physiology department of the University of Pennsylvania when his phone rang. The call was from an athlete who had been reading about the geneticist’s remarkable experiments in creating muscle-bound rodents — Schwarzenegger mice, as the press called them.

Sweeney’s experiments were simple but dramatic. He had isolated a gene responsible for manufacturing a protein called IGF-1. In mammals, IGF-1 boosts muscle growth and helps their repair. When we exercise vigorously, our bodies naturally churn out the stuff. But as we age, production drops off and our muscles…

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Nick Bromberg sent me this link from The Hardball Times about an underreported trend in baseball:

The incidence of hit batsmen in major league baseball has dramatically increased in the past couple of decades; a significant transformation has taken place in the very nature of the game. Yet this transformation has caught little notice, engaging neither broad contemplation nor comprehensive understanding. …

Through the early decades of the 20th century, the incidence of batters being struck by pitched balls steadily declined, in both the American and National Leagues. As the sport developed from its rough-and-tumble origins to its slick and professional maturity, the pitchers’ control improved, and the batters’ tactic of semi-intentionally taking the HBP as a means of getting on base faded. By the 1930s, the typical team had a hit batsman little more than once every 10 games.

In subsequent decades, the rate waxed and waned, but never in either…

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