The Futility Infielder

So I'm finally finished with what I refer to as my winter workload, my contributions to the Baseball Prospectus and Fantasy Baseball Index annuals as well as Maple Street Press' Dodgers Annual, edited by Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman. All of that stuff is about a month away from hitting the shelves, but I'm back in circulation at Baseball Prospectus with a couple of articles this week.

Today's piece is a recurring feature based upon a chapter I wrote for BP's pennant race book It Ain't Over, "The Replacement-Level Killers." It's about players whose production was so awful that it might have prevented their team from reaching the postseason, yet so easily replaced that it's more an indictment on the managers and general managers who put up with that production rather than solve the problem (though many of these teams took steps to try to address them). Since we're in the middle of the Hot Stove season, I checked in on teams' attempts to remedy these problems and found, to my surprise, that many of them had taken a half-assed approach, likely in connection to economic uncertainty. The Giants were one of two teams to actually fill multiple Killers, and since I hate the Giants, here they are as the excerpt:

Second Base:
Emmanuel Burriss (.211 EqA, -1.1 WARP), Freddy Sanchez (.221 EqA, 0.3 WARP), Giants

The Giants finished last in the majors in EqA, and at no position did they get worse production than at second base, where five players made at least 16 starts and hit a combined .236/.281/.329; remove Juan Uribe (.274/.331/.538 in 35 games at second, less than he saw at third or short) and those numbers become .227/.269/.280. Burriss more or less held the job from Opening Day to mid-June before being sent to the minors and subsequently hurting his foot. The team then spent the next six weeks briefly trying on Matt Downs (.187 EqA, -0.1 WARP), Kevin Frandsen (.086 EqA, -0.5 WARP) and Uribe for size before trading for Sanchez, who strained his shoulder two weeks after arriving and then tore his meniscus upon returning from that injury. All told, the team finished four games behind the Rockies in the Wild Card, a gap that could have easily been narrowed with a competent solution at the keystone.

Remedy (?): The Giants didn't even wait until the World Series was done to re-sign the 32-year-old Sanchez to a two-year, $12 million deal, this despite the fact that the signing has limited them to some fairly cut-rate solutions elsewhere which cast Mark DeRosa as a corner outfielder, Aubrey Huff as a first baseman, and Night Train as the house's top red wine option. Yeah, good luck with all of that.

Right Field:
Randy Winn (.248 EqA, 2.2 WARP), Nate Schierholtz (.249 EqA, 0.4 WARP), Giants

In the final year of a three-year, $23.5 million deal, Winn hit a godawful .262/.318/.353, a performance driven — through a guardrail overlooking a cliff — by a .158/.184/.200 showing in 125 PA against southpaws, the single worst righty-on-lefty performance of the Retrosheet Era (1954 onward). With Bruce Bochy dissatisfied with left fielder Fred Lewis' production (his .348 OBP, second on the team, clashed with the sub-.300 zeitgeist the manager was trying to instill), Winn also saw significant time in left so as to allow Nate Schierholtz (.267/.302/.400) to wave a wet noodle at NL pitchers. If not for Winn's above-average defensive contributions (+15 FRAA) things would have been even worse, but as it was, this debacle and the one at second base were enough to dash the Giants' Wild Card hopes.

Remedy (?): With Winn gone and the team saving its pennies in fear of a big arbitration award for Tim Lincecum, the Giants appear to be vying for an entry on There I Fixed It by letting Schierholtz and John Bowker battle for the right to eat up more outs than necessary.

Writing about ineptitude is always one of the more fun parts of my job, and this one was no exception. Anyway, earlier in the week I wrote a piece arising from a question in last week's chat, is an attempt to answer the question — an important one popularized via Bill James' Keltner Test — of who the best player at each position is outside the Hall of Fame, using JAWS. Five of the 10 position leaders (and two runners-up) are on the current Hall of Fame ballot, and part of the JAWS ticket which went 0-for-7 on Hall of Fame election day. The rest aren't so obvious. Who would have thought I had a good excuse to write about George "Piano Legs" Gore or dust off an old comparison of Bobby Bonds to Reggie Jackson?

Center Field

JAWS Standard: 68.3/44.0/56.1

Best eligible player: George Gore (62.5/44.6/53.6)
Who? "Piano Legs" Gore was a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing character with massive calves. He played center field for Cap Anson's Chicago White Stockings from 1879 through 1886, a span during which he was a key part of five pennant winners; he went on to play for two more pennant-winning Giants clubs. He led the league in walks three times during an era where one needed six to nine balls for a free pass, and was consistently among the league's OBP leaders, hence his strong WARP totals, though they still leave him shy of the JAWS standard in center field. I don't know if the Veterans Committee ever seriously took up his case, but Lord knows there are far less accomplished VC-anointed outfielders in the Hall of Fame; his JAWS numbers crush those of Hugh Duffy, Max Carey, Earl Averill, Hack Wilson, Edd Roush, Earle Combs, and Lloyd Waner, all VC selections.

Runner up: Jimmy Wynn (57.1/47.6/52.4)
The Toy Cannon spent the first 11 years of his career playing in the Astrodome, a godforsaken hitting environment if there ever was one. Properly adjusted for context, he was a helluva hitter, topping a .300 EqA six times during that span, with a high of .348 in 1969. He had two more outstanding years with the Dodgers in 1974 and 1975 before injuries washed him out of the majors at age 35. In the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James ranks Wynn 10^th all-time among center fielders, and likens him to former teammate Joe Morgan, another small, strong, speedy guy with outstanding control of the strike zone and good defense.

Right Field

JAWS Standard: 75.7/46.6/61.2

Best eligible player: Dwight Evans (59.5/37.7/48.6)
Evans spent parts of 19 seasons in the Red Sox outfield (1972-1990), during the prime of which he was overshadowed by Jim Rice and Fred Lynn. He wasn't entirely overlooked, however, cracking the AL top five in the MVP voting twice (1984 and 1987) and winning eight Gold Gloves in a 10-year span (1976-1985). Like many other players here, he was undervalued in his day because a large part of his offensive contribution came via walks; he topped 100 three times and ranked in the league's top three six times in a nine-year span. He lasted just three years on the BBWAA ballot, though, and his numbers, which were once above the JAWS standard, now come up short. They're still ahead of Rice's (34.2/28.5/31.4) by more than one win per year at their peaks.

Runner up: Bobby Bonds (55.2/41.8/48.5)
Barry's father was a pretty fair player in his day, best known for reaching the 30/30 club (homers and stolen bases) five times, an all-time record shared by father and son. A natural center fielder who got stuck in right field by the Giants because he had the misfortune of arriving when Willie Mays was still a going concern, Bonds seemed to spend much of his career under a cloud of bad luck. He and Reggie Jackson were almost exactly the same age and debuted one year apart. Both had power, considerable speed and a ton of strikeouts, and the two players finished with similar career rate stats (.268/.353/.471/.296 EqA for Bonds to .262/.356/.490/.300 for Jackson), Yet one was a superduperstar who won an MVP award and five World Series rings, and stuck around into his 40s. The other never finished higher than third in an MVP vote, played just three postseason games, left the majors at 35, and died young.

The leader at first base, Mark McGwire, had an eventful week, admitting during a Monday media blitz that he used steroids during his career. This was not exactly news; ever since an AP reporter named Steve Wilstein found a bottle of then-legal androstenedione in his locker, we've had plenty of clues that Big Mac was on the juice. He was named in Jose Canseco's book, involved in an FBI investigation into steroids trafficking called "Operation Equine," and last seen in public tearfully tiptoeing around his right not to self-incriminate during the 2005 dog-and-pony show in front of Congress.

It was a dark day for baseball, of course, and an even darker day for journalism, as many of the fourth estate hacks who goaded McGwire to come clean now vilified him for doing so. Via Twitter, Craig Calcaterra, who's been killing it over at NBC's "Circling the Bases" blog, offered a dollar to the first person who caught one of the come-clean camp slamming McGwire for coming clean, and soon claimed his own reward by nailing Jon Heyman, who twattled, "If you lie for 10 years, and everyone knows you're lying, what's the value of finally telling the truth?" Craig asked Heyman directly, "On October 18th you wrote 'its time for Mark McGwire to come clean.' If you don't think there's value, why did you say that?" He got no response.

Which isn't to say that Heyman was the only egregious offender. The ever-idiotic Dan Shaughnessy shat himself in public once again by invoking Hitler, always a popular pastime among morons on the Internet. Even the more reasonable Tom Verducci and Ken Rosenthal spent their time on the MLB Network after viewing McGwire's interview by declaring that now for sure they wouldn't vote for him for the Hall of Fame, because he had removed all doubt about his involvement with steroids. Guh.

McGwire sure as hell didn't cover himself with glory with his admission, and his belief that steroids actually had no effect on his level of accomplishment was laughably self-delusional. It was also, however, a pretty typical display of the athletic mindset, the long-hardened belief in one's own abilities often in the face of directly contradictory evidence ("I still believe I can get hitters out in this league," says the pink-slipped pitcher). Nonetheless, he apologized, showed contrition, cried enough times to make even children uncomfortable, did just about everything short of committing fireside harikiri. Yet it wasn't enough for some.

As is often the case when a big steroid story breaks, I spent about three and a half hours doing morning drive time phoners — 13 in all — for the Fox News Radio network, sparring with some hosts, agreeing wholeheartedly with others and trying to put what was said into context. I found it notable that though he was hired as the Cardinals' hitting coach back in late October, his "Meet the Press" moment, which had to be a precondition for his return from oblivion, occurred after the Hall of Fame election cycle, perhaps so the slugger could avoid the accusation that he was pandering to BBWAA voters or at the very least could avoid overshadowing the other candidates on the ballot. Yet some hosts didn't seem to understand why this genie was coming out of the bottle now.

Some of the hosts were well-prepared and had the news in perspective; the guys on Louisville's WHAS and San Diego's KOGO were especially good. The poor guy on WMT in Cedar Rapids, an admitted Cardinals fan, sounded like he had contemplating throwing himself out of his office window but had realized that it being just the second story, probably wouldn't put him out of his misery. On the other hand, the host on Omaha's KFAB asked a rambling two-minute question in which he tried to connect the steroid culture with President Bill Clinton's infidelity, doing so much pontificating that I thought he was about to kiss a baby and announce a Senate bid. Being a good lefty, I called him on it, accused him of scoring political points irrelevant to the matter at hand and stuck to my talking points. This was not my first rodeo.

So how do I feel about McGwire? Disappointed and saddened but hardly surprised. He's a product of a very specific time in baseball history, one where he made some bad choices in which the MLB Players Association, the owners, the commissioner, the media and fans were quite complicit. It's the height of hypocrisy to hang him for those choices and declare that we need to expunge his numbers from the record book. Hell, if the stats from the thrown 1919 Black Sox World Series — as grievous a crime as has ever been committed against the integrity of baseball — are on the books, then a few tainted home runs can certainly stand. Records record what happened on the field; it's up to us to interpret them properly. Sadder and wiser, we move on with our lives.

Labels: books, JAWS, steroids

One of my favorite musicians is the late, great pop genius Lee Hazlewood. As a singer he brought a wry sense of humor, world-weary view and distinctive baritone to both originals and covers. As a writer, he wrote "These Boots Are Made For Walking" and other hits which turned Nancy Sinatra into a superstar. As a producer, he was genuinely groundbreaking, the man who put the reverb Duane Eddy's guitar and impressed a young Phil Spector with his proto-Wall of Sound.

Though I already owned a handful of his reissues, a couple years ago I tracked down a bunch of his out-of-print albums via the Internet, and I now have about 24 hours worth of his music stuffed into my iTunes. For whatever reason, Hazlewood's whacked-out combination of pop, country, lounge and psychedelia has somehow become one of my soundtracks of choice when I'm under the gun, downright soothing yet delightfully weird. When I get on an airplane or a train, I calm my travel anxieties with his gentle, gorgeous 1970 album Cowboy in Sweden. When I'm stressing out while facing a deadline, I always seem to start my playlist with his 1966 album Friday's Child:



Recently the latter was given a lush re-release on the limited-edition Rhino Handmade label as part of three-albums-and-change set called Strung Out on Something New. Worth seeking out if you're hip to his sound, though probably not for novices. Anyway, that's where the title of this post came from, though it's got historical antecedents as well.

Onto the leftovers from my last post...

• On Wednesday I did a chat at Baseball Prospectus. Here's a taste:

dianagramr (Cubehenge): Good afternoon Jay ... thanks for the chat. Has the cloud of PEDs tarnished or thrown into the question the relevance of election to the HOF? (and yes, I know the exclusion of African-Americans prior to 1947 tarnished the HOF already) Jeter is a HOFer, yes? A-Rod, in the wake of his "confession"? Damon?

JJ: Hi Diana. I think the question of PEDs and the Hall of Fame is an open one that will take at least a decade to tell us anything even remotely conclusive. As hard as it may be to envision the players outed as steroid users via one means or another actually getting in, I have a much harder time envisioning the Hall's relevance without guys like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez.

As for Jeter, he's a lock; this year puts him over the line as far as JAWS is concerned, and he's got the kind of resume writers will love. Damon's going to have to get somewhere on his push for 3,000 hits to have much traction; he's got just two All-Star appearances and scores well below average on the Hall of Fame Monitor and HOF Standards metrics. A-Rod will get there eventually, I think, particularly if he keeps to this new STFU PR strategy.

jromero (seattle): Hi, Jay. I am not sure what you may have written in the past regarding Pete Rose's HOF eligibility, but can you briefly share your take on a.) his worthiness as a player; and b.) your opinion as to whether he should be allowed in (assuming his stats stack up). Thanks!

JJ: Absolutely worthy as a player even if he did overstay his welcome by a few years. His JAWS (106.7/56.2/81.5) is above average at any position in all three categories.

As to whether he should be allowed, he knowingly broke the cardinal rule that's posted in every clubhouse: DO NOT GAMBLE ON BASEBALL. He denied it for years, and when he finally fessed up, it was in the service of making a buck. I haven't seen anything out of him to suggest real remorse or reparations to the game, so really, I see absolutely no compelling reason to reinstate him.

Nick Stone (New York City): Jay, assuming you think that the AL East crown is probably settled, how do you see the wild card battle playing out? Will it be just between Boston and Texas? What are the keys to watch for, outside of Wakefield's return?

JJ: Hello, Nick! At this point in the season I'm having a hard time taking the Rays seriously as Wild Card contenders given their inconsistency on both sides of the ball, so I do think it will come down to the Rangers and Red Sox. Earlier this year I'd have said it would be difficult to imagine the Sox struggling this much for this long given their roster, and that it would be even tougher to envision the Rangers maintaining their hot start given their pitch-to-contact ways. The Sox have had a lot of injuries, not only among the players they knew were health risks to begin but also to the players representing the first line of defense against them, and while I like the deadline moves they've made, particularly Victor Martinez, right now they're a mess. The Rangers have had injury problems as well, and done a very nice job augmenting their team in-season by calling up Derek Holland and Neftali Feliz, and as minor as it is, I like their acquisition of Pudge for the stretch.

I can envision this race coming down to whose young pitching holds up best under pressure -- Buccholz or Holland/Feliz. It's bigger than that, of course, but that's what I'll be watching most closely.

GregLowder (DC): Jay, I think it's impossible to use a specific number to measure HOF worthiness...3000 hits, 500 homers, 300 wins. You can pull a "Curtis Martin" and be effective for several years just due to good health and luck. I think you have to be great for a short period of time, in baseball I put that at 6-8 years, or very good for a long period of time, 12+ years. Do you agree?

JJ: Among actual voters, by which I mean the BBWAA ones, not the VC ones, career length is a much bigger factor than you give it credit for being. With a few exceptions (Rice, Sutter, Brock, Tony Perez) guys who get elected by the writers generally have had good to great peaks AND very good long careers.

• My Toledo radio hit, which discussed the Tigers' acquisition of Aubrey Huff, the Magglio Ordoñez fiasco, waiver deals in general, and the state of various division and Wild Card races.

• My Boston radio hit, which discussed the Red Sox's relatively faded postseason hopes, Jon Papelbon's woes and the perpetual problem of their catching situation, among other things. Fun stuff.

Labels: chat, JAWS, music, radio, Red Sox, steroids, Yankees

Via my boy Alex Belth comes this fantastically irreverent Slate piece by Charles P. Pierce on Manny Ramirez's return to action:

Then, back in May, the test results came back. A chorus of moaning arose from the Church of the Perpetually Outraged. (This week's sermon: "What about the children?") But he slowly but surely made a goof even out of the Most Serious Crisis There Absolutely Ever Has Been. The drug for which he was nailed was only the beginning of it. Pundits were dispatched to the far corners of the minors to seek out the disheartened and disillusioned. Instead, they found fans who were just happy to see Manny Ramirez swinging for the fences of their little stadium. (My favorite was the guy who told Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times that he and his wife had, like Manny, used a fertility drug. "Manny got suspended," the man told Plaschke. "We got twins!") With Manny in town, the game was a happy, not haunted, place. This seemed to come as a surprise to some people.

Ramirez's weird pilgrimage to the bushes served as a living reminder that 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.

This isn't the first time the Massachusetts-based Pierce has taken up the poison pen when it comes to Ramirez's detractors. The day after he was traded to the Dodgers last summer, he marveled at the pitchfork-wielding mob which ushered him out of Beantown:

I was driving home late in the last afternoon of the Manny Ramirez Era in Boston, listening to the local ESPN radio outlet, when, suddenly, it seemed that the two hosts had decided that what the situation called for was the opinion of Margaret Hamilton's character from The Wizard of Oz.

... disgrace to the game ... I get sick of people in Boston adoring a guy who didn't play hard. ... blackmailed the Red Sox ... an affront and an embarrassment ... What about the integrity of playing the game right? ... When it comes to the Hall of Fame, there will be a lot of people who have a lot more questions about Manny Ramirez than they do about Mark McGwire.

And his mangy little dog, too, one supposes. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of the sources of this particularly violent magma displacement was ESPN's Peter Gammons. This is like being heckled by one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. It's also gloriously unmoored from reality. Gammons' own record on covering the Steroid Era is a decidedly mixed one. Not that I care, because that cause was never my frenzy of choice, either.

There's no question in Pierce's mind that Ramirez's positive test and suspension mark a turning point in baseball's battle against steroids. Without trying to belittle the need for that fight, I agree with him. Here we have a popular superstar who has been caught by Major League Baseball's increasingly sophisticated testing program; recall that he didn't test positive for a steroid but for elevated testosterone, which gave MLB license to examine his medical records, where they discovered a decidedly unkosher prescription for hCG. While certainly granted more coverage than was necessary, there was no innuendo, no violation of guaranteed anonymity, no illegal governmental leak. Just crime and punishment, the violation of baseball's drug agreement triggering a 50-game suspension served as eager fans awaited his return.

And not just Dodger fans; as Pierce points out, ESPN devoted plenty of space to Ramirez's day-by-day progress during his suspension and "rehab" assignment. For once, the chattering classes notably failed to agree that history's greatest monster was walking among us. Plaschke's curmudgeonly colleague at the LA Times, T.J. Simers, went so far as to call himself a Ramirez apologist because with Ramirez around, "The Dodgers are not only relevant again, but a show worth watching."

While there have been outbreaks of handwringing here and there since Ramirez returned to the lineup last Friday, a long last, it appears we're at least incrementally past the simplistic outrage that equates steroid users as Evildoing Cheaters Who Have Destroyed the Game and Should Be Banned For Life, Plus Spanked and Sent to Bed Without Supper. Ramirez broke the rules, the rules were enforced, the penalty was handed down, Ramirez served it unflinchingly, and the sun still rose in the East. That's healthy, and if somebody wants to Think of the Children, how about reminding them that after serving their punishment, people deserve their second chances.

As I write this, Ramirez has just been ejected in the fifth inning of Tuesday night's Dodgers-Mets game. Home plate umpire John Hirschbeck wouldn't stand for him tossing his elbow pad to express his disgruntlement with being called out on strikes via a ball that, conservatively speaking, was closer to Rockaway Beach than home plate. That's a punishment disproportionate to the crime, but thankfully, at least Manny is back to being Manny.

Labels: Dodgers, Manny Ramirez, Red Sox, steroids

Something that keeps coming up in the mainstream reporting surrounding Manny Ramirez's return, and something I've been asked about in radio spots — it came up in today's Toledo hit — and in the BP piece's comment thread, is the idea that his rehab stint is a) unique to his case and b) a violation of the spirit of the suspension which shows what a farce the whole system is. The Plaschkes, Ringolsbys and Justices are having kittens as they work overtime to manufacture outrage over this, and I'm sure there are plenty of talk radio hosts around the country stoking the fires.

As to the first of those two statements, in fact every player who's been suspended for 50 games under baseball's drug policy has had the same right to such rehab stint, including Ramirez's Dodger teammate Guillermo Mota, who did so with the Mets' Triple-A affiliate back in 200, and the Phillies' J.C. Romero, who did so in the Phillies' chain last month.

As to the second statement, people seem to forget that the policy is the product of collective bargaining. MLB and the owners can't just unilaterally impose their will to punish the players — that's why there's a union, for crying out loud, and that's what the 1994 strike was all about, the prevention of the owners from unilaterally imposing working conditions.

There's nothing magical about the number 50 in a 50-game suspension other than the fact that it's a round number. It seems apparent that the Players Association would only accept such a length of time for a first-violation suspension if a minor league rehab stint were exempted from that count. Had they not agreed to such a stint, it's quite possible the players wouldn't have accepted a suspension longer than, say, 40 games, and Ramirez would be coming back cold, or forced to spend a week at the team's extended spring training complex or something. The overall timeline for his return to the majors might not have changed at all.

Labels: Dodgers, Manny Ramirez, radio, steroids

In today's Prosepctus Hit and Run, I examine how the Dodgers have stayed afloat since during Manny Ramirez's suspension, an analysis that took a close look at Juan Pierre:

...Ramirez is eligible to return to the Dodgers' lineup on July 3, and barring a major collapse over their next nine games, which come against three .500ish teams, his team will have weathered his loss just fine. They were 21-8 when the news of his suspension broke, with a +55 run differential, both major league bests. Since then they've gone 25-16 with a +30 run differential, both National League bests, and they've held the Hit List's top spot since the first regular season rankings. At the time, they had a 6½-game lead over their closest pursuers, the Giants, an 8½ game lead over their expected rivals, the Diamondbacks, and an 83.3 percent shot at the playoffs according to our plain-vanilla playoff odds. Now they lead the Giants by 8½ games, with the Diamondbacks DOA at 17 games back, and their overall odds at 97.8 percent. That's about as pretty as a team can sit.

Pierre hasn't homered all year, but his overall slugging percentage is 50 points higher than [James] Loney, 98 points higher than [Rafael] Furcal, and 133 points higher than [Russell] Martin. Indeed, the supreme irony of this entire fiasco is that the ridiculously expensive slap-hitting speedster who had been relegated to fourth outfielder status has gone bonkers upon being restored to the lineup. Pierre collected multiple hits in 14 of the first 20 games after the suspension, and has now done so in 19 of 41, including a three-hit effort in the most recent ESPN Sunday Night Game of the Week against the Angels. Thanks to an unsustainable .368 batting average on balls in play, he's third in the batting race at .337, and his .392 OBP and .433 SLG would both be career highs.

Furthermore, his .198 MLVr trails only Ramirez (.641), [Casey] Blake (.249) and [Matt] Kemp (.211) among Dodger regulars, which raises the question of what happens once Ramirez returns. Last week, manager Joe Torre told reporters he'd be headed back to the bench, but given Andre Ethier's slump in Ramirez's absence (.233/.296/.404) and struggles against lefties (.195/.279 /.377), it's not hard to envision a potential Ramirez-Pierre-Kemp alignment working its way into Torre's rotation; Pierre is hitting .411/.476/.518 in 65 PA against lefties, the kind of small-sample performance Torre might find impossible to resist.

The larger question is whether Pierre's play has boosted his value enough to make him attractive to other teams, and the answer is "probably not." He's about halfway through his absurd five-year deal, owed $10 million this year, $10 million next year, and $8.5 million in 2011. It's unlikely any team is willing to assume the approximately $22 million he'll still have coming after the trading deadline; in the current economic climate, even half that might be a stretch, and with the Dodgers already eating $21 million worth of Andruw Jones pie between here and 2014, it's tough to envision them having an appetite for much more — unless Steve Phillips, who from the ESPN booth has lobbied for the Dodgers to take care of Pierre so often you'd think he was his agent, suddenly finds himself in a GM chair. Suffice it to say that there's no threat of that these days.

...Back to Ramirez, it will be interesting to see how the fan base and the mainstream media, both local and national, handle his return. Prior to his suspension, he had mostly enjoyed a nonstop lovefest even given this winter's contentious negotiations. So long as he can still produce — even if not at the level he had done since last August — the majority of Dodger fans will likely warm to him, rationalizing that he's paid his debt to society. His transgressions will almost certainly generate some boos in opposing ballparks, but that's hardly new given his tenure playing the villain in Boston; on the other hand, his sixth-place showing in the All-Star balloting suggests he's also got his supporters outside the city of angels. But expect that the moment the Dodgers finally lose three games in a row — amazingly, they've yet to do so — you'll see a spate of articles from the usual hacks on Manny's tired act and the way his return has disrupted the team chemistry, hanging poor Juan Pierre out to dry at a time his career was undergoing a renaissance. That train is never late.

Of course, as I note in the article, the team's pitching has plenty to do with their surviving without Manny; they're allowing fewer runs per game than any NL team, they lead in BP's starter- and reliever-based win expectancy metrics, and they're getting by with Jeff Weaver and Eric Milton having made eight starts. That those two as well as free agents Randy Wolf and Casey Blake and nobodies like Ramon Troncoso and Ronald Belisario have been contributors to the team's success even as the Loneys and Martins have disappointed reflect favorably on Colletti and his staff, for all of their various missteps. Even a blind chicken finds a few kernels of corn now and again.

Labels: Dodgers, Hit and Run, Manny Ramirez, steroids

Jose Canseco's stupidity is America's most renewable natural resource. Check this one:

Jose Canseco plans to file a class-action lawsuit against Major League Baseball and the players' association, saying he's been ostracized for going public with tales of steroids use in the sport.

Canseco said Wednesday that he has discussed the suit with lawyers and intends to enlist Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro to join in the suit.

Canseco said the basis of the suit would be "lost wages -- in some cases, defamation of character."

"Because I used steroids and I came out with a book, I was kicked out of the game, but I have not been inducted into the Hall of Fame," Canseco said in a telephone interview.

"A lot of these players have not been inducted into the Hall of Fame: Mark McGwire and so forth. They're losing salaries, because obviously when you're inducted into the Hall of Fame, you get asked to do certain, you know, appearances and shows and so forth, which incorporates income. So there is a major income loss.

"Not even that, baseball blackballs you from their family, meaning you can't have a future proper reference from them, a job, no managerial jobs, no coaching jobs, nothing. They completely sever you."

Let's see, the posterboy for bad behavior in baseball broke the game's steroid rules (however poorly enforced) and the clubhouse code of silence, created a firestorm of negative publicity (but alas, was right about so many that he fingered), served jail time and two years of house arrest due to battery charges stemming from a nightclub brawl (a term which he violated by using steroids, natch), pled guilty to a misdemeanor offense of trying to bring a fertility drug from Mexico into the USA, revealed himself to be not just a total assclown but a flat-broke one, and then suffered every public speaker's second-worst nightmare (showing up without pants being numero uno). And he wants to be MLB's latex salesman? Thinks he's entitled to be considered for employment -- not to mention untold riches -- given that track record?

Don't stop believin', Jose. Without you we'd have much less to laugh about.

Labels: Senility, steroids

For the past two years, I've been appearing nearly every week on a Toledo, Ohio ESPN affiliate, WLQR 1470 AM, as the guest of Norm Wamer for the show "The Front Row." It's my favorite media hit of the week, as Norm and I have a great rapport, and generally at some point during our freewheeling conversations we'll crack each other up while talking about the Tigers (whose Triple-A affiliate is based in Toledo), the Indians (who are geographically closer), the AL Central race, obscure and lousy players from the Seventies and Eighties, or whatever else is at hand in baseball.

I've long wished the station streamed or archived the segments so that those outside that local market could hear them, and finally, it appears that they do both. This week's segment, which was done with fill-in host Joe Rychnovsky, is here. The opening question, which somehow got trimmed, was along the lines of "What's going on with the Nationals and their supposed firing of manager Manny Acta?" We discussed that, Sammy Sosa, the Tigers' pitching staff and more.

Last week's episode, which was done with Wamer and led off with a bit about the draft and first pick Stephen Strasburg (two weeks in a row leading with the Nationals?), is here (skip to 2:30 in), and the one from two weeks ago -- which by my count was the 100th time I've appeared on the show -- is here (skip to 1:45 in). Enjoy!

Update: and here is the Young Guns show from Boston's WWZN 1510 AM.

Labels: radio, Red Sox, steroids

Baseball Musings' David Pinto picks up the link from my last post and wonders if teams will stand pat in the face of the Dodgers losing Manny Ramirez for 50 games:

The Diamondbacks fired their manager, so does a change of field leadership improve the team? Do the Giants try to trade for a bat to help their fine pitching staff win with a good ERA? If you think the Dodgers are going to run away with the division, maybe you don’t make moves to try to catch them. With Manny out, however, there’s an opening to catch them by improving your team.

I'm skeptical that this will trigger any big moves unless either of those teams close the gap significantly, because both are relatively budget conscious these days. The Diamondbacks spent the winter bracing for hard economic times, laying off around 30 front office employees and letting expensive free agents such as Adam Dunn, Orlando Hudson and Randy Johnson depart; they then turned around and signed Jon Garland for nearly the same price as the Big Unit. For all of their belt-tightening, their payroll rose by abut $7.3 million over last year; they ranked 20th in Opening Day payroll at $73.5 million.

The notoriously tight-fisted Giants, on the other hand, increased their payroll from $76.6 to $82.6 million (13th) this winter in an effort to break their two-year streak of 90+ losses. They made $37.25 million in salary commitments, the NL West's largest outlay and the eighth-largest in the game, though admittedly that's a rounding error relative to the Yankees' $441 million worth of commitments. Aside from a few untouchable blue-chippers, including giggleworthy pitcher Madison Bumgarner (yes, really) they don't have a lot to deal in a midseason prospects-for-veterans swap.

Both teams probably have some wiggle room to add salary if they're truly contenders, but recently we've seen a shift in the way teams value prospects in general. Even if either one pulls the trigger, the Dodgers have far more resources — prospects as well as mony — and more leeway, as they cut salary from $118.6 million to $100.4 million while still signing making an NL-high $105.9 million in commitments via free agents Hudson, Ramirez, Casey Blake, Rafael Furcal, Randy Wolf et al. Certainly, I don't think you'll see either of their competitors go to the whip early and trade for a CC Sabathia or an Adam Dunn until they make up considerable ground on the Mannyless Dodgers.

• • •

Here's this week's Hit List. That's my fourth article at BP in the last three days, breaking last week's record of four in four. Mixing things up from my usual selection, here are the Yankees as well as a couple of the more interesting entries:

[#13 Braves] You're a Dull Boy, Frenchy: After supposedly finding the religion of plate discipline over the winter, Jeff Francoeur is back to his old ways, drawing just four walks in 118 PA, and getting on base at a .305 OBP clip that's actually seven points below his career rate. "If on-base percentage is so important, then why don't they put it up on the scoreboard?" he muses, indicating that yes, there are questions so dumb they shouldn't be asked.

[#14 Angels] Nap Time At Last: Just three days shy of three full years in the majors, Mike Napoli finally gets a start at DH—three of them, in fact — and responds by going 8-for-11 with 13 total bases. You'd think such a move would have been glaringly obvious by now given the presence of a defensively superior catcher and the absence of Vlad Guerrero, the lone Angel with a higher OPS since Napoli hit Anaheim back in 2006. Alas, old-schooler Mike Scioscia labors under the notion that there are only two positions for a backstop: a-squattin' and a-sittin'. Napoli's hitting .328/.444/.642, just two points of batting average shy of leading the team in all three triple-slash categories.

[#19 Yankees] The Yanks lose five straight and fall to 3-10 within the AL East after defeats by Boston and Tampa Bay, and they lose Jorge Posada to the disabled list due to a hamstring strain along the way. The good news is that Alex Rodriguez will rejoin the lineup on Friday; in his absence, Yankee third basemen have hit .202/.248/.283. The bad news is that he can't do anything about the MLB-worst 6.3 runs per game the pitching staff is allowing.

Also at BP, in addition to my Manny math is my two-part series (National and American Leagues) on which April results are meaningful as far as the playoff races are concerned. From the AL piece:

In the East, history suggests that we ignore Toronto's hot start at our peril; 18-10 teams with three straight seasons above .500 tend to keep the good times rolling. On the other hand, particularly with three teams forecast to win at least 94 games, the PECOTA-based odds suggest a deck still stacked heavily against the Blue Jays, and last week I identified a handful of reasons they might regress. Forecast to have the league's lowest-scoring offense, they're suddenly and improbably the highest-scoring unit, fueled by an infield that's hitting a combined .303/.380/.479, with Aaron Hill (.360/.404/.552) and Marco Scutaro (.262/.400/.458) both particularly over their heads. Their rotation has been decimated by injuries, and it's possible that three starters who helped them post the league's top ERA last year — Dustin McGowan and Shaun Marcum, both rehabbing from off-season arm surgeries, as well as departed free agent A.J. Burnett — won't throw a single pitch for them this year. Through the end of April they had played the league's second-easiest schedule (.474, based on PECOTA-projections), but they'll face the AL's second-hardest (.513) overall. Not helping the Jays is the fact that the indicators suggest that neither the Yankees nor Rays have scuffled enough to rule them out, and both have substantial upgrades waiting in the wings — the former in the form of Alex Rodriguez, the latter via David Price, the game's top pitching prospect.

If you like the ESPN Insider flavor better, you've got your AL and NL versions too.

• • •

Thanks to Manny, A-Rod's latest controversy is old, old news. I don't feel particularly inclined to weigh in to great extent except to note that it seems clear the worm has turned for Selena Roberts, author of the dumpster-diving exposé which has rocked the baseball world with revelations that Rodriguez only tips 15 percent at Hooters. Where her discovery that the slugger tested positive during the supposedly anonymous 2004 survey testing was a legitimate (if rather unsavory) journalistic coup, her latest allegations reek of smear tactics and innuendo, serving to remind the world of her own tarnished past and her execrable writing style.

Before you close your mental drawer on the situation, here are a few must-read links:

• The Kansas City Star's Jason Whitlock reminds readers of Roberts' infamous handling of the Duke lacrosse rape allegations:

She claimed that the players’ unwillingness to confess to or snitch about a rape (that did not happen) was the equivalent of drug dealers and gang members promoting antisnitching campaigns.

When since-disgraced district attorney Mike Nifong whipped up a media posse to rain justice on the drunken, male college students, Roberts jumped on the fastest, most influential horse, using her New York Times column to convict the players and the culture of privilege that created them.

Proven inaccurate, Roberts never wrote a retraction for the columns that contributed to the public lynching of Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans.

In a follow-up column at Fox Sports, Whitlock continues his attack: "By refusing to acknowledge her mistakes in the Duke case, she creates the impression that her agenda trumps the truth." Ahem.

• Steve Goldman weighs in with an excellent Pinstriped Bible:

I don't trust Roberts' judgment, I don't trust her understanding of baseball, and I don't trust her motives in writing a book about Alex Rodriguez that surely would not exist were it not intended to be a hit piece. If Rodriguez was juicing in high school or kindergarten, it goes to character, not performance, and we have had countless reasons to know that he's not Mother Theresa in the clubhouse or off the field. Neither were Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, et al. Cobb's reward was to die friendless, Ruth and Mantle died young, the causes of their cancer probably not unrelated to their youthful carousing, and Williams' own son had him decapitated and stuck in a freezer.

...If Rodriguez used steroids in high school, that tells us a little more about Rodriguez the man but nothing of substance about Rodriguez the ballplayer. If he used HGH as a Yankees, well, HGH seems to help athletes with recovery time and healing, not performance. So does aspirin. Move on. Xavier Nady is having platelets shot into his elbow. The dividing line between these two therapies is entirely arbitrary.

As for Roberts' allegations of Rodriguez tipping pitches as a Ranger, they had best be better sourced than her work on the Duke case. According to SI.com, "Roberts said that over the course of a couple years, some people with the Rangers began to detect a pattern whereby Rodriguez would appear to be giving away pitch type and location to hitters, always middle infielders who would then be able to repay him in kind when he was at the plate, with his body movement."

It is extraordinary to think that "some people" would notice this and not alert management as to the practice. Unless there is videotape evidence, or Roberts' sources are willing to come forward and explain why they sat on their knowledge that Rodriguez was damaging his own pitchers, this must be dismissed as the worst kind of hearsay. That Roberts knows relatively little about baseball must be considered here -- her credulity and our skepticism must be of equal proportion.

Word.

• Of all people, it's noted blogger/blog-hater Murray Chass who offers the definitive takedown of Roberts:

In general, Roberts makes far too many serious allegations about Rodriguez to hide them behind anonymous quotes. Rodriguez deserves more, but more importantly readers deserve more. There is far too much in this attack book for Roberts to expect readers to take it on faith that her anonymous sources are real and they can be trusted.

The use of anonymous sources has come under increasing criticism from readers of all types of publications. Having used them frequently in my decades as a reporter and columnist, I am aware of the problems they pose. Reporters have to establish their credibility with their use of unidentified sources for readers to accept them.

Roberts and I were once colleagues at The New York Times, and I can’t say she established that credibility. She also didn’t strike me as being a top-flight reporter. As a result, I don’t feel I can trust her book full of anonymous sources. Even if every single A-Rod transgression she reports is accurate, it’s too easy for her to write one former teammate said this and another player said that.

...Roberts belies her understanding of baseball with an observation she makes in trying to offer an example of A-Rod on steroids. Citing the game in August 2002 in which he hit three home runs, she writes that his “performance set off the steroid alarms,” explaining, “In the dog days of the season, when players are wilting, A-Rod had fresh legs and a fresher bat.”

And she quotes an unnamed “Ranger teammate” as saying, “It’s that stuff that makes you say no (bleeping) way.”

No way? Both Roberts and the teammate should consult The Elias Book of Baseball Records,” pages 359 through 362. The list of players who hit three or more home runs shows that 76 players other than Rodriguez hit three or more home runs in August.

Gil Hodges slugged four for the Brooklyn Dodgers Aug. 31, 1950. Hall of Famer Jim Rice hit three in a game twice, both games being played Aug. 29. Other Hall of Famers who hit three in an August game were Ralph Kiner, Larry Doby, Ernie Banks, Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson and Eddie Murray (twice).

It has never been suggested that any of those players used steroids.

Yeah, ouch.

Labels: Alex Rodriguez, Dodgers, Manny Ramirez, steroids

I didn't have much time for surprise yesterday when the news hit that Manny Ramirez had drawn a 50-game suspension for violating Major League Baseball's drug policy. Before I could untangle my own emotions, catch my breath, dig into this week's Hit List or get the full breadth of the rapidly evolving story, I'd been assigned a piece for Baseball Prospectus and ESPN Insider examining the cost on the field to the Dodgers, one that specifically re-evaluated a "reality check" piece I'd just published for the two sites examining the NL's first month.

Here's a taste:

Just as looked as though the Dodgers might run away with the National League West, they were hit with a bombshell on Thursday, namely Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension for violating Major League Baseball's drug policy. Leaving the specifics of his violation to the reporters except to note that he won't be eligible to return until July 3, the question is whether his absence will put the division in play. The answer — sorry, Diamondbacks fans and Manny haters — is probably not.

Despite haggling with the Dodgers over his contract into early March and suffering a hamstring strain during his second week of spring training, Ramirez had picked up where he left off last year, hitting .348/.492/.641 and leading the NL in OBP and walks. His performance has helped power the Dodgers to the majors' best record (21-8), run differential (+55) and Equivalent Average (.286), not to mention a modern major league record 13-0 start at home. The team currently leads the Giants by 6.5 game and the Diamondbacks by 8.5 games.

At the outset of the season, our PECOTA projections pegged the Dodgers as a 93-win team with a 47.8 percent chance of winning the division and a 9.4 percent chance of taking the Wild Card, with the Diamondbacks at 88 wins, 34.7 percent, and 10.3 percent, respectively. Updating today's "Reality Check" piece to include Wednesday night's results and their ramifications in the PECOTA-based version of our Playoff Odds report, the Dodgers are projected to win 100 games (a .619 winning percentage), with an 84.1 percent chance of winning the division and a 4.7 percent chance of taking the Wild Card, while Arizona is projected to win 84 games (a .521 winning percentage), with 10.7 and 12.1 percent shots at the division and Wild Card. In other words, the Dodgers have widened the gap considerably on their closest rivals. The Giants, meanwhile, are still projected for just a 78-wn season, with a 3.4 percent shot at the division and 4.6 percent chance at the Wild Card.

After running through the Marginal Lineup Value Rate-based cost in runs of the Dodgers' three in-house candidates to replace him — Juan Pierre, rookie Xavier Paul, and third baseman Blake DeWitt, who would force Casey Blake to the outfield — I suggested another means of calculation:

As an alternative way to gauge the impact of Ramirez's absence, suppose we segment the Dodgers' season into three unequal parts, namely the 29 games they've already played, the 50 games they'll be without Ramirez, and the 83 games they'll have left once he returns. For the first segment we pencil in the team's actual scoring rates to date, and for the latter two segments, we use the team's PECOTA-projected scoring rates, applying the worst-case "Manny Hit" (-0.568 runs per game) for the course of his suspension:

Segment     RS     RA
First 29   5.55   3.66   Actual
Next 50    4.49   4.39   PECOTA minus 0.568 r/g offense
Final 83   5.06   4.39   PECOTA
Overall    4.98   4.26

Using Pythagenpat, that's a .573 winning percentage and a 93-win pace, or right where we pegged the Dodgers at the outset of the year. While this math is effectively saying that the cost of losing Ramirez may be enough to undo the extra advantage they've gained with their quick bolt from the gate, that still leaves the Diamondbacks having to find about 10 wins to overtake the Dodgers.

The bottom line is that Ramirez's absence likely won't cost the boys in blue the NL West flag. It could tighten the race, but the only real certainty is that it will be less colorful.

Before the day ended, I wound up doing radio hits for ESPN's Austin affiliate as well as my regular WWZN Boston spot, and this morning, like clockwork, I'm making the rounds on the Fox News Radio network. Catch me yakking with your local drive time host:

WJNO West Palm Beach, FL
0710AM ET

WSYR Syracuse, NY
0735AM ET

WTVN Columbus, OH
0742AM ET

WGIR Manchester, NH
0750AM ET

KTRH Houston, TX
0805AM ET

WOAI San Antonio, TX
0840AM ET

KCOL Fort Collins, CO
0935AM ET

KOGO San Diego, CA
1007AM ET

Back later with more.

Labels: Dodgers, Manny Ramirez, radio, steroids

In addition to flattering me with some choice casting, El Lefty Malo (a/k/a Alex Lash, a mentor from way back) raised a provocative question in this post last week: is sabermetrics anti-labor?

One thing about our sabremetric era that doesn't get discussed much: it's inherently anti-labor. "Efficiencies" is not a word workers want to hear from the executive suite. When Bob Seger sang "I Feel Like a Number," he wasn't talking about OPS+ or Revised Zone Rating (and by "Like a Rock" he sho nuff didn't mean Tim Raines), but there's more than a grain of truth to the suspicion that all this statistical research turns people into commodities as owners squeeze the most performance from the least amount of capital.

But one man's soulless Futuramic dystopia is another man's common sense. Why not try to figure out who actually plays better defense? Why not ask what, exactly, is the pitcher's contribution to his team's success? Smart players will take advantage of the technology, too, whether it's digital video or higher math.

Besides, when we describe baseball players as "labor," we're not exactly talking the downtrodden and oppressed. Baseball players are, shall we say, exquisitely exploited. If this report is accurate, Bobby Abreu is about to take a 67% pay cut, and he'll still make at least $5 million. After pocketing more than nine digits during his illustrious career, Tom Glavine isn't sure he's willing to play for $1 million.

...So when I root for the Giants to build the best team possible at the most sensible price, I guess I'm siding with The Man and against my brothers in the fields. So much for solidarity. I don't feel too guilty. The players' union, like many other unions in history, has grown from a righteous cause to a juggernaut that has made its share of transgressions. For example, there are some who feel it's just as complicit as management in the steroids cover-up. It wouldn't surprise me one bit.

...What's all this about? Perhaps as player contracts have increased, they've alienated more fans. Perhaps as prices have gone up, the fan base has become more white collar, more identified with ownership, not labor. Maybe it's the Internet's fault, making math and statistics and computing power so much easier for kids to get hold of. Damn you, Internet.

At times I've wondered about this question myself. In the six years since Moneyball was published, most of its lessons have been absorbed into front offices, but at a pace much more slowly than that of the business world (see Michael Lewis' epilogue). Those lessons resonated most clearly with an audience of baseball fans who fancy themselves as the next Billy Beane -- or, given even greater success -- the next Theo Epstein. Stat geeks channel their inner GMs, talking of team-building and refusing to overpay for mediocrity.

Nonetheless, I think it should be apparent that among this crowd is enough understanding of the game's historical nuances, from the rising and falling tides of offensive levels to the long and sordid history of its labor-versus-management battles, to find plenty of sympathy for the players' side. Search "Marvin Miller" in the Baseball Prospectus database and you'll find a wide selection of articles by numerous authors which either tilt towards the labor side or are heavily critical of the management side, and in particular, commissioner Bud Selig. I've written about Miller myself, and have long viewed the game's steroid saga through the lens of the labor battles which left the union with the upper hand when it came to any attempts to impose testing. From a 2004 FI piece:

While I want to see the game I'm so passionate about come up with a sensible way to handle the problem, I see the failure to do already in the context of a labor-versus-management war that has waged continuously for the past 35 years. The owners have historically shown a strong aversion to bargaining in good faith and produced union-busting tactics such as collusion and replacement players, and they've offered up a general dishonesty about the game's financial state as well. None of this justifies the players' use of such substances, but the owners' actions haven't engendered the kind of trust necessary for the Major League Baseball Players Association to join the owners in constructing an effective and proactive means of combating their usage either. While the players' conduct in this matter hasn't been exemplary, their hands have yet to be forced, and the MLBPA didn't get to be the most powerful labor union in history by selling out its rank and file just to appease a casual fan's notion that everything was a chemical-free hunky dory.

While I had another couple of thousand words to follow this post regarding the less-than-flattering picture of the Major League Baseball Players Association that's been painted by the A-Rod affair, that entry got stuck in the pipeline behind my other work, and now we've got Rodriguez's press conference shit show to consider...

Or not. While I thought Rodriguez did a particularly craptacular job on Tuesday with his fable of the unnamed cousin administering an compound of unknown effect on an unspecified schedule during that "loosey goosey" era of being not-quite-so-young but certainly stupid, I'm far more tired of the way the mainstream pundits manufacture outrage in 800-word parcels while failing to acknowledge their own culpability in an issue that's more nuanced than "liar, liar, pants on fire!/cheater, cheater, pumpkin-eater!" Remember, those pundits the ones who anointed Rodriguez the New Hope after they were forced to topple the previous gods they anointed such as Mark McGwire. They're the ones who looked the other way while ballplayers were gobbling greenies back in the day and failed to report the steroid story as it was unfolding in major league locker rooms. They're the ones who forget that all too often, big-money athletes have big-time failings as human beings, and their ability to hit curveballs 450 feet doesn't make them saints or qualify them to be role models. Exactly what credentials do they have to serve as judge, jury, or executioner?

A-Rod deserves plenty of anger, sure, but the guy didn't commit murder, didn't bust his wife in the mouth for burning dinner, didn't gamble on baseball, didn't steal an election, didn't wage a war based on faulty intelligence, didn't cause the economy to collapse, didn't bilk investors out of billions, didn't cancel Arrested Development. For all of his obfuscations, he's admitted to far more wrongdoing regarding steroid usage than any other player accused of using ever has, yet there appear to be some who won't be satisfied with anything less than him opening up his wrists in remorse and bleeding to death mid-press conference while confessing to drowning kittens in puddles of spilled human growth hormone.

Colleague Joe Sheehan hit it out of the park yesterday at BP:

One of the ongoing notions in the past decade's witch-hunting is that people -- really, the media -- just want players to confess, to own up to what they did. The idea is that by coming clean, the public -- really, the media -- will forgive them and allow them to get on with their careers. In fact, most of the case against Mark McGwire is that he didn't do just that, and baseball fans -- really, the media -- have never forgiven him. The legal case against Barry Bonds isn't about drug use, but about words. Rafael Palmeiro failed a test, but his reaction to it, pointing fingers at teammates, is what doomed him. We -- really, the media -- hate this behavior, belittle it, and yearn for a player who will talk about his use.

Yesterday afternoon, Alex Rodriguez sat down and answered as many questions about his use of performance-enhancing substances as any team-sports athlete ever has. No one has ever gone into the level of detail that Rodriguez did in his statement and in the 40 minutes of questioning that followed. No one has copped to as extensive a usage history. Whether you think he would have been there absent Selena Roberts' reporting, the fact is that he provided more information about his personal use than any player caught up in this mess.

Yet it's still not enough for many. The reaction to Rodriguez's press conference has been at best apathetic, and at worst, critical. His demeanor, his word choice, his expressions, his inflections have all been picked apart, and he's been given no credit for the details he provided. There's an assumption that he's being deceptive, duplicitous, and insincere. Whether this stems from the dislike so many people have for this very insecure man, the dislike of his agent, or the general disdain for the successful and wealthy -- let's face it, sports coverage has devolved into thinly disguised class warfare -- this most open moment has been dismissed, and Rodriguez has been given no credit for providing it.

Contrast that with the reaction to the press conference at which the Chargers' Shawne Merriman openly discussed his... oh, wait, that didn't happen. It didn't happen because the NFL doesn't have a vested interest in making its players look bad to gain the upper hand in an unending war against its own product. The NFL would never sustain a story like that through multiple news cycles, never allow PED use to overwhelm the story of training camps opening, never contribute to speculation that its game and its stars were somehow less than because of their behavior.

The other day, Bud Selig whined that he shouldn't be held responsible for the so-called "steroid era," claiming that he wanted to talk about the problem as far back as 1995. As I've mentioned, Selig has flipped on this issue a few times, sometimes claiming to have been fighting it for a while, sometimes claiming he didn't know there was a problem. I suppose he could have been fighting a problem he didn't know about. It's not as if Selig was running a needle-exchange program, but given that the man was an owner for 25 years and commissioner after that, I'm going to say that he had both the knowledge and the authority to do more than he did. His busy schedule of misleading Congress, putting out endlessly innumerate claims of poverty, attempting to break the union, destroying franchises, and extorting billions of dollars from taxpayers didn't allow much time for attacking this issue.

Selig's announcement last week that he was mulling punishment for Rodriguez was particularly laughable given the non-punitive nature of the original offense (which was supposed to remain anonymous, of course) and the ease with which an arbitrator would have swatted such an attempt away. "Jaffe mulls punishment for Selig" would have been just as credible a headline. The commissioner and the union leadership deserve to be sweating from the heat of the spotlight now just as Rodriguez is.

Anyway, I could go on, but I've had enough of this unappealing topic for the moment except to say that the idea that A-Rod is beyond redemption because of this transgression is pretty dumb. He's got nine more years of playing ball according to the terms of his contract, and while the guy has shown his ineptitude at dealing with life beyond the foul lines, he's hardly down to his last at-bat in the public sphere. If the media intends to make his every day as miserable as the past several have been -- not just for the slugger, but for fans who have some sense of scale regarding his actions and their context, fans eager to embrace the renewal marked by the rite of pitchers and catchers reporting -- then this truly is our prison without bars.

Labels: Alex Rodriguez, steroids, Yankees

The Alex Rodriguez story took a new turn on Monday evening, as A-Rod submitted to an exclusive interview by ESPN's Peter Gammons in which he admitted to using steroids from 2001 to 2003 while a member of the Texas Rangers. While the interview was relatively softball -- the hand-picked Gammons is about as threatening as Barbara Walters -- Rodriguez admitted to wrongdoing, repeatedly using words like stupid, selfish, arrogant and naive to describe his actions, which he claimed were a reaction to the pressure of living up to the 10-year, $252 million contract which brought him to Texas.

It was a reasonably solid performance, though Rodriguez's obvious lack of facility in the glare of the spotlight has left no shortage of wags taking issue with his lack of uncontrollable sobbing and occasionally vague descriptions of his usage, parsing his every word and feigning outrage that he didn't give them the beeper number of his dealer or the name of each substance and its page number in the Physician's Desk Reference. Even the delay between the story's break and Rodriguz's interview pissed some pundits off, as if they expected an athlete with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and endorsement at stake to do something besides consult a lawyer under the circumstances. If it wasn't baseball's finest hour, it was hardly sports journalism's finest hour either. NBC Sports' Mike Celizic was the rare exception (hat tip to Cory Schwartz for the link):

To A-Rod’s credit, his response to ESPN after being caught sounded pretty honest. He said he was young and naïve and he wanted to prove he was worth the biggest contract in baseball history. 'Roids were part of the culture of the game then, so he took whatever the other guys were taking that helped them play better.

It might sound shallow, but the guy’s a jock. What do you expect?

I know Rodriguez lied a couple of years back when Katie Couric asked him if he had ever used the juice, but I’m not going to hold that against him. That was the same as asking him if he had ever cheated on his wife. Or asking elected officials if they’re atheists. People don’t answer those questions honestly unless they are under oath or confronted with the evidence against them. Even then, they try to wriggle out of it because if you admit it, you’re dead.

No matter how sincere, one single apology isn't going to win over Rodriguez's toughest critics, but the fact is that he has already done more than Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro and Mark McGwire put together in response to the allegations. Instead of blanket denials and legal threats, he took responsibility, showed accountability, brought water to the raging bonfire instead of gasoline. It's not the end of the story, but it's a step in the right direction.

Making the rounds on the radio this morning, I was struck by the lack of outrage my Fox News Radio hosts showed relative to our previous discussions about Bonds, Clemens and the topic in general. Perhaps there's a selection bias at work; I've made the rounds on this circuit often enough and shown enough resistance to pandering to turn off extremists like the particular female host in a New England state who clearly had a pitchfork stuck in her derrière over Clemens. All of which reminds me that it was Jose Canseco's allegations regarding Rodriguez which essentially bumped me off of my tabloid TV debut for Inside Edition back in December 2007. The producer kept pressing me for a two-second soundbite like "A-Rod is the last hope," but I knew I could never face myself or my colleagues if I fed the beast on their terms. I said words to the effect that the game is more than resilient enough to withstand the wrongdoings of its biggest stars, and that it's a mistake to invest too much hope in any single player but that Rodriguez, if clean, certainly had the chops to pass Bonds. That deliberately wordy answer left me on the cutting room floor, but I never regretted the outcome.

Only a small handful of what I've read on the subject over the past couple days is worth sharing, but before passing on a few links, I'd like to point out the article that inspired this title. With the absolutism of a four-year-old, the New York Daily News' Bill Madden called upon the Yankees to eat the $270 million remaining on Rodriguez's contract. You read that right. They're supposed cut off their noses to spite their faces by taking the financial hit on behalf of the entire industry over something which (if Rodriguez is to be believed) took place on another team's watch. Seriously, the guy's brainpan has to be dripping to pen an article that insults the intelligence of its readers so blatantly that it's not out of line to suggest that the Daily News should eat HIS contract. You may not be dumber after reading Madden's piece, but you'll certainly be angrier.

Among the responses to the whole imbroglio worth mentioning, Newsday's Ken Davidoff was quick to point out the trampling of the Fourth Amendment that's brought this whole scandal to light:

No matter how much you despise him, A-Rod is as much victim as wrongdoer in this ugly saga, unveiled yesterday by SI.com's Selena Roberts and David Epstein. Whatever level of embarrassment A-Rod feels today, the United States government should be 20 times more ashamed...

For A-Rod's name to get out is a journalistic triumph for Roberts, an established, terrific reporter, and Epstein. And it's a disgrace for our government, which couldn't protect this very sensitive information.

While it's too late for A-Rod, it's not too late for our government to be reprimanded some more. We saw it this past week, as Judge Susan Illston indicated that she would not permit some of the crucial evidence that the feds had compiled in their perjury case against Bonds.

Back in 2004, when IRS agent Jeff Novitzky first acquired the testing records, Illston questioned Novitzky's tactics and honesty, as reported by Jonathan Littman of Yahoo!

"I think the government has displayed . . . a callous disregard for constitutional rights," Illston said in open court, according to Littman. "I think it's a seizure beyond what was authorized by the search warrant; therefore, it violates the Fourth Amendment."

BP colleague Derek Jacques, a lawyer by trade, succinctly explained the story arc of the samples relative to the subpoenas and search warrants:

The authorities' seizure of the non-BALCO 2003 tests was a little more than "serendipitous." A search warrant is supposed to be very specific, limiting the authorities to only searching for and/or seizing specific items they have probable cause to believe may be evidence of a crime. The IRS search warrant related to baseball players connected to BALCO, and since BALCO was allegedly dealing in PEDs, they had probable cause to think that MLB's survey testing of the players in question would turn up evidence that the players in question were using steroids, possibly sold to them by BALCO. The Feds should have only grabbed the results of those ten players, but they instead wound up seizing the test results for all the more than 1,000 players tested. This was convenient, since they'd requested all the results in a subpoena that the two laboratories were fighting at the time the IRS raided their offices. It's a long story that's still pending appeal.

Rodriguez's former teammate Doug Glanville, who writes the occasional Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, was able to looked beyond A-Rod's transgressions, echoing Davidoff's unease with the violation of rights:

I'm not surprised by baseball's extensive drug culture. It's part of the game's history and has as much to do with insecurity as greed. Players have to capitalize on opportunity, and at the hypercompetitive major-league level that’s like threading a needle — no wonder they will do just about anything to get ahead. Not that this justifies taking performance-enhancing drugs.

But before we get self-righteous, we should look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether exposing A-Rod, or any player for that matter, is worth stepping all over rights, privacy, confidentiality and anonymity.

There is a lot of outrage out there about Alex. Not surprising. But what really surprises me is the lack of outrage about how a confidential and anonymous test could be made public. We seem to gloss over the fact that these players voted to re-open a collectively bargained agreement in a preliminary effort to address the drug problem. When privileged information is shared it effectively hurts anyone who has expected privacy in any circumstance, just as when someone made Brittany Spears's medical records public.

The 2003 test was only supposed to assess whether the number of players using performance-enhancing drugs exceeded a certain threshold. If it did, as part of the agreement, a full drug policy would be instituted in the following testing year. One that was more comprehensive with penalties. This was at least a step in the right direction.

So: if Alex tested positive then, but he hasn't since (and Monday he stated that he’s played clean since joining the Yankees), maybe that program served its purpose as a deterrent. If we take the higher ground and talk about the greater good of the game, then why create trust issues between owners and players by allowing an agreement to be breached this way? It undermines any sense of cooperation.

The Daily News' John Harper suggested that the heads of the Major League Baseball Players Association, executive director Donald Fehr and chief operating officer Gene Orza, should roll

So now it's likely to get messy again, and scary for players whose names are on that list with, allegedly, A-Rod. You'd think that this might stir up the union's rank-and-file, but players have long been intimidated by the clout Fehr and Orza have held as leaders of the most powerful union in sports, clout earned over decades of tough negotiating that made their membership incredibly wealthy.

As such, players have rarely challenged Fehr and Orza in public, or even in meetings behind closed doors. And one former player last night said that even after all the embarrassment brought on by the various steroids incidents, he can't imagine current players overthrowing the union leadership.

It would take an organized movement," the former player said. "And players aren't going to want to get involved with something like that. Players won't do anything that might mess with their careers or their money, and there has always been a feeling that you don't want those guys (Fehr and Orza) mad at you."

In fact, the former player said he preferred not to use his name because even in retirement, he feared the possibility of ramifications for speaking out against Fehr and Orza.

Orza stood accused of tipping off Rodriguez to a 2004 test, according to Selena Roberts and David Epstein's report, a similar allegation to one voiced in the Mitchell Report that was later attributed to David Segui. In a press release, the union denied any wrongdoing (surprise) and laid out a timeline regarding the federal governemnt's conveniently-timed subpoenas which prevented the relevant samples from being destroyed. Plausible, perhaps, but the union hasn't exactly basked in glory by failing to clarify this until now. And if there's more than a sliver of truth to Harper's description of a union in thrall to a thuggish, unresponsive leadership, now would be a good opportunity for a change of direction.

Also rising to the occasion was colleague Joe Sheehan, who pointed a finger at the most hysterical of the chattering classes:

Knowing Alex Rodriguez used PEDs, in the context of those names, isn't information that changes anything. A great baseball player did bad things with the implicit approval — hell, arguably explicit approval—of his peers and his employers. It's cheating, yes, which would be a problem if we hadn't been celebrating cheating in baseball since the days when guys would go first to third over the pitcher's mound. You can argue that it's different in degree, though the widely accepted use of PEDs by peers and superiors, and the use of amphetamines before them, is a strong point against that case. What is clear is that it's not different enough, in degree, to warrant the kind of histrionics we're reading and hearing over this. It's not different enough to turn Alex Rodriguez into a piñata.

Of course, the screaming is about the screamers. The loudest voices on the evils of steroids in baseball are in the media, and there's probably a dissertation in that notion, because for all that we have to hear about how greedy, evil players have ruined baseball by taking these substances (and then playing well, according to this selective interpretation; no one's ripping Chris Donnels these days), the reason we're talking about this in 2009 is that so many "reporters" — scare quotes earned — went ostrich in 1999. We hear every year around awards time that the people closest to the game know the game better than anyone, because they're in the clubhouse every day, and they talk to everyone, and they have a perspective that outsiders can't possibly understand. For those same people to do a collective Captain Renault, which they've been doing since beating up players for this transgression became acceptable, is shameful. Take your pick: they missed the story, or they were too chicken-shit to report it. In either case, the piling-on now is disgusting.

In the same way that the reporters who vote for the Hall of Fame are going to take their embarrassment out on Mark McGwire, and probably Barry Bonds and Rafael Palmeiro behind him, and god knows who to follow, they should punish themselves as well. I propose that for as long as a clearly qualified Hall of Famer remains on the ballot solely because of steroid allegations—or for that matter, proven use—there should be no J.G. Taylor Spink Award given out to writers. If we're going to allow failures during the "Steroid Era" to affect eligibility for honors, let's make sure we catch everyone who acted shamefully.

Colleague Steven Goldman, writing over at YES, offered not one but 11 reactions to the news:

3. Most of the players caught taking steroids have been of the most fringe-y types. These fellows did not turn into Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez. It's hard to see that they received any benefit at all. When we turn to a Bonds or an A-Rod and say that they received a great benefit from using, not only are we automatically in the realm of conjecture about the basic effects, we're also positing that they received a benefit beyond what other users received. While it is known that certain medications will affect various individuals differently (the impact of side effects varies, for example), it is something of a stretch to say that one guy gets nothing and the next guy gets 50 home runs, or even 10 extra home runs. If you've had radiation administered to your eyes, as I have, you will find out that some people have their vision reduced, and some go completely blind (as I have). One guy in a hundred does not turn into Cyclops of the X-Men and go about shooting bad guys with his optic force beams. That kind of result just isn't on the menu of possibilities.

...5. Rodriguez had the best offensive season of his career in 2007. His 2008 offensive output wasn't too different, when adjusted for context, than his now-tainted 2003 performance. How do we reconcile these things, assuming Rodriguez was clean after 2003 or 2004? Wouldn't it be naïve of us to believe that 2003 was the only time A-Rod was using?

6. Clearly, using PEDs does not help you come up with the big hit in a postseason game.

Goldman hits on a great point, one that I made several times in the course of my radio rounds. For every A-Rod or Bonds whose numbers fit into our stereotype of what performance-enhancing drugs do to the statistics of the game, there are dozens of obscure players from the ranks of the BALCO files or the Mitchell Report who saw no discernible improvement. Trying to weed such players out of PECOTA, as some Baseball Prospectus readers have suggested, is a pointless exercise, not only because we have no basis to accurately determine what was used and when, but because the bottom line is that in the grand scheme it makes little difference to our ability to measure performance in retrospect or to forecast it going forward. And trying to wish the numbers away by expunging the record books -- a common theme on the talk radio circuit -- isn't going to happen. If the stats from the 1919 World Series are still on the books, the ones compiled by A-Rod, Clemens, Bonds et al ain't going anywhere.

Anyway, that's some of the good stuff, which beats the hell out of reading tripe like this. I still think it's likely to get worse before it gets better, but for one day, at least, Alex Rodriguez made progress towards putting this story behind us.

Labels: Alex Rodriguez, radio, steroids

As usual, big news in baseball's steroid story means me waking up at oh-dark-thirty to field a handful of interviews for the Fox News Radio network, talking sense to the occasionally inflamed radio hosts, though with the Alex Rodriguez story shifting a bit int he wake of yesterday evening's interview with ESPN's Peter Gammons, tempers may have cooled somewhat.

Here's today's docket, many of which can be heard over these stations' web sites. All times Eastern:

WTVN Columbus, OH
7:42 AM ET

WTAG Worcester, MA
8:06 AM ET

WOAI San Antonio, TX
8:40 AM ET

WSYR Syracuse, NY
8:50 AM ET

KTRH Houston, TX
9:20 AM ET

KFAB Omaha, NE
9:35 AM ET

KFBK Sacramento, CA
10:18AM ET

Labels: radio, steroids

It's a dark day for baseball, the revelation that Alex Rodriguez was among the 104 players who failed a drug test in 2003. Never mind the fact that the test was supposedly anonymous and carried no punitive consequences but was being conducted as a survey to establish whether Major League Baseball should implement more stringent testing for performance-enhancing drugs. The soapboxes have already been mounted, and it's clear that this news will bypass the thaw promised by the impending arrival of pitchers and catchers. For those looking to further vilify the game's highest-paid, least media-savvy superstar, the Summer of Hate has begun.

A-Roid Scandal... Yankees Stuck with A-Fraud... Alex a Total Bust... Tarnished Forever... Roid-riguez in Hall of Shame... that's just a small selection of one day's headlines. Those of us who live in the Big Apple get to read stuff like this for the next nine years, if Rodriguez plays through the end of his contract. Oh, joy.

Like a foot-long shit sandwich, this story stinks seven ways to Sunday. It stinks for those of us who've stood by the Hammerin' Hamlet with the frosted tips as we've witnessed him performing some of the most remarkable feats on the diamond that we've ever seen (three home runs in one game, two homers in one inning) as well as the most bone-headed (the glove slap) -- and that's before touching his infamous opt-out. It stinks for those who supported him when he was thrown under the bus by Joe Torre not once or twice but thrice, most recently over the manager's own laundry-airing "autobiography" in conjunction with Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci. It stinks for those who wanted to believe that Jose Canseco was off base when he pointed the finger at A-Rod. It stinks for those who bore hope that Rodriguez might eventually restore some dignity to the all-time home run record after it had been sullied by Barry Bonds' joyless quest.

The stench is hardly alleviated once we move beyond whatever faith was misguidedly placed in Rodriguez; by now we should have known better. This stinks for fans of due process, the right to privacy, and collective bargaining. That the confidentiality of the 2003 testing, the product of a collectively bargained agreement, was not safeguarded is a black eye for both the players' union and Major League Baseball, who have federal investigators up in their business because they didn't destroy the samples as they had agreed to do. Said samples and the key to match them up to the identities of individual players were then seized in a raid that was part of the BALCO investigation, with the union failing to negotiate to limit the subpoena to the records of 10 BALCO-related players, as Howard Bryant notes.

Further allegations that the Players Association's chief operating officer, Gene Orza, tipped Rodriguez off regarding an impending test in 2004 and that he was charged with finding enough false positives among the 104 players to drive the percentage below the threshold needed to trigger testing discredit the union even more, call into question its sincerity on the matter once it agreed to crack open the 2002 Collective Bargaining Agreement in the first place. From here the allegations surrounding Orza look like grounds to haul everybody in front of Congress again for another dog and pony show.

That the federal investigators in turn leaked information to the press regarding the identities of the players -- and if you believe Rodriguez was the only one whose name leaked, I've got a bridge to sell you -- is just as disturbing. That's been business as usual ever since the BALCO investigation began, and it's not surprising that this information is coming to light at a time when the prosecution is fighting an uphill battle to admit all of its evidence against Bonds into his perjury trial. Despite the conviction of BALCO leaker Troy Ellerman, it's clear that there are others willing to do an end run around due process to out people no matter the stakes. It's also clear that most of the chattering classes don't care at all how this information made its way to daylight. They just want to manufacture outrage and admit the ill-procured evidence into the court of public opinion. A high-profile ballplayer doing steroids six years ago, before MLB began enforcing any type of ban? I'm shocked. SHOCKED!

At the risk of playing Kill the Messenger, it's only appropriate to point out that Roberts, who shared the byline on this break, has a book on Rodriguez coming out this summer. Funny how she broke this news just as the "A-Fraud" buzz from Torre's book was dying down, isn't it? While some regard her as a solid reporter, her days at the New York Times were marked by one of the most grating styles ever to, uh, grace its sports page. Rife with agendas, laden with innuendo, she was living proof that the world of hackneyed sportswriting wasn't restricted to those with a Y chromosome (or two). Check the sheer ineptitude of her late-to-the-party dissing of Billy Beane and Moneyball. Check her premature burial of Bonds. Check her smear of Rodriguez regarding the rental properties he owns in Miami and his alleged lack of generosity with regards to charities. Clearly, she's well equipped for whatever literary takedown she's preparing on the slugger.

None of which is to exonerate Rodriguez for any of this, of course; he screwed up. And while that should only make him yet another screw-up in an era full of them -- Bonds, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, the BALCO boys (and girls), the players in the Mitchell Report, et al -- being the highest-paid and perhaps most talented one, he becomes the newest poster boy for the era. Barring a remarkable turnaround in his ability to deal with the harsh glare of the spotlight, he'll be carrying this baggage with him for a long time.

Which makes me miss the departed Jason Giambi all the more. As much as he was pilloried for his lack of specificity when he came forward and apologized for his PED usage, his candor -- to the extent he could be candid while avoiding saying anything explicit enough to void his contract -- and contrition stand in marked contrast to the players who have taken the lady-doth-protest-too-much route like Clemens and Palmeiro. Here was a player ensnared by the BALCO investigation, one whose career nearly crashed onto the rocks in its aftermath, one who drew skepticism even in his home ballpark once he began hitting again. Yet Giambi never complained publicly about the bind he'd gotten himself into, never put the blame upon anyone but himself. He simply kept his head down and played ball, outlasting the abuse he took by discovering a way to reconnect with fans via his own sense of humor, as signified by a cheesy mustache.

Giambi pulled off a pretty neat trick, and for the sake of whatever rooting interest I maintain in the Yankees, I wish he was around to beat some of that advice into A-Rod's thick skull. That's not going to happen; it's unclear what tack Rodriguez will take once he opens his mouth, but the bet here is that he'll find a way to make the problem worse.

Labels: steroids, Yankees