Blogger has been having some... issues. The post that I did yesterday seems to have vanished. So here is the card I did by request of William Noetling.

It's almost too good to be true: before-and-after cards of Roger Clemens from the early Nineties.

Do you think that when it's all said and done, Roger will build a secret lab in his basement and pump himself silly with growth hormone? I like to think that he will skip the steroids and have retractable alloy adamantium Wolverine claws installed in his arms, so that when he has reason to be angry he can really go ballistic.

And maybe someone could slip Mike Piazza a pill that would make super-powerful, red optic blasts come out of his eyes. That way, when Old Man Wolverine Clemens comes to pick a fight, Piazza-clops will be there to meet the challenge... at least before Wolverine Clemens rips Piazza-clops' arms out of their sockets.

I might pay to watch that on pay-per-view.

What's funnier: the fact that Clemens needed help injecting himself with steroids, or that Clemens is the face of Topps Series 3? As much fun as a Saturday night spent shooting a washed-up Roger Clemens full of steroids sounds, I'm going to have to go with the fact that Topps is now connected with the two most high-profile users in the Mitchell Report.

Compound that with the fact that the level of bad luck handed down to Topps spokesmen has to rank up there with the Sports Illustrated and Madden cover curses. First David Wright's Mets put together a collapse that puts the 1964 Phillies to shame. Then Father Time, excuse me, Greg Oden, shuffles into the operating room and misses the entire season. Follow that by golden boy Alex Rodriguez bitch-slapping the Red Sox on the eve of their World Series sweep with news that he'd burn a stack of $100 dollar bills in front of a group of needy children––I'm sorry, I can't read my own handwriting––I mean opt out of his already mammoth contract for one even more mammoth-er. Now Roger Clemens, Topps' cover boy for Series 3, is about to enter panic mode (if he wasn't already there). Oh, and I totally forgot about Dwyane Wade and his Magic Shoulder. And I guess you could add Barry Bonds to this list, since technically he is still under contract with Topps, though what's the point? In case you haven't noticed, that guy's a ticking time bomb.

Seriously, it must suck for Topps PR right now.

In less than 24 hours, the entire American media will be consumed with Roid Rage. Columnists and bloggers will never have had it so easy, with myriad angles to cover, so-called big names to out and moralizing to be done. But the question that probably won't be raised (because it doesn't sell papers) is: Does anybody actually care? Seriously. Do you really want to know if your favorite sports star has injected himself with more hormones than a Perdue chicken?

I mean, read any anecdotal baseball book and you'll see that ballplayers have been popping greenies since the Seventies. It's one of the things that ballplayers are all about: getting an edge, acting batshit crazy on the road, and winning the World Series. But you still like those players from the Good Ol' Days, right? You still collect their cards. Even if they were users.

And what about the Pittsburgh Drug Trials? Players were buying cocaine from the Pittsburgh Parrot, for chrissakes. Sure, it may have ruined Tim Raines's and Dave Parker's chances at making the Hall of Fame, but Keith Hernandez figured into that stuff as well, and well, he's still a well-liked baseball celebrity.

Baseball has probably weathered more vice charges than any other sport in America, and may rank second to soccer on the world stage in terms of public relations nightmare scandals and fuck ups.

Here's a handful of other good times: Hal Chase gambling on games while still on the field playing in them, Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb fixing a game in 1927, legends Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays banned for life for appearing at a casino, and who could forget Sammy Sosa losing his grasp on English before the Senate Committee? Yes, it's easy to make it through a whole post on baseball's storied scandals without even mentioning Pete Rose or the Black Sox. (Well, almost.)

So let's face facts. There will be hundreds if not thousands of articles written on the Mitchell Report. ESPN will launch special coverage and Pedro Gomez will go without sleep for six weeks as Barry Bonds will most certainly be named in the report.

Will card prices suffer? Cards of The Asterisk have had plenty o'time to have the bottom fall out, and if anything, it's been a slow decline. But what about others? I just don't see it happening. Well, unless Clemens is named...