(l-r : Piazza, guy trying to look like Dave Scheid)

Sorry, that would be the steroid closet.  What did you think I was talking about?  Denied his full range of accusatory investigative journalism chops at the Gray Lady, Murray Chass uses the blogging medium to deliver a bombshell about Mike Piazza.  What’s next, Paul Lo Duca had a Napoleon Complex? (link courtesy Repoz and Baseball Think Factory)

Early in a recent New York Post column Joel Sherman writes about Piazza™s acne-covered back. This was a physical feature I had always noticed with Piazza. Not that reporters spend their time in clubhouses looking at guys™ bare backs, but when a reporter is talking to a player at his locker before he puts on his uniform shirt or after he takes it off and he turns around to put something in or take something out of his locker his back is what is visible. And Piazza™s acne was always visible. Teen-age kids never had such a problem.

Now as naïve as I might have been about steroids, the one thing I knew was that use of steroids supposedly causes the user to have acne on his back. As I said, Piazza had plenty of acne on his back.

When steroids became a daily subject in newspaper articles I wanted to write about Piazza™s acne-covered back. I was prepared to describe it in disgusting living color. But two or three times my editors at The New York Times would not allow it. Piazza, they said, had never been accused of using steroids so I couldn™t write about it.

But wait, I said, if I write about it, I will in effect be accusing Piazza of using steroids and then someone will have accused him of using steroids. No can do, I was told. I always took the veto to stem from the Times ultra conservative ways, but I also wondered if it maybe was the baseball editor, a big Mets™ fan, protecting the Mets.

Whatever the reason, I never got Piazza™s suspicious acne into the paper. Then all of a sudden the acne was gone. Piazza™s back was clear and clean. There was not a speck of acne on it. His back looked as smooth as a baby™s bottom.

What a remarkable development. It was a medical miracle. If teenagers could get hold of whatever Piazza used to clear up his back, they would be rid of the acne problem forever.