THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

It would be good if they released the entire list of 100 players.  Then we’d see that every single team had multiple players who tested positive, making every player a potential PED user.  I’ve always assumed everybody was juicing a la 1988 Olympic 100 meters...Maybe we could convince everybody else of that and move on?

Funny how the (sports) media has now become Big Brother.

I just wish they’d release they whole list--quit piecemealing and come right out with it.

I didn’t even shake my head at this news. I’m still completely lost on why people care this much. Let me correct that: why the sports writers care this much. Player’s actions show that they don’t care and the fans actions show that they don’t care. So who are the sports writers speaking for?

This is so old hat now, it’s ridiculous.

Just last week, the Star Ledger devoted a front page story to their baseball writer (Politi) to describe how he’d fix the HOF in light of steroids.

MSM is so outside of the loop, but continue to insist they are in the middle of it.

This was their cover story:
http://www.nj.com/sports/ledger/politi/index.ssf/2009/07/in_a_perfect_world_there.html

And this is their sidebar with 4 Star Ledger voters:
http://www.nj.com/yankees/index.ssf/2009/07/the_starledger_forum_on_perfor.html

Red Sox Fan, June 30, 2009:
You always knew that Manny was trouble. They should kick him out of baseball for good, that cheatin’ bastard. This team is so much better off with out him.

Red Sox Fan, July 30, 2009:
Listen, we all know the pressure these guys were under to try the juice. If you knew other players were using, then you’d use it too. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. The past is the past, let’s move on.

Not mentioned in all of this is that the players were assured the results of the 2003 testing would be kept confidential.  That these names keep getting released is a much bigger deal than the steroid use. 

I agree with Redsauce above, get the list out, let it blow over, and move on.  Of course, it’s in the best interest of the newspapers to release them bit by bit--it sells more papers.  Once the big names are released, however long that takes, then we’ll probably get a large group of “the rest,” namely, scrubs who used steroids that nobody will care about.

Is anybody actually surprised by this?

I’m surprised that the media can keep making this a story.

I’m surprised that the media can keep making this a story.

...said the blogger who wrote a new post about it.

You can say people are expressing more outrage than they truly feel… but to say it’s a non-story is just not true.  It’s a big story; if it wasn’t, ESPN could have posted as many links as they wanted and no one would have clicked on them.

Here’s what I find interesting about Manny.  In his statement, he claims he has passed 15 drug tests in the past 5 years.  We have no reason to doubt that, do we?  But now it appears likely that he’s been juicing that whole time.  So if he’s figured out how to beat the test 90% of the time, doesn’t that suggest that there’s a *lot* of other players who’ve also figured it out?

So now the media wants the names of the 100 players released so they can not only vilify those on the list but also proclaim the innocence of those not on it.  And that’s absolutely preposterous if the false negative rate is as high as it seems to be.

"And that’s absolutely preposterous if the false negative rate is as high as it seems to be.”

How do you know what the false negative rate is?

The only response I have to Papi being outed is, “Yawn.”

If all 97 left on the list are released, 50-75% of superstars will appear, I believe, and 25-50% of the other regulars…

My experience with other fans is that people only really care about steroids to the extent that it makes them happy when players they already root against are caught

I have no idea what the false negative rate is.  And for all I know, Manny juiced only once in 2003 and recently took HCG for a medical reason unrelated to steriod use.

However, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable interpretation of the reports to believe that he’s been using all along and managed to beat the test 14 times.  Was he really the only player smart enough to do so?

And I don’t mean false negative in the clinical sense.  Perhaps he was using HGH or some other PED undetectable by current MLB testing or maybe he just knew how to cycle his usage to minimize his risk of being caught.

The point is that if he was using illegal PEDs for 5 years before being caught, it would then seem likely to me that those testing positive represent only the tip of the iceberg.

I have no idea how advanced doping is in the MLB.  It is, however, very advanced in cycling, and the false negative rate is tremendously high.  Bernhard Kohl tested positive from a sample taken during last year’s Tour de France, and (surprisingly) decided to tell all (naming suppliers, etc.) to authorities and gave candid interviews to the press.  He said that he should have failed about 200 dope tests over the previous seven years, if the tests actually worked.  Sometimes he would inject in the morning, be tested in the afternoon, and the test would come up negative, even though supposedly the drug remained in the system for 24 hours.

(The only reason he got caught, by the way, was because of a nifty trick from the anti-doping authorities.  When they heard that pharmaceutical companies were making CERA, a new form of EPO, they recognised that it would be wanted by athletes, and so they asked the manufacturers to put a tracer molecule into CERA so that they could easily detect it.  Perfect secrecy was maintained, and they sprung a bunch of big-name riders last year.)

Marion Jones passed well over a hundred dope tests despite being on the juice.  The doping doctors know how the tests work and advise their athletes accordingly. 

“I’ve never tested positive” is an extremely weak defence for an athlete.  It means next to nothing when the false negative rate is so close to 100%.

Given his comments earlier this season (post- A-Rod leak), would David Ortiz have qualified as a “Holy Player?”

There are three types of players:
- Holy Player
- Coward
- Honorable

The honorable player stands up for what’s right, against a tide of cowards and preachers.

As of today, the only player that has been identified as honorable is Rick Helling.  All other players fall into one of those two categories.  Some of them, like Ortiz, bounce from one to the other.

Here’s a novel way to defend yourself in advance just in case you get outed:

“Bronson Arroyo, a former Boston Red Sox teammate of Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, said he would not be surprised to find his name on a list of 104 ballplayers who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, as he had heard a then-legal supplement he was using was tainted with steroids, the Boston Herald reported.”