Rolling Steroids Thread 2010

yeah he's saying that no one knew before yesterday or whatever--his wife, tony larussa, his teammates, etc. he strongly denied cansecos account that they used to inject together--i don't even know why that would be a big deal after the big admission except i guess no one within the game probably wants to give canseco any credibility

― call all destroyer, Monday, January 11, 2010 7:41 PM (15 minutes ago)

this is hilarious - 'hey guys i know this is gonna blow ur mind but...and no one knew this...i took steroids'

what minority is mark mcgwire a member of

lol

minority group

it's just the 2010 steroid headlines thread

i guess i dont understand it

mcgwire is kind of a ginger--maybe that is the minority group in question

i really want Bonds to call for a press conference tomorrow heavily attended by most media outlets
and then he announces a sponsorship of a batting glove or new energy drink

^^ YES.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) — San Mateo County prosecutors have charged Barry Bonds' son with five misdemeanors after he allegedly threw a doorknob at his mother.

!!!

...The door knob sails wide up the first base line, Sid Bream's son slides home, the Braves are going to the World Series!

Mods can you turn this thread title into something legible/pertinent?

maybe little bonds was playing a very heated game of 'doorknob'
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=safety%20game

well you are no fun ss

yeah come spring training and then people are like "wait what was taht FUN title for that steroids thread" and then someone starts a new one.

Mike (St. Louis)
I don't get why people are so upset about steroids as performance enhancers but don't care to mention all the other medical advances that make today's ball players better than those of the past.

Klaw (1:30 PM)
It's an arbitrary distinction, especially since baseball and the media can't seem to figure out the difference between steroids (some effect, but unquantified) and HGH (no effect, at least for men of playing age).

Barry (Indy)
So if PEDs only help the best of the best (Bonds, McGwire) and not all players (Manny Alexander, FP Santagelo), we should just not care about their effect on the record books or on the game?

Klaw (1:41 PM)
How much you care is a personal matter. I don't like pretending that we know how much they affected the record books, if at all, and I don't believe they affected the game negatively.

Shasta, what more legible/pertinent thread title would you suggest?

I don't get what "minority" has to do with it either.

That's good. Tahnks.

http://twitter.com/injuryexpert/status/12478504057

http://twitter.com/injuryexpert/status/12482172848

it'll probably be some fringe middle reliever

okay so apparently the player to be suspended is a "semi-big" but not "huge" (...) NL pitcher -- let's all place our bets now

i'm going with edwin jackson

also, he doesn't play for the mets

http://cache.boston.com/images/bostondirtdogs//Headline_Archives/Clue-Game.jpg

Its livan hernandez and I collect my $500

gotta be zito.

Eckstein

Vicente Padilla

stretching the definition of "semi-big" ?

Eh, he was the most recent opening day starter for one of the most popular teams in the sport, he pitched a couple of great playoff games last fall, and he's been around long enough that most people know his name. Padilla's the definition of "semi-big".

Yeah if you put a gun to my head I would guess him too for the same reasons.

Plus hes kinda old, still throws gas but still kinda sucks. He also looks like a criminal.

Well thar she blows

Cincinnati Reds pitcher Edinson Volquez has failed a test for performance-enhancing drugs and will be suspended for 50 games, SI.com has learned.

An announcement is expected shortly. It is believed he failed the test during spring training.

Volquez went 4-2 with a 4.35 ERA for the Reds in 2009. He was an NL All-Star in 2008 but has not pitched yet this season.

:(

they traded Josh Hamilton for a doper.

Did he get TJ or was it Cueto?

this kind of sucks -- volquez was dope

Volquez is out most of the year anyway. I guess the suspension starts when he's off the DL?

was he even in spring training? seems kinda ridic 2 have something in ur system when ur out for the year

probably trying to recover faster?

yeah, makes sense. also he can serve the suspension immediately, which makes it kinda pointless.

so youre saying joe nathan should go hard on a ped regimen...just make sure 2 get caught b4 the last 50 days of this season

lol

Billy Wagner was probably shitting his pants in anticipation of this

I imagine most of you have seen this *news*:

http://espn.go.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/4179/shocking-news-about-lenny-dykstra

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/minor-leaguers-to-be-tested-for-hgh-this-is-all-pr-by-the-way.php

A-Rod hits 599 last night, and reasoned that his HR pace has slowed due to his discovery of "team play" and not the selfish pursuit of glory... i roffled.

"I am old lol"

"A-Rod hits 599 last night, and reasoned that his HR pace has slowed due to his discovery of "team play" and not the selfish pursuit of glory... i roffled."

A-Rod is so self absorbed and delusional about himself, I guarantee he actually believes that statement.

is he delusional about being one of the 10 greatest all-time players?

http://joeposnanski.si.com/2010/08/06/what-if-we-are-wrong-again-about-steroids/

wow! where is verducci for his counterpoint?

I just read the Posnanski piece, and came to post a link...Yeah--wow. I haven't yet read the Walker piece; will try to do so on the weekend with an open mind. My point about keeping McGwire and the rest out of the HOF was always that there was no need to rush until some distance and some solid evidence provided more context. If someone has come forward with what he believes to be the latter, I'm open to being persuaded. It has to be much stronger than some of the put-them-in-immediately sentiments expressed here, which to me mostly amount to just throwing up your hands and saying "What's the difference?"

Just read Posnanski's post now, I skimmed Walker's piece, it's too long for me to read right now. But the basic conclusions seem to be the same as what's been said a number of times on this board.

my take on this has always just been that we simply don't know enough to be drawing lines to separate acceptable from unacceptable.

-we don't know which players used PEDs from 1994 to 2004. we know a few who did but there's no reason to assume anyone else innocent or guilty
-we don't know that there's not already at least one PED user in the hall of fame.
-we do know that there are HOFers who used amphetamines, and we don't know enough about the effect of steroids on baseball performance to claim that they did more to help players than greenies did

ET CETERA

glad this guy put up a website to debunk the mitchell report three years after it was released.

USA! USA! USA!

injuryexpert
Was told tonight that the total cost of the Bonds case is over $60m to the government and possibly as much as $10m to Bonds.

holy s***

Bill James:

First of all, I have absolutely no doubt that, had steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs existed during Babe Ruth's career, Babe Ruth would not only have used them, he would have used more of them than Barry Bonds. I don't understand how anyone can be confused about this. The central theme of Babe Ruth's life, which is the fulcrum of virtually every anecdote and every event of his career, is that Babe Ruth firmly believed that the rules did not apply to Babe Ruth....

http://www.slate.com/id/2266750/

http://content.internetvideoarchive.com/content/photos/038/001627_13.jpg

That was very American. You wouldn't do that in Germany. You wouldn't do that in Canada. You sure as hell wouldn't do it in Singapore.

Geez, Bill, we're completely out of control up here in Canada. We gave the world Neil Young and Justin Bieber--we're bad news.

Ruth would have done steroids because he was prone to excesses of all kinds, wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, and wouldn't have cared less about the potential long-term health effects. I'm not sure how James gets from that to a mini-treatise about a supposedly unique American tendency to break rules. His underlying point -- that players from all eras would have used PED's -- is obv correct, but I'll take a pass on the rest of his essay.

It's just James' version of Bill Murray's speech about the American character in Stripes

Directed by a Canadian!

written by other Canadians, tho I expect Murray might've written that

i agree with James' thesis but refuse to read the article due to the conflict of interest from who signs his paychecks.

do you think the red sox pay bill james more than they sold babe ruth for?

only w/out era adjustment

Bill James had a better year.

Verducci:

There's no cool like old-school cool. Batting average and RBIs sometime seem as devalued as landlines, rabbit ear antennas and floppy disks. A host of newer stats better explain a player's efficiency and production. But it's the old-school stats that really connect generations of ballplayers in a more accessible, seat-of-your-barstool kind of way. Go ahead: try come up with something analogous to the Triple Crown in football, basketball or hockey.

Last year Joe Mauer won a Triple Crown of modern sorts by leading all AL players in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage. It was a phenomenal achievement that spoke volumes about his efficiency. And baseball fans reacted with a collective yawn. There were no "Percentage Triple Crown" watches. No one mentioned Yaz, Robby, Mickey or Ducky. Fans -- the majority of fans; that is, casual fans -- still love what is amassed, not the rate at which statistics are acquired.

I'm not trying to open this up again--everyone's had their say, and I understand where you guys are coming from. But I wanted to post this because he bascially says what I think I was trying to say all along.

it's a valid but meaningless point

Oops...wrong thread! Meant for the Pujols thread.

I love how Verducci repeats Batting Average in the modern category.

He ignores the fact that fans don't care about ANY milestones anymore.

maybe Ripken's perfect attendance record

But if someone broke it, I don't think it would have the same resonance.

injuryexpert
40% of the NFL uses hGH, according to ESPN The Magazine. I'm guessing we won't hear this once on Sunday.

I'm posting this YT here why because it intersting, especially at ~6:00 in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGDlwhITEp8&feature=player_embedded

Long story short, strength less important for pitchers than flexibility and coordination.

I want to respond to something NoTime wrote earlier today on the Baseball Scandals thread. I'll move it over here.

And IMHO, the only people on their high horse about steroids are the groupthinkers who believe they're part of some common sense revolution about how steroids affected the game, despite there not being a single piece of evidence that can conclusively establish how steroids affects hitting or pitching, and anyone who dares to point that out or question their unshakable logic is shouted down. But hey, let's not make this into a steroids thread.

I think there are some valid, logical reasons not to get worked up over steroids. These arguments are familiar by now:

1) Steroid use was not, all through the '90s and beyond, in contravention of any MLB policy.
2) (Following from #1) It's a player's responsibility to get whatever edge he can, provided it falls within the rules.
3) I don't care what players put into their bodies--it's not my body, they can do whatever they want. I'm a fan of the game as it's played on the field, and I don't need to know the backstory. (I could be wrong, but this seems to be something close to Morbius's viewpoint.)

All of these arguments make perfect sense to me; I may not agree with them, but I understand them. But "despite there not being a single piece of evidence that can conclusively establish how steroids affects hitting or pitching" rings as hollow to me as O.J.-is-innocent arguments did in 1994. O.J. flaks would get on TV and explain away the blood evidence, explain away the glove, explain away the lack of an alibi, explain away the bizarre Bronco chase, explain away the abuse, explain away everything. And, to me, dismissing a decade-plus of freakish offensive stats and historically unprecedented levels of excellence from guys as old as Clemens and Bonds--a decade-plus that just happened to align itself perfectly with prevalent steroid use by those very same players--is to be just as willfully oblivious to what seems like a fairly clear connection between the two. To say that all the hitting and all the records took place on a completely separate and parallel track to the steroid use, that's an argument that makes no sense whatsoever to me.

As far as "groupthink" goes, one thing I hate is when someone explains to me why it is I think what I think--especially if it's to tell me that what I think is received wisdom. One thing I really appreciate about NoTime's writing on this board is that even though he's someone who has clearly absorbed sabermetrics, he doesn't make gospel out of it--he'll still write stuff like he has no problem with team success factoring into a close MVP vote, like he did on the awards thread yesterday. That's the ideal balance, to me.

I assure you that my views on steroids have nothing to do with groupthink. My views have evolved over a number of years, and in fits and starts. Five years ago, I wrote a piece for my page defending Bonds; at that point, I was probably pretty close to most people on this board. But as the story developed, and the net cast wider, it just seemed as if ignoring the obvious was silly. I think I held out for so long because, having spent so long obsessing over baseball stats, I was mesmerized by all the pretty numbers. Eventually, I simply stopped caring--there were so many of them, they'd lost all meaning.

I think that when all is said and done it is (will be) pretty LOL that Canseco was the only one telling the truth!

Isolating Bonds (as many are wont of doing) is a joke because Bonds was certainly not the only one taking steroids or HGH and even yet, his stats were incredibly dominant in the era. There is no advantage or factor that we can apply right now and probably ever. What we do know that many great players were on something as well as hundreds of mediocre players who are already forgotten. The numbers of mediocre players who tested positive outnumber the notable players by a ridiculous margin.

Dodgers fans were always very rough on Bonds but LA's classic 00s roster was far more tainted by the Mitchell Report, a little too late for revisionism in the "groupthink" imho.

i think the mitchell report named every l.a. dodger hero of the oughts iirc

Pretty meaningless, Shasta, since "The numbers of mediocre players who tested positive outnumber the notable players by a ridiculous margin" works just as well.

And isolating Bonds is a red herring. It's sad that the most talented player of his generation just had to push it too far, but he did and he deserves all the shit he gets as a result. If some career AA noname was injecting just as much crap as Bonds and gets away with it, that doesn't make Bonds any less guilty.

If the physical harm of the stuff he was may have been using has only marginal side effects, i.e. if he and Clemens live well into their '70s without heart problems, are we still going to wring our hands in moral outrage?

This is just a theory, but ... in my opinion, the guys who really made it work for them were the Ken Caminiti / Dante Bichette / Jason Giambi types. But most of the more "athletic" players who got caught didn't seem to benefit much. I think you could make an argument that Brady Anderson didn't benefit from steroids. Unlike those guys his body didn't change, and he didn't sustain his fluke season. Whereas most of the bigger guys who got caught ... Sosa, McGwire, Bonds, Giambi, etc. not only had a power surge but also sustained it, AND sustained their new body type. I think you can make an argument that the players who really benefited were the guys who were the most driven to add muscle mass via weight training, and that group happened to coincide with steroids because weight training and steroids were so related. But the guys who weren't hitting the weights as hard and ALSO did steroids did not improve much or sustain their improvement much.

Brady might be a bad example but you get the idea.

DID YOU KNOW:
the majority of players who have tested positive for steroids/hgh are pitchers, followed by middle infielders/corner outfielders.

DID YOU KNOW:
pure power hitters are one of the least likely archetype of baseball player to test positive for steroids/hgh.

DID YOU KNOW:
i pretty much made up those last 2 factoids based on some data i looked at so long ago that i don't even remember but i remembered when i read it that i scratched my chin and said "huh!"

wait was brady anderson linked to steroids? or does everyone just assume? i wouldn't think a one-year spike like that would be any sort of indicator, since if you really developed that much extra strength it wouldn't make sense that it just all went away again in one offseason

also there is a myth that STEROIDS automatically = MUSCLE MASS which is a fallacy:

Yes, steroids + working out = muscle mass
but
working out - steroids = muscle mass
and contrarily
steroids - working out /= muscle mass

Call this a post between myself and my conscience.

I've been half-expecting a well-known music writer on this board to jump on and say, "If you're so bothered by people who presume to explain to other people why it is they think what they think, why did you once spend a few thousand words explaining to me and the rest of the world why it is that I think what I think?" He hasn't, so I'll do it for him. The only thing I'd say is that what I wrote was based on ten years of closely reading him and a lot of personal history; it wasn't arrived at cavalierly. Nonetheless, he'd have a point; I'm being more than a little hypocritical here.

my takeaway: w/ no meaningful testing until 2005 (?), it's not cheating.

As I said above, I think that's a perfectly logical defense of Bonds and the rest, even if I don't share it myself.

And, to me, dismissing a decade-plus of freakish offensive stats and historically unprecedented levels of excellence from guys as old as Clemens and Bonds--a decade-plus that just happened to align itself perfectly with prevalent steroid use by those very same players--is to be just as willfully oblivious to what seems like a fairly clear connection between the two.

You're proving my point for me, because that decade-plus of increased offense also just happened to align itself perfectly with -- among other things -- two rounds of expansion and the opening of about 15 new ballparks, nearly all of which were smaller and more offense-friendly than the parks they replaced. And we have ACTUAL evidence about how ballparks and expansion affect offense, real, irrefutable evidence based on numbers and historical trends that span several different eras of baseball.

my takeaway: w/ no meaningful testing until 2005 (?), it's not cheating.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, November 24, 2010 6:18 AM (7 hours ago)

Not sure I buy this. Test or not, taking illegal substances is against the rules, just like gambling in baseball is against the rules, or fixing a game.

And we have ACTUAL evidence about how ballparks and expansion affect offense, real, irrefutable evidence based on numbers and historical trends that span several different eras of baseball.

Parks, obviously. But are you sure about expansion? Here's James, in reply to a reader question a few weeks ago:

Expansion has no impact on the level of offense vs. defense. That's clear. People BELIEVE it does, but it doesn't. The first expansion was accompanied by frenetic speculation about what the effects of expansion would be. Although there was little or no speculation that this would help the hitters, the superheated rhetoric about expansion insured that whatever happened in 1961 would be attributed to the expansion. What happened in 1961 was a lot of American League hitters had very good years. This led to a superstitious connection being formed between expansion and the level of runs scored. In fact, it was a park effect.

And he goes on from there to talk about '61 in more detail. I assume he's studied this issue pretty closely, or he wouldn't be making such an unequivocal assertion.

So I'm skeptical about expansion's role in what happened. If you want to say it was a combination of PEDs and smaller ballparks, I could go with that. Though I'm not sure how smaller ballparks would help the 42-year-old Roger Clemens turn 24 again.

We have to treat each case separately. There's no way the huge jumps in offense in '77 and '93 could be attributed entirely to park effects. And of course, there's no way to quantify the luck involved (i.e. ordinary, year to year fluctuations in offense and pitching/defense). But the point is that we need to consider a number of different factors. It's simplistic to claim that the half-run jump in offense in the AL from '76 to '77 was purely due to expansion. And from '93-'02, just like for every extreme hitting (or pitching) era in baseball history, I'm certain that there were a number of factors involved. If someone waves off the entire decade by saying that it was "obviously" all due to steroids and won't even consider any other reasons, then *they're* the ones who need to get down off their high horse.

I can't tell if this is addressed to me, or if you're writing more generally. If it is meant for me, do you really think that "if someone waves off the entire decade by saying that it was 'obviously' all due to steroids and won't even consider any other reasons, then *they're* the ones who need to get down off their high horse" is a fair characterization of what I wrote?

From my long initial post above: "And, to me, dismissing a decade-plus of freakish offensive stats and historically unprecedented levels of excellence from guys as old as Clemens and Bonds--a decade-plus that just happened to align itself perfectly with prevalent steroid use by those very same players--is to be just as willfully oblivious to what seems like a fairly clear connection between the two." I don't know how you get from me saying there's a fairly clear connection between two things--which I believe there is--to me saying it was "'obviously' all due to steroids and won't even consider any other reasons." Saying A and B are obviously connected is hardly saying that A is the only explanation for B.

And if that wasn't clear enough, from a subsequent post: "If you want to say it was a combination of PEDs and smaller ballparks, I could go with that." That's what you call being on a high horse?

If it is meant for me, do you really think that "if someone waves off the entire decade by saying that it was 'obviously' all due to steroids and won't even consider any other reasons, then *they're* the ones who need to get down off their high horse" is a fair characterization of what I wrote?

I wasn't referring to you, I was following up from the other thread where you and Mark C talked about "fans" who try to dismiss the effects of steroids and won't get off their high horse about it, and I claimed that it was the opposite. I should have been more clear about that.

Okay, thanks. I sometimes have a tendency to mistakenly assume something's directed at me when it isn't. I'm right where you are on this: not one factor, but many. Right now--and I'm still working my through this--the most sensible explanation to me is some combination of PEDs and smaller ballparks.

Well, I probably shouldn't have been cherry picking phrases from days old posts on completely different threads ...

The expansion-in-and-of-itself (as opposed to bringing in new teams with hitter-friendly parks) = increased offense argument is one I've never quite understood; maybe someone can explain it in a way that'll make sense to me. I always thought it went something like this: that if you bring two new teams into the league, you're giving jobs to 20-25 pitchers who wouldn't be in the majors otherwise, and that therefore offensive levels are driven up. But aren't you also giving jobs to 30-40 hitters who wouldn't be in the majors otherwise, and don't the two balance each other out? I don't really get it.

that's what common sense would suggest

common sense might also suggest the same happening with steroids, since it wasn't just hitters taking them. i haven't seen any research on what the degree of improvement might be for a hitter vs a pitcher on steroids

I'm just making a guess on this, but: because of an initial misreading of what PEDs do--the idea that they increased power, as opposed to increasing the body's recuperative abilities--I wouldn't doubt that PED use was disproportionately weighted towards hitters at first. It's easier to get your head around the idea that PEDs would help hitters than they would pitchers, so maybe that's the way it unfolded before Clemens started to show that pitchers could benefit too. Again, just a guess; maybe PED use was 50/50 right from the start.

xpost But that's assuming that it's as easy to find major league ready (~ replacement level or average) pitchers in the minors as it is to find major league ready hitters. I'm fairly sure that it's not, partly because pitchers usually need more time to develop than hitters.

Common sense would definitely suggest that if hitters could add 20 pounds of muscle and hit the ball farther, then pitchers could add 20 pounds of muscle and add a couple of MPH to their fastball, or get more snap on their breaking pitches. And yet you don't see the people who go hysterical over the "steroid era" making that argument. Unless they're talking about Clemens, because of course he somehow had to be an exception.

I think people's reaction was simply based on what they saw: a sustained jump in the number of guys hitting 40/50/60/70+ home runs, not a sudden jump in the number of guys striking out 300 or posting sub-2.00 ERAs. If it had been the other way around, then I'm sure the "hysteria" would have been directed at pitchers. (Quotation marks because from '93 to the early 2000s, there was no hysteria; fans, myself included, were perfectly happy with the offensive boom.)

Following up on the multiple-factors theory, here's where I sit right now (in approximate order of importance):
1) PEDs;
2) smaller ballparks;
3) equipment: everybody rushed to the lively-ball theory around '93-'94, then it seemed to go away. I still don't doubt that that played a role, and probably bat technology, like the advent of maple bats, had something to do with it.
4) maybe expansion played a small role; definitely Colorado played a role single-handedly;
5) for as long as I'd been watching baseball, the strike zone seemed to be forever getting smaller. Maybe this reached some sort of critical mass from '93 to 2003;
6) some kind of generational cycle; maybe it was a decade where there were simply better hitters coming into the league than pitchers;
7) maybe there's some connection to the fact that Latin players totally dominated during the offensive boom. I have no idea, but there sure were a ton of great Latin hitters all over the league leaders during that decade. (I used to be fascinated with this; you'd look at the Top 10 in BA in the American League, and it would be 9 or (pre-Ichiro) 10 Latin players);
8) some other factor I've totally overlooked.

i'd put your #5 and #6 first and second personally. the smaller the strike zone gets, the more viable an all-or-nothing swing becomes.

i also suspect there was a bit of a domino effect where teams started selecting power hitters over good defensive players to 'catch up' to the teams with the bondses and mcgwires offensively, but i don't know how i'd test this hypothesis. it would explain the shift back in the past couple years as defense becomes more valued again though. like, i don't think jermaine dye sits at home for a whole season 10 or even 5 years ago, and i'm not sure 10 years ago a team like texas would have moved michael young to 3B to make room for a weak-hitting elvis andrus, for example.

i'm never discounting PEDs as a factor, i just don't think they had the ability to improve players by anywhere near the degree of the offensive surge that happened

The domino effect makes sense. Related: the offensive boom was great for business, so I'm sure that was something that fed upon itself as the decade went on. Outside of Atlanta, who already had the core of their great pitching staff in place, I doubt there were a lot of teams saying, "You know, we're going to do a 180 and try to put together the best pitching staff in the league next year; that'll be good for attendance."

The reason I threw the Latin players in there was based on the "You don't walk your way off the island" cliche; I thought they might have brought about a more aggressive, free-swinging attitude that spread throughout the game. But when I think about players like Edgar Martinez, Palmeiro, Bobby Abreu, Pujols, etc.--highly disciplined hitters with high OBPs--I'm not sure if there's any (or at least much) truth to the cliche at all.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/story/2011-09-21/Baseball-energy-drinks-Red-Bull/50498950/1

Jason Grilli OTM!

"He said he drank several cans of Red Bull and soft drinks before pitching that afternoon."

That seems like it would make you not feel and you probably wouldn't do it twice.