Alas, the game was something of a dud despite a heavy concentration of brand new "Joba Rules" t-shirts and pinstriped number 62 jerseys in the stands. Chamberlain, who came in scheduled for a very limited 65-70 pitch range, jacked it up to 101 MPH on the stadium's hot radar gun (98 according to YES, I think) but struggled with his control and blew more than half his pitch allotment in the first inning. He walked Shannon Stewart, left fielder on the All-"You're Still Here?" team, to open the game, and Stewart came around to score without benefit of a hit thanks to a balk, a passed ball, and an infield grounder. That was bad enough, but he then proceeded to load the bases via a Scott Rolen single and two more walks to Lyle Overbay and Matt Stairs. He whiffed Rod Barajas to end the inning but he'd used 38 bullets when it was all said and done.
The Yanks touched up Doc Halladay for two in the bottom of the inning. Johnny Damon smoked a leadoff triple to right-center, and while the failures of Derek Jeter and Bobby Abreu to bring him home had Yankee fans tearing their hair out, Alex Rodriguez took one for the team and then Hideki Matsui followed with a sharp single. A-Rod scampered home when Jason Giambi followed with a single to left center, exactly through where shortstop David Eckstin's neighborhood had the Little Gerbil not shifted to the other side of the bag.
Chamberlain was somewhat more efficient in the second, as he retired the Jays 1-2-3, but he still needed 16 pitches to do so. His night came to an early end after he walked Alex Rios on four pitches with one out in the third. He totaled 62 pitches and struck out three to compensate for the four walks, but the book on him wasn't closed yet. Dan Giese, who'd been recalled from Scranton to make his Yankees debut, came on in relief and could only watch as Jose Molina made a horrible throw into right-center on Rios' attempted steal, sending him to third. Giese then gave up a groundball that tied the score, the run charged to Joba's room.
The Jays added another run in the fourth via a Barajas double, a Brad Wilkerson single, and an Eckstein sac fly, and while Giese kept things close, the remainder of the Yankee bullpen blew the game open in the seventh when Jose Veras, Edwar Ramirez, and LaTroy Hawkins conspired to surrender six runs on four hits, four walks and a sac fly, running the score to 9-2. It was ugly, my friends; the only solution to getting through it was a considerable cash outlay for more beer in celebration of the end of the Democratic primary season. Even so, we departed the moment our cups were empty in the eighth inning. Meh.
• • •
In this week's Prospectus Hit and Run, I've got a rather contrarian take on the early-season scoring drop that has some of my colleagues atwitter. Joe Sheehan went on a big but inconclusive dig through the April numbers a few weeks back, and while AL scoring levels have continued to plummet -- they're down half a run from last year overall, from 4.90 per game to 4.40 -- there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason. His look was at least data driven, which is more than I can say for the mainstream pundits who suggest that increased drug testing is the reason for the drop:
Changes in the drug policy are perhaps the most frequently invoked, and in fact, the two-month dip we've seen in the AL would make for the most dramatic drop in the drug-testing era if it held out over the full season. But baseball's drug policy has evolved gradually without exhibiting a consistent effect on scoring. Consider:
Year NL AL Key Policy Changes 2000 5.00 5.30 2001 4.70 4.86 2002 4.45 4.81 2003 4.61 4.86 Survey testing 2004 4.64 5.01 Treatment for first offense 2005 4.45 4.76 10-day suspension for first offense, precursors banned 2006 4.76 4.97 50-game suspension for first offense 2007 4.71 4.90 Amphetamines banned 2008 4.60 4.41 More frequent in-season and offseason testing
Where's the pattern? Regarding the current year, one can't even invoke the effects of the new policy, which basically doubled the number of in-season and off-season tests. It wasn't ratified until less than two weeks ago. Some may say that expectations of enhanced testing in the wake of the Mitchell Report are what's driving the drop, but that's pure speculation.
Having studied the matter for the past few years, I'm not a big believer in PED-based explanations; I tend to favor the ball-doctoring theory to explain the scoring and power fluctuations throughout the entire post-1993 era. The magnetic resonance images (MRIs) from Universal Medical Systems show a synthetic rubber ring that's unaccounted for in MLB's ball specifications, not to mention other anomalies that suggest wider disparities in the balls used than MLB should be allowing. Furthermore, MLB's own studies confirm such disparities--the use of out-of-tolerance balls--as well as finding that the flight distances of balls at the extreme ends of official tolerances could differ by as much as 49 feet despite being struck under the same conditions.
While Joe Sheehan used fly ball rates to dismiss the possibility that ball changes might be factoring into what we've seen this year, the decrease in total bases per hit--what Eric Walker calls Power Factor--from recent historical levels of about 1.60 to 1.56 last year and 1.53 this year suggests this explanation may still be in play. However convenient it may be, until we have more data under our belts, not to mention new scans of 2008 balls that can be compared to last year's models, it's premature to haul the ball-doctoring explanation out to explain this year's results. (In a brief conversation with UMS president David Zavagno, I was told that such scans are forthcoming; I'm planning a lengthier discussion with him in the near future.)
...Having basically lobbed more spitballs than Gaylord Perry on Old-Timer's Day in this article, I'm not going to send you away with any firm conclusions, because I don't think there are any to be drawn. Scoring has fluctuated considerably during Bud Selig's reign, a time of nearly constant change in the game. The crush of coverage that's developed during that time via electronic media, 24-hour news cycles and the blogosphere can lead to a rush of attempts to explain the game's current trends and anomalies, often -- particularly when it comes to those high-profile talking heads -- twisted to fit a preconceived narrative rather than backed by hard data. By October, the larger sample sizes will likely steer us back to scoring levels more in line with recent history. While it may not be a catchy answer to say, "Let's see where the data is at the end of the year," before we firm up our theories about this scoring drop, it's the right one.
I'm looking forward to interviewing Zavagno sometime in the not-too-distant future. We'd spoken before prior to yesterday, and while I don't buy everything he says, he has produced some compelling visual evidence while raising very good points about MLB's testing of baseballs. Ours should make for a fun conversation.
• A Prospectus Hit List to go with Wednesday's Hit and Run piece on struggling rotations, with special focus on the current Tigers and the historically awful Rangers, with an aside about the Yankees' failure to get innings from their starting five (5.07 per start).
• a spot on the Rotowire Fantasy Sports Hour with Chris Liss, XM 144 at 2:25 PM Eastern
• Meanwhile, one article to recommend, today's freebie at BP. In it, Nate Silver aims a bullet at Bill James' recent, baseless allegations that steroid usage played a part in the development of Gary Gaetti and Kirby Puckett and their subsequent success in helping the Twins to a pair of unlikely world championships. James' comments come in his latest book The Bill James Gold Mine 2008, and as offhanded as they may have been intended, the fact that someone with his stature would stoop to the realm of the fingerpointers is a dark, dark day for baseball and for those of us who hold his legacy dear. I'd already decided I was in no hurry to buy the Gold Mine -- Steven Goldman bought one while we were on our promotional tour and we chewed on some of its rather pedestrian offerings -- and that sealed the deal.
• Drawing mention in Silver's piece is David Ortiz, as a victim of the old eyeball test for steroid stoppage, a statement that's a reliable litmus test to determine whether the person you're talking baseball with is a blithering idiot. Big Papi should have been part of my "Big Lugs and Small Sample Sizes" entry, now that I think about it. Ortiz started the season 3-for-43 since then has hit a considerably more robust .298/.377/.532, with 14 hits in his list 11 games. It's a coincidence that the turnaround almost exactly coincides with the excavation of a an Ortiz jersey buried in the bowels of the new Yankee Stadium. Probably.
My piece today at Baseball Prospectus covering Wednesday's Congressional hearing will have a familiar ring to anyone who's been followingalong in this space. While there's plenty to debate about the propriety of such a dog and pony show in Congress, not to mention the credibility of the Mitchell Report and of Brian McNamee, I focused on the hearings as a product of Roger Clemens' public quest for vindication:
In any event, Wednesday's hearings weren't so much about the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform's interest in the culpability of the commissioner, the union, or the owners as they were about Roger Clemens' decision to challenge the findings in the Mitchell Report in an attempt to clear his name. Without Clemens' vehement campaign to discredit the work of the Mitchell Commission while denying the charges that he used steroids and human growth hormone, there would have been no hearing. But given his goal of vindicating himself, it's difficult to conclude that Clemens did anything but fail miserably on a grand stage.
...Clemens came into the hearings needing to cast doubt on the Mitchell Report, on Pettitte, and on McNamee, and at best, he went a weak one-for-three. The proceedings raised credibility questions about his former trainer, demonstrating that McNamee basically fits the profile of someone desperate who gets backed into corners like these -- allusions to a Florida rape case where the charges didn't stick, a fake diploma and some shady misrepresentation, a seriously ill son, and a sudden desire to set things right for the youth of America so as to avoid jail time. His accounts appear to be in a constant state of evolution, which opens him up to facile charges of lying but which are, as Souder pointed out, characteristic of people forced into such deals. For certain, McNamee is no prize pig, something we've known for months; Clemens and his allies on the committee didn't get very far beyond that, and in fact Clemens created new problems for himself while dealing with the body blow of the other major revelations.
Indeed, experts suggest the probability of a Department of Justice perjury investigation versus Clemens, though I'm skeptical there's enough evidence to convict him. Meanwhile, there's much less to suggest McNamee is in danger of being proven as lying about the Mitchell-related allegations and thus in violation of his proffer agreement, or that Clemens' defamation suit against McNamee will gain any traction. Had Clemens simply copped to using HGH (and only HGH) as Pettitte did after the report came out, this sordid saga would likely be over. Clemens and his legal team look foolish for not recognizing that unless the Rocket was absolutely spotless -- and here, the unchallenged information about Debbie Clemens' HGH use looks especially bad -- he was going to be hung out to dry.
Roger Clemens was very good at intimidating batters for over 20 years, but his brawn and bravado simply don't work in a legal or pseudo-legal setting. He's gotten far more than he bargained for in his quest for vindication. Instead of throwing smoke, he's simply been smoked.
Today's headlines have brought some new information into the mix. According to this New York Times piece, committee chair Henry Waxman now regrets that the hearing took place, and reveals that on the Republican side, only Tom Davis and Mark Souder even bothered to read the depositions. It's telling that Souder came off as one of the few Congressman on either side to cross the partisan divide:
Souder was also one of the few committee members who refused Clemens's request for a private meeting before the hearing. And it was Souder who stood out from his Republican colleagues by stating during the hearing that the depositions were "fairly devastating" against Clemens.
"I don’t think, quite frankly, that they anticipated quite the solid wall on the Republican side, the defense of Clemens," Souder said Wednesday of the Democratic members of the panel. Speaking of Clemens, he added, "It wasn't an accident that word got to me that he’s a Republican, or he said that President Bush called him."
Meanwhile, much more information about McNamee's debriefing by investigators from the Clemens camp is coming to light. If you thought this saga was over, think again.
Once again, it was a very surreal scene to see baseball hauled in front of Congress for the purposes of posturing about steroids. From where I sat in the Fox News Radio Studio, where host Dave Anthony and I were joined via phone by Jim Bouton, it was a pretty bad day for Roger Clemens. Andy Pettitte's testimony stating that Clemens told him of his HGH use, the revelations that Clemens discussed HGH with Brian McNamee, who injected his wife, and Clemens' potential tampering with a witness, the family nanny, who placed Clemens and family at the Jose Canseco house despite Clemens' claims to have been playing golf -- all of those things made the Rocket's testimony look less than credible.
As for the Congressmen we saw parading in front of the cameras, if it's true that we get the elected officials we deserve, then we as a nation must have befouled some giant ancient burial ground to bring forth the grandstanding morons of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Yesterday's proceedings mostly followed a partisan line, with Democrats going after Clemens and Republicans attacking McNamee, the latter with a high degree of histrionics (Dan Burton, Darrell Issa, Virginia Foxx and my old nemesis Christopher Shays being the most egregious). Blech.
Clemens came into the hearings needing to cast doubt on the Mitchell Report, on Pettitte, and on McNamee, and at best, the proceedings raised credibility questions about the latter, demonstrating that he basically fits the profile of the kind of desperate schmuck who gets backed into corners like these (allusions to a Florida rape case, a fake diploma, a sick son, and a sudden desire to set things right for the youth of America so as to avoid jail time). But I don't think Clemens got very far beyond that, and in fact created new problems for himself while dealing with the body blow of the Pettitte testimony and the revelations about his wife.
Furthermore, I don't think one can rule out a Department of Justice perjury investigation versus Clemens, though I doubt there's nearly enough to convict him. Meanwhile, there's nothing to suggest McNamee is in danger of it being proven that he's lying and thus in violation of his proffer agreement. If Clemens had just copped to HGH (and only HGH) a month ago like Pettitte did, this sordid saga would probably be over, and Clemens is a dolt for not recognizing that unless he was absolutely spotless he was gonna get hung out to dry. He's gotten way more than he bargained for in his bid for vindication.
Anyway, I'm in the midst of a heavy load of radio appearances this morning. Catch me if you can:
As for writing about the Rocket's 'roids-related revelations, I covered the pinstriped angle of the Mitchell Report for Bombers Broadside 2008, a forthcoming book on the Yankees from Maple Street Press. This is the second year in a row I've contributed to Bombers Broadside. In this edition's 112 pages of glossy, full color goodness you'll also find editor Cecilia Tan and such familiar names as Mike Carminati, Vince Genarro, Dan Graziano, Derek Jacques, Tara Krieger, Dan McCourt, Sweeney Murti and Pete Palmer. The book will be available on newsstands in the Tri-State area on March 4, and can be ordered directly from the publisher now.
As for what I actually think about whether Clemens used? As skeptical as I am of the Mitchell Report and of Brian McNamee's character, I've had a hard time believing the Clemens camp's protestations from the beginning. Furthermore, every weird turn this case has taken -- from the Mike Wallace softball interview to the taped phone call to Andy Pettitte's admission and testimony to the needles and gauze to the naming of Debbie Clemens to the Rocket's glad-handing up on Capitol Hill to Rusty Hardin's down-home machismo -- has further eroded my confidence in Clemens' version of events. The only major point scored in Clemens' favor since the report's release was the revelation that he was not in fact named in the Jason Grimsley affidavit, contrary to the Los Angeles Times' previous reports.
Which isn't to say that I particularly care whether Clemens used or not. Though his late-career accomplishments certainly fit a pattern not unlike that of America's previous Public Enemy #1, Barry Bonds, I'm more skeptical than ever about what the drugs he allegedly took may have done to his performance. In the context of the hundreds of other players who allegedly used PEDs prior to baseball's beefed-up policy, his case isn't especially remarkable; it's the denials which have amplified the coverage and given the story legs. What's certain is that the public persona of Clemens that has emerged through this saga is even less charming than the one on display throughout his career. And while I have to admit that I'm not really prone to sympathizing with right-wing, redneck bullies, I fear that the cover-up -- if this flurry of activity is indeed covering up for Clemens' misdeeds -- is worse than the crime.
That said, I doubt there will be enough evidence to convict Clemens of perjury, and I find the whole notion that Congress should be involved in this dispute to be patently ridiculous. Henry Waxman, Tom Davis and their colleagues -- particularly my old nemesis Christopher Shays, America's expert at Not Knowing Anything About Anything -- are a bipartisan bunch of camera-hogging assclowns who ought to be doing something more important, like begging their constituents for forgiveness for wasting their time and taxpayer dollars on such relatively trivial matters.
Anyway, as ever I'll try to impart a modicum of reason into the reportage.
But having done enough of thatlast week, I switched gears for this week's Prospectus Hit and Run. I tied up up a few loose ends by revisiting the 2013 Hall of Fame ballot, the close-but-no-cigar crew who topped Jim Rice's 72.2 percent, and correcting myself regarding a slip on David Justice. Finally, I turned my attention to the forthcoming season via a topic I covered in the forthcoming Baseball Prospectus 2008 (which ships February 18), namely the Brewers' abysmal defense:
As I wrote a few months back, the Brewers finished 28th out of 30 teams in Park Adjusted Defensive Efficiency. They were 3.44 percent below average in converting batted balls into outs, a shortcoming that translates to -44.7 runs (every one percent away from average equals 13 runs). A look at the defensive numbers of the infielders suggests that number isn't far out of line. Based on their Fielding Runs Above Average totals and a simple Linear Weights conversion of Baseball Information Solutions' Plus/Minus ratings into runs, the quartet of Prince Fielder, Rickie Weeks, J.J. Hardy and Ryan Braun came in a whopping 49 runs below average.
In a tight but winnable division, that simply won't do, so kudos to the Brewers for not sitting on their hands. The recent signing of Mike Cameron to play center field created a domino effect, shifting incumbent Bill Hall, who struggled to hold down the middle pasture, to the hot corner, and Braun, who put up a ghastly .895 fielding percentage, to left field. According to the Davenport fielding numbers, Hall has performed as a league-average third baseman in 84 career games, 59 of them in 2005. Braun, however, is untested in the outfield.
How much will all these moves improve the defense? I set out to do a quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation, incorporating 2007 FRAA, Plus/Minus and the new kid on the block, Dan Fox's Simple Fielding Runs...
I did two estimates, one the those numbers, the other using the 2008 PECOTA projections, which account for multiple years of data, player aging patterns, and regression to the mean. Between the two estimates, I bracketed the defensive improvements as worth between 1.5 and four wins, something that should comfort my Brewer-loving in-laws.
• • •
Elsewhere at BP, yesterday was a big day, as Kevin Goldstein published our Top 100 Prospect list, then submitted to a full afternoon of interrogation. Topping the list is Cincinnati center fielder Jay Bruce, and the Reds can also boast pitcher Homer Bailey (#), first baseman Joey Votto (21), and pitcher Johnny Cueto (41). That's a nice bit of high-end talent, but nobody can touch the Rays, who have five of the top 25 prospects; their days as the AL East's doormat may be at an end.
The Yankees' Joba Chamberlain comes in ranked an impressive #4, though that won't be enough to appease the nitpickers who sweat Boston's Clay Buchholz being ranked #2. The Yankees placed five kids on the list, the Red Sox seven, but beyond that raw count, it's it's actually a tossup between the two beasts in terms of strength. Boston has the higher-rated player and two in the top 20, but the Yanks have four in the top 50. Ian Kennedy is ranked 34th, outfielders Austin Jackson and Jose Tabata 47th and 48th, respectively, and pitcher Alan Horne 67th (Philip Hughes, in case anybody was wondering, is no longer eligible for the list, having topped 50 innings last year). Beyond Buchholz, the Sox have center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury (16), starting pitcher Justin Masterson (53), "shortstop" Jed Lowrie (57), outfielder Ryan Kalish (60), starting pitcher Michael Bowden (95th) and first baseman Lars Anderson (100).
The Dodgers fared well, too. Starter Clayton Kershaw ranks fifth; according to Goldstein he's the early favorite for next year's #1. Third baseman Andy LaRoche is 14th, shortstop Chin-Ling Hu 32nd, and pitcher Scott Elbert 66th. That's solid but not incredibly strong, but when one considers that the system has graduated Chad Billingsley, Jonathan Broxton, Andre Ethier, Matt Kemp, James Loney and Russell Martin to the bigs in the last two years, whoa. Goldstein's Top 11 Dodger prospects will be up later today; I'll check back with a link.
• • •
We won't know until this evening whether the deal will become official or not, but the Mets are poised to steal Johan Santana from the Twins. You know it's bad when Baseball America's home page boldly greets you with the headline "Twins Didn't Get Enough."
Of the four prospects headed Minnesota's way, the highest-ranked on BP's list is center fielder Carlos Gomez at #65. He's a toolsy guy with what they call a projectable body, which is to say he causes scouts' hearts to go pitter-patter despite the fact that he has yet to translate his physique into results. As a 21-year-old he was pressed into big-league duty by injuries in the Mets' outfield last year, he hit just .232/.288/.304 in 125 big-league at-bats. As bad as that is, the kid has hit just .278/.336/.399 in four minor-league seasons, and between being overmatched in the bigs and suffering a broken hand, he lost a good bit of development time. PECOTA forecasted a weighted mean equivalent performance of .265/.315/.392 in 2007 (that's translated from wherever he played in the minors); for this year it's .253/.310/.371 -- about 25 OPS points lower. Backwards moving is he.
The deal gets worse for the Twins. Neither pitchers Phillip Humber nor Kevin Mulvey crack BP's Top 100; both are seen as back-of-the rotation guys. Nineteen-year-old pitcher Deolis Guerra ranks 79th, but that's again a function of his projectable body rather than his results to date. After an impressive 2006 as a 17-year-old, he put up a 4.01 ERA and 6.6 K/9 in the Florida State League last year; he'll need to bulk up his repertoire so that he actually misses bats if this deal is to be salvaged for Minny.
Here's what BA's Jim Callis had to say:
Guerra (No. 2), Gomez (No. 3), Mulvey (No. 4) and Humber (No. 7) all ranked prominently on our Mets Top 10 Prospects list. But there’s simply too much risk involved in this deal for Minnesota.
The two best prospects in the trade, Guerra and Gomez, come with high ceilings but also lack a lot of polish and have a long ways to go to reach their potential. The odds that they both will do so are slim.
Guerra has an 89-94 mph fastball and a promising changeup and he’s only 18. But he also has a below-average breaking ball, has yet to pitch more than 90 innings in a season and while he has held his own, he hasn’t dominated. Gomez had the best package of tools in the Mets system, but his bat is still extremely raw...
Mulvey has an arsenal of four average pitches and throws strikes. He’s not overpowering and he’s most likely a No. 4 starter. Since having Tommy John surgery in 2005, Humber hasn’t fully regained the stuff that made him the No. 3 overall pick in the 2004 draft. His curveball is his best pitch but his fastball now sits at 87-91 mph. He too projects as a No. 4 starter.
The Twins have traded Santana for two high-reward but also high-risk prospects, and two back-of-the-rotation starters. They didn’t get a prospect whose combination of ceiling and certainty approaches that of Hughes, whom the Yankees were willing to deal for Santana earlier in the winter. They didn’t get a package comparable to the ones the Red Sox reportedly offered earlier, fronted by either Jacoby Ellsbury and Jon Lester and also containing two solid prospects nearly ready for the majors: righty Justin Masterson and shortstop Jed Lowrie.
BPs Joe Sheehan was none too wild about the haul either, though he did counter some of the conventional wisdom based on the rumors that have floated around all winter:
The package just wasn’t the right one. I’m not going to compare this trade to the long-rumored and varying offers that were reportedly on the table at varying times this winter, because I’ve come around to the idea that what’s actually offered and what gets reported are two wildly different things. We can’t compare an actual trade to rumors. However, evaluating this deal in a vacuum, we see that it adds just one position player of note, one with some major flaws and who wouldn’t be one of the top ten prospects at his position in the game. The rest of the deal is mid-rotation pitching prospects.
There are mitigating circumstances here that must be noted. Santana forced Bill Smith’s hand by threatening to invoke his no-trade clause, which would have ended all talks and forced the Twins to either sign Santana or lose him at the end of the year for nothing. With the Twins looking up at the Tigers and Indians in the division, and the Red Sox and Yankees in the league, it didn’t seem reasonable to keep him in a push for success in 2008, and the Twins have never acted like signing Santana was a reasonable option for them. With Santana pointing the gun, apparently wishing to have his 2008 status settled right now, Smith had little choice but to make a deal. This trade does little for me, but when positioned as “one year of Johan Santana or this trade,” it’s a bit more defensible... Blame Bill Smith for the deal that he did make, but save a little ire for Terry Ryan, whose decision three years ago [to grant Santana the no-trade clause] set these events in motion.
What's really funny is that I spent nearly six years at a design studio with a boss named Bill Smith. Didn't know much about baseball; the story goes that when he was taken to a game, he brought magazines to read and asked when halftime was. Possibly more legend than fact, but good for a punchline in this context.
Mainly I'm relieved that the Yanks didn't give up Hughes to get Santana, and that they won't have to face him in what would have been an insanely stacked Red Sox rotation. If it goes through, the Mets are a solid bet to finish the job they botched last year and take the NL East, though I really think the Braves, with a full season of Mark Teixeira and continued development of their young nucleus (Brian McCann, Kelly Johnson, Yunel Escobar, Jeff Francoeur) will be a continued threat (Philly's lack of pitching will doom them).
Anyway, I've got more links to share, but that's enough blogging for one entry.
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.
I shoulda shown more cleavage, I guess. Apologies to anybody who wasted their time trying to track this down.
I can't say I was all that surprised at the outcome. I refused to let the producer put words into my mouth, settling for responses to their questions that didn't break up into neat two-second soundbites ("This is a dark day for baseball," "A-Rod is the last hope," etc.). Basically, my every suspicion about tabloid TV's depth of interest in the story was confirmed. While I'd have loved the segment to have aired so that I could add it to my clip files, and while rushing out the door to jump through their hoops was a serious inconvencience given my workload, the whole adventure was nonetheless a fascinating peak into the sausage factory of TV, and I'd be lying if I said I was the least bit bitter about the outcome.
• the second segment of my JAWS 2008 Hall of Fame ballot roundup went up on Thursday, December 20. It covered the outfielders on the ballot, most notably Tim Raines, whose segment was the longest I've ever devoted to one player. In it, I made a direct comparison between Raines and Tony Gwynn and found that the two of them come out mere whiskers apart on the JAWS scale despite their different skill sets:
Raines [123.7 career WARP/68.4 peak/96.1 JAWS] is often slighted because he doesn't measure up to his direct contemporary, Henderson (187.8 career WARP/83.4 peak/135.6 JAWS). He doesn't have 3,000 hits, and his 808 stolen bases rank "only" fifth all time, and while his 84.7 percent success rate is the best among thieves with more than 300 attempts, that skill doesn't really register in today's power-saturated age, limiting the impression of his all-around ability. But Raines does more than measure up to another Hall of Fame contemporary, 2007 inductee Tony Gwynn. Their JAWS totals are virtually identical (124.4/68.4/96.4 for Gwynn, within one win in each category), but Raines outdistances the left field benchmark by 4.8 JAWS points, while Gwynn rates a hair below that in right field (125.0/68.7/96.8). Gwynn gets the glory because of his 3,141 hits, five 200-hit seasons, and eight batting titles. Raines won only one batting title, but while he never reached 200 hits due to his ability to generate so many walks, he compares very favorably to Gwynn in many key statistical categories:
TOB is times on base (H + BB + HBP), BG is bases gained, the numerator of Tom Boswell's briefly chic mid-'80s Total Average stat (TB + BB + HBP + SB - CS), which is presented here to show that Raines' edge on the basepaths made up for Gwynn's ability to crank out the hits. The point is better served via the comprehensive Equivalent Average and WARP valuations, but it's nonetheless a worthwhile comparison for those wishing to stick to traditional counting stats. The conclusion is the same: Tony Gwynn and Tim Raines were two fantastic ballplayers who had slightly different skills. One was disproportionately heralded in his time thanks to his extreme success by the traditional measures of batting average and hits, while the other was under-appreciated in a career that included a more concentrated early peak and a lot more ups and downs. The two were equally valuable on both career and peak levels, and there is absolutely no reason why one should be in the Hall of Fame on the first ballot while the other should languish outside for more than five seconds. If the voters don't see it that way -- and the early line is that they won't, at least initially -- it will be a gross injustice.
I received a good amount of support regarding Rianes from BP's readership, including a very nice note from a beat reporter who is still a few years away from obtaining his ballot but who told me that I had swayed his thinking about the Rock. That made my day.
• Alasdair Wilkins of Harvard's student radio station, WHRB, interviewed me for a lengthy multi-part podcast regarding my JAWS take on this year's ballot.
• Also on the subject of the Hall of Fame, I had a civil exchange with none other than Rob Neyer last week in which I took issue with the way he handled some performance-enhancing drug hypotheticals in a recent chat in the wake of the Mitchell Report. More specifically, I was peeved at his repeated lumping of Jeff Bagwell in with Mark McGwire in what I read as an "I know it when I see it"-style accusation, and with his statement that the burden of proof now lies on the players (how do you disprove such a negative?). Bagwell has never tested positive, never been mentioned in the context of a steroid-related law enforcement investigation, and while he was tarred by his erroneous inclusion in the notorious WNBC "fake list" that circulated in the hours before the report's initial release, there are no credible PED allegations against him. To simply begin finger-pointing based on a player's late-career injury history -- even in the context of numerous Mitchell-named players with similar latter-day histories (Kevin Brown comes to mind) -- is a slippery slope that leads to a lowest-common-denominator mudpit that any responsible writer should take pains to avoid.
Now, in the context of the entire chat (instead of just two or three questions which I cherrypicked) I do think Rob did a better job of positioning the Bagwell instance as a hypothetical than I initially gave him credit for. And I definitely take pride in the fact that he referred to me as "one of my favorite writers" before running my email to him (with permission) in his Insider column (subscription only, alas). That means a lot to me, particularly because I'd likely be nowhere near this forum had I not started reading him at ESPN years ago and tapped into my long-dormant Bill James-flavored taste for baseball analysis. Neyer had that impact not only on me but on hundreds of writers -- he's our Blogfather -- and thousands upon thousands of readers. He's arguably done more to elevate the debate about all kinds of baseball-related topics than anybody since his mentor, James. But as both a fan of Rob's work and a fellow writer, I would have preferred see him handle the matter in question with a bit more precision and a bit less cynicism instead of taking what I read as a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach.
It's difficult and probably futile to convey the whole scope of our conversation within this brief rundown, but basically I just think that particularly in the wake of the Mitchell Report that baseball writers of any stripe need to do a better job of separating fact from speculation lest they feed the rampant hysteria that the Mitchell Report stoked in some quarters. Steroids isn't the most appealing topic to spend a few minutes or hours dwelling upon as a writer, but I've always tried to take great care in addresing the issue with precision, accuracy, and a lack of hysteria. Within the tens of thousands of words I've devoted to the topic over the past several years, there are only a few I'd like to take back.
As for the report, I have my issues regarding it. I think the release of names without due process was rather appalling, and that the committee's investigative powers were hamstrung greatly by the lack of legal standing and subpoena power. Nonetheless, I feel that Mitchell was basically right on regarding the need for amnesty and moving forward, and that many of his recommendations could help continue to clean up the game. As flawed as it is, the report should move the public dialogue forward, but this "cheater cheater pumpkineater" syndrome that the more tabloid elements stoke does the game and its fans no good.
Anyway, particularly given the Hall of Fame-related ramifications of the issue, I'm planning to do an addendum to my JAWS series regarding my take on Mitchell, my exchange with Neyer, and how to regard the likes of McGwire, Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, etc. going forward. I don't claim to have THE solution, but if nothing else I feel a great need to clarify my own position on the matter.
• • •
In the event that I don't find my way back to this space before 2008 is rung in, I'd like to thank all of my readers here, at Baseball Prospectus and at points beyond, my wife Andra, the Jaffe and Hardt extended families, and my dear friends for their continued support and encouragement. This has been an exciting year for me on the professional and personal fronts -- new column at BP, prominent placement in It Ain't Over, a debut at SI.com, more than 100 radio hits around the country, new apartment, and more -- and while it's resulted in a much lower profile at this blog, it's a positive set of developments nonetheless. Here's hoping the ride takes us in even more interesting directions in 2008. Happy New Year to all of you!
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:
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.
Last night, Sammy Sosa hit his 600th home run, becoming just the fifth player in baseball history to do so. Ironically, he hit it against the Chicago Cubs, the team for whom he walloped 545 of those homers, including 243 over a four-year span. While that barrage arguably made him the game's most popular player at the time, it has since raised numerous eyebrows as BALCO and other steroid scandals have come to light. Most famously, Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly smugly challenged Sosa to pee in a cup to prove his innocence; when Sosa refused, Reilly wrote a have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife column about it. Sosa, for his part, made a lackluster showing at the 2005 Congressional Steroid Circus, and many other writers treated his 2006 quasi-retirement as a de facto admission of guilt, working steroids into their narrative of his departure.
For all of the innuendo surrounding Sosa, there's no smoking gun, and far less circumstantial evidence surrounding him than his two other contemporaries who crossed the 61-homer Maris threshold, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds (corked bats, on the other hand...). Earlier this year, reports surfaced via a leak that the dubious Mitchell Investigation had called for Sosa's medical records; Mitchell refused comment as to any justification for doing so. In most quarters, that's called a smear.
But enough about steroids for the moment. Multiple readers have asked me about Sosa's JAWS case, so here goes. Coming into the year (working with January 2007 set again), Sosa had 103.1 career WARP3 and a seven-year peak total of 64.3, good for 83.7 JAWS. The average Hall of Fame rightfielder (including freshly-elected Tony Gwynn) scores 119.8/65.5/92.7, leaving Sosa significantly short on the career front, a consequence of him ceasing productivity after his Age 35 season. ESPN's front page trumpets his 30-homer/131-RBI pace, but 12 homers into his comeback, Sosa's hitting just .242/.297/.458, good for 0.7 WARP1, and a projection of 2.3 WARP3. In other words, he's not helping his cause beyond padding his career totals and distracting the focus away from the Rangers' myriad other problems.
Somewhere in there I found time to take in the Yankees-Red Sox series, albeit with my thumb pumping the Tivo remote's fast-forward button. I've literally become tired of watching Yankee games; the combination of the team's recent mediocrity and typical plodding pace is a total drag when on a given night you can watch about a dozen other games moving along at a more sprightly pace (offer not valid in Boston). Even with the Tivo, watching Kyle Farnsworth endlessly fidget outside the strike zone is no fun.
Nonetheless, it was good to see a bit of energy flowing through the Yankees as they beat up on Tim Wakefield and Curt Schilling; the benefits of time-shifting allowed me to pause after Hideki Matsui's home run in the latter to cue Blue Oyster Cult's "Godzilla" for an impromptu celebration of the team's 3-0 first-inning lead against the Tubby Bitch. And then to see Doug Mientkiewicz upper deck Schilling, both literally and figuratively, aw yeahhh. Derek Jeter passing Joe DiMaggio for fifth place on the Yankee hit list in the midst of a streak of his own added icing to the cake, as did watching Alex Rodriguez get his groove back with homers in three consecutive games, not to mention a nasty take-out slide of Dustin Pedroia that drew words from Boston. Hey, when Jason Varitek takes off his mask to fight A-Rod instead of hiding behind it like a pussy, the latter can send flowers to Pedroia.
Nonetheless, it was a bit of a dark week in Yankeeland for the off-the-field stuff. Jason Giambi's steroid-related comments drew an audience with Bud Selig, not to mention talk of a voided contract (no chance, and given the Yanks' cynical contract concessions none deserved) and a failed amphetamine test (quite likely a smear job from within MLB offices; Peter Gammons says that Giambi hasn't been asked to take follow-up tests, which would have occurred after a positive). My BP colleague Joe Sheehan had an excellent column (free, not subscription-only) on the Giambi situation:
The specifics of Giambi’s point can be debated, but the central idea here, the one that blame for the nominal Steroid Era lies with personnel both in and out of uniform, cannot. The players who took performance-enhancing drugs shoulder the majority of any responsibility, but to absolve non-uniformed personnel, up to and including the ones on Park Avenue, is folly. We live in an era in which the idea of “clubhouse chemistry” is considered a tangible thing that can be manipulated and monitored. With that the case, it’s silly to think that front offices, spending all kinds of time looking for the right mix of personalities, could not be aware of a different sort of chemistry making the rounds.
Fourteen months ago, Commissioner Bud Selig drafted George Mitchell to investigate the use of PEDs in baseball during the pre-testing era. I said at the time, and I believe now, that the Mitchell Commission is a cynical exercise in public relations, designed to turn up no surprises. What I didn’t see coming was how the Commission would be used to focus blame for the era exclusively on uniformed personnel. Every time the Commission makes the news, it’s in some way reflecting badly on the players: they won’t talk, they won’t give up medical records, they won’t cooperate. If the Commission isn’t going to make any new findings along the way, it will certainly make sure to establish in the public eye who the villains are.
To which I say, “enough.” The Mitchell Commission isn’t going to—and isn’t designed to—make any discoveries about the nominal Steroid Era. It has neither the authority nor the gravitas to do any real work. It exists merely in the hopes that it will provide a veneer of credibility to official disdain and/or condemnation of the media-approved bad guys of the timeframe.
The Mitchell Commission should be disbanded. It should be disbanded because all it’s doing is extending the shelf life of a story that does the game no good. MLB isn’t going to get anywhere by trying to figure out who was doing what five to 10 years ago; there’s nothing that can be done, and no credible way or sorting out the impact of PEDs on gameplay, wins and losses, or statistics. If the evidence in Game of Shadows isn’t enough for the Commissioner to come down on Barry Bonds — and no, it’s not — then no amount of paper-shuffling and stern questioning is going to produce actionable information.
The Commission isn’t helping baseball. It’s only keeping a dead story alive, while shifting focus from the evidence we have from three years of testing, from MLB’s toughest-in-sports PED policy, from the great storylines created by the players on the field. In four seasons of testing, going back to the survey year, the number of positives has dropped from the high 80s in survey testing down to a single-digit number. Of the players who have tested positive, we’ve seen a mix of pitchers and hitters—putting the lie to the idea that steroids were responsible for the raised offensive levels of the 1990s—and the entire list has a Q rating comfortably behind your average “Dancing With the Stars” cast.
Also weighing in with a must-read is The New York Times'Harvey Araton:
Imagine if Jason Giambi had gone to the House Government Reform Committee hearing in March 2005 and said what he told a USA Today reporter last week.
Imagine if, after Mark McGwire had ceased stammering and Rafael Palmeiro stopped grandstanding and Sammy Sosa was done pretending he couldn’t understand English, it was Giambi’s turn and this is what he said:
“I was wrong for doing that stuff. What we should have done a long time ago was stand up — players, owners, everybody — and said: ‘We made a mistake.’ We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward.” In that setting, that context, can’t you hear the politicians and reporters gushing over Giambi, saluting him for setting a standard of accountability for the rest of baseball to follow?
Can’t you picture the commissioner, Bud Selig, thanking Giambi for placating the pols instead of summoning him to meet with baseball officials — as Giambi did Wednesday — and perhaps considering punitive action?
Meanwhile, it appears Carl Pavano's tenure in pinstripes is mercifully over, as the various big-name surgeons consulted confirmed that Pavano is a candidate for Tommy John surgery. As I said in the Hit List, here's hoping Dr. Octagon — or Dr. Nick Riviera or Dr. Leo Spaceman, depending which flavor of pop-culture quack you prefer — performs the operation, preferably after some Yankee official slips the guy a $20 and tells him to take a detour through the abdominal cavity. After drinking a six-pack, preferably.
I did a quick bit of figuring on Pavano's contract, comparing it to the infamous Darren Dreifort deal (five years, $55 million) the Dodgers handed out back in 2000. Using BP's marginal dollars per marginal win formula, Dreifort netted the Dodgers one extra win for every $13.1 million of the deal. Pavano blows that away, with one extra win for every $35 mil. It may take BP's equivalent of the Warren Commission to find a worse contract.
On the topic of marginal dollars per marginal win, do check out Maury Brown's tribute to the late Doug Pappas, the originator of that formula. It was three years ago this week that the game lost its foremost expert on financial matters and one of the biggest bees in Bud Selig's bonnet, a sad day indeed.
• • •
A bit more about those off-site articles of mine. The most interesting facet of the JAWS piece, to me at least, was the impact of Frankie Frisch on the Veterans' Committee from 1967-1973. Frisch led the way in the election of some of the Hall's most dubious members, particularly with regards to my methodology:
To give an idea of just how far off the mark these candidates — Frisch's Follies, if you will — are, [Chick] Hafey (CF), [Fred] Lindstrom (3B), [George] Kelly (1B), and we'll-include-him-anyway [post-Frisch honoree and former teammate Travis] Jackson (SS) rate as dead last among Hall of Famers at their positions according to JAWS, which makes them the players that I drop when I compute the positional averages (as explained here). [Jess] Haines is the second-to-last pitcher, which puts him in the same category (I drop four pitchers). [Ross] Youngs is second-to-last in rightfield,[Jim] Bottomley is third-to-last at first base. [Dave] Bancroft, sixth-to-last at shortstop (one hair ahead of Phil Rizzuto), is the closest thing to a defensible pick here.
...Bancroft aside, none of these players are within 25 JAWS points of the average Hall of Famer at their positions. Furthermore, out of the 138 hitters with a JAWS score, Bancroft ranks 100th, Jackson 119th, Youngs 126th, Lindstrom 134th, Kelly 136th, and Hafey 137th — that's right, three of the bottom five. To borrow a phrase suggested by Derek Jacques, these guys should pack their plaques.
Along with that, a look at the cases of Jeff Kent and Bobby Grich, the all-time ranking of Roger Clemens, I also found time to add JAWS to BP's glossary, a long-overdue move that can provide a quick reference for anyone looking for the system's explanation and standard numbers.
At the Sun (which is now free as well), I examined the likelihood that the AL Wild Card would come out of the Central division, as it did last year:
When the Red Sox went into a tailspin last August, the collapse hastened an end to their threeyear monopoly on the AL Wild Card. Confusion reigned, as though birthright and expense guaranteed playoff spots for the AL East's top two teams, the Sox and Yankees. That breach was filled by a thrilling AL Central race, as Minnesota overcame the upstart Tigers' early lead and fought off a late challenge by the defending World Champion White Sox. Though the Twins won the division, Detroit's wild card winners ultimately snagged the pennant.
With the Yankees currently limping along below .500 and nine games behind the sizzling Red Sox, the Central again appears poised to send two teams to the playoffs. This time it's a four-team race, with the Indians joining the White Sox, Tigers, and Twins. But which two teams will win out? Baseball Prospectus's Postseason Odds report uses a team's run-scoring and run-preventing proclivities, adjusted for park effects and quality of competition, in a simulation which plays out the rest of the season one million times. Run the numbers, and the Tribe (67%) and Tigers (47%) have the best shot at October, with both teams' chances dwarfing those of the Yankees (26%), though both are also well behind the Red Sox (93%).
Three days and a series win for the Yankees later, those odds are more or less unchanged: Red Sox 93.6 percent, Indians 57.5, Tigers 51.2, Yankees 27.5, White Sox 16.3, Twins 9.0. Further sobering news comes in the form of my quick hit at Unfiltered: "During the Wild Card era, just three teams have come from at least 10 [games] back to win a division flag, including last year’s Twins. However, 11 out of the 24 Wild Card teams have come back from double digits to make the playoffs. Five of those teams had fallen to 10 back by the 41-game mark [as this year's Yanks did], including the pre-Joe Torre 1995 Yankees, not to mention the 2002 Angels and 2003 Marlins, both of whom went on to win the World Series."
A reader left several Bonds-related questions for me in the comments section of my previous post. Based on their tone, the lack of an email address and perhaps a touch of my own paranoia, I initially took the comments as trolling. I still think they might be, but I also think those questions have enough merit to be worth the trouble of a response so that I can clarify my position. So here goes...
[D]o you think that by promoting use of the asterisk to mark what you consider illegitimate records you might be opening the door to marking up all historical records that were gained under other types of unique or questionable circumstances that gave a player a specific advantage? Is that something you would like to see? Or would it be just for alleged cheaters?
First, I haven't used an asterisk to mark anything besides the single-season home run record in a few instances within my own writing here and at Baseball Prospectus. It's my form of protest, a reaction to a very specific combination of events and a great deal of evidence indicating wrongdoing. It isn't a quest for an official action on the part of Major League Baseball; it's more of a grassroots effort to acknowledge the dubious context under which Bonds hit his 73 homers in 2001. I'm not so naive as to think MLB will come knocking to ask me for advice as to how to handle its record books any time soon, so I'm not too worried that I'm opening the door to anything (except maybe the refrigerator, because that's where the beer is).
Would I advocate the usage of an asterisk in other instances? I would be thoroughly entertained if other writers and fans keep referring to 73* or 715* or 756* (or wherever Bonds winds up) as a form of popular protest, to remind us why we've lost the opportunity to celebrate those particular feats without the shadow of doubt. On that note, I'm fond of a couple of paragraphs from Joe Sheehan's BP column on Monday. Sheehan and I don't particularly see eye to eye on the Barry Bonds situation (a topic the two of us discussed via email this past week), but he eloquently captured some of my reservations about this debacle:
What has been taken away from us, as baseball fans, is the ability to enjoy the moment with no reservations. Even for someone like me, who’s criticized the process and who thinks Bonds has been given something less than fair treatment, it’s clear that his last six seasons have occurred at the intersection of ability and something else, something of dubious legality or morality...
I'm someone who wants to celebrate the greatness of baseball and its players, and whatever Bonds has or has not done, he’s taken that away from me. I'm left with a choice between ignoring everything, cheering and feeling a little bit like a sycophant, or snarling at the feat and pointing to a hardcover book and reams of media coverage. Neither is satisfying.
As for taking the asterisk beyond Bonds, that would depend on the record and the weight of the evidence; I don't see a need to go tacking on asterisks willy-nilly to career totals that we know are tainted (say, Jose Canseco's homer total based on his own admission of steroid usage, or Gaylord Perry's win total, which I'll discuss further below) because really, they don't mean much in the grand scheme.
Maybe it's silly, but I think there's something about the home run records (single season and all-time) which transcend the sport. For the past eight and a half decades, a great deal of the popular appeal of baseball has centered around the home run and its surrounding mythology. Even the terminology far outdistances the sport, finding usage in a wide array of contexts, some of which would make Babe Ruth roll over in his grave. Numbers like 60, 61, 714 and (someday) 755 hold a romance to those who knew them as records. They're just numbers, but they're numbers that act as a point of entry to new fans, are recognized by even the most casual fans, and have remained touchstones though the ages because they're so rarely attained.
Should Gaylord Perry's place on all-time lists be annotated due to his admitted cheating?
First of all, Perry has already done us that service by titling his autobiography Me and the Spitter and publicizing his transgressions. He isn't the single-season or all-time record holder for anything I'm aware of, except perhaps unofficially for the most spitballs (or Vaseline balls, etc.) thrown, most public discussion of spitballs thrown, and most gestures indicating he might throw a spitball. Even at the tail end of his career, he was a riot to watch when he pitched. Wiping his jersey, running his fingers through his hair, rubbing the bill of his cap, tugging at his sleeves -- it was all a shell game, designed to put the idea in the batter's head that a doctored pitch was coming. If Perry had loaded up as often as we imagine, he would have been a breeze to catch, but he understood that the spitball's potential use was every bit as potent a weapon as its actual use.
The first big difference between Perry's spitballs and Bonds' steroid usage is that Perry's actions weren't in violation of any laws, just Major League Baseball's rules. Baseball outlawed the spitter in 1920, grandfathering seventeen pitchers, the last of whom (Burleigh Grimes) retired in 1934. Bonds' actions did violate several laws as well as MLB rules, albeit laws and rules that weren't always particularly well-conceived and were often poorly enforced. Congress made the usage of steroids without a prescription a crime back in 1991, and that same year baseball created a policy which applied to all illegal drugs, including steroids and other drugs used without a proper prescription. As we've seen, that was only paying lip service to the problem of steroids, but it does prevent Bonds and others from hiding behind that excuse.
Another big difference between Perry's spitballs and Bonds' steroid usage is that Perry's actions were taking place on the field of play, in plain sight of the players, coaches, fans and umpires. Savvy umpires, particularly at the behest of the opposing manager, certainly could have pressed harder to stop Perry by searching his uniform or more diligently inspecting the baseball. In actuality, Perry wasn't ejected from a major league game for throwing a spitter until 1982, his 21st season in the majors. Why not before? I suspect that has to do with th
