Major League Baseball

No spring in these steps

Published Oct. 20, 2010 10:15 a.m. ET

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PERFORMANCE-enhancing drugs now have some fierce competition.

PEDs, meet PESes - performance-enhancing shoes, which are said to increase vertical leap.

Concept 1 shoes, a $300 pair of basketball sneakers that house a spring-based system, have been banned by commissioner David Stern and the NBA, despite what creators Adam and Ryan Golston, owners of Athletic Propulsion Labs, describe as high demand.

The twins - both walk-ons at Southern California - said roughly 30 percent of the NBA rookie class and other NBA players have expressed interest, but declined to give names, saying many already have lucrative shoe deals.

"Under league rules, players may not wear any shoe during a game that creates an undue competitive advantage," the NBA said yesterday.

It's mind-boggling why a professional basketball player standing 6 feet or taller needs a shoe with springs to dunk on a 10-foot rim.

Miss the Phillies game?If you forgot to TiVo or DVR yesterday's Phillies-Giants game and wish you could watch more than just the highlights on ESPN's "SportsCenter" or Comcast's "SportsRise," the MLB Network does a nice encore presentation in a 2-hour time span the day after the event. While it won't show every batter or every pitch, MLB shows the leadup to every big play. Now, you can be the champ at the water cooler for once, instead of the fantasy geek two cubicles down.

Wait, what?If you thought the Jamaican bobsled team was an oxymoron, we think we can eclipse that. The Iraqi rowing team is training with members of the U.S. national team in Cincinnati, leading up to next month's Asian Games. The war-torn nation's two main rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, are part of an endangered water system and stretch across a landscape listed by the U.S. State Department as 167,929 square miles of desert.

- Kerith Gabriel

Send e-mail to highandinside@phillynews.com.

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