Damien Cox strikes out, but why is José Bautista hitting all those homers?

Saying someone doesn't know rate stats from counting stats is the new "doesn't know his ass from second base." Put another way: it's tough to trust a journalist with semantic data if her/his age exceeds José Bautista's home-run total — 40.

That's a gross generalization intended it makes the point. Greater minds have hit Damien Cox's weak-ass cheese about the Blue Jays' Bautista out of the park -- Cox Bloc even came out of retirement -- but whatthehell.

A couple points: One is that Cox showed what can happen when the perpetuation of PED hysteria is combined with an age of digital democracy. It's possible for anyone to write a So-And-So Must Be On Steroids post any day of the week. (Bleacher Report must exist for some reason, people.)

Every sport is in play (Mike Wilner: "You can either choose to believe those who have passed [drug] tests are clean or you can choose to believe that cheating is still rampant in the game and enjoy the game anyway.").

That makes it awfully curious that since every sport is fair game, a hockey writer such as Cox went out of his way to ding a ballplayer. Just saying.

The second point is that Lloyd Dobler principle from Say Anything, "I know that I don't know." One of daily journalism's old saws is the "good at English, bad at math" stereotype. Speeding up the sports culture hasn't changed that; it's only served to reveal it. And it's not any more prevalent among older journos than younger ones.

The difference, though, is some realize journalism is not the totality of one's personal experience and general knowledge. As a former mediocre math student, I know I am the wrong person to come up with all-encompassing, quintessential answer for why Bautista has been such an outlier, with 40 homers and counting through Monday. (His previous single-season high in the majors was 16.)

(Update: Dave Cameron, who might be that right person, has looked at it over at Fangraphs.)

At the very least, you gotta make an effort, you know?

Cox's first mistake, of course, was focusing only on the raw sum, Bautista's home-run total. It's not about the counting stats. It's about the rate stats.

At a glance, Bautista seems to be on a unique if unsustainable run. Only two everyday players in the majors have had a higher percentage of their batted balls become fly balls than Bautista (53.2%, according to what was posted at Fangraphs as of 12 a.m. Eastern on Aug. 24).

Only three had had a higher percentage of their fly balls go out of their park than Bautista (20.8% home run/fly ball rate). You want to question anything, question why he's able to get more loft on the ball, and hit it so far (although we know steroids don't make you hit the ball farther).

Rogers Centre, according to Hit Tracker, is the homerdome this season, yielding a MLB-high 2.86 gopher balls per game. New Yankee Stadium is next at 2.78, then there's a huge drop-off down to the 2.5 range.

Bautista has hit 25 of his 40 homers at home, in about 50 fewer at-bats than on the road.

That helps make the case Bautista is just an outlier. It doesn't give us all the answers, but it gives us a good framework.

Only one other everyday player hits more of his batted balls in the air and has also seen at least 20% of his fly balls sail over outfield fences — the Arizona Diamondbacks' Mark Reynolds. But you know where this is heading. Reynolds, who had 27 homers through Monday, is famous for striking out in a 40% about of his at-bats, nearly twice Bautista's whiff rate. Reynolds' home park is also a launching pad.

Who else is beating Bautista in home run/fly ball rate? The Cincinnati Reds' Canadian first baseman, Sports Illustrated cover boy Joey Votto (26.1%), leads the majors. Votto doesn't hit the ball in the air with any great frequency, which is part of why he's vying for a batting title in the National League while also being up with the leaders in home runs (and guess what, Votto's home park in Cincy also is notoriously generous for homers, 2.39 per game).

Tampa Bay's Carlos Pena (23.5%), has a ratio of almost three strikeouts for every two base hits he collects, for pity's sake. Next up is another Three True Outcomes slugger, the Washington Nationals' Adam Dunn (21.7%).

Bautista has struck out 95 times in 522 times at-bat this season, which isn't a lot for a cleanup hitter. He's more of 2 1/2 True Outcomes & mdash home run, base on balls, a few strikeouts.

A mathematician, I am not, but there is some plausibility to saying Bautista is on a roll, derived from changing his approach to produce more fly balls in his home run-friendly home stadium. The increase in his home run/fly ball rate from 2009 over the past season (12.3% to 20.8) is almost identical to that enjoyed by Votto (17.5% to that aforementioned 26.1). But no is wondering how that came to be for Votto, even in his hometown of Toronto. Nor should they.

None of this completely explains away why Bautista made it to 40 homers this season before anyone else reached 35. He did show signs when he put up a .339 on-base / .606 slugging with 10 homers in 125 times at-bat in Septemeber. It wasn't meant to, since I ain't that smart. The point is it's not that hard to at least be in the ballpark, so to speak, when an ballplayer's performance improves markedly. It's asinine and reductionist, not to mention played-out, to just automatically mention steroids. You could even say it's pathetically naive to think going for shock value for its own sake works.

The truth is out there if you care to learn how others are looking for it. Perhaps Damien Cox will learn to do that someday.

(The gist of Cameron's post:

"For the most part, he’s been hitting bombs like the two he drilled [Monday] night. If we look at his HR/FB rate, you can see that his frequency of getting balls to clear the wall isn’t that unusual: 21.5 percent of his flyballs have left the park this year, which still ranks him behind Joey Votto (25.7%), Carlos Pena (23.7%), and Adam Dunn (21.7%). Over the past three years, five players have averaged a HR/FB rate of 21.5% or better, which isn't exactly uncharted territory.

"Bautista will likely never have a year like this again, but there’s no reason to think he’s going to revert back to the version we saw before last September."

Good stuff.

(Image credit: The Canadian Press.)

Losing that fake concern about drugs in sports, made easy

At first blush, it was like someone didn't see Run Ricky Run.

It was tough to stay reined in after reading Winnipeg Sun column pointing the CFL's new drug policy is toothless and PR-motivated. (Rob Pettapiece has tackled the CIS angle over at cisblog.ca.)

Seeing "illegal drugs" and having marijuana lumped in with steroids was almost cause to go off after a long three weeks of seeing much of the drive-by media cock up the Waterloo War-roids story.

Plus it poked fun at Ricky Williams. Who does that anymore? The Washington Times, which is obviously run by liberal guilt-ridden propper-uppers of permissiveness, describes him as "a guy who just wants to spread the love."

"With a policy like this, Ricky Williams might want to come back.

"Actually, the use of marijuana, the former Toronto running back's drug of choice, isn’t even covered in the CFL policy. Neither is cocaine.

"The message to players: if you find the NFL's policy on 'recreational' drugs too stifling, come on up! The Cannabis Football League has a job for you!

"Wouldn't team presidents and GMs, most of whom claim to be so eager to connect with their communities and their fans, particularly families, want to know if their players are abusing illegal drugs?"

A sober second thought is that is actually a great takedown of how old media pander to a 21st-century answer to reefer madness with steroids and PEDs, the shorthand term. As a whole, it talked a lot about the Waterloo debacle, but didn't listen or learn.

No one wants to chat about how CFL and CIS football players using steroids is just a sports-of-the-times thing. The reality a a newspaper column is a 600-word sprint makes it even harder to approach. One might as well go the other way and be satirical.

For the last time, what happened at Waterloo was no shock. Look around. Big Pharm has a hook into about everybody and nutritional supplements can be bought by any student, fact. That has almost been a fourth wall in much of the Waterloo coverage. Steroids bad ... over-the-counter stuff that might work like a steroid pretended away.

Of course, we can't have that conversation. It would force OMDs to confront their own bias and cease and desist from being governed by their hang-ups and need to judge a younger generation. They're not going to give that up, especially when falling back on shallow snark out of uber-defensiveness is available.

That means the above from Paul Friesen is brilliant, and that is said in full sincerity.

He pointed out how print journalism is so self-limiting when it comes to examining anything complex. It was hook-line-sinker on this end, to the point an e-mail had to be sent just to ask for explanation. On further review (a phrase that is apt after the Saskatchewan Roughriders' wild win over the Montreal Alouettes), it works on several levels.

It skewers our dated attitudes about how sports should uphold some notion of muscular Christianity instead of athletes outwitting and outplaying each other for our vicarious joy.

The same goes for how people get in a bunch about illegal drugs. Meantime, they pay no mind all the readily available legal ones that have created a trendy career for women who look a lot like the breadwinner at Mike Fisher's home.



Using Williams as an Athletes Behaving Badly straw man hits on an irony in sports fandom that we don't talk about much. Why does the marijuana-smoking Miami Dolphin have such a stickiness, while jocks who have committed heinous crimes that made life difficult for at least one other human being go straight down the memory hole?

Dollars-to-Doritos says if we walked into a bar showing a CFL game and asked people about Ricky Williams, all could ID him as a halfback who is a lover of the herb. How many could tell you about Trevis Smith, a Saskatchewan Roughriders linebacker whom in 2007 was sent to prison for knowingly exposing his sexual partners to the HIV virus?

That is effed-up that we remember Ricky and forgot Smith. You might halfway seriously wonder why we obsess more over what male athletes put in their bodies than what some have put in a woman's body against her will, excuse the crassness.

That last graf calls out that collective effed-upedness:

"Wouldn't team presidents and GMs, most of whom claim to be so eager to connect with their communities and their fans, particularly families, want to know if their players are abusing illegal drugs?"

Feigning concern about for "families" and using "illegal drugs" as an all-purpose blanket term are classics out of a career politician's handbook.

It shows concern without addressing the matter. As such, each has become a common media trope that could and should be retired faster than the Blue Jays' 3-4-5 hitters on most days.

Families?

A sports team may be family-friendly, but it's not a morality cop.

The Trevis Smith saga actually illustrates this very well. Family-friendly really just means a family of four can still afford to watch a competitive team play a game amid a raucous atmosphere. That's it. That is the connection the CFL (and CIS football) has to make.

The crowd in Regina at the Riders' CFL 54-51 overtime win over the Montreal Alouettes on Thursday is a proof.

The Riders are one of the most profitable teams in the CFL and the most passionately followed. Their fans, like all fans, have voted with their time and disposable income that their support begins and ends with the product.

Having a player convicted of a crime was embarrassing for the Roughriders organization in 2006. Then-GM Roy Shivers was fired while all this was before the courts, but it was for a variety of other reasons. Point being, it passed. However, abject behaviour by players, coaches, or team execs (see Eric Tillman) has little sway with rank-and-file sports fans. They can sort it out on their own and continuing living their lifes without any media moralizing.

That should make it clear we have little to no need to extend the nanny state to the performers in spectator sports. It's like some people want that in order to screen out contemporary life from creeping into their notion of the world of fun and games. Oh, not stupid reality again! It's the damned modernity which shapes the fun and games, pal.

Denying it makes you as a big a goof as Stephen Valeriote. He is a former Waterloo football player who tried to blame the adverse tests at his alma mater on almost all things CIS except the testees (and the two players who have been arrested and charged).

"So you ask yourself: ‘Why were so many players at UW on steroids?’ Was it because that the only way to compete with older, heavier, stronger players out east and out west was to bulk up?

"I don't like to criticize without offering a solution. In order to purify men’s university athletics, I suggest that they adopt the following rules:

"Ban ex-OHLers or Jr. A hockey players;

"One year in junior football or Quebec prep school equals one year of university eligibility."

Purify? Who believes anything is pure now? We find a peace within a state of compromise, so GTFOY, sir. Get. The. Fuck. Over. Yourself.

Far be it to point out CIS men's hockey has not had a positive doping test in almost forever. Never mind asking how the average age of football players at out-of-province schools could have influenced behaviour among players at Waterloo. The Warriors could only meet those teams in a national semifinal or Vanier Cup. (Hah!)

Since Valeriote is a school teacher, one can only presume he'll swallow it wholeheartedly the next time a student fails to turn in classwork and blames it on someone else.

Any culture of prohibition is a rearguard action. Legislating morality is a losing battle. The only line is when drug use is a symptom of a discipline problem that affects one's job performance. Stereotypes aside, it might not in all cases.

Whose job is it to instill the personal responsibility which keeps one on the straight and narrow? The people who look after you for the first 18 years of your life. Parents, the main part of the family unit.

Acknowledging that means baby boomers have to really look at how their four decades' of self-indulgence have trickled down to millennials.

Just thinking about that would make their collective lips numb. There's probably something you can take for that. Which brings us to:

Illegal drugs?

Using wacky-tabaccy-loving Williams as Mr. Bad Example, tongue in cheek, spoofs how careless some in the Canadian media are/were about in providing context on this matter.

Dogging Williams obviously doesn't hunt. His drug habit is far from the worst among NFL castoffs who have come to the CFL in the past 15 years. Remember Todd Marinovich? He was a former first-round flameout who told Esquire writer Mike Sager (no relation) that he shot heroin at halftime during his short-lived stint with the B.C. Lions in 1999.

"Todd retrieved a premade rig out of his locker and went to the bathroom to shoot up. Sitting on the toilet, half listening to the chalk talk, he slammed the heroin. As the team was leaving the locker room for the second half, he struggled with the screen in his glass crack pipe — he wasn't getting a good hit. Then the pipe broke, and he lacerated his left thumb. By the time he got out onto the field, his thumb wrapped in a towel, the game had already started. He took up the clipboard, his only duty. 'I didn't even know what play they were calling,' Todd says. 'Nobody looked at the shit I wrote down anyway.' "

Todd Marinovich did heroin at halftime. Do you need Norm Macdonald to repeat that for comic effect?

And that segues into the drive-by media's blind spot, that aforementioned fourth wall about nutritional supplements, a highly unregulated industry. The prevalence of prescription drugs in everyday life is barely mentioned, too.

People know. However, it gets in the way of keeping a column or story simple(istic).

Rob put it best:

"Now that we have a list of banned substances, and the use of any of them in CIS counts as a first strike with respect to the CFL's policy, an enterprising reporter could take Appendix D from this PDF, then go to the well-known supplement franchise with several locations in the country (some close to university campuses) and whose website lists product categories like 'anabolic agents' and 'pure creatine powders,' then find something with lots of levels of one of the banned substances in it, then ask how many of those products have been sold recently to young men. But I guess that's too esoteric a task."

Of course, that ain't gonna happen.

Who wants to read that drug use in Canadian university football might only be only marginally more prevalent than it is among males ages 15-34 who exercise regularly? That is not sensational or sexy.

It would also jeopardize the concept any athlete who has not tested positive for a banned substance is by deductive reasoning a clean athlete.

Perhaps someone is getting by on eating well and getting eight hours' sleep each night.

It would probably be more honest to just accept most high-level competitors have their little helpers. Every profession has something. Imagine a newspaper put out in a world without caffeine.

That would be much more honest about where we are as a society. That's all this is, a plea for a little more honesty, which means to stop scapegoating athletes, especially the ones in CIS who make an easy target.

The obliviousness to how all drugs reshape our lives is just tiresome. (As a friend put it: "Do you eat meat? Well, you took a steroid.") By the way, the aforementioned Eric Tillman, the former Roughriders GM who had to leave after he was convicted to sexually assaulting his family's 16-year-old babysitter? He attributed his actions to the effects of prescription medication. No irony there.

In closing, it is sickening the University of Waterloo used a criminal investigation of a couple players as a kneejerk excuse to whack its football team and throw 53 players under the bus.

One may only wonder if other Ontario universities are wondering why they couldn't be so lucky to have a gift-wrapped reason to not compete in CIS football, during an an era when the calibre of play is on a huge upswing. (So, so Canadian: it's getting tougher to win, so why try?) It is equally nauseating to see the same 53 players received the angel treatment, too.

Honesty replacing fact-plus-fiction and truth-minus-facts (Chuck Klosterman's characterizations of most news stories) would involve the media not seeing everything as so cut-and-dried.

Specifically, is it that wrong to think the CFL not testing for cocaine and marijuana is barely worth a mention, since neither is the issue?

One, not testing for it might reflect a quaint view there is still some right to privacy left in the world. Two, it might be an admission it is hypocrisy to bust players for that when there would be no pro football worth watching if not for stronger legal drugs used during training and recovery periods. (Those are taxed drugs, so the government doesn't fret about them as much.)

The CFL, by its actions, essentially said:

"Look, we realize people decided we were expected to come up with a doping policy like all the big boy-pants wearing leagues, even though we always have been and always will be an independent minor league with oddball rules. So this is the best we can do. It's not going to catch everybody, but it'll help us sleep at night. Now go work out your moral and ethical dilemmas on your own instead of expecting to find answers to them between the lines of a football field."

The world where a sports commissioner could say that is the world I one day to want to live in.

In not so many words, the CFL kind of did address fans and media as if they were adults. Fans are so there. The media not so much.

That "Cannabis Football League" crack, even if it's sarcastic, is reminiscent of the exact kinds of remark that kill in a newsrooms that are bastions of old-media hubris. It does not reflect trying to challenge one's own set of assumptions, let alone so-called conventional wisdom. It just reinforces it.

Old media got old for reasons beyond technology, people. That's why there's not a snowball's chance in hell it can discuss such a topic seriously.

Something like the truth with so-called Waterloo steroid scandal

The volume of linkage below says it all with what happened at Waterloo on Monday.

The Warriors football team getting benched for 2010 even made The New York Times, plus it was in sports sections in U.S. cities such as Charlotte, Kansas City, Knoxville and Minneapolis where much of the readership hitherto was unaware Canada has college football. Even the Ottawa media noticed, actually calling the Warriors "one of Canada's most storied university football programs." (It's definitely in the top two in the Kitchener-Waterloo region and in the running for the top 26 nationwide.)

Rob Pettapiece, who will be a UW alumnus by the end of the week, had his rebuttal to the decision. My paying gig should be priority, but as so often happens when the quote, unquote real media cover a CIS story, there are some myths that have to be debunked.

1. That this is only a one-year suspension.
   
   Greg Layson gets credit for this point. Waterloo has looked to cut expenses. Rob has alluded to UW's indifference to its profile in major sports such as basketball, football and men's hockey. It has a kickass women's rugby team, which is win-win since it's a growth sport which does not cost much to run.
   
   That is why it is reasonable to think Waterloo football ain't coming back, despite the predictable day-after denials swallowed whole by the drive-by media.
   
   It's a simple plan.
   
   
   • Do an amplified impression of Claude Rains in Casablanca ("I am shocked! Shocked!") about players being on steroids.
     
     
   • Imply upstanding student-athletes knew but didn't tell (see Point 2).
     
     
   • An across-the-board punishment which is not entirely unjustified.
     
     
   • Come back in a year and plead hardship, saying they're isn't enough money for football and the scandal killed recruiting.
     
     
   • Not have football again.
     
     
   There is a chance all is on the up-and-up and Waterloo comes back in 2011.
   
   It is going to be a long, long road back to respectability. Football players aren't like basketball players. They don't go to a school for a chance to start as 18-year-old rookies, since most know they need time to get faster and stronger.
   
   Some of you are probably aware of when the NCAA gave Southern Methodist University's football team the death penalty in the late 1980s. The Mustangs sat out 1987 and '88. A program which counted NFL greats such as Eric Dickerson and Dandy Don Meredith as alumni needed 21 seasons before it made it back to a bowl game, even though almost every .500 team in the NCAA goes to a bowl.
   
   It's possible UW looks at this in a year and says, "Too hard, don't bother."
   
   
2. That we should presume total innocence on the part of players who did not test positive.
   
   It is possible to have compassion for the players who do not have a 2010 season without striking up a symphony of small violins.
   
   One Toronto bird-cage liner ran a column headlined, "Innocent held hostage at Waterloo." It somehow neglected to mentioned there is an extant police investigation that will try to find out what coaches and players know and when it became known.
   
   Teams win as one and lose as one. Society in general seems loath to accept collective penalties, but it's hard to believe that the majority of the players in the Warriors locker room did not know something was up. There are no secrets in a team's subculture, hence that further investigation. Athletes, like anyone else, are supposed to call out unethical behaviour.
   
   One of the more illuminating quotes from a player came from Jordan Verdone, the promising linebacker, in the Toronto Star:

   "I’m not upset with them at all. Everyone that got caught is a hard working person. They actually loved and cared about football so much that they wanted to become better."

   Not to turn into Dr. Cal Lightman, but does that ring of someone who had no idea his teammates could be doping? Maybe or maybe not. There is a part of human nature where we try to rationalize behaviour, especially when a different action might have staved off a cruel twist of fate. And losing an entire football season is a cruel twist of fate, no matter how it is inflicted.
   
   
3. This pertains only to the present-day team and nearby OUA schools.
   
   The crux of a steroid scandal is it cast doubt on anyone who has a sudden spike in performance. It gets applied retroactively. Everyone knows now that steroid use baseball didn't magically start in 1995 when they were trying to get fans back after a strike cancelled the World Series.
   
   That is germane to CIS. The book is open on the past 10, 15 years, since anyone picking up a paper now knows how it easy it was to sidestep doping controls:
   

   "A football staff member, for example, can choose which numbers go in the hat. And if a player chosen happens to be absent from practice that day, he’s off the hook.
   
   "You can see how easily a team could protect players who might be suspected users."

   How far back the investigation will stretch depends on what police need to know and, to some extent, how much Waterloo admins want to know. One goal of an investigation is to establish patterns of behaviour, how things were always done.
   
   That is not to suggest anything indecorous happened at Waterloo prior to 2009. Let's call this is a historical sports irony. That roughly 1995-2005 period is now associated with a lot of drug scandals in sports. There was baseball with Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds (my prediction he'll never spend a day in jail is looking better each day), Marion Jones going from golden girl to U.S. federal prison inmate, Floyd Landis losing his Tour de France title, people snidely calling the 1996 Atlanta Olympics "the HGH Games."
   
   No one talked about this on Monday since they likely don't remember, but Waterloo won its only two Yates Cups in 1997 and '99, running Hall of Fame coach Tuffy Knight's venerable wishbone option.
   
   It seemed ironic that when all that was going on the great wide world of sports, a school typically synonymous with second-division status in OUA football won its only championships. It also did so with a run-based offensive scheme that required blockers who were agile, but beefed-up enough to overpower opponents. And shielding players from a drug test was as easy then as it was as late as last fall.
   
   That's only being pointed out to illustrate what kind of tangents people go on after a steroid scandal.
   
   Waterloo is an open book going back 10, 15 years. The same goes for neighbourhood rival Laurier, especially after its players weren't tested when the CCES showed up on campus.
   
   
4. The University of Waterloo taking the high road with steroid abuse.
   
   The only pee Waterloo cares about is in PR. This all harkens back to some fat, dumb and bald guy said last fall in regard to another egghead school cancelling its fall homecoming weekend.
   
   Universities, especially Ontario institutions that aspire to elite status, are little more than paranoid public relations vehicles these days. They are so quick to come down on any kind of bad behaviour that could mean negative headlines that stayed cached on Google forevermore.
   
   They could have gone ahead with the season. It would have been a tougher call to pull the plug on a winning team. It was easier to use a 3-5 team as a political football and show the university, in institution-speak, doesn't take these matters lightly.
   
   Did you notice Waterloo director of athletics Bob Copeland was left to make the announcement instead of university president David Lloyd Johnston? Johnston wasn't about to get the taint on his suit. I'll say it: he should have made the announcement.
   
   
5. The media's concern about steroids in the CFL and CIS.
   
   It is a good story when a university takes a knee on an entire football season.
   
   The subtext to why there was so much coverage is part monkey-see, monkey-do and part is that excrement runs downhill. Everything that happens in Canada typically follows in the shadow of what has already happened in the United States. The U.S. media went through its period of high dudgeon and righteous indignation over athletes being goosed up on steroids. We're a little more into shades of grey in Canada, but we still needed one to make our own.
   
   Waterloo was built right to spec, a legitimate news/sports story and a vulnerable target. People have commented that how it's funny that people got bent out of shape about juiced baseball players, but gave the NFL a free pass. The latter is a sacred cow. In Canada, the NHL is a sacred cow. Insinuations about doping or player misbehaviour are almost always rebuffed with extreme prejudice.
   
   It's a little easier to put the focus on football and little easier to go after CIS. It's petty to ask, "Hey, TSN, since a CIS 'scandal' led Sportscentre, does that mean you'll make more of an effort with covering the basketball and football championships?"
   
   At least we understand why they played it up in such a way. Canadian football's lack of a drug testing policy could have been an issue long ago. Odd how that works.

I have about run out words on the subject. Some sort of punishment was needed. Honestly, you should read Bill James' 2009 essay that says in future generations, everyone will be taking some form of steroid, once the health risks are controlled.

In the here and now, drug testing in CFL and CIS needs sharper teeth, even if it's more for keeping up appearances.

Related:
UW suspends football team’s season in wake of steroid scandal (Christine Rivet, Waterloo Region Record)
Waterloo steroid scandal a 'wakeup call' says University of Regina's director of athletics (Ian Hamilton, Regina Leader-Post)
Solutions elusive for CIS doping problem (Bruce Arthur, National Post)
Waterloo doesn’t shirk dirty work (Randy Starkman, Toronto Star)
Plugging the loopholes; Dobie applauds off-season tests (Paul Friesen, Winnipeg Sun)
Coach trying to fix 'collateral damage' (Perry Lefko, sportsnet.ca)
No football for a year: captain 'sick to his stomach' (Greg Mercer, Waterloo Region Record)
Waterloo suspends football program over steroid use; Waterloo’s 2010 season ends after nine adverse drug tests confirmed among players (Allan Maki, Globe & Mail)
Innocent held hostage at Waterloo; University of Waterloo’s harsh solution leaves normal kids left out in the cold (Steve Simmons, Toronto Sun)
Doping scandal bombshell; University of Waterloo Warriors football program has been suspended for a year (Ryan Pyette, London Free Press)
Sevigny disappointed but not surprised by steroid scandal (Greg Davis, Peterborough Examiner)
Suspension a 'black eye' on university football, says Huskies coach (Matthew Wuest, Metro Halifax)
Collateral damage (Rob Massey, Guelph Mercury)
Argo stunned by Waterloo revelation (Terry Koshan, Toronto Sun)

Zen Dayley: Where is Bonds' major-league job?

Alex Rodriguez is going to get a World Series ring. Mark McGwire's buddy gives him a job as a hitting coach.

Meantime, Barry Bonds, the one other tainted ballplayer who gets the descriptive "disgraced slugger" according to the Fake AP Stylebook is, well, somewhere, awaiting trial on something.

It's hard not to think of McGwire getting back in the big leagues as a St. Louis Cardinals coach — thanks to the beneficence of Tony La Russa, who was convicted of drunk driving not too long ago — without thinking about Bonds being erased from the sportgeist. It's not clear how much of that is related to time healing all wounds and how much is racial. The fact remains McGwire is back in the game and Bonds is off the grid. Why one and not the other?

The other polarizing pariah of a pituitary case is at least as eminently qualified as McGwire is to be a hitting instructor. Bonds would have the bona fides. Future Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox once said of him, "He might be the most observant hitter I've ever seen. He's on the bench, always talking about the hitters." (Sports Illustrated, July 26, 1993.) That sounds a lot like what a hitting instructor does. It's more consulting than coaching at the major-league level, offering advice, giving people a framework to make good decisions, like teaching hitters how to read pitchers.

It seems like a question worth asking, since ex-greats often do get coaching jobs — although how much coaching is actually involved seems rather dubious. Sooner or later, one of Bonds' old teams, or maybe one of his ex-managers, might invite him down to spring training as a guest instructor, try to get him back in the fold.

Imagine what's going to break out when that happens. It will strain the all that forgiveness and bygones-be-bygones sportswriters are willing to trade in today. The restoring of McGwire's image has begun in earnest. A column on FOXSports refers to McGwire returning from "eight years of a self-imposed exile," as if the public shaming was utterly undeserved.

A column out of St. Louis notes McGwire cannot expect to skate on The Steroid Question, noting "he can’t remain defiant, like Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds (or) offer mealy-mouthed recollections, as Alex Rodriguez did." At the same time, the writer, Jeff Gordon, like most of us, notes, "Personally, I’ve come to terms with the Canseco Era. PED abuse was rampant. Hitters juiced up to hit home runs. It was good for business, so commissioner Bud Selig looked the other way -– as did the owners, general managers, managers, player agents and players' association leaders." Four years ago, that was a minority opinion. It is now the majority.

Point being, it is easy enough to say when it's been eight years since McGwire stopped playing and four since his "I'm not here to talk about the past" appearance before the U.S. Congress in 2005, plus he's a white guy.

Meantime, Bonds is wearing the hair shirt. One would like to think it had to do with him being a cold, aloof prick more so than North America's racial politics. At the same time, people don't forget when a public figure who is visible minority who screws up, or has her/his human frailties exposed in a humiliating fashion. Nearly 30 years later, you can still find people making reference to former Montreal Expos star Tim Raines admitting to cocaine addiction, even though he got help and got clean. You never hear about the white jock who did blow, even though there's been a few.

Anyway, there's no beef with La Russa bringing McGwire back into the fold to try to get him into the good graces of the sportswriters who vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame. (Keep an eye on how much his support jumps in January after being around 25% the first two tries, right down in Tim Raines territory, coincidentally enough.)

It just seemed worth pointing out this will come with Bonds before long. There's been scarcely little in the news about the charges he's facing in U.S. federal court, which could lead one to believe that has run cold (Please do not remember who said, "He won't serve a day.) Major League has been trying to scrub away Bonds for the past five years, although people would have yelled rat if he hadn't been allowed to stay one and supplant Henry Aaron as the all-time home run leader. His name popped up a few times in 2008 whenever some team had a crying need for some left-handed home run power, then gradually that faded away as '08 became '09, although he could have done about as well as the .735 OPS the five-years-younger Ken Griffey Jr. posted in Seattle.

The ship's sailed on Bonds playing again, but someone might approach him about doing some coaching. Please keep an eye on how that's received.

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.

Vernon Wells tries to be transparent about his terrible hitting

Vernon Wells sure has delivered in terms of offering up grist for the few, the proud who are not PED-ed out by steroids-in-baseball talk. Who says he never comes through when the chips are down?

"The American League team’s union representative is among a growing number of players who are calling for the infamous list of 104 names to be made public.

" ... Wells said this is akin to water torture and is sullying the game's image with the steady prodding of adverse publicity every time a new name comes out.

" 'This all went down so long ago,' Wells said. 'It's just, let's move past this. Whether more names come out or they all come out at the same time let’s get past it so we can stop talking about something that happened six years ago.' "
-- globesports.com

Please forget that is a little Freudian that the Globe & Mail's guy used "water torture" as an analogy, considering what else went down in 2003-04 which is a little more shameful. America has always been good with obsessing over a sports scandal rather than face facts like their government destroying the concept of habeas corpus. That is neither here or there.

Wells' comments take on a certain light if you read Jeff Blair's Monday column that suggested MLB needs to "get in front of the news curve and fashion a blanket amnesty for players on the list." The man has between third and sixth all season while on-basing .301 and slugging .400. With slash stats such as those, it's almost like Wells is making a plea to be free of the jokes that Jays fans wish he could improve his production through pharmacology.

Point being, this has the droll side and the serious side. Jays fans, since they can't cry, will probably draw a couple laughs from Wells being the one to say release all the names. The way his season has gone calls to mind the story about Earl Weaver going to the mound to visit a struggling pitcher, "If you know how to cheat, start now." His park-adjusted OPS figures, season by season, since 2003, do set the mind to wondering:

'03: 132
'04: 105
'05: 104
'06: 129
'07: 85
'08: 121
'09: 84

Thing is, no one knows why Wells' numbers have cratered. He is projected to end up with Triple Crown stats of .259, 16 homers and 64 RBI. It might be noteworthy that he had a much higher line drive when he first became an everyday player. He makes a lot more flyball outs now. It's as if he hit home runs when he first came up just because he was so strong sometimes those line drives would carry over the fence.

On the serious side, Blair's suggestion seems pragmatic. Major League Baseball's labour agreement is up after the 2011 season, so it can't afford to have the steroid matzo ball hanging out there.

Meantime, it is too funny by half to see a Boston newspaper going on about how the Red Sox "need to be put on notice" when it comes to getting rid of steroids in baseball, as in, sure, now it's a big deal. Greater minds have no doubt said this and I said it once on Kinger's show, it's silly how much has hue and cry there has been over steroid use in baseball and Michael Vick running a dogfighting ring in the past couple years. Those have become defining events against a backdrop of Guantanamo, the Iraq quagmire and finding out the U.S. housing market ran on the principle "if you could fog up a mirror, and had a pulse, you were eligible for a fairly large mortgage" (stick tap: Make It Eight) and Bernie Madoff robbing people blind.

Sports scandals are benign and their leaders' job is not provide a moral compass, no matter how much its fits some columnist's 12-year-old worldview. It only matters if a sports story is symptomatic of a larger outrage, like the NHL being a water carrier for a plan to fleece taxpayers in Arizona.

That is off-topic. Point being, at least Wells is being honest, and at least baseball can get closure on the Steroid Era before hockey will on the Bettman era.

Related:
Wells wants baseball to come clean (Robert MacLeod, globesports.com)

Big Papi (and what it means to a Jays fan)

In another time and place, there was a young reporter who knew "here it comes" when an editor peered at him and said, "Question for you ..."

Would that George Mitchell could be held to account. As Jason Rosenberg pointed out, the question for him is how is that the much-ballyhood Mitchell Report failed to make mention of David Ortiz and Manny Ramírez and it now it's alleged the Red Sox's erstwhile slugging tandem apparently testing positive for steroids? How could that be when Mitchell, the former U.S. Senate majority leader, is employed by the Red Sox. (You also know the same media outlet which broke this also owns a stake in that baseball franchise, right?)

That's about it. With respect to Ortiz, you can't convict based on an anonymous survey test, which is what it was in 2003.

Releasing all the names at once just to stop this slow drip is a no-go since there is that troublesome due process, although Rosenblog suggested, tongue-in-cheek, "(Commissioner Bud) Selig sells Fox the rights to the names that get released as part of a one-hour special."

People certainly do care. Ortiz is the top trending topic on Twitter at this moment, with the 3-4 slots occupied by "Manny Ramirez" and "Big Papi," just like Boston's batting order during their championship years (well, actually Ortiz hit third and Manny hit cleanup). It's just that they're not necessarily angry.

Really, though, everyone is compromised and anyone who says they are "done with baseball" due to steroids, well, in Bill Daly's phrasing, you have to question their bona fides as fans.

The schadenfreude of it all, speaking as a Blue Jays fan whose team which isn't the darling of the U.S. media, is that MLB's symbiotic relationship with ESPN and FOX Sports means there is less incentive to expose a Toronto player. It is far-fetched to think the Jays would not have someone among the 104 names.

In other words, praise Buddha the U.S. media is only interested in uncovering positive tests by players on big-market teams, with bonus points if the player is a visible minority.

It (turn on your sarcasm detector) means the Jays are safe since 2003 was their White Jays phase. They don't have anyone who put up big numbers in 2003 and has seen his stats fall down the side of a cliff like Ortiz did for the first part of this season. That doesn't sound like anyone on the Jays, least of all their starting centrefielder. Carry on.

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.

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.

Zen Dayley: Mauer could be another Ted Williams, but .400? No ... no

In the box marked It's Not For Nothing, please note that Joe Mauer had his first 0-for-5 all season on Tuesday, dropping his average down to .395.

Mauer is a wicked player, but the idea of him hitting .400, really? One should stay on the stathead side with respect to the Sports Illustrated cover story about Mauer being the literary device in Tom Verducci's argument that, post-Steroid Era baseball's "most iconic, captivating pursuits are of hitting streaks and a .400 batting average." The snark has already been covered off Tommy Craggs ("Tom Verducci has found his latest anti-drug mascot: Joe Mauer").

The Mauer meme was probably started by Joe Posnanski. Poz wrote a column a month ago where he noted most of the highest batting averages recorded in recent times where by players who almost never struck out, like 4% of the time. Using that 4% strikeout rate, he figured that Manny Ramírez might have hit .416 one season and that Canadian Larry Walker might have hit .400 a couple times for the Colorado Rockies (and .398 in another season).

This is not an attack on two writers who have put out/will put out a book this year every baseball fan will likely want to read (Verducci's The Yankee Years and Poz's The Machine, which is about the 1975 Reds). The problem is that one guy is ignoring math and the other was ignoring intent.

The question about whether we will ever see another .400 hitter was answered by the late, great Stephen Jay Gould. Chris Lynch at A Large Regular dug out a great quote from Full House:

1. Complex systems improve when the best performers play by the same rules over an extended period of time. As systems improve, they equilibriate and variation decreases.
   
2. As play improves and bell curves march toward the right wall, variation must shrink at the right tail. (Emphasis mine.)

Like Lynch says, "The disappearance of the .400 hitter is seen as basically a measure of an overall improvement in play."

League batting averages, give or take a few percentage points, have been relatively stable over time. In 1941, when Ted Williams hit .406, the entire American League hit .266. You know what the league average was in 1977, when Rod Carew hit .388? The exact same, .266.

Three years later, when George Brett took his run at Williams and wound up at .390, the AL hit a collective .269. Last season, it hit .268, with the highest average in the league being Mauer's .328.

You can pretty much go back to any season from the wayback era when the .400 hitter was commonplace (when black athletes were barred from playing and scouting and player development was next to nonexistent) and find similar support of Gould's theory that the best players don't lap the field by as much because there are more good players.

Take 1911, when Ty Cobb hit .420 and Shoeless Joe Jackson was runner-up at .408. Twenty-one players (i.e., those who batted enough to qualify for the batting title) hit at least .300 that season, almost three per team in an eight-team league. In the first post-Dead Ball season, 1920, when George Sisler hit .407, there were 26 .300 hitters in the AL. There were similar totals throughout the heavy-hitting '20s, the last decade where .400 hitters appeared with any regularity.

By '41, though, when Williams turned the trick, 15 players hit .300 in the AL, less than two per team (the eight-team NL had only 11). Fast-forward ahead to 2008 and only 17 everyday players in the 14-team AL hit .300, just one per team on average.

Those are only randomly gathered examples, but you should see the trend. The more competitive the game gets, the less likely you are

There also (sorry, Poz) does not seem to be any correlation between batting averages and strikeout rates. His aforementioned column certainly did stimulate thought, but it ignored intent. Players do not intend to strike out. Even a world-renowned space cadet such as Manny Ramírez does not say, "Okay, this will be one of my 100 strikeouts for the year, it's just a cost of doing business." He is trying to make solid contact and sometimes he misses because the pitcher he is facing is better than him that day.

Pitchers generally go for strikeouts more than their decades-ago brethren, who were often expected to pace themselves to last the full nine innings and did not have to worry the threat of Dr. Longball. Besides, as I'm sure someone much smarter long ago pointed out, there is no relationship between strikeout rates and overall batting averages.

Last season, when the entire AL hit .268, Jack Cust led the league with 197 strikeouts. Sixty years earlier, when only one player in the AL (Pat Seerey, remember him?) struck out 100 times, the entire league hit .266. The year after that, the entire league hit .263 without a single player joining that dubious Century Club.

This is not meant to be ad hominem. Verducci and Posnanski both write like a dream. Baseball fans are blessed to have them writing about the diamond game. They and their editors are smart to understanding it's all in how you package a story. Any baseball fan would be stirred if Joe Mauer was hitting .410 deep into August, even those who know batting average is a bunko stat. What Verducci says about Mauer is good writin', Dickie:

"Here is where Mauer comes in. With home runs having gone the way of junk bonds, derivatives and no-document mortgages, the most iconic, captivating pursuits are of hitting streaks and a .400 batting average, in part because of their daily drama and the stirring of the ghosts that come with them. Not since the Reds' Pete Rose hit in 44 straight games in 1978 has a hitter come within 15 games of Joe DiMaggio's single-season record of 56 straight. Not since the Rockies' Larry Walker and the Padres' Tony Gwynn, in 1997, has anyone hit .400 even as modestly deep into a season as June 22 — until Mauer."

A counter-point might be, who said Mauer has to hit .400 for the average casual sports fan to be regarded as an awesome ballplayer? FanGraphs has him down to finish this season with rate stats of .354/.433/.579 and he plays catcher, the most demanding fielding position. That hardly needs any high gloss.

Related:
Tom Verducci has found his latest anti-drug mascot: Joe Mauer (Tommy Craggs, Deadspin)
Joe Mauer Will Serenely, Politely Crush You (Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated)

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.