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My latest piece at Baseball Prospectus (a freebie) covers several steroid-related bases via my responses to various readers. Regarding a question related to the veracity of McGwire's statistics, I began by discussing the phenomenon of writers mailing back blank ballots (I believe there were two this year, including Rick Telander):
Without touching upon the possible effects of PED usage on a player's performance or health — for a moment, at least — from a voting standpoint the issue shouldn't be an insurmountably difficult one to work through. Did Player X ever fail a drug test? Was Player X caught in possession of PEDs? Has Player X been named in a PED-related investigation? If the answer to all of those questions is no, then it strikes me as rather un-American not to give him the benefit of the doubt. He should be considered innocent until proven guilty — even if only in the court of public opinion, based on a preponderance of evidence — and he can't be proven guilty unless he's actually been charged with something.
As flawed as it is, the Mitchell Report should serve as a reminder that we don't really know what impact PEDs have on player performance. For every statistical outlier like Clemens or Bonds whose late-career greatness is supposedly attributable to steroids and/or human growth hormone, there are dozens of named players who allegedly used PEDs but who remained on the fringes of the majors, unable to win regular jobs even with whatever extra help they provided. Either that, or I simply missed the days of greatness of Adam Riggs and Phil Hiatt. Furthermore, there were many more named players who apparently turned to PEDs but simply couldn't reverse the effects of age and injuries, and were out of baseball by their mid-30s. David Justice and Chuck Knoblauch, two players on this year's ballot, come to mind.
Add to that the fact that the rising tide of home runs most commonly associated with "the Steroid Era" is best explained by more fundamental changes in the industry, not by the drugs or the myriad changes that have taken place over the past two decades—newer (but not all necessarily smaller) ballparks, expansion, the changing strike zone, and interleague play. On the one hand there are the well-publicized changes in bat composition; maple bats, as used by Bonds and others, are slightly more dense then the typical ash bats, but also more durable, allowing for thinner barrels and lighter, faster-swinging clubs which maintain the size of the bat's sweet spot. On the other hand, there are the more under-the-radar changes in balls, such as Rawlings' decision to move its manufacturing base from Haiti to Costa Rica in the late 1980s, switching from hand-wound balls to machine-wound ones during the 1990s, and introducing a synthetic rubber ring in the ball's core, one not covered by MLB specifications. A study commissioned by MLB and Rawlings done at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in 2000 found that balls within the extremes of official tolerances could differ in flight distance by 49.1 feet despite being struck under the exact same conditions. Juiced balls, not juiced sluggers, likely represent the primary reason for those rising home run rates.
None of which is to say that McGwire, the player currently occupying the intersection of the steroid story and the Hall of Fame ballot, is entitled to a free pass from the voters. As his JAWS (109.4/67.5/88.5)shows, his peak measures up to the Hall of Famers at his position, but even with 583 home runs, his relatively short career leaves him a bit shy on career value. The bigger problem is that while he wasn't named in the Mitchell Report, and while his career concluded before the advent of the drug-testing program, he's got no small share of PED allegations surrounding him, from the sordid injection stories in Canseco's book, to the now-outlawed androstenedione discovered in his locker during the 1998 home run chase, to details of his chemical regimen turning up in the FBI's "Operation Equine" investigation, to his tearful "I'm not here to talk about the past" stonewalling during the 2005 Congressional hearing. With the exception of Canseco's book, which is basically one man's word against another, none of this is particularly easy to dismiss; the available evidence does suggest McGwire had help. Even if one believes that the benefits of whatever chemical regimens he may have indulged in are oversold—and here would be a good time to name-drop proto-Moneyball analyst Eric Walker's exhaustive compendium of the best research on the effects of PEDs — there's still the fact that that such alleged usage was illegal under federal law and a violation of baseball's rules, however lackadaisically enforced. As those are issues that fall outside McGwire's statistical case for the Hall of Fame, I see no reason to abandon the numbers when discussing his overall merits.
I can't recommend the Walker site, called simply Steroids and Baseball, enough. The man who put the OBP-is-king philosophy into the head of Oakland A's GM Sandy Alderson back in the early '80s has compiled a tremendous amount of research which takes direct aim at the assumptions of the Mitchell Report and challenges the prevailing wisdom about the effects of steroids (and human growth hormone) on the game. Alan Schwartz wrote about Walker in Sunday's New York Times, but he barely scratched the surface of the site, which summarizes its author's points on the main page, then offers detailed, citation-rich analyses in four main areas:
Walker's work has caused me to question my own assumptions about PEDs and baseball. As I wrote at the beginning of my piece, within BP my views of Barry Bonds and his home run records are something of an outlier. Here's what I wrote on the occasion of Bonds' 756th:
Even absent a positive test, the mountain of evidence that Bonds used performance enhancing drugs is enough to convince me that his accomplishment is tainted. We'll never know the extent to which Bonds was aided, but the fact that his historically unprecedented late-career surge matches up with the well-documented timeline of his alleged usage is enough for me. However, Bonds certainly wasn't the only player using during this sordid era, and the extent to which the drugs helped him achieve his record will forever remain uncertain. Furthermore, Major League Baseball's failure to address in any meaningful way the pervasiveness of the steroid problem made them complicit in Bonds' use. There's also a growing body of evidence that MLB's decision to introduce a livelier baseball following the 1994 strike played a part in the astronomical home run totals that followed, but that's a story for another day.
This much we know: the three players who topped Roger Maris' long-standing season record of 61 homers have varying degrees of evidence suggesting they had help in the matter, and it's not unreasonable to eye their latter-day accomplishments with some degree of suspicion so long as that evidence remains. I'm not advocating an asterisk in the record books or the expungement of any stats; if the fabric of baseball history can withstand the variable impacts of the spitballers, scuffers, bat-corkers, sign-stealers, and greenie-poppers -- to say nothing of the Black Sox and Pete Rose, rats of an entirely different color -- it can withstand this.
As comforting as it would be for me to cling to my assumptions about Bonds, McGwire and Sammy Sosa (who still has considerably less evidence surrounding him than the other two), I have yet to encounter any studies which convince me that steroids and HGH ARE affecting the numbers to the extent that Walker's work and the handful of other papers linked there (including the work I've done in this field for Will Carroll's The Juice, cited by Walker) convince me that they are not.
This does not mean that I advocate the use of PEDs, think that baseball shouldn't continue its efforts to clean up the game. But I do think it's time that the media and fans drop the outraged cheater-cheater-pumpkin-eater mindset and the adherance to a dogma that says steroids have distorted the statistical fabric of the game and instead take note of the facts. Suffice it to say that if you're an open-minded fan of the game, you really should see Walker's site before expelling another breath of hot air regarding steroids and baseball.
So much going on and so little time for me to write. After more than seven months of waiting, my wife and I finally closed on our Brooklyn apartment and will be moving this weekend, thus ending my nearly 13 years in the East Village. The timing isn't exactly great, coming in the middle of my winter deadlines, but with the closing having been postponed twice on the sponsor's part and the situation exacerbated by the collapse of the mortgage market, the past two months have been protracted agony as I watched the move date creep into this territory. At one point I expected to be watching the postseason -- or at least the World Series -- on a new flat-screen TV, but... wait 'til next year, I guess.
Following the closing, my wife and I went for a celebratory drink even though it was only about 3:30 in the afternoon -- how often does one get to buy a home? Afterwards, still a bit buzzed from the 20-ounce beers, we made a trip to Staples to pick up more boxes. We were schlepping them along 34th Street looking for a cab when my cell phone rang. It was the producer from Sports Radio 1470 in Toledo (WLQR), my weekly spot with Norm & Matt; I had forgotten to tell the show I'd be out this week. Thinking fast, my wife and I ducked into some random foyer on 34th Street so I could take the call, and they hit me with the news of Alex Rodriguez's end-around.
My first reaction was that Rodriguez's decision to engage the Yankees without Scott Boras was in fact a Boras ploy, designed to let the superstar play good cop to the nefarious agent's bad cop in the hopes of winning the Yankees and the fans back. Otherwise, if Rodriguez was so disgruntled with the job Boras had done, why not fire him and prevent him from getting his commission on whatever bajillion dollar contract was coming his way?
Just over 24 hours later, the framework of a deal is in place for A-Rod to return to the team he supposedly scorned, calling for $275 million over 10 years, with incentives that could make it far more valuable if he does in fact chase the all-time home run record. Rodriguez still gets a record-breaking contract, but he falls far short of the $350 million Boras told the Yankees would be the starting point of any pre-opt-out negotiations. He falls short of the annual salaries he would have made via the old contract's escalator provisions in 2009 and 2010, or via the eight-year, $230 million offer that the Yankees had planned as their opening gambit. It's understood that somewhere in the new figures is a remedy for the $21 million subsidy from the Texas Rangers that was lost on the contract's termination, a loss that had led Brian Cashman and the Steinbrenner brothers to take a hard-line stance on not negotiating with Rodriguez after the opt-out.
For some reason I'm reminded of a Simpsons episode where Homer has to ask for his job back at the nuclear plant. Instead of being allowed to walk into Monty Burns' office through the door marked "Applicants," he's forced to crawl through a doggie door marked "Supplicants." "A-Rod Crawls Back," read the cover of Thursday's New York Post, and it's clear that whether or not this is a Boras ploy, Rodriguez has been forced to swallow some pride in order to rekindle his pinstriped career.
In any event, despite the awkwardness of the reconciliation, this is a solid win for the Yankees, who were faced with a very difficult task of replacing Rodriguez's monstrous production amid a poor free agent crop and a trade market where Miguel Cabrera could only be had for their brightest pitching prospects. The Yankees lost no face by accepting A-Rod's olive branch because of the superstar's acknowledgment that the lost subsidy would be factored into his new deal.
It's less clear whether A-Rod himself won. While it's tough to begrudge him the opportunity to exercise his contractual right, particularly in light of the rocky ride he had endured over the past three years, the timing of the announcement of his opt-out was horseshit, making him appear to try to upstage the World Series. That may have been a Boras move, but if it went against Rodriguez's tastes that only raises the question of who's wearing the pants in this relationship.
Furthermore, Rodriguez's action almost certainly burned bridges with a segment of Yankees fans. Yes, it may have been the bandwagoneers who were happy to see him stay when he was bopping 54 homers and looking like the MVP, but another underwhelming postseason for him and for the team thinned that herd while frustrating just about everyone who follows the Yankees. For all of the pressure he put on himself in the previous three years, his Hamlet act has cranked the knob to 11 for the coming years. Until he chases his October demons away, he will be under an even hotter spotlight than before.
Speaking as a Yankee fan, I'm glad his production is back, and I certainly do enjoy watching Rodriguez play, at least from April through September. But I'll be hard-pressed to muster the heights of enthusiasm that I've felt towards him before on those days when I knew I was watching Alex Rodriguez, Best Player on Earth. Things may be chilly for awhile. In addition to winning a championship, he's gonna have to bake me and every other Yankee fan one big chocolate apology cake apiece before bygones are bygones.
What's also clear is that whoever won, Boras lost, even if he does get to take home five percent of the $275 million deal. Many, including Fox's Ken Rosenthal (who gets the scoops while Peter Gammons plays the house organ) surmised that a back-channel deal had already been worked out prior to the opt-out. But Boras' timing angered those inside the game, and the mere threat of his outrageous demands quickly sent teams into retreat, or at least into the mode of reassessing their offseason priorities. Among the half-dozen or so teams equipped to make A-Rod an offer, all but the Angels and Dodgers had asserted at one point or another that it might be beyond their capability. Boras overreached, and while the new contract -- incentives regarding his potential chase of the all-time home run record aside -- sets a record by being $23 million more than the 10-year, $252 million deal Rodriguez signed for the 2001 season, the increase doesn't even match the rate of inflation. That's all ya got, Scott? Pfft. In the words of Nelson Muntz, "Ha-ha!"
Meanwhile, the man Rodriguez may someday be chasing for the all-time home run lead, Barry Bonds, was indicted on four counts of perjury and one of obstruction of justice in relation to his BALCO testimony. Again, I found out about it from somebody wanting to put my instant opinion on the radio; Fox News Radio interviewed me for some national soundbites about a half-hour after the story broke on Thursday, and I'm in the midst of nine affiliate hits on Friday morning as I post this.
Even as a decided non-fan of Barry Bonds, I'd say that the announcement feels anticlimactic. Bonds has the home run record, tainted though it may be, and as a 43-year-old free agent, he's already low on most teams' shopping lists. Bud Selig can't suspend him without a conviction lest he set off a fight with the Players' Association, but the owners and GMs now have one more excuse to shun Bonds like a leper in a nudist colony. That's not to say that some team won't sign him, but if you thought the market for A-Rod was tepid, the one for surly, indicted 43-year-olds with multiple knee surgeries is sure to be even moreso.
The announcement feels anticlimactic mainly because I doubt the charges can stick. From the old saw about how a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, the four-year timespan in which this indictment was put together, to the testimony leak, to the lack of a Bonds positive test for anabolic steroids under the auspices of Major League Baseball (though the indictment says the evidence includes a positive test, it was one apparently administered by BALCO, lacking a clear chain of custody), this may well wind up being a circus designed to do little more than hassle Bonds and prevent him from getting another job rather than actually generating a conviction. If they couldn't nail O.J. Simpson...
Which isn't to say that I think Bonds is innocent, not by any stretch of the imagination. As I wrote on the occasion of his 756th home run:
Even absent a positive test, the mountain of evidence that Bonds used performance enhancing drugs is enough to convince me that his accomplishment is tainted. We'll never know the extent to which Bonds was aided, but the fact that his historically unprecedented late-career surge matches up with the well-documented timeline of his alleged usage is enough for me. However, Bonds certainly wasn't the only player using during this sordid era, and the extent to which the drugs helped him achieve his record will forever remain uncertain. Furthermore, Major League Baseball's failure to address in any meaningful way the pervasiveness of the steroid problem made them complicit in Bonds' use...
This much we know: the three players who topped Roger Maris' long-standing season record of 61 homers have varying degrees of evidence suggesting they had help in the matter, and it's not unreasonable to eye their latter-day accomplishments with some degree of suspicion so long as that evidence remains. I'm not advocating an asterisk in the record books or the expungement of any stats; if the fabric of baseball history can withstand the variable impacts of the spitballers, scuffers, bat-corkers, sign-stealers, and greenie-poppers -- to say nothing of the Black Sox and Pete Rose, rats of an entirely different color -- it can withstand this. That doesn't mean we have to worship the record or the man with the prickly persona who achieved it, nor does it diminish the accomplishments of the men who preceded him in holding that record.
Will a Barry Bonds conviction heal the wounds we feel from the cynical chase and toppling of Hank Aaron's home run record? Suffice it to say that I'd be surprised if we ever get to find out.
I missed the home run. Or rather, to borrow the take-home phrase from Office Space, I wouldn't say I missed it. I just didn't care enough to watch. Such was my disinterest that after viewing one replay of it on ESPN -- where its coverage pre-empted the Bronx Is Burning episode I'd TiVoed -- that I didn't even bother to find out who surrendered it until lunchtime today. The sight of the orgy of celebration in San Francisco was enough to drive me away.
I'd missed #755 too, though at the time I did hear my computer alert me via one of those annoying ESPN update chimes on a page I'd left open, and several minutes later, when my wife paused the movie we were watching, I flipped around to find a replay of that one. I even watched it twice before flipping away.
Were either of those home runs against the Dodgers, I might have sat still and enjoyed Vin Scully wrestling with the contrast between the accomplishment and its reception even as I gave Bonds the double-barreled middle finger from my private box seat. That the San Francisco fans uncritically embraced Bonds was no surprise. That the San Diego fans chose to stay classy felt weak; particularly given the two teams' rivalry and Bonds' stated loathing for PetCo Park, I thought they'd have more cojones than to smile brainlessly when prompted for their close-up, but I thought wrong.
The cheerful celebrations in San Diego and San Francisco belied a chase that was no fun at all for most of us, a group that likely includes Bonds. His pursuit brought out the worst in people, from Bud Selig to elected officials to the peers of Bonds and Aaron, from the media to the fans in 29 other ballparks. I'm not happy to concede that at times it's brought out the worst in me, but I'm not too ashamed to admit that watching the joy drain from the chase filled me with some small degree of satisfaction. As a nation of baseball fans, we deserved what we got, a cynical and likely chemically aided summit of a peak that was thought to be unconquerable.
I'm done gnashing my teeth. The record is what it is, something to be taken in context. Even absent a positive test, the mountain of evidence that Bonds used performance enhancing drugs is enough to convince me that his accomplishment is tainted. We'll never know the extent to which Bonds was aided, but the fact that his historically unprecedented late-career surge matches up with the well-documented timeline of his alleged usage is enough for me. However, Bonds certainly wasn't the only player using during this sordid era, and the extent to which the drugs helped him achieve his record will forever remain uncertain. Furthermore, Major League Baseball's failure to address in any meaningful way the pervasiveness of the steroid problem made them complicit in Bonds' use. There's also a growing body of evidence that MLB's decision to introduce a livelier baseball following the 1994 strike played a part in the astronomical home run totals that followed, but that's a story for another day.
This much we know: the three players who topped Roger Maris' long-standing season record of 61 homers have varying degrees of evidence suggesting they had help in the matter, and it's not unreasonable to eye their latter-day accomplishments with some degree of suspicion so long as that evidence remains. I'm not advocating an asterisk in the record books or the expungement of any stats; if the fabric of baseball history can withstand the variable impacts of the spitballers, scuffers, bat-corkers, sign-stealers, and greenie-poppers -- to say nothing of the Black Sox and Pete Rose, rats of an entirely different color -- it can withstand this. That doesn't mean we have to worship the record or the man with the prickly persona who achieved it, nor does it diminish the accomplishments of the men who preceded him in holding that record.
I don't see eye-to-eye with my BP colleague Joe Sheehan on very much in the Bonds sphere, but a few weeks back, he wrote something that stuck with me, something I resolved to file away for this occasion:
Should Bonds get to 756 home runs, it will mean only that he hit more home runs than anyone else in the game’s history. Doing so doesn’t make him a better person than Hank Aaron—it is irrelevant to that question entirely—nor does his superiority in one statistic necessarily make him a better baseball player. Hank Aaron’s legacy as a player is not diminished one whit by the fact that his name is no longer atop a list of names and numbers. His greatness isn’t defined by a number, and his accomplishments remain just as impressive—overcoming racism in the South in he 1950s, being a player who could do everything on a baseball field, his amazing consistency stretching across two decades of play, and his grace under pressure, surrounded by hatred, as he set the all-time home run record.
Statistics are a record of what happened in baseball games. We make lists, but those lists don’t rank men, they rank their doings. All statistics, however, need to be put into context. That applies when comparing two pitchers who work in disparate run environments, two prospects who play three levels apart, or two Hall of Fame outfielders who find themselves next to each other on a list. Beyond statistical context, however, there’s historical context. The narratives of Ruth and Maris, of Aaron and Bonds, will be written and rewritten, and their places in the history of baseball will be determined not by any statistic, but by the body of their work and their impact on the game.
I've yet to read anything in the coverage of the entire home run chase that I agree with the way I agree with that, and so I'll quit while I'm behind, hopeful that the all-time home run list finds a new man atop it -- Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, Jason Tyner -- by the time I need to explain this record to my children.
If we can agree on one thing, let us agree that the next time around should be more fun.
• • •
My latest Prospectus Hit and Run went up at BP yesterday. With milestone home runs the obvious leading topic, I began with a look back at some old research I did:
I come neither to bury Bonds nor to praise him, but given that the all-time home run list has seen enough shakeups since I wrote about it over three years ago, updating that older work will surely keep me down with OBC (Obligatory Barry Content). Along with Bonds tying Hank Aaron at 755, Sammy Sosa has become the fifth player to top 600, Ken Griffey Jr. and Rafael Palmeiro have cracked the top 10, and Frank Thomas and A-Rod have joined the 500 club.
...Among the top 27 home run hitters of all time — the 22 men in the 500 Club, plus the three active players likely to reach that plateau within the next year, and the two men who came up just shy — Bonds' ratio of home to road homers is the ninth-lowest. That's pretty ho-hum stuff. What's much more interesting is how the chart's latest interlopers have profited from their home parks. While nobody will ever catch Mel Ott when it comes to home field advantage, Thomas, [Jim] Thome, and Palmeiro have all hit at least 20 percent more homers at home than on the road, with Sosa and Griffey enjoying about a 10 percent advantage, while A-Rod checks in at five percent.
From there, I went on to rerun one of that old piece's most popular items:
The "Home Doubled" list shows what the leaderboard might have looked like if each of these sluggers had enjoyed the perks of home in every park; we've simply doubled the home HR totals (2xHHR). The "Road Doubled" list (or 2xRHRR) puts things on more neutral ground. It ain't rocket science, but it's revealing nonetheless:
What stands out most about the Home Doubled list is how much bigger the 600 level might have been if all these sluggers had feasted on home cooking all of the time; a couple more Skydome shots by Thomas and we'd have 10, with Double X Jimmie Foxx just outside the ranks. The second thing to note is that at every rank but one, the Home Doubled total is higher than the Road Doubled one, by an average of 38 homers. The Road Doubled list shows Bonds as having left Aaron in the rearview mirror already, while maintaining a much more exclusive 600-homer level. It's just further confirmation that the reputations of these sluggers were considerably helped along by favorable conditions at home.
Elsewhere in the piece, I took a look at the best bullpens according to BP's suite of statistics, and the best and worst pitching staffs as a unit according to our win-expectancy based measures. That kind of stuff isn't as timely or as controversial as talking about the longball, but I relish the fact that we can now turn our attention to such matters with fewer distractions.
