Originally published by “Duke Casanova” on The Nooner Blog, March 5, 2009.

The following format is completely unoriginal. It is a tribute to Fire Joe Morgan, which some of us think is the funniest Web site in the history of Internet. We read this piece on Mike Piazza’s bacne on Murray Chass’ blog and couldn’t help ourselves. So here goes. In keeping with FJM format, the bold words are Chass’, the others are ours.

Joel Sherman of the New York Post and I do not have any kind of relationship. We have not talked for years. There’s no need to bore you with the reasons why.

“Because I’m an old crotchety jackass and he’s a younger crotchety jackass.”

But the other day his column caught my attention. Not many of his columns do. He writes them, after all, for the New York Post.

As compared to the bastion of journalistic integrity that is MurrayChass.com.

Circumstantial evidence against Piazza is almost as strong as it is against Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. A 62nd round draft pick in the 1988 draft and drafted only as a favor to his father, a close friend of Tommy Lasorda, Piazza wound up as the No. 1 home-run hitting catcher in major league history.

Yes, that is almost as strong as federal perjury cases, grand jury testimony, doping calendars, and receipts for steroid purchases. Because all longshot success stories must have cheated. Tom Brady? Juicehead. Cinderella? Boob job. We’ve got circumstantial evidence.

Piazza wasn’t a terrific catcher; he would have fared better as a designated hitter.

Well, except then… Oh, we won’t even get into it. Let’s just skip to the bacne.

Early in the column 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.

First of all, gross. Second, you just broke the cardinal rule, Murray Chass. Please turn in your BBWAA card immediately and let Jack Morris know that he will not benefit from your Hall of Fame vote next year. Never acknowledge checking out an indecent baseball player, ever. We thought you went to journalism school.

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.

“Another thing I know about steroids is that they supposedly cause the user’s testicles to shrink. And one time in the Tigers’ clubhouse in 2000, I noticed that Bobby Higginson had some tiny testicles. Now I had never seen Higginson’s testicles before he started playing baseball so I have no idea if they shrank to that size, but hey, he had small testicles and he hit home runs. Obviously he was a steroid user.”

When steroids became a daily subject in newspaper articles I wanted to write about Piazza’s acne-covered back… 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.

This is the best logic we’ve heard since the Old Dirty [expletive] said, “I don’t have no trouble with you [expletiving] me, but I have a little problem with you not [expletiving] me.” Honestly, we have no idea how this line of reasoning didn’t work on the editors at the New York Times.

I always took the veto to stem from the Times ultra conservative ways

Ahem? (Also, you need an apostrophe there, chief. And probably a hyphen between ultra and conservative.)

but I also wondered if it maybe was the baseball editor, a big Mets’ fan, protecting the Mets.

Or doing his job.

Then all of a sudden the acne was gone… I heard a radio commercial for a product called Proactiv (cq) Solution… Piazza’s name was not on the list and his picture was missing from the group of pictures that adorned the site. So Proactiv Solution wasn’t the answer for his problem.

And since Proactiv is, as we all know, the only product on the market known to fight pimples, obviously Mike Piazza used steroids. It’s as clear as our skin was once we started using Accutane, Clearasil, Stridex and Oxy.

The conversation was aimed at eliciting if Piazza planned to play another season or would be retiring, but I also asked him about steroids.

“I don’t really think about stuff like that,” he responded. “I think in a way these investigations there’s a positive in putting the whole thing to rest. This game is very resilient. There will be a time when people will say there was an issue and they dealt with it.”

That’s probably true, but it’s going to take a really long time, because people like Murray Chass won’t shut up about Mike Piazza’s bacne.

His back is presumably clear in retirement.

We’re not so sure, Murray, and you should probably do some investigative reporting on this one.

But it was Piazza’s back that undermined Sherman’s column.

Is there video footage of that? Because Mike Piazza’s been denying rumors of his homosexuality for a long time, and it seems downright irresponsible for some unaffiliated blogger like Murray Chass to go spouting off rumors about Piazza “undermining” Joel Sherman’s “column” with his back, if that’s what they’re calling it these days.

I didn’t send an e-mail.

“Because I couldn’t figure out this newfangled thing.”

We actually feel kind of bad picking Murray Chass like this because he strikes us as a pathetic old man lashing out at something — Internet — that he still can’t wrap his head around, all while trying to come to grips with his own obsolesence on the very forum that has rendered him so. And that’s got to be tough, we get that. Tragic stuff.

But we make no pretenses to unbiased journalism, and we love Mike Piazza in a totally platonic, heterosexual way, and we couldn’t allow his good name to be sullied in this way. So Mike Piazza had bacne and then it went away. That makes him guilty of nothing more than being kind of gross.

…addendum, Friday, 10:34 a.m….

We want to go back to this line, briefly:

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.

This might be the funniest thing we’ve ever read. We hope Chass is trying to be cutesy here, and we guess that’s his right. But if Chass — Mr. I’m-a-responsible-journalist-and-I-hate-blogs — was actually trying to pitch his stories using this type of Salem witchtrial rationale, it pretty much trivializes everything he’s ever written.

Guess what? We’ve heard that Murray Chass stomps puppies. Granted, no one’s ever accused him of that before, but guess what: We just did. Try to disprove it, Chass. The ball’s in your court.