3 strikes against outing ballplayers

Well, since it is two years to the day since Barry Bonds, who will be vindicated yet, becoming Major League Baseball's all-time home run leader...

Circling The Bases and It's About The Money, Stupid had the better rebuttals to baseball great Henry Aaron having no use for the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution (unreasonable search and seizure) by saying the names of all the ballplayers who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. The former National League outfielder Doug Glanville also wrote a great op-ed for The New York Times:

"When all is said and done, these players are simply 'users,' low men on the totem pole of a drug scheme. The players lying at hearings and in the media are creating a distraction and getting in the way of the investigators’ ability to do their job. They are also inhibiting their need to focus on the more significant issues, like the suppliers and the source of these drugs. We’re talking amounts that are changing local economies, not the meager thousands of dollars these guys spent in a year on their 'fix.'

"I think the release of this list of 104 would be a travesty. The promise of confidentiality was in place to allow players to be more willing to provide a true test. We can't go back and change the rules after the fact and then claim we are now noble and honorable."

What individual players think is kind of immaterial. Major League Baseball needs to nip this story in the bud and protect the players' right, lest it invite a lawsuit. It's pretty simple. Announce a blanket amnesty for any player who wants to unburden himself and try to have leakers in the U.S. government Nifonged.

Even if every name was out, you would still have players who managed to beat the test. You'll never know, but we'll have jokes that a struggling player should start cheating like yesterday. That's another shade of grey someone had pointed out to "Only God Can Stop The Leaks" Scanlan. If there is a God, there are bigger things to worry about than who stuck a needle in his tuccus.

Zen Dayley: Bill James, 'your grandchildren are going to be steroid users'

Thank goodness Bill James can put into words what the rest of us can't.

James has written an essay, "Cooperstown and the 'Roids," for billjamesonline and the Bill James Gold Mine 2010 annual which argues that all those disgraced PED-using pariah ballplayers are going to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame — Mark McGwire, Alex Rodríguez, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro and "probably even Barry Bonds." It's available as a PDF and The Sporting Blog and TheScore.com blog have linked to it. For the most part, it's new to people who don't go down the rabbit-holes which are the hardcore Seamhead sites, plus the Hall of Fame's induction day is on Sunday, so it's topical.

James is far from the only person who has espoused a belief ballplayers affected by what he calls MLB commissioner Bud Selig's "periodic spasms of self-righteousness" will be judged more fairly over time. A lot of people have felt that way for the past couple years while listening to kneejerkers in the media prattle on about PEDs.

It's hard to argue their points, oversimplified though they might be. However, the way some commentators have Plasckhed on and on about fans moving on before sportswriters gave them the OK has never set right. It goes double when it contradicts what a writer said previously. Thank god for Bill James:

"The fact is that, with time, the use of drugs like steroids will not disappear from our culture. It will, in fact, grow, eventually becoming so common that it might almost be said to be ubiquitous. Everybody wants to stay young. As we move forward in time, more and more people are going to use more and more drugs in an effort to stay young. Many of these drugs are going to be steroids or the descendants of steroids.

" ... we can reliably foresee a time in which everybody is going to be using steroids or their pharmaceutical descendants. We will learn to control the health risks of those drugs, or we will develop alternatives to them ... If you look into the future 40 or 50 years, I think it is quite likely that every citizen will routinely take anti-aging pills every day.

"How, then, are those people of the future — who are taking steroids every day — going to look back on baseball players who used steroids? They're going to look back on them as pioneers. They're going to look back at it and say 'So what?'

At that point, all the moralizing you've heard over the past few years won't have a leg to stand on.

"The argument for discriminating against PED users rests upon the assumption of the moral superiority of non-drug users. But in a culture in which everyone routinely users steroids, that argument cannot possibly prevail. You can like it or you can dislike it, but your grandchildren are going to be steroid users. Therefore, they are very likely to be people who do not regard the use of steroids as a moral failing. They are more likely to regard the banning of steroids as a bizarre artifice of the past."

Whether the self-improvement of future generations actually involves "steroids and their pharmaceutical descendants" is beside the point. For all we know, genetic enhancement might be the future. That is no different from a moral/ethical standpoint, and that is James' focus.

The normalization of steroids is merely the first argument. The others are as follows.

1. Eventually, some players who have been associated with steroids are going to get into the Hall of Fame.
   
   Right now, the "extreme position" that no steroid users should ever be inducted still holds sway. Mark McGwire's weak support in his first two years on the ballot is a case in point. The man hit 583 home runs and he's 12th all-time in park-adjusted OPS, but he hasn't cracked 25% on the ballot.
   
   However, it only takes one. Basically, as James says, once there is "no longer a firm consensus at an extreme position, there (is) an fluid standand that moved inevitably toward more and more openness ... It was like a battle line that disintegrated once the firing started. The important of holding the battle line, in old-style military conflict, was that once the line was breached, there was no longer an organized point of resistance."
   
   
2. History is forgiving. Statistics endure.
   
   James uses the example of 1960s and '70s slugger Dick Allen, who was kind of the Albert Belle or Milton Bradley of his time, a productive power hitter who was a hothead and careened from team to team. Allen dropped off the Hall of Fame ballot when he was first eligible despite having the numbers, albeit over a relatively short career. However, the Veterans' Committee might put him in someday.
   
   Another example is Shoeless Joe Jackson. There was a time when it was unfathomable a player banned for life would ever be inducted, but more people than not believe he should be in posthumously. Professional lobbyists are working to get Jackson into Cooperstown, almost 60 years after his death.
   
   People forget, in time.
   
   
3. Old players play a key role in the Hall of Fame debate. It seems unlikely to me that aging ballplayers will divide their ex-teammates neatly into classes of 'steroid users' and 'non-steroid users.'
   
   Some players who are quote-unquote untainted will be elected. They will speak up for teammates. Off the cuff, Pedro Martínez lobbies hard for Manny Ramírez. Pudge Rodríguez goes to bat for Palmeiro. Mike Mussina, Mariano Rivera or Randy Johnson speaks up for Alex Rodríguez, and so on and so on.
   
   
4. ... was there really a rule against the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs? At best, it is a debatable point.
   
   That is the big matzo ball hanging out there for the steroids = cheaters crowd. James notes:

   " 'Rules,' in civilized society, have certain characteristics. They are agreed to by a process in which all of the interested parties participate ... The 'rule' against Performance Enhancing Drugs, if there was such a role before 2002, by-passed all of these gates. It was never agreed to by the players, who clearly and absolutely have a right to partipate in the process of changing any and all rules to which they are subject."

Perhaps the rank-and-file of sports columnists who make a fetish out of simplicity don't want to hear it. When it comes to grey areas with the Steroid Era, a lot of them are like the grown-up brat played by Isla Fisher in Wedding Crashers, holding their breath, sticking their fingers in their ears and stomping their feet until Daddy, played by Christopher Walken, gives in and says, "OK, I will go along with your vision of baseball as it existed when you were 11 years old and say no steroid users in Cooperstown."

Andrew Stoeten of Drunk Jays Fans fame made a good point that James has added "a layer of complexity that we can't just barge our way around by screaming that PEDs are illegal and whoever did them is a cheater." It's an important arrow to have in the quiver.

People are coming around. Former Chicago White Sox pitcher Jim Parque wrote an op-ed where he confessed to using human growth hormone to try to come back from an injury. He now runs a youth baseball academy, and as he told it, enrolment went up after he told people he had taken HGH and regreted it.

People are forgiving. The Hall of Fame might, as Craig Calcaterra noted, be "owed just as much reverence as Wal-Mart, Google, Congress or any other useful yet ultimately self-interested institution," but ultimately it is going to reflect the principles of society of general. It will take pressure and time. The pressure will likely be economic; as Pete Rose said in February, what's going to happen if in 10-15 years, no players are getting in? It's hard to have an induction weekend when there was no one to induct.

Related:
The Hall of Fame: it's all about the money (Craig Calcaterra, Circling The Bases)

Mannywood, Air McNair and the death of manufactured outrage

You live in a moral grey zone. You don't exit it when you are in sports fan mode.

That is the ketchup answer — covers everything — for whatever has been said in the past week about Manny Ramírez and the late Steve McNair. Some sportswriters based in the cities where Manny has hung his do-rag, Boston and Los Angeles, were apoplectic that Ramírez got a hero's welcome when he returned from a 50-game suspension for a positive drug test. Less than 24 hours after Ramírez rejoined the L.A. Dodgers, McNair, who played QB in the NFL for 13 years, was found dead next to the body of his 20-year-old girlfriend. As you know, McNair was still married to the mother of his four children (and God forbid that U.S. lawmakers realize allowing a 20-year-old, not much more than a child really, to buy a handgun is a really bad policy it's a bad idea to have a society where a 20-year-old can easily get a gun).

The common thread is how to deal when sports get crowded by stupid reality again. Once and for all, it is time to divest oneself of the notion that sports fans, much less sports writers get to play the ethics and morality squad. We don't.

Honestly, distancing oneself from the scribbling practised by the likes of the L.A. Times' Bill Plaschke and Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy, is about the best thing a sports nut can do. It's not clear if they really hate Manny Ramírez, or if it's just a routine, a face-dance. Either way, very little of it is needed.

Life is too short for both hate and for pundits who substitute shtick for trying to honestly convey what an event was like. When did manufactured outrage replace telling the shades-of-grey truth? As a L.A. Times user, reading Plaschke rail about, "Manny did the time, but what about the crime?" is a little like a pivotal scene near the end of The Shawshank Redemption. You know it. Red (the Morgan Freeman character) tells off a parole board official over the meaning of the word "rehabilitated."

"I know what you think it means sonny. To me it's just a made up word. A politician's word so that young fellas like yourself can wear a suit and a tie and have a job."

That is really part of what we're talking about. It's not whether Ramírez's return proves standards have gone all to hell. It's about respecting that ultimately, everyone gets to assert their own terms, not adhere to society's, like Red/Morgan Freeman did with his redemption. This is about getting rid of a sportswriting construct where the columnist fulminates over What Should Be, which has made Bill Plaschke semi-rich.

The hero's welcome Manny got in places such as Albuquerque while playing a few tune-up games in the minor leagues was not reason to go off half-cocked. Americans have always loved outlaws, from Wild Bill Hickok to Barry Switzer. This was not going to change on the say-so of some sportswriters who wanted Manny to do their jobs for them by being all teary and apologetic.

Honestly, Dan Shaughnessy comes off less like a gatekeeper (an outmoded old-media concept) and more like an out-of-touch grouch.

"The longer this goes on, the more it seems that the only people who care about steroids are Hall of Fame voters, a handful of baseball purists, and perhaps those players who have not cheated and now feel like suckers.

"I called the commissioner to ask him about Manny getting the Charles Lindbergh treatment in San Diego (site of his first game back with the Dodgers).

" 'The only comment I have on that score is that fans everywhere will have to make their own value judgment,' said a disgusted Bud Selig. 'That certainly is out of our control. That’s all I'll say on that.' "

Far be it to say there was another way to take Selig's comment that "fans everywhere will have to make their own value judgment." No one who was not privy to the conversation know that the MLB commissioner was really "disgusted."

Perhaps Selig, in the parlance of our time, actually dared to address baseball fans as if they are adults. Maybe those aggrieved Hall of Fame voters, rather than act above the rabble who pay for tickets and the MLB Extra Innings package, ought to heed the people who support the whole pro sports apparatus with their discretionary income. Just because you memorized baseball stats as a kid and that influenced your choice of profession doesn't mean you have superior reasoning skills.

Thankfully, there are a few who can better channel their rage and get a post up about this much sooner, such as ShysterBall. ("What all of these columns seem to boil down to is anger at the fact that there has been no sturm und drang associated with Manny's suspension. The minute baseball actually discovers and penalizes a major star in a drama-free and orderly fashion, however, everyone gets bent out of shape.") There is also Charles Pierce, who wrote a wicked piece for Slate on Monday pointing out that if anything, Ramírez betrays the general attitude toward steroids, exposes the big lie.

"... it was of a piece with Manny's greatest gift as a professional athlete — his innate ability to make everything about baseball that is self-reverentially loathsome look ridiculous. In the great, hushed temple that baseball is perennially building for itself in its own mind, it's Manny's who provides the dribble glasses, the whoopee cushions, and the exploding cigars. It is his holy mission to take the living piss out of the self-important, the moralistic, and the people who cling to baseball in order to defend their inherent right to be 13 years old for the rest of their lives. So, there he was, an Albuquerque Isotope, selling out the ballpark and, by all accounts, happy as a clam.

"... the great steroid hunt is almost solely an intramural problem between baseball and its various acolytes. The overwhelming number of baseball fans — who, given the economic problems of the moment, are filling ballparks in reasonably overwhelming numbers — have quite obviously made peace with what happened in the game over the past 20 years. Manny Ramirez was treated as though he'd pulled a hamstring or tweaked a tendon. Now, he's back. That's the way things are going to be from now on."

No one says you have to like what has gone on in baseball any more than you have to like hearing that McNair was found dead next to a Woman Not His Wife.

This is not an apologia for anyone. There is no hair-splitting about the nature of Ramírez's cheating. Steroid experts say the fertility drug he tested positive for is one that "every steroid dealer carries." It is in the same vein with McNair. Not to speak ill of the dead, but there is little to no defending someone straying outside her/his marriage.

The question is why, as a sports lover, one would assume the best about a NFL player, whom you only know through TV images on Sunday afternoons and the odd Monday night, along with some touchy-feely PSAs for the United Way. It might be best to presume everyone, whatever their many virtues while in the moment doing their thing, is flawed like everyone else. One of the most perceptive comments in that vein came from the Chicago Bears defensive end, Adewale Ogunleye:

"Life is not a game. Football is a game. You can't expect a guy to make pinpoint decisions the way he would as a quarterback. I'm not condoning anything but at the end of the day, he's a human being."

You know this already, but there are other, better options to have as heroes. Point being, people need to let up a little on the knee-jerk judgments. Meantime, and everyone does this in sports (present company included), it's important not to conflate ability with character.

You cannot keep real life from seeping into sports. If anything, sports seeps into real life. The desperate traditional media might be getting high-school catty, but you don't have to play ball. You just have to accept, hey, in this age you have to stickhandle through a lot of weirdness and shamelessness, kind of like the protagonist in Douglas Coupland's JPod.

I am not advocating for everyone to have lower personal standards for her/his conduct. If anything, it's as important as ever to try to set a good example. But if you're going to have people on that we should expect unambiguous virtue from sports figures, you're dead wrong.

Thank you, Manny Ramírez, and thank you, Morgan Freeman.

Rany Jazayerli provides the ultimate 'It's not you, it's them'

At least we know what it means when a sports franchise comes down hard on the media.

Baseball Prospectus co-founder Rany Jazayerli does a radio show about his beloved Kansas City Royals. Long story short, he wrote a post saying the Royals should fire their long-time head athletic trainer. The Royals retaliated by banning team personnel from going on his show (they also tried to ban team personnel from all stations which carry it, but backed off once word spread virally).

(Update: There is a relatively happy resolution. Yay!)

Out of that, ShysterBaller Craig Calcaterra proffered an explanation of what it says about a team who rides herd on someone who speaks critically of the team:

"There's no escaping that they're focused on the wrong things. There's also no escaping that, if this how they respond to external dissent, there's no reason to believe that they're making the right decisions internally either, because all good decisions are made in a setting where people can feel free to say anything without fear of reprisal."

In other words, this is not on Rany, this is on the Royals. Seeing how a team treats the media as an off-shoot of how they go about their business is pretty ingenious. The ones who are hyper-sensitive about honest criticism or insist that coverage of the team be "positive" are typically the bad organizations.

The principle is pretty simple. Teams which worry about media coverage probably should be spending more time worrying about themselves and less time worrying about what's said on a blog, news website, message board, radio or television. Outsiders have always had opinions about how well the coach, general manager and owner are doing their jobs. There are just so many ways to now journal them. Dealing with it is a sign of character.

This is inside baseball, but it is germane when you think of stories like the Edmonton Oilers turfing a reporter for blogging from the press box. More recently, a media friend who wouldn't her/his name used, lost a media gig because a team did not like what was said about it on the air. Thankfully, this friend is in a much better place, with bigger and brighter things in the offing.

No one can say for sure how every semi-halfway significant sports franchise in Canada and the U.S. deals with the media. It is not clear if there are thinner skins than compared to 20 or 30 years ago. Back then, teams did not have to worry about what was said about them floating around on the Internet in perpetuity. People threw away newspapers, they could not record what was said over the air so easily.

The situation with Rany was a pretty clear case of shoot-the-messenger. Jazayerli, a co-founder of Baseball Prospectus and a contributor to FiveThirtyEight.com (the political analysis website) who at is a diehard Royals fan, was only saying what was borne out by his research. He noted the one constant in the Royals' surpassing suckiness over the past two decades has been its head athletic trainer, a guy named Nick Swartz, and that time and again, the team has mishandled player injuries.

For those who don't pay the Royals much mind (present company included), their closer, Joakim Soria, ended up having a stint on the 15-day disabled list extend to six weeks. Centrefielder Coco Crisp is done for the year due to shoulder surgery. It was announced the other day that shortstop Mike Aviles is going to need Tommy John ligament replacement surgery. Injuries are part of the game, but in this case there was a pattern:

"The handling of Coco Crisp’s shoulder injury is by itself a fireable offense. Crisp was playing – terribly, mind you – with a bum shoulder FOR FIVE WEEKS, and even after his shoulder pain became severe enough that he could no longer play, the Royals kept shuffling him in and out of the lineup for three weeks, putting him back out there as soon as the pain became tolerable again.

"But the pain didn’t go away. It only got worse, and presumably his shoulder only got worse. The question that no one can answer is whether, five weeks ago, Crisp already had a torn labrum, or whether the injury occurred while trying to play through the inflammation. We can’t answer it, but we sure as hell can speculate. As far as I’m concerned, the Royals’ ham-fisted approach to Coco Crisp’s shoulder turned an injury which might have healed with a few weeks of rest into a season-ender.

"The ham-fisted approach to Soria’s shoulder turned a quick 15-day DL stint into a six-week drama . We don't know the nature of Aviles' prognosis yet, but the fact that the Royals commandeered him into playing again even after he came clean with the injury certainly could not have helped.

" .... This is a trend, people. When the Royals downplay the extent of an injury, then give the player a few days off before sticking him back out there, and only later realize the injury was worse than expected THREE TIMES in the span of less than three months, this is not bad luck. This is incompetence, plain and simple. And while (manager Trey) Hillman and (GM Dayton) Moore are the ones quoted above, they’re making those decisions based on the medical information they’ve been given. And the point man for all that information is Nick Swartz."

"... it seems like every year some Royals player has an injury that lingers beyond any reasonable timeframe, or an injury that we’re told for weeks is minor turns out to be season-ending."

The point is the obvious. Jazayerli was being even-handed. He wasn't making anything up. He simply said there probably is a cause-and-effect between who's minding the store and the results. It's like, random example, pointing out that the Kingston Frontenacs have gone longer than any other Ontario Hockey League team without winning a playoff series, so maybe it's time to replace the general manager they have had over that entire 11-year run. Perhaps the Kansas City Star would not call for a trainer most people have never heard of to get fired, just as calling Larry Mavety "The Royal Mavesty (Rhymes With...)" is going to be restricted to a couple blogs. For anyone who has an issue with that, well, welcome to the web. The standard of decorum is a bit different, plus you can't pull punches if you want to differentiate oneself from traditional media.

Meantime, point being, what does it say about a team which has a problem with what people say about them?

Pre-emptive bag of shhhhhhhh on specious steroid list

No doubt it is only a matter of time until traditional media seize on the supposed list of 103 ballplayers who tested positive for steroids in 2004. It's ready-make opportunity to bash all because of the actions of one.


It's a fake. The general consensus seems to be that someone did a huge cherry-pick of big names in baseball from 2003. It's actually kind of brilliant, as one of TBL's commenters noted:

"We know somebody has the list, and that they’re willing to leak names, especially in the face of vehement denials by guilty parties.

"So make up 103 names, write them down, and just wait for the fireworks.

Cuban missive crisis; why it took so long to address Ibáñez and Sosa

Here you thought you were crazy for thinking the blogs vs. MSM debate was as talked-out as, well, steroid use among major league baseball players.

(Since it was on this blog that Stephen Brunt anticipated the desire to make a hero of former sportswriter Steve Wilstein, a post was appropriate, even at this late date.)

That is a best stab at feeding two birds with one scone. It hangs off Mark Cuban's wingnuttery about ESPN needing to put up "a page of blacklisted blogs and websites whose posts they won't comment on or report on in any way" and the whole "PED blame game" (Buster Olney, ESPN.com) which has dominated baseball news over the past fortnight.

The latter is embodied by the Jerod Morris-Raúl Ibáñez controversy and the leak about about Sammy Sosa being one of the 104 major-league baseball players who tested positive in 2003. What all of this can be boiled down is that some, present company included, have more trouble than others accepting that everyone has a way to express an opinion. (Present company included, sometimes.)

To be completely honest, the first thought after seeing Cuban's post on Friday night was to laugh it off. If Cuban wants to think, "ESPN and local newspapers, radio and TV media have become the patsies of bloggers," with respect to how trade rumours are reported in sports, well, that's his journey. A rich man saying whatever is on his mind with no consideration of logic, gee, that has never happened before.

Point being, whipping up a post with a headline such as "Mark Cuban has stupid ideas about blogs" accomplishes sweet eff-all. The blogs vs. MSM debate is also a go-nowhere play, since it does not get at why Jerod Morris became a flashpoint. Try to get past the snark.

Maybe mentioning Cuban is just a way to make this seem fresh. There are similarities with how Morris v. Ibáñez played out over the past fortnight. As the creator of the Clavin Rule, I'm inclined to agree with Cuban's point about trade rumours (it's best left to the people who specialize in it), but don't miss the point. Cuban dislikes that any doofus can whip up a trade rumour.

It was a similar story with how Morris vs. Ibáñez played out. It was not really about whether "a blogger" (see Bucholtz's explanation) said Ibáñez is a 'roidoid because sports nuts are cynical about why the 37-year-old Philadelphia Phillies outfielder's production far surpasses his career statistics.

Buster Olney blew that canard all to hell:

"Some of the mainstream media outrage to the (Jerod Morris) column was fascinating, because some of the same writers who have said they will never vote for a player they suspect of using steroids are saying it's wrong for others to blog about their own suspicions of players' steroid use. Think about the laughable inconsistency there."

Exactly. At the heart of it was a desire to control the narrative with baseball's steroids saga. This involves protecting the privilege of who gets to call someone a cheater. The latter is basically expressed as, "Hey, you must have been in journalism this long before you can say that!"

Those in paying media gigs would like to keep that for themselves. Like Colin Quinn on mid-1990s Saturday Night Live, they have their story and they're stickin' to it.

That lent itself into turning Jerod Morris into a straw man. When traditional media such as The FAN 590's Prime Time Sports did not bother using Morris' name, it made it easier to do this. If "a blogger" wrote Ibáñez's "great start was probably due to steroids," hence all bloggers wrote Ibáñez's great start was probably due to steroids.

(For the last time, Morris did not say it, see for yourself.)

'Closing the book'

Then you have baseball writers' general desire to close the book on the Steroid Era and have people believe it was mostly confined to the '90s and early 2000s. It's completely understandable why that would be the case. Jeff Pearlman savaged that mindset in a piece for Slate ("Pee No Evil," June 2, 2006):

"After having been duped by the men they cover, America's sportswriters are playing dumb again. One year after being dismissed as a has-been, steroid-using fibber, Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi is the toast of New York. Recent articles in metropolitan newspapers have praised the steadfastness and resiliency that have led him to hit a team-high 14 home runs. But where, oh where, are the doubters? At the start of spring training in 2005, Giambi looked smaller than in seasons past. Now, he has muscles atop muscles atop muscles. Yet unlike the San Francisco Chronicle, which dedicated itself (journalistically and financially) to learning the truth about Bonds, none of the New York dailies have assigned an investigative team to the case.

"... I, for one, don't believe him. During my six years at Sports Illustrated, I fell for the trick and covered Giambi as the hulking, lovable lug who cracked jokes and hit monstrous homers. All the while, he was cheating to gain an edge. So, why — when MLB doesn't administer a test for human growth hormone — should I believe Giambi is clean?"

Three years later, a lot of traditional media outlets are slashing budgets and staff and expecting fewer staff to produce more and produce it quickly. That makes it tougher, not to mention less high-reward, to assign an investigative team to anything, let alone a sports story.

A lot of journalists are angry and defensive, even though many papers are still profitable. It also means that the fortunate ones with paying gigs, in many ways, have been reduced to the same footing as some of the well-informed amateurs. If idle, ill-informed speculation was outlawed, sports talk radio would cease to exist by tomorrow.

Meantime, it is only human nature to wish to pretend away something unpleasant like the reality of the Steroids Era (that athletes might use steroids if a professional sport sticks its head in the sand over steroids, especially if there's a feeling it's a common thing among her/his peers). It was icky. It was sleazy. It was just embarrassing how so many people got sucked in during the days of Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds and Sosa.

The rules of the day and the media's complicity were enablers, as Jonah Keri wrote last week:

"Just can't get worked up at over Sosa or anyone taking PEDs. MLB policies enabled it. I'd take Substance X if it made me umm ... write gooder.

Of course, it's easy enough to tell people what they should hear instead of telling them that all the evil-doers PED-taking ballplayers are going to pay (since bin Laden and all the AIG guys are harder to bring to justice).

That is too logical by half for some people. That is why you get the rear-guard action brought down tenfold on the unfortunate Jerod Morris. It is easy to see why the sportswriting profession, to quote Deadspin's Tommy Craggs, "simultaneously flays itself for not bulldogging the steroids story hard enough and congratulates itself for starting the conversation."

Craggs' words are in a similar vein to what The Globe & Mail's Stephen Brunt, who is ultimately smarter than us, cited in 2008 when he explained why declined his ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame:

"I also retain a very strong memory of the great home run derby, and especially of the baseball-writing community's reaction — or non-reaction — to the andro story. I was at the first McGwire press conference the following spring training (in 1999), and one guy in the room had the balls to ask a question about andro. The rest of the writers looked at him as though he'd farted.

"Anybody who has a HOF vote now was writing then. Also I recall that when I wrote about McGwire and andro, wondering why we celebrated him while crucifying Ben Johnson, the fan/public response I received was almost one hundred per cent negative. Leave McGwire alone, they said. Totally different thing. Don't wreck a great story.

"So the same writers who were celebrating Big Mac back then, and pissing on the reporter who wrote the andro story, suddenly got religion last year. I got sick reading all of those 'what will I tell my children if I vote for him' columns."

If only everyone was as transparent as Brunt and Pearlman.

Meantime, desperation is a stinky cologne

Hopefully, this is providing some background on the buzzsaw Morris walked into two weeks ago. It also reflected something that Vancouver Sun managing editor Kirk Lapointe touched on last week when he blogged, "The tradition in news organizations is to believe their work is definitive. The corollary of that belief is that others' work is inferior. The product of that belief is to dismiss, disregard and even discredit anyone else's work."

Of course, that is on the way out. The journo's job is best summarized, "We don't know everything, but know where to find what we don't know."

A lot of those well-informed amateurs know as much or more about a sport or a particular sub-section. Case in point: When the Ottawa stadium debate was going on, I didn't bother to read a lot of the news coverage. I just e-mailed Pete Toms to get his take.

Many journalists realize you have to engage with your audience. The next generation, people such as Kinger, are already doing this very well.

What Morris v. Ibáñez showed is how entrenched the old way of thinking is, but hopefully for not too long. Craig Calcaterra, the ShysterBaller, realized as much by late last week.

"I can only conclude one thing, and that's that the Morris-Ibanez thing wasn't about steroids and it wasn't about ethics ... It was an effort to breathe life into a tired blog vs. MSM turf war and old-fashioned media sensationalism. A couple of years ago that observation might have made me angry and might have inspired me to unleash a screed or two. As I sit here this evening, however, I can only shake my head and smile.

" ... no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. It seems to me that the sporting press in the mainstream media is giving it the old college try. For my part, I'd be lying if I said that I thought idiocy and sensationalism would one day be gone from journalism entirely. But I am optimistic, based on what I've seen here and what I've seen on many other blogs in the wake of the Ibanez stuff, that the idiocy will constitute a less prominent place in journalism as time goes on."

Thankfully, Calcaterra made sure to get some mileage out of the furor instead of sitting and stewing, like a certain resident of Sageritaville we could name (Neate S.? No, too obvious, N. Sager). The topper was creating the Geoff Baker Rigidity Award to honour sports columnists who have tossed around baseless PED allegations.

There will always be value in having the time and ability to do some digging and being able to write, no matter whether you do it for pay. The point is that there was a method to keeping quiet about all this until now. There is little to no point in going into blogs and MSM, especially when one no longer believes in either term (both are kind of limiting, and traditional media works better for the latter). Meantime, it's always better to think for yourself rather than collecting some celebrity's thoughts. Maybe one in 15 of Cuban's ideas are good.

It's up to people to try to learn something out of all this instead of running over the same ol' ground and not learning anything. The point with Cuban and Morris-Ibáñez is sooner or later, the snark and sideshow aspects, while necessary, get old. People can work past that and come out the better. Goddamn it, we are still capable of understanding nuance, no matter how often the news cycle suggests otherwise.

Don't bother giving baseball a purity test

Further to the point made four months ago that baseball's shame over steroids "will serve to liberate it from the conceit ... that baseball is the best game of all because of its record book."

Bill Simmons has drawn a lot of eyeballs with a column attempting to define what was the purest era in baseball from a statistical and competitive viewpoint. He settled on 1988-92, a era of modest offence (someone could win the batting title hitting .313, or win the home run crown with 36, as Fred McGriff did for the 1989 Blue Jays), which "now seems Jonas-level pure, after the fact. Cocaine had become passé, and the number of suspicious statistical guys -- we could create the word "'roidy" here, just for kicks -- was a handful, at best. Er, worst. They clearly didn't damage the game any more than the spitballers, scuffers and corked-bat guys of earlier eras."

Craig Calcaterra, the ShysterBaller, weighed in:

"(Simmons) may be right, even if the definition of 'pure' is a bit unclear and maybe not that useful. What is useful, however, is Simmons' highlighting the fact that, at just about every single point in baseball history, there was something, be it drugs, or rules, or racist policies or whatever, that altered the statistical and competitive landscape. Some of them -- and I'm thinking segregation here -- were borne of even more malice than the cheating of the steroids era.

"Simmons' observation puts lie to the notion, so popular in recent years, that the steroids era's greatest evil was that it somehow sullied a heretofore pure record book. There was nothing pure about it, and certainly nothing consistent about it. Lefty Grove would have been a Hall of Famer whenever he played, but there's no escaping the fact that a lot of the guys he got out wouldn't have been able to sniff the big leagues if black players had been allowed in the game. Bob Gibson would likewise be celebrated, but his 1.12 ERA in 1968 would never have happened if he was pitching from a modern mound in a modern retro-park. We talk about baseball's wonderful continuity all of the time, but things have changed in radical ways over the years, and no one has ever presented any evidence to convince me that steroids impacted things any more radically than did high pitchers' mounds, huge strike zones, segregation and dead balls." (Emphasis mine.)

It is gratifying to see that meme filter up to someone who deservedly has a larger platform. The point is the obvious. The game was never perfect, and it's good to rid yourself of the idea that baseball was once this perfect, incorruptible game or that it was better when you were younger. It's a mental construct which seems to come up a lot in hockey, too. People believe the NHL was somehow better when 57-point teams could almost make it to the conference final, as the Maple Leafs almost did in 1986.

Here's what this site said in February, when the excrement hit the aerofoil device over Alex Rodriguez:

"Rodriguez breaking the home run record... good thing: Contary to what you might have heard, Rodriguez has not destroyed the game's history. His shame will serve to liberate it from the conceit, kept up by self-appointed gatekeepers such as Bob Costas, that baseball is the best game of all because of its record book.

"Those of you who have also watched all 18½ hours of Ken Burns' Baseball, six times over in the past 15 years might remember this part. At one point, Costas says the grand old game stands alone since you can rhyme off numbers such as 56, 755, 4,256, .406 and everyone will get the reference. In other sports it is, "How many yards did Jim Brown have when Walter Payton passed him? How points did Wilt Chamberlain have when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar passed him to become the all-time leading scorer in the NBA?"

"Statistics are a good backup for confirming what you saw or filling in what you missed. It's mostly a reflection of the competition player faced, the conditions (i.e., segregation, scouting, home ballpark), the way the game was played at the time and whether he was fortunate enough to enjoy a long career. Everything needs to be put into context, not just the Steroid Era.

"The failure to understand is this is why Dick Allen, who played in the low-scoring 1960s and early '70s, is not in the Hall of Fame ... Oh, and remember, anyone who played before the game was fully integrated, their numbers are a bit suspect too."

It cannot be stressed enough that this is not an attempt to usurp credit. That's a bit like the end of the Family Guy "Blue Harvest" episode

Chris: "Didn't Robot Chicken already do this three months ago?"
Peter: "I wouldn't worry about it, Chris. I don't think people are even aware of that show's existence."

Related:
Baseball has never been pure (Craig Calcaterra, Circling The Bases)

Manny: Clear the dance floor for the jig of the self-righteous

The question is how much stickiness there is with Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension for a positive drug test.

On pure gut reaction, not much. There's a fatigue with the constant media hoopla over who's the latest ballplayer to get smeared (Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and so on and so on). Maybe in 2007 you could have people on that this is, like, the worst thing ever, but life has become a bit more serious in the past 12 months. It's best to wait and see if Ramirez can produce a prescription slip. Ultimately, this is a time when Ramirez's space-cadet routine might help. Knowing what we know about him, he's not going to pour gasoline on the fire like that last two players listed above, since he could not give a patoot. (And it might have been something he was taking for erectile dysfunction?)

As it happens, I just got around to picking up J.C. Bradbury's book The Baseball Economist (published in 2005, but still highly topical). It's in paperback at Indigo and Chapters in Canada, so you should skim the chapter, "The Steroids Game." He calls BS on the whole notion of opposing steroids on the grounds they're "unnatural," pointing out Tommy John surgery, cortisone shots, laser eye surgery and everyday stimulants like caffeine and energy drinks are hardly natural. He even threw in Curt Schilling's bloody sock. At the time, it seemed like a heroic act of self-sacrifice, but at the end of the day, having a torn tendon stabilized and putting off having the proper procedure was not something people would do normally.

Bradbury goes a lot deeper. The point is, when someone plays hurt like that, the standard response is, "It's his career." The same holds true for what players ingest in post-Mitchell Report Major League, like it or not.

Anyway, how smart are the Red Sox for dumping Ramirez last summer? Of course, people are wondering about his former teammate, David Ortiz, still stuck on zero homers five weeks into the season.

The upshot is Ramirez stands to miss about 30% of the Dodgers' games (50 of 162). That's on par with the San Diego Chargers' Shawne Merriman sitting out of four games of a 16-game NFL schedule (25%) in 2006, when he was the league's top defensive player. Anyway, others have already spun it this way: The L.A. Dodgers didn't get Manny Ramirez until July 31 last season and reached the National League Championship Series. He is eligible to return July 3, so hey-hey, they're ahead of the game.

Rodriguez ... the real 'tipping' point

This is mostly a test to make sure the in-one-ear, out-the-other rule with Alex Rodriguez is being followed.

You shouldn't believe for a second that much will come from Major League Baseball's reported investigation into Alex Rodriguez. ShysterBall turned on this like a Brian Burres offering: There is little evidence, unless someone in the game decides to spill his guts, and you'll remember how many ballplayers voluntarily came forward to help out with the Mitchell Report. The Yankees blog River Ave. Blues, "In the end, baseball has to investigate to look good for Congress." That's where it ends.

The pitch-tipping allegations might do more to finish Rodriguez with rank-and-file fans. People expect the games to be on the level. The rub is that hitters share information with players on other teams and so do pitchers, so you can see why pitch-tipping might become a next step for these guys.

People have kind of reconciled themselves to the reality steroids are a gray area. It wasn't illegal at the time and it's only human nature to expect that ballplayers, who have a very finite career span, would do whatever they could to enhance their performance. Like Jim Bouton once said, "If you told a pitcher there was a pill that would guarantee he'd win 20 games every year but would shorten his life by five years, he'd take it."

Cheating on the field, though, that's a different story.

It would be tough to prove, unless other players stepped up and said Rodriguez was helping them out during lopsided games. The thing is, it's entirely believable. It's pretty low, but you should never confuse ability for character in sports.

Hitters share information with hitters in baseball; pitchers share info with pitchers. It has been that way for a long time. It probably runs counter to us-vs.-them football and hockey mentality that has more currency with most sports fans. It's not hard to imagine that extending to Rodriguez and a few money-hungry hitters were in cahoots in order to collect a few more home runs and RBI.

Baseball is an individual sport masked as a team game and the players are compensated based on their stats, not the team's won-loss record. (Teams are getting much smarter about understanding players' contributions to preventing runs, that being said.) One can kind of understand why they would do that in games where the issue had been decided. A few points here or there, a few more RBI, could make a difference at contract time. It's not right,

Perhaps someone with the right kind of mind could prove it statistically, but even then, it's not too clear. A major league hitter against a major league pitcher could know what was coming and still hit the ball right at a fielder or get under a fastball and fly out to the warning track.

Who knows what happened or whether MLB would want to get into it. Perception is reality, though.

Related:
Baseball Said to Be Inquiring About Rodriguez Drug Use (The New York Times)
MLB Investigating A-Rod (ShysterBall)
Roberts refuses to help as MLB digs into A-Rod (River Ave. Blues)

You can't spell 'Alex Rodriguez' without AIG

People probably will spend 22 bucks to read about Alex Rodriguez since the public appetite is whetted for scandal.

It's better from a mental health point of view to only concern yourself with this Narcissus in pinstripes only in terms of his statistical impact on a ball game, which of course, means that your interest might be piqued because A-Rod, according to the New York Daily News story, is accused ... "of 'pitch tipping' when he was with the Rangers — letting a friendly opponent at the plate know which pitch was coming in lopsided games." That might be worse than the 'roids.

Stripping him of all the A-Rod artifice seems like a fitting punishment, since he did eff up royally. This is all about keeping in mind that there is always some pretty good scratch to be made ballyhooing a sports scandal at a time of great upheaval. It draws eyes away from the real outrages, of which there seem to be a lot of in the United States these days.

The beauty of it is that it's not hard to find like-minded people who also refuse to play ball. With all due respect to Selena Roberts, being told a thickheaded jock possibly shooting steroids as far back as high school and such is like being told a lot of Hollywood actresses are bulimic. Well, duh! Paraphrasing the late, great David Foster Wallace, it's one of those things it's better not to know about. It kind of spoils the whole sustaining illusion that keeps the sports-industrial complex going, which is that you or I could do what Alex Rodriguez does. You have to start taking steroids in high school? Forget it.

That's not to cast aspersions on Ms. Roberts. Plenty of people, including ShysterBall, which noted that much of her reporting on the 2006 Duke lacrosse case did not hold water, are doing that already. (Granted, a lot of people got taken in by the Duke story, and you know how that turned out: The prosecutor got disbarred.) At the end of the day, sportswriters are mostly entertainers, just less well paid and schlumpier than most athletes and performers. By and large, they do not write with the aim of increasing understanding, stimulating serious thought, doing public good or respecting the right to due process.

They're trying to write something people will read, which is still noble. Roberts is keeping us entertained and presumably got a Jesus-big advance for the third major Yankees-focused book to come out in the past three months in the past three months of so. (Previously there was Joe Torre's The Yankee Years and Jeff Pearlman's bio of Roger Clemens, The Rocket Who Fell To Earth. It promises to be a lulu:

Rumoured to be on the verge of a personal and professional collapse so profound it would rate as one of the most dramatic falls in major league history. Through exhaustive reporting and interviews, Roberts will detail A-Rod as a plunge-in-progress, a once-in-a-generation baseball talent tortured by an internal struggle between the polished family man he wants to be and the unabashed hedonist he has become. The storyline will include his dalliances with strippers, infatuation with Madonna, details of his record-breaking $315-million contract, shady real estate empire and further evidence of steroid use, but will also tunnel deeper into his behavior. Roberts will reveal the root of Alex's identity crisis - the night his father abandoned him - and, in so doing, answer the question: who is the real A-Rod?

Let the record show that the witness made the "What-ever" sign with his thumbs and forefingers, like the kids did. The upshot is this has no impact on one's appreciation of baseball. It's probably good for someone who feels like he's going out of the house naked if he doesn't have a morning shot of Haterade.

You don't have to get sucked in. Enjoy the game for the game's sake.

There are tens of thousands of people who will attend a major league baseball game this summer without having devoted a second to thinking about what Alex Rodriguez did, who he did, how he did it or where he did it. That's not keeping one's head in the sand, because the Baseball Hall of Fame voting could be a full-on gong show for the next 10-20 years in the wake of the juiced-ball era and the perception steroids fueled the home run explosion of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Really, though, it's not a revelation that people who are disproportionately rewarded for being able to perform a socially irrelevant act like hitting home runs can be needy and emotionally fragile, and capable of rotten behaviour. Make no mistake about that. That's not keeping one's head in the sand, it's just some cagey compartmentalizing.

Related:
A-Rod took steroids while with Yankees, and as teen, claims new book (New York Daily News)
Previous:
Thirteen thoughts on the baseball Judas (Feb. 10, 2009)

Top 5: Splendid spliffers...

It is 4/20, so apropos of that, there should be a Top 5 of sports' greatest stoners.

Few are taken aback by pot-smoking anymore, and paraphrasing North Dallas Forty, which came out in 1979, players take much stronger stuff just to get out of the locker room. Even conservative judges think it's totally bogus the U.S. government won't allow for medicinal purposes, which raises the question why the hell it was front-page news when a picture surfaced of the Olympic swimmer of Michael Phelps sucking on a bong. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Any athlete who breaks this fourth wall always ends up taking heat from his bosses and having to put up with ridicule from dealers in the small joke trade.

The point is, there have been a more than a few athletes who were partial to the wacky tabaccy. Maybe a few kids read this and realize, hey, pro athletes are human, they have vices too. We're all a little screwed-up. Robert Parish, the erstwhile Chief of Boston Celtics fame, was left off this list, but there's plenty of others.

MARK STEPNOSKI, NFL offensive lineman

The five-time Pro Bowl centre enjoyed a long and productive NFL career with the Houston Oilers and Dallas Cowboys, and upon his retirement in 2001, became head of the Texas chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He said he'd started smoking in high school, often to help him relax after games. Stepnoski's explanation was as straightforward as the Cowboys' famed lead draw play to Emmitt Smith: "I'd rather smoke than take painkillers."

FERRIS FAIN, baseball player

An oldie but a goodie. Fain was a two-time American League batting champion, winning in 1951 and '52 with the old Philadelphia Athletics. He didn't hit very many home runs, but his numbers suggest he had plate discipline out the yin-yang, since his career on-base percentage was .424 (he even led the league in OBP one season, when Ted Williams was off flying planes in the Korean War).

Thirty years after leaving baseball, though, Fain, was twice arrested for growing marijuana and eventually did 18 months in a California state prison. He played the moral-relativism card, though, telling reporters in 1994:

"I never abused or shot anyone. I was just trying to make a buck. What I did was far less harmful than a bartender getting you boozed up and then letting you out on a highway where you might kill someone. I know how bad that stuff can be."

JOSH HOWARD, NBA forward

Granted, some would say, "The Entire NBA" should get a spot on its list. That's more of a commentary on how we tend to believe the worst about public figures. They show less and less of their true personalities and have a legion of professionals paid to highlight their good qualifies, so it's only human nature.

Howard broke a fourth wall a while ago when he straight-up told Michael Irvin, then of ESPN, that he smoked marijuana. He didn't even act like it was a big deal: "I just let him know that most of the players in the league use marijuana and I have and do partake in smoking weed in the off-season." In other words, Josh Howard should be rewarded for his honesty. It's like something Bryant Gumbel once said, We complain about guys giving cookie cutter answers to questions, and then there is outrage when someone speaks his mind

Estimates of how many players smoke range from 30 per cent (2005 Rocky Mountain News survey) to 60 per cent (2001, then-Raptor Charles Oakley).

RICKY WILLIAMS, NFL running back

Many fans have felt a kinship to Williams, the walking contradiction who projects a blissed-out hippie mien even though he's one of the top power runners in NFL history. It's a good reminder that people can't be put into small boxes, although any time before about 2005 or '06, you would have got your ass kicked for suggesting it.

Williams was said to have tested positive for marijuana four times, which ultimately led to him being suspended by the NFL and having to come up to Canada for a one-season sojourn with the Toronto Argonauts. The fact the NFL considers weed a banned substance is kind of strange. No This is the league where fans and media react to a player getting a four-game ban for steroid use pretty much the same way they do when someone's out a month with an injury.

RANDY MOSS, NFL wide receiver

Being a New England Patriot and catching touchdown passes from Tom Brady has helped erase the rough edges around the most prominent graduate of Rand University. At the end of the day, if you win, people look at you differently. That's what is.

Moss, who's been this ass-talker's favourite football player since 1996, his freshman year at Marshall, had the exact opposite of the Midas touch during his years as a Minnesota Viking. There was the squirting of an official with a water bottle, bumping a meter maid with his car, the mock mooning, the "I play when I want to play" and last but not least, being honest with Gumbel during a 2005 interview.

"I have used, you know, marijuana ... since I've been in the league….But as far as abusing it and, you know, letting it take control over me, I don't do that, no ... hopefully ... I won't get into any trouble by the NFL by saying that, you know. I have had fun throughout my years and, you know, predominantly in the offseason."

That's pretty much forgotten now, as Moss has image-rehabbed his way to a bust at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Point being, he smoked weed and he's still considered a consummate professional, one of the best to ever play the game.

So, to all you kids out there, now that you know you can do it and still take care of business, please, don't do it.