The Futility Infielder

A month ago, Salon Sports Daily columnist King Kaufman invited me to pinch-hit for him during his upcoming paternity leave, one of a select group of writers that includes Bat-Girl and Chris Kahrl. I'm pleased to announce that my turn at-bat has come today with a piece on steroids and home runs, checking in on the current rate at which balls are flying out of the park and their relation to the ongoing scandal. I'm particularly excited to put my writing in a new venue, and chuckling at the irony that in the same week, I've been published in both a conservative New York City newspaper and a a liberal San Francisco-based politics and culture website. Righty, lefty, I've got both sides of the plate covered. A special welcome to readers coming here via my article.

The piece was long in the making. Initially I submitted a numbers-laden draft that relied heavily on data I compiled for my chapter in Will Carroll's The Juice: The Real Story of Baseball's Drug Problems. Before the editors could get back to me, the Rafael Palmeiro news broke, giving the topic considerably more weight and all of us covering it plenty to write about. Last Thursday I was literally two minutes away from publishing another epic-length blog entry on the topic when editor Kevin Berger called, and he liked my point of entry -- the rampant swirl of rumors that MLB was sitting on an untold number of additional positive tests -- enough that I repurposed much of what I wrote there for this piece.

In our conversation, I took Kevin through a wide range of steroid-related topics, from the statistical research I'd done for Carroll's book to the history of the owners' battle with the players' union to my recent reading of Howard Bryant's fine history of the post-strike epoch, Juicing the Game. Kevin suggested a piece in the neighborhood of 800 words, but he had filled me with so many ideas that my initial submission more than doubled that length. To his credit and my relief, he willingly rode out the longer piece, and for once I didn't have to fret about what got left on the cutting-room floor.

My basic statistical finding is that while home runs are down this year by 7.4 percent, we're still seeing them at rates similar to the recent past, and it's tough to connect the drop with new and improved steroid testing; after all, we had testing last year and homers actually rose.:

With roughly the same number of positives as last year -- a group that makes up less than 1 percent of those tested -- it's tough to point to testing and its penalties as solely responsible for the drop in home runs. A few other reasons for the decline stick out. It's easy to point to the absence of Bonds, who from 2000 to 2004 homered with a frequency more than four times the league average. Bonds has sat out the season with a knee injury, likely sending some 40-plus homers missing. More important, the return of baseball to the nation's capital via the former Montreal Expos has not only introduced RFK Stadium -- the most pitcher-friendly, homer-suppressing park in the majors -- but also taken away a more favorable environment by removing Olympic Stadium and its shotgun-wedded bandbox of a bride, San Juan, Puerto Rico's Hiram Bithorn Stadium, where the Expos played 22 games apiece in 2003 and 2004. Thus far this season, the number of homers in RFK is 36 percent lower than in other major-league parks. If we exclude the home games of the Nats and Expos in our year-to-year comparisons, homers have fallen just 6.5 percent.

Because ballparks generally take a few years for their full effects to reveal themselves, due to weather patterns and other sample-size issues, a more responsible approach to comparing recent homer rates can be taken in controlling for the parks where we have less than three full seasons of data to draw upon. Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park, Cincinnati's Great American Park, and San Diego's PetCo Park all opened in the past three years, while Kansas City's Kauffman Stadium moved the fences back considerably prior to 2004. All have shown themselves to lean toward the extremes at either end when it comes to homers. Citizens and GAP are very conducive to the long ball, while PetCo and the reconfigured Kauffman are quite suppressant. Removing those as well as the Nats and Expos, we see a 5.6 percent drop in homers per game from 2004 to 2005.

By themselves, new ballparks can't explain the decrease any more than they could explain the rise, but it's clear they've been a contributing factor in the variations. So, it's tough to credit drug testing for the drop when, using the same controls, homers increased by 1.7 percent from 2003 to 2004, despite an 86 percent decrease in the number of positive tests.

Controlling for new ballparks appears to account for about one-quarter of the recent drop, as well as more than two-thirds of last year's rise (on a per-game basis, homers went up 4.77 percent overall). This backs up my assertion that neither steroids nor ballparks alone can account for the rise we saw in homers during the 1994-2004 period, a stretch in which nine of the top 10 single-season home run per game rates were produced.

Anyway, the article is free; you just have to click through an ad on your way to it. I'm deeply indebted to Kaufman for inviting me to contribute to Salon, and to Berger for patiently sticking with me as the piece became more all-encompassing. I'm proud to add something substantial to the discussion of steroids' impact on the game.

What follows is the original blog entry which keyed that piece. A week after I wrote it, I think it holds up well enough -- and provides enough links that the Salon article omitted -- to justify running it belatedly.

• • •

Welcome to Purgatory

In the wake of the Rafael Palmeiro steroid revelations, these are dark days for baseball; yes, darker than even the Whitey Ford pretzel-pelting incident. The days since the Palmeiro disclosure have been filled with the thrum of rumors about the next steroid-related domino to fall, more big names in the pipeline for a suspension. Suddenly, every player is under suspicion, no accomplishment escapes our cynical speculation, and the presumption of innocence is out the window.

Almost exactly a month ago at Yankee Stadium, I was sitting in front of some random yahoo who opined to anyone within earshot that Jason Giambi -- who had reeled off four homers in three games en route to a 14 homer month -- was back on steroids. "Guy couldn't hit and they wanted to send him down. He figures he's going to either get cut or get caught and he'd rather go out in a blaze of glory, so he starts juicing again," claimed the yahoo. The comment was easy to dismiss, a conspiracy theorist ranting about grassy knolls and lone gunmen.

A month later, that accusation doesn't sound so farfetched, with Giambi's .355/.524/.974 July having garnered him the American League Player of the Month honors just as Palmeiro -- like Giambi, a player implicated in Jose Canseco's The Juice as one to whom the anabolic apostle spread his hypodermic gospel -- went up the river. Even as Giambi's innocence was being pre-emptively asserted, a hoax made the rounds, with a man identifying himself as Yankee president Randy Levine's assistant calling local and national media outlets claiming that the slugger had tested positive.

Unfortunately, it's not an unreasonable suspicion. As ESPN's Buster Olney reminded, Giambi's comeback might be fueled by Human Growth Hormone, which according to the leaked BALCO testimony, he had used before:

Is there steroid speculation about Giambi throughout baseball? Sure there is, and there always will be, because of the leaked grand jury testimony printed last winter in the San Francisco Chronicle. That said, he has passed all of his steroid tests. We also know that if any player wanted to find a way around the testing system, they could use human growth hormone.

Recall that HGH won't show up in a urine test; it's a naturally occurring substance in the body, it requires a blood test for detection and as such, it's beyond the reach of the current program. Even the blood test is unreliable. As Baseball Prospectus' Will Carroll reported back in December:

HGH, in forms like Seristim and Nutropin, are created by advanced genetic techniques and are chemically indistinguishable from naturally occurring hormones. Dr. Lewis Black told me in his BP Radio interview that tests for HGH are difficult and that instead of looking for a drug, as is normal testing procedure, testers are likely actually looking for metabolic byproducts. HGH testing was said to have had its first run last summer in Athens, but according to sources, the test is dubious at best. There were no positive tests. One source told me that "there's a primitive test, but it'd get beat in court. It's a good first step and a nice scare tactic. They're keeping the samples in hopes that the test gets more reliable, more sensitive."

Giambi now finds himself in a no-win situation, but such is his burden since BALCO. His accomplishments will forever be tainted, even with a thousand clean whiz quizzes. He can't be caught, nor can he be proven innocent.

All of which makes it tough to digest the recent spate of articles suggesting Giambi's big month is some sort of triumph, vindication, or redemption, such as this piece from Newsday's Bob Herzog: "The award is a vindication of sorts for Giambi, who was written off by members of the media, fans and even his own organization, which wanted to send him to the minors in May." Or this from Sunday's New York Times's Tyler Kepner:

Unlike the other prominent players linked to baseball's steroid scandal, it is Giambi who has emerged as the game's most redemptive story. Barry Bonds has been injured all season. The retired Mark McGwire, Giambi's mentor, broke down in tears before Congress in March. Sammy Sosa is a shadow of himself. Rafael Palmeiro, who pointed his finger at Congress and swore he had always been clean, was suspended this week for failing a drug test.

...Giambi is proof, perhaps, that a player can stop using steroids and regain his old aura. But he does not frame his redemptive season in those terms. To Giambi, his story is about overcoming the tumor that all but incapacitated him last summer. If he were tempted to use steroids now, he said, he would be a fool to give in. "Trust me, there is no way, no possible way," Giambi said this week, over two revealing interviews about his comeback. "I've gotten to this point because I'm healthy. There's no chance I'm going to take a chance on doing anything. There's no way."

But Giambi, who has been tested this season, told the news media before the 2004 season that he had never taken steroids. It was later reported that he had said the opposite a few months earlier, before the grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative.

While I've held firmly to my belief in due process and the presumption of innocence with regards to the various developments in the steroids story, I'm having a hard time maintaining that stance these days. As a Yankees fan, it's a real conflict to root for Giambi even without the current allegations, and I've taken little pleasure in his resurgence even before the latest rumors made their way into the mainstream. I've had to practice keeping my enthusiasm in check no matter how clutch his hits get, and as his role in the their offense becomes more prominent, rooting for the entire team becomes that much less fun. It's not just Giambi who's in purgatory for his transgressions, it's all of us who love the game. This is the true legacy of the steroid scandal.

Giambi isn't the only one under the microscope right now. One of the trashiest pieces of writing to emerge in the wake of Palmeirogate is this from Oakland Tribune columnist Monte Poole on the occasion of Roger Clemens' 43rd birthday:

With Barry Bonds absent, Sammy Sosa irrelevant and Rafael Palmeiro disgraced, the duty of carrying the banner for old ballplayers who stretch the limits of human possibility falls to Roger Clemens.

Why not leave it to the oldest? Clemens turned 43 last week and continues to pitch at an incredibly high level. Houston's ace, who won his 339th game Sunday, an 8-1 win over the San Francisco Giants at China Basin, is the only oldster in line to receive honors this season.

More to the point, Clemens is the only one of the four whose age-defying productivity, even in the age of performance-enhancing substances, generally is credited to the American work ethic.

Hmm.

So it is his willingness to work that has made Clemens, at his age, the most unhittable pitcher in baseball. He leads the majors in ERA by nearly a run per game, and opponents were batting a majors-low .188 before Sunday... Yet the explanation for Clemens' numbers is as simple as his dedication?

Hmm.

Don't get it twisted; there are plenty of skeptics who look askance at Clemens' intriguing ability to perform so well. There are snickers. And muted suspicions, some of which actually get whispered.

... There is, so far, not a hint of taint staining baseball's grandest old man.

Hmm.

Got it? "Not a hint of taint" except "snickers" and "whispered suspicions" which, golly, happen to have made into print via this here column full of one-sentence, innuendo-laden paragraphs written by a "skeptic" who's looking askance. Hmmmm.

Meanwhile, the rumor mill continues to grind. Carroll wrote in Monday's Under the Knife column:

The scariest thing is that it doesn’t look like we’re done with this, the debate or the suspensions. Multiple sources in baseball have confirmed to me that there are ongoing appeals and/or grievances, portending future suspensions. It’s unclear how long this process takes, though indications from both the Palmeiro and Ryan Franklin cases give a two to three month timeline from test to suspension. Yes, this means that there are players out there on fields now, perhaps affecting pennant races, leading categories, or heading towards winning awards, that are facing suspensions at some point. It’s also possible that some of these procedures might not be finished during this season. This isn’t about naming names or questioning the necessary due process. This is about the fact that public perception of this is going to be poor. Baseball is getting pummeled by this, by the press, by Congress, and by the public, all despite the fact that there’s plenty of performance-enhanced athletes making headlines this weekend in other sports. When asked for comment, the MLBPA declined due to confidentiality concerns, while MLB had not return our calls as of press time.

On Wednesday, Carroll followed up:

The story continues, however, with Congress jumping in again. As Palmeiro waits to see what one committee does with the information released to them, another is sending letters to MLB. The letter includes eight questions that would clear things up -- for someone not paying attention. The answers are pretty well known for six of the eight questions, if not specifically then generally. The interesting stuff will come if, as some rumors are now saying, that Palmeiro is ready to play the part of Joe Valachi. Yes, there are rampant rumors going through clubhouses and press boxes across baseball, and yes, there’s another name coming soon. Names don’t solve problems.

The speculation about the next shoe to drop has reached such a crescendo that late on Wednesday, Major League Baseball and the Players' Association issued a joint statement about them:

Faced with a swell that was becoming a storm, Major League Baseball and the players' union took what they called an "unusual step" -- the sides issued a joint statement Wednesday, with hopes it would quash the rampant speculation.

"Reports of large numbers of positive tests currently unreported are totally false. Reports of big-name players having the reporting of their test results delayed are totally false," it said.

"All drug-testing results are processed in precisely the same manner, and without regard to the identity of any player or to the volume of positives at any given time. These media reports and rumors are totally, and completely inaccurate, and do not deserve further comment," it said.

The statement was issued by Rob Manfred, executive vice president for labor relations in the commissioner's office, and Gene Orza, the chief operating officer of the union.

On Tuesday, commissioner Bud Selig said a young player -- as in, not a star -- was currently in the steroids system. Once a player is informed he has tested positive, he can appeal before any penalties are announced.

It would be a relief if baseball fans could hang our hats on "totally false," but unfortunately, MLB's denial is worth as much as a pinch-hitting at-bat from Enrique Wilson (offer void if you're Joe Torre). You don't have to be a member of Congress to believe that we're far past the stage of being able to take anything from either the union or the league at face value when it comes to steroids. They're in purgatory, along with you, me and nearly every major league player, and we all figure to be here awhile.

Labels: steroids