Words I never thought I’d utter: “Hi, I’m Jay Jaffe, and I’m here to be a guest on Inside Edition.”

Anybody who wants to see my suddenly-in-demand expertise in the field of yapping about steroids in baseball chopped up into itty-bitty soundbites can tune in to Monday morning’s episode of Inside Edition. In the New York market, it will air at 11:30 AM on Fox (channel 5). The segment was originally taped for Friday evening, and I touted it here as such, but the producer who rushed away with the tape apparently didn’t beat the production deadline, and I lost out to President Bush, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, and Bill Madden in the “Dark Day for Baseball” segment.

If you’re unfamiliar as to where the show airs in your market, see here.

And yes, I believe this constitutes my national network TV debut. As Mel Allen would say, “How about that!”

Rather than write coherently about what transpired with Thursday’s Mitchell Report release and its aftermath, and thus threaten my deadlines even more, I got links to:

• a broad spectrum of worthwhile takes by baseball historian John Thorn, BP colleague Nate Silver, BP colleague Joe Sheehan, Lohud’s Pete Abraham, New York Sun columnist Tim Marchman, Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke*, Sports Illustrated Dot Com, Tom Verducci, ESPN’s Mark Fainaru-Wada, Howard Bryant, Jon Weisman, the OC Register‘s Mark Whicker, Allen Barra and the recommendations of the report itself.

*not actually worthwhile, I just like watching him eat crow.

• Biz of Baseball’s index to the players named in the report, for those of you wanting to find the allegations against your (least) favorite player

• Yanksfan vs Soxfan’s kick-asterisk guide to expanding our repertoire of means to annotate the record books