With the start of baseball season underway, it is only appropriate to 'leadoff' (sorry.) with a post about America's favorite past time.

Sadly, this one is as much about politics as it is about Opening Day. I justify this by the fact that the BoSox opened in Tokyo. Because I cannot countenance them playing the first game of the season there, this naturally illegitimates the season opener in my warped mind.

I digress.

You know politics down in Washington has reached a particularly acrimonious level when Republicans and Democrats can't even agree over Baseball. But the news out of the Beltway is that this is exactly the case. Talk about who's on first...

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According to the report from Sports Illustrated, GOP Rep. Tom Davis questions the Democrat majority's findings of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Democrats have suggested that Roger Clemens might have lied to the committee and passed along the case to the Department of Justice. Republicans intend to pass along to the Attorney General a conflicting account along the following lines:

And the Republicans question why the Democrats cast doubt on Clemens' testimony that he received B-12 shots because teams' medical records do not show such injections; the minority report notes that Yankees trainer Gene Monahan testified his team did not always keep records about B-12. And the report mentions interviews with two team doctors and two trainers about whether Clemens had an abscess, but no witness corroborated McNamee's testimony on that subject.

One might expect baseball fans to be rabid partisans of their particular team. But who knew Congress could reach a similar divide over the same sport? It is perhaps not irrelevant that five of the Democrat members of the committee hail from New England (Red Sox fans?)- the most of any region. By contrast, only one Republican on the same committee is from New England.

This analysis alone tells us that politics has too much infiltrated our love of the game.

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