Showing posts with label Steroids. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steroids. Show all posts

Saturday, July 23, 2011

[Saturday] Sox Talk: Is It Hot in Here, Or Is It Them? And: Steroids, Jeter, and Thome

Now some of the rest of you get to experience weather that is de riguer for summer in Texas. It seems like the entire country is in the grip of 100+ degree temperatures.

But the Red Sox, about whom I have not written of late, are also pretty damned hot. They are 8-2 in their last ten games, have the second best record in baseball, and have hit the 60 win mark faster than at any point since the Fred Lynn-Jim Rice "Gold Dust Twins" era. And they have been doing it all with a depleted roster that has been beleaguered by injuries -- 60% of the starting rotation is on the disabled list and Carl Crawford just returned.

I'd like to think that all of this means that this team is not even close to peaking. Which is good for at least two reasons. For all of their accomplishments just past the midway point the Sox are still only two games clear of the Yankees, who are the only team with an even better run differential than the Yankees, which is the key factor in figuring out Pythag projections. And if we are willing to project to the end game I hope happens, the likely National League champion right now seems to be a Phillies team that looks even better than the Sox do and that has what is clearly one of the better rotations in a generation or more, surpassed only by the 1990s Braves in my memory.

The Sox just started a twenty game stretch of games that should help clarify things. They host Seattle now, facing a wretched Mariners team and will follow that up with a Kansas City visit in which the away team's rallying cry is "we're not quite the worst team in the AL!" From there they get a three game trip to Chicago to face a White Sox team whose most interesting element their cumbustible manager but who are probably still in the running for a mediocre AL Central. Then it is back home to face Cleveland, which had every sign of a team ready to fold it in after setting the world on fire in April and then collapsing soon after but that is back in the running of the aforesaid Central. Three games in Fenway against the Yankees should give us a really good sense of the direction the divisional race will take, though that is likely not to be the last clash between these two teams, and then the Twins meet up with the Sox in Fenway before the Sox get their next off day.

A few words on Derek Jeter and Jim Thome. Both have hit or are about to reach monumental landmarks, Jeter becoming the first Yankee to reach 3000 hits and Thome about to surpass 600 home runs. Jeter is surely a great player even if he is simultaneously a vastly overrated player. Thome is probably rated right about where he should be given that we do not really know what power numbers mean anymore even for those of us who think the steroid scandals, while bad for the sport, created ginned up outrage among the media that did not really reflect fan outrage to the same degree. But while we are on the steroids thing, let's just keep in mind that a lot of those same media members are now saying that Jeter and Thome have never been tainted by steroids. And it would be unfair to do so without evidence (not that lack of evidence has stopped the speculation before, but the media loves Jeter in a way that they never loved other guys). But one of the forms of circumstantial evidence that people happily used against, say, Barry Bonds was that OMG Look How Big He Got. And his head grew!!! Ok.

Jeter as a rookie:




And Jeter more recently:



All I'm saying is that using the head growth argument as a form of evidence brings us down a slippery slope because, and I want to be nice here, Jeter's current head appears to have swallowed his rookie head and left room for seconds.

And Jim Thome:

Rookie:



And now:



(Please do your own Google image searches because obviously this is an imperfect measurement -- which is, of course, my point).

See, when journalists say that an athlete "has not been tainted" the passive construction masks who tends to do the tainting, which is, of course, that selfsame media. Now, before anyone goes crazy, I do not have any reason to believe that Jeter or Thome (or for that matter Cal Ripken, who also got a lot bigger over his career, and whose longevity streak happens to coincide with the one thing that we know that steroids do even more than increasing power, which is increase the ability to fend off and recover from injury) ever took steroids. I'm just saying what I'm saying, which is that there was always an asymmetrical approach to steroids (by a media that managed to miss almost the entirety of the steroid era while it was happening, by the way, and yet managed to be the most outraged constituency of all once they caught up to the story) that was based as much on personality as it was on concerns about journalism.

Monday, August 03, 2009

Sox Talk

Ok, it seems to me that it is time for some baseball talk. And here, at least, that means talk about the Red Sox. I see three issues most worthy of discussion: The explosive PED news about Papi and Manny, the trade deadline, and most important, the pennant race.


They Peed, They PED'd:
If you're reading this, you almost certainly know the news: In the slow bleed that has become the infamous list of 104 names of people who tested positive for Performance Enhancing drugs, Sox stalwarts Manny Ramirez (now the Dodgers' problem) and beloved David Ortiz, Big Papi, were on the list. And if you've read this far, you know the response by the well paid writers and talking heads, who have shown time after time that they are a lot more concerned about this debate than the rest of us, despite their complicity/blindness/ignorance during the worst years of the rampant PED usage: OUTRAGE! TEETH GNASHING! TAINTED TITLES! To that I say: Bah.


Do not get me wrong -- this is not good news. But it also is the exact news you get when you let a sport run without a testing program, making the use of steroids during the time in question effectively decriminalized activity, akin to Hamsterdam in The Wire. The list, which of course was never supposed to be released or leaked, comes from a time when baseball did not have a program in place to stop this sort of activity. In a very real way, steroids, HGH, what have you, were taken no more seriously than doctoring the baseball. That guys then utilized these means should come as no surprise.


What do failed drug tests from 2003 tell us? That guys failed a test for a whole range of drugs -- including amphetamines and a range of pre-steroid supplements that were not necessarily even banned in those incarnations at the time. We have no idea what the failed tests mean. What we do know is that it should never have come to this -- the list should have been destroyed. I am no fan of Alex Rodriguez, as most of you know (or should, if you read this). But the fact that he was on that list is something we never should have known. ARod is a bit of a tool, and he managed to make matters worse in his attempt to come clean, but this should not have been a story, at least from the vantage point of his name on that list being leaked. As for Selena Roberts' book, well, that's another matter. ARod still might be the greatest player I've ever seen. That does not preclude him from being a douchenozzle.


But above all, let's put to rest all of this talk about tainted titles. The Red Sox were playing on a level playing field in 2004 (and how any of this could possible taint 2007, when there was a testing program, eludes me entirely). Indeed, the team they beat in an epochal ALCS, the Yankees, had arguably the largest demonstrable list of those on the infamous list or otherwise under suspicion or confirmed. No one has clean hands in all of this. The idea that the titles of the Sox (or White Sox, or Cardinals, or Marlins, or, for that matter, the Yankees (nah, fuck the Yankees) is absurd. If the 2004 red Sox had played the 1975 Red Sox in the World series, that would be one thing (though players in that era had their own PEDs, most notably amphetamines, or "greenies," as they were known by the players who gobbled them by the handful). The idea of tainted titles is silly, ahistorical, and shrill.


Now, the records matter is another factor entirely. but even that issue I cannot exactly get worked up about. Whatever advantage the use of PED's provided players in the last two decades (why are many trying to draw a line starting in the mid-1990s anyway? If we know anything it's that we don't know anything -- fans in the bleachers in Fenway were chanting "Steroids!" at Jose Canseco in the late 1980s. Were we wrong on the merits? Hard to make that case now) is nothing compared to the abomination of segregation that profoundly colors everything that went on before Jackie Robinson's lonely walk onto the Diamonds at Flatbush, and really, for another decade or so, until real integration took place at all levels of baseball.


It also drives me mad that some sports are completely off the hook -- football most notably. We see sportswriters lamenting the baseball PED crisis in the purplest prose possible while football players get off with a 4-game slap and a wink and nod. PED's in baseball were not a good thing. They were not the end of the world. I wish this had not hit my beloved Red Sox, but Big Papi is still one of my favorite players of all time. Say it Ain't So? Sure. But it is so. Let's take off the scales and not pretend this is the end of the world.


Trading Laundry:
Meanwhile the trade deadline has come and passed. The only big Sox deal involved the Red Sox trading a couple of legitimately promising (but not absolutely top tier) young guys for Victor Martinez of the fire sale Indians. Martinez plays both catcher and first base (as well as DH when necessary), van hit, and because of his versatility, he gives Francona some serious flexibility, which will be essential both in dealing with some fragility (Mike Lowell, eg.) and with egos, given that there are now more guys than spots in the lineup. But with Kevin Youkilis' ability to play gold glove-caliber first and third base, and Jason Varitek's need for more time off than he has been getting, my guess is that what might seem like too much will at times seem like barely enough in the weeks to come.


The Sox were one of many teams allegedly in the Roy Halladay sweepstakes. And I have no doubt that they were players until the end. But it would have been uncharacteristic for the Theo Epstein era Sox to have poured too much into a 32-year old pitcher with just over a year left on his contract. There is not a team in baseball that would not want a warhorse like Halladay. But Epstein had a ceiling, I'll guarantee that, and he refused to smash through it even as all around him there was an air of panic as the Sox completed their worst run of the season. I have said it repeatedly over the years, but the Sox are learning yet again that there is no such thing as too much starting pitching. This year, as in so many of the last few, the Red Sox seemed to have more starting pitchers than slots in the rotation. But in a long season those extra arms always end up as to few arms. Starting pitching may yet prove to be the bridge too far for these Red Sox. But the price was too high for a guy who seems determined to test the 2011 free agent waters.


In sum, with all of the rumors that were swirling (I most wanted the Sox to find a way to get the Padres' Adrian Gonzalez, but that too proved impossible), the Red Sox remembered that the trade deadline, like politics, is the art of the possible. The Sox did what they could. Now we'll see if that is enough.


The Pennant Race:
Move drugs and business aside and what we have stretched out before us will be another wonderful pennant race. The Red Sox, Yankees, and Rays are three of the best teams in baseball and are going to fight it out for two postseason slots in what is still the most exclusive playoff system in sports by a long way. This coming week the Sox face a two-game series against the Rays followed by a four-game series against the Yanks in the New Toilet Bowl. The odds are the Sox will split these series, as always seems to happen in even-numbered series. Win either one and the Sox will feel pretty good. Pull out a sweep and it becomes a great week. And of course they want to avoid doing the unthinkable, so let's don't think about it.


The Sox have a hellacious August schedule in which they face the Yanks twice, the Rays, the Tigers, the White Sox, the Rangers, and a feisty Toronto team twice. But the Sox have a tendency to rise and fall based on the level of competition. My guess is that this week will settle nothing save for the fact that there will be much left to settle. September almost promises to have the Sox and Yanks fighting for the division title with a future October date penciled in. That is as it should be. No one is happy about PED revelations. But in the end we have the game, the glorious, wondrous, fantastical game that is baseball.

Friday, July 31, 2009

Meta (A Post on Possible Future Posts)

I'll have something to say this weekend, I hope, about both baseball's trade deadline and the recent news about Manny and Big Papi's positive steroids tests in 2003. But for now, how is this for being in some disturbing ways prescient?

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Not to Say I Told You So . . .

I wrote the following as part of a post on Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's home run record in 2007:
The chase is done, though the recriminations have just begun. The self-righteous await hopefully ARod taking the record away, because they who remained willfully blind suddenly have decided that ARod was never part of the scandal they never saw when it was happening yet see so clearly in outrage-fueled hindsight.

Well, now we have this.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

The Never-Ending PED Controversy

There is so much hypocrisy, inconsistency, and overwrought fulmination over the supposed scourge of performance enhancing drugs in baseball that the critical mass of opinion has buried the ability of most observers to sit back and take a reasoned, rational look at the issue without the moralization snd mock outrage that characterizes the state of the debate. Malcolm Gladwell's recent postings on this issue at his blog are thus welcome. He has four salient posts, here, here, here, and here.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Clemens, Steroids, and Irrationality

Looking for a voice of reason, a voice of sanity amidst the latest steroid hysteria? See Tommy Craggs' column at The New York Times' online newsletter for their sports magazine Play. Here's an excerpt, but read the whole thing:
The spirit of Bill Bennett hung over the proceedings like a foul ganja cloud. There was, for starters, the operative assumption that steroids and growth hormone are roughly equivalent. There was the demonization of a new substance (vitaminB12, you're up!). There was the offhand conflation of drug "use" and "abuse," even by some of those Republicans who went easiest on Clemens. There were the scary numbers plucked from the air -- the "millions of teenagers" using the stuff, according to Tom Davis, the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. There was Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican, repeatedly calling McNamee "a drug dealer." And there was the old drug warrior Mark Souder, of Indiana, comparing McNamee's affidavit to something out of a meth or cocaine investigation and then working himself into a sputtering rage over baseball's omerta -- at one point citing a family in Baltimore whose house was firebombed and "all of them were killed, all their children, because they talked," which is sure to send ballplayers running to the Rayburn Building.

We've now become so unmoored from common sense that we turn to Darrell Issa, of all people -- the Republican largely responsible for the recall that handed the California governorship to a known steroid user -- as the closest thing to a voice of reason. "We are now heading down a road that starts looking like Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy's," Issa told the Albany Times Union. "We're looking for steroid users; we're looking for people who knew people. ... Congress has never prosecuted or pursued users of drugs. Pushers, yes. Users, no," he said, perhaps forgetting, in a moment generally full of clarity, the federal laws that punish those possessing drugs. "This really is about getting headline news."

The most remarkable aspect to me of all of this is the way that prosecutors have traded down in terms of the relative statures of the violations allegedly committed in order to trade up in terms of name. By this I mean that Brian McNamee's crimes far surpass those of Roger Clemens and yet because Clemens is a far bigger name we are seeing the equivalent of letting an unknown rapist get off because he squealed on a famous jaywalker.

Tuesday, August 07, 2007

756! (%$#!!^@ 756 ??) 756.

Within the last few minutes Barry Bonds hit number 756, a no doubter that resonated across San Francisco, across baseball history, and into the realm of endless debate. At the New Republic Gary Hoenig, Editor-in-Chief of ESPN The Magazine , has one of the most perceptive reflections on what this imbroglio all means. Here is an excerpt:
If you bothered to read beyond the Bonds expose and the circus of congressional hearings in 2005, you would have learned that steroids have been used by baseball players as far back as at least the mid 80s, that by 1991, baseball officials were alarmed enough to add steroids to a list of banned substances sent to all teams, and that even with new testing procedures in place since those hearings, any player who wants to enhance can likely do so with little chance of being caught. But most sportswriters and columnists went back to the safest route: blaming the few, extolling the virtues of the game, finding solace in building up new heroes to replace the fallen ones.

Bonds's real sin, in the end, is in making that so difficult. As he continued his assault on Aaron's record, passing Ruth in the bargain, he was a constant, irritating reminder of the shortcomings of the church of baseball, and especially of its priests in the press. And so he had to be punished. Again and again and again.

Won't we all be relieved when it's finally over.

One element of this controversy that I would like to see clarified is what, precisely, was the role of the banned substance list for which there was no testing policy. What were the penalties for violating the list, and without a testing policies, what did such a list mean? Truth be told, I was under the belief that there was no steroid policy at all.


I most appreciate Hoenig's rather pointed dig at the journalists who have consistently led the holier-than-thou brigade. The chase is done, though the recriminations have just begun. The self-righteous await hopefully ARod taking the record away, because they who remained willfully blind suddenly have decided that ARod was never part of the scandal they never saw when it was happening yet see so clearly in outrage-fueled hindsight.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Does This Really Tell Us Anything?

His rookie year:


Toward the end:


The second guy is a lot bigger than the first guy. So for those people using this as the magic clue to solve the steroids mystery, I hope you are consistent. And I do not, by the way, have any reason to suspect Ripken of anything. But that's not the point. The point is that professional athletes, indeed any fit guy, can get bigger over time. Let's not drink the Kool Aid of circumstancial evidence when the circumstance at the heart of it all is the explosion of weight training during the 1990s.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Barry Bonds

This is undoubtedly funny. It's not exactly fair. But it's funny:



Look, we do not know who did what when. We do not know enough because Major League Baseball -- players, owners, the league -- did not want to know. Even if Bonds broke the law, it is highly doubtful whether or not he broke any of baseball's rules.


And don't give me this nonsense about the plausibility of Bonds growing in size as he aged. Every athlete, every guy, gets bulkier as he gets older. And the only people who argue against the possibility of gains in muscle mass as someone gets older have never spent any time in a weight room.


The most bothersome aspect of the Bonds situation is the rampant hypocrisy and the self-righteousness of it all. Barry Bonds is the greatest baseball player you have ever seen play the game. He may be unlikeable, and of course we may learn more than we now know about the steroids mess. But it is a mess to which baseball (and journalists) turned a blind eye. Post-facto hand wringing and finger waving does not change anything.


Still, the baseball card mock-up is pretty funny. Insensitive, crude, and unfair, but funny.


Hat tip to My Colleague, Chemistry Kyle.