Don't get too excited.

Often as part of my day job, we're offered the chance to interview celebrities via satellite. Typically they're pimping some product that they're paid to promote. We turn most of them down.

Today my producer gave me a sheet and it had Sabathia on it. I told him to book it. He was working with Bayer and the Red Cross.

The plan was to let him pitch his charity work / pain pills / corporate shilling, then ask him some real questions.

But at the last moment we were told that the Red Cross sent a rep to be interviewed alongside Sabathia. So it became an interview with Sabathia and the Red Cross rep. That severely limited by time, and it would have been unfair to pepper him too hard with the another dude sitting alongside.

That said, I told him that some of my best sports memories are of him in a Tribe uniform, and I told him I'm from Cleveland. I said, "Help me understand something. Often when a player like yourself or Mark Teixeira signs with the Yankees, they say that they're a competitive athlete and they just want a chance to win. But isn't a truly competitive athlete going to want to play without having the playoffs handed on a silver platter every year?"

He replied, essentially, "Yes, but I got traded. I didn't have the chance to stay in Cleveland."

I smiled knowingly and told him that I thought the Indians made him an offer (which has been reported to be 5 years, $90 million, made before the start of the 2008 season), but he said that the team never made him an offer at all.

It's not exactly breaking new ground, but it's frustrating to hear him repeat falsehoods. It's incumbent upon us not to allow the fat and powerful to rewrite history to suit themselves. (Having said that, he looked much slimmer, and I told him that, and I thanked him kindly for his time.)

Video to come on Friday after the interview airs. And we'll be aiming to do more formal LGT-based interviews in the near future.