Steroid Perception Has Little To Do With Evidence

December 21, 2007 – The New York Sun

Tim Marchman does a good job of explaining why patience is a virtue, even if you don’t have the time.

He does an even better job of explaining why the so-called steroid scandal shouldn’t really surprise anyone.  And maybe even why our collective outrage is just a little, or a lot, hypocritical.

On the other hand, he seems to be as slippery as I aspire to be when it comes to being pinned down, so let’s not give him (or me) too much credit.

The point is we shouldn’t exhalt athletes or their achievements, but we needn’t damn them either. The one thing we know for sure is that the solid ground we thought we had when we were kids, not only wasn’t solid then, but is positively liquid now.

Steroid Use as a Graphic Timeline

bse-timeline-as-revealed.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

There is a benefit to this approach, which shows in broad strokes when major new information was revealed to the public, and in an alternative view when it was happening. Alas, there isn’t enough detail to use this as more than a cheat sheet, but for a quick summary it’s certainly useful. (If the text is too small make your browser window bigger, the text will get bigger, too.)

Let Baseball Players Police Themselves

JC Bradbury – New York Times

Before the ill-fated War on Terrorism there was the more-provenly ill-fated War on Drugs. One of those drugs wasn’t deco-durabolin, or HGH, or some other performance enhancing drug. But our approach to stopping the scourge of PED’s in baseball and other sports has been more akin to our failed approach to stopping cocaine coming from Columbia and heroin coming from Afghanistan than any actual strategies contemporary thinkers might have come up with.

Whether those strategies might be successful remains to be seen, but JC Bradbury’s approach has the virtue of actual incentives and our knowledge that it hasn’t failed before. I used to believe that because it was impossible to control the use of illicit drugs sports shouldn’t outlaw them, but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. But I’m totally sure that if you’re going to ban illicit drugs you better come up with effective ways of getting them out of the game.

If you don’t, the whole system will collapse. As it should.

No Discipline

Baseball Musings:

I may have written about David Pinto’s story earlier, but I know that spent much of tonight arguing the same thing. Discipline in this case is futile, for the most part, and counterproductive. The right thing would have been to embrace the information anyone would have given without threat of punishment, the better to judge what happened.

We still want to know what happened, because so many players who feared punishment didn’t talk to Mitchell.

That was a mistake.

Mitchell Report to Name Names

Newsvine

This post is mostly to express my weariness about the forthcoming Mitchell report. Since everybody else in the world seems to have an opinion, why not me? Mine is that all discussion before the report is released, including leaks of tantalizing tidbits that don’t actually include information, should be taken in the form of PR people spinning, since at this point none of us know anything real about the report.

My ears did perk up when someone leaked that there would be surprises. I’ll be surprised (but hardly shocked) if that’s the case.

Barry Bonds – A guide to help you cut through the noise

The Hardball Times

I’m a little skeptical about these grand jury cases where the prosecution offers someone immunity from prosecution in return for testimony, then asks questions for which the honest answers would be personally damaging, then prosecutes for perjury.  As you can imagine, I’m thinking Barry Bonds, Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton.

It isn’t that perjury isn’t a crime, but that somehow the immunity grant seems to be a special sort of torture for public figures whose reputations will be damaged by truthful testimony. The right answer, obviously, is for them to testify truthfully, but I certainly understand their decisions to try and save their asses by lying.

Keith Scherer’s informative walk through the issues in the Barry Bonds case at Hardball Times doesn’t get into that, but instead walks us through the hard issues of what happens when federal prosecuters decide to indict someone. The answers can’t be comforting to the Bonds defense team, which no doubt knows all this.

If there is real evidence I don’t know why Bonds isn’t copping a plea, and I suppose there is still time for that. But it looks like if he defends himself this thing is going to be going on for a long time. (thanks baseballmusings.com)

People’s Voice: Bonds polarizes –

Dan Wetzel – MLB – Yahoo! Sports

I’ve written a few times about the ridiculous screeds of Dan Wetzel, but held off (for the most part) after he wrote an article about how Bonds breaking the record was “Hollow, not hallowed.” (He’s the guy who used the degree by which Bonds broke Maris’s record as proof that he was juiced.)

What’s interesting is that he comes off as a much more sensible, thoughtful and serious guy responding to people’s criticisms of that piece. He actually acknowledges all the gray areas he ignores when he puts down a column, and is clearer about what is known, not known, and why that matters.

Good for him.

Baseball Prospectus on Bonds

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=6570

I haven’t actually paid much attention to Bonds breaking the record. The superficial reasons are because I’ve been busy with my family, and my life, and something has to give.

Also, big career records are the result of circumstance. Nobody broke Babe Ruth’s career record in the 50s or 60s or 70s or 80s or even 90s because people didn’t hit so many home runs then. Is that because there weren’t great home run hitters then? Or is it because fewer home runs were hit? You be the judge.

But plenty of homers were hit in the 90s and 00s, and while that was happening to many hitters Barry Bonds eventually hit more major league home runs than anyone else.

When you read the BP tales linked to here you’ll have to decide whose smart ideas are valid and whose are crap. I admired that guy Ehrhardt’s 12 Monkey’s approach, though it’s pretty much a stunt. But he’s right that the question isn’t really worth our memory.

So I offer my take: All baseball records reflect the era in which they were set. This is inevitable. The dead ball is different than the live ball. Mound heights changed, expansion happened again and again. Ballparks got bigger. Ballparks got smaller. The DH. And certainly PEDs have played a role. So when we compare records across eras we’re inevitably comparing apples to papayas.

I find it incredible that some people still offer up Cy Young’s 511 wins as baseball’s most unbreakable record. Um, yeah.

Bonds’ achievement came within a context that also created A-Rod and Junior and Slammin’ Sammy and Canseco. I read a story the other day that talked about the percentage increase in Bonds’ record over Maris’s, without talking about the intervening records of McGwire and Sosa. [Sure, they might all be tainted by ‘roids, but they happened. Bonds did not break Maris’s record.]

There will never be a Davenport Translation that eliminates PEDs from the record. Not everyone used, and no one knows how much help the drugs are. I think it suffices to look at such things in the context in which they were created. If Clay Davenport (and Will Carroll) tell me that the contextual adjustments make Ruth No. 1 Career Home Run hitter and Bonds No. . . . Whoops, I don’t recall what they tell me about Bonds. That he’s either second or third all time, and either is fine by me.

But that’s what our statistical evaluation can do. If Bonds were the only steroid user his advantage would be incalculable. He would soar over everyone else. But we know others used, and we have no evidence that he used more than them. We know that many of them (at least half) were pitchers. In any case, all of that comes out within the context. Bonds setting the record looks more like Bonds establishing that he’s the best home run hitter of his era. That he set the career mark as well is trivia.

Of all the BP essays in this package, the one I admired most is Christina Kahrl’s. She’s an ambitious stylist, but in this case I think she also gets the race thing right. Maris beating the Babe (in baseball’s first expansion year) was the triumph of man over legend. Feh, the traditionalists said! Legends don’t fall to flawed men. Asterisk, please.

Aaron has always been derided for his lack of flash, for the duration of his career, for never hitting lots of homers in one season. But now, illuminated by Bonds’ strange light, he’s the paragon of self-esteem and integrity, the wounded party when Barry Bonds’ nouveau race man comes to town. Christina says it much more elegantly than I am here. How much hatred accrues to Bonds because he’s (probably) used steroids? How much because he’s broken the record? How much because he’s uppity?

None of us knows the exact answer, but I agree with Christina that the issue still bites and is still in play here.

I’m here to say that in my book Ruth is the greatest home run hitter, based on 1921 and 1927, but that Bonds deserves all the respect you can stomach giving him. And if that’s not a lot, then a lot more. He’s clearly a driven talent with both skills and dedication enough to set gargantuan records. If you think it’s the drugs that put him over the top, you still have to admire all that he accomplished without drugs. And it makes more sense to devalue the record than to decry Bonds’ achievement besting an arbitrary number into some sort of symbol of moral decay.

At least I do.