THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I’m almost always a players man when it comes to owner-player disputes, but you’re right: the MLBPA dropped the ball here. They also had a responsibility to the players who weren’t doping to allow them to play in a clean game with a level playing field. Those guys paid dues, too.

I have the same question about discipline in sports leagues, though it usually surfaces in the rougher sports like hockey and football. The union is prepared to file a grievance any time they think a player has been too harshly punished, and fights to keep such punishments limited in their CBAs. They seem to forget the players on the receiving end of illegal hits are also members of the association.

i’d like to throw clemens into an open volcano. altho that has almost no relation to any alleged steroid use.

The owners too treated testing as a bargaining chip, and the whole steroid issue as way to embarass the players during the 2002 negotiations. (The owners like to trash the on-field product as a negotiating tactic. I never did get that one.) I can’t defend the players either, but there’s no way the owners have the moral high ground here.

Tango--

I don’t follow your reasoning here.  You say that “the stars ... should be ashamed of themselves,” seeming to single them out for especial disapprobation.  But then at the end everyone is equally responsible and there’s no reason to hold things against, say, Bonds and Clemens more than anyone else.  Enlighten me?

I didn’t say everyone was equally responsible.  I said this:
“was complicit in one way or another”

That does not imply “equally”.

In any case, the idea to sacrifice a couple of superstars to cleanse our souls, the souls of people ALSO complicit, is ridiculous.  We’re all in this together.

Presuming the efficacy of PED use, then why wouldn’t stars, especially near the end of their careers, have strong incentive to use? It could prolong their careers, perhaps quite a bit, enabling them to earn much more money, and to stay in the limelight longer.

Indeed it naively seems to me that Clemens possibly turned to PEDs only after he left Boston to rejuvenate his career. And perhaps Bonds only started taking PEDs late in his career for similar reasons.

One might write a Greek-style tragedy about Bonds, the greatest (but often under-appreciated) star of his generation, fuming as McGwire and Sosa gain fame, fortune, and praise for “saving baseball” while chasing Maris’s record, all the while suspecting they’re juicing. But his pride won’t allow them to have all the attention, so eventually he decides to try PEDs also, and figures out how to gain more from them than anyone before him. And eventually he, to, is brought down by his cheating. You’ve got a hero performing amazing deeds, goaded by pride, but ultimately brought down by his own hubris.

Anabolic agents help recover more quickly from injury (the Pettitte excuse), and they also allow you to train harder without breaking down than athletes not taking them. The athlete still needs to work hard - indeed probably harder - than a “clean” athlete would even be capable of. But such edges could help a solid player make the majors, or a good player become a star, or a star dominate for longer.

So there’s incentive for players of any level to take, especially if/when they know others are doing so as well.

Tango--

Gotcha, that makes sense.  How do we “cleanse our souls,” then?  I take that to be euphemistic for somehow holding the guilty accountable.  Is there just no way to do that?  Even if the writers are also complicit (I agree that they are), why is withholding the Hall for Bonds et al. an unreasonable way to hold someone accountable?  Just because it’s hypocritical?

The Holy Writers as the self-appointed judges?  Oh, yeah, what a perfect group to do so.

(Hugely sarcastic comment if you didn’t know.)

And look how they include Bagwell in there.  Brisbee’s brilliant in-depth study showed that Bagwell:
- played in 1991-2005
- has muscles

That’s it.  That’s what the Holy Writers know.

Just get past it, that’s all.  Ours is not to reason why, ours is just to watch them play.

Tango--

You haven’t made an argument as to why it’s inappropriate or a bad idea to keep Bonds et al. out of the Hall.  You’ve called names and made sarcastic remarks, which you habitually excoriate others for doing without making an argument.  Of course you get to do what you want, but it’s out of character.

Actually, it’s not out of character when it comes to me talking about the arbitrary, biased, and capricious nature of the holy writers… oh, excuse me… THE HOLY WRITERS.

And it’s not to me to make the argument against BBWAA to hold such power over Bonds AND BAGWELL. It for them to make the argument.

Or how admitted and repeated cheaters, who are somewhat proud of their cheating methods, are in the hall of fame by those very writers (Gaylord Perry, et al).

I am fairly new to the site, so obviously I am wrong about your general take on the Holy Writers.  Sorry about that.

The argument for why it’s appropriate for the BBWAA to withhold the Hall from Bonds (the argument for withholding it from Bagwell would be different and I’m not making it) is straightforward:  It’s the only means available of achieving some justice (or some cleansing our souls, if you prefer).  They should have been held accountable during their playing days but weren’t.  Post-career, after they’ve made all their money and accumulated all their stats, denying them the Hall is all anyone has left.  You could say that the hit their reputations have taken is punishment/justice enough, which is fair, in my opinion, but highly contentious.

As for Perry, if one thinks that he shouldn’t be in the Hall because he cheated, it doesn’t make sense to me to claim that Bonds etc. should be in the Hall because Perry is.  You’re left then with claiming that Bonds etc. should be in the Hall because denying them the BBWAA writers would be made into hypocrites.  This may be true, but I don’t think it’s a good argument for putting the steroid users in.

Labeling them as hypocrites is not a good test?  That they’ve changed the standards is not a good test? That better to catch one cheater while turning a blind eye on another is acceptable?

I’m definitely NOT on board with you.

***

As for “justice”, justice has been achieved.  They’ve paid the price as allowed based at the time the events took place. 

To have the Holy Writers then put an additional post-justice system to take care of all those guys that they feel haven’t been punished enough, based on their own arbitrary, biased, and capricious justice system is ludicrous.

Basically, the statute of limitations has passed, and the final say does NOT rest with the Holy Writers.

Look at ARod, who admitted what he did.  If MLB and MLBPA cannot do anything about ARod three years later, then it’s NOT up to the Holy Writers to exact vigilante justice.

Even if you can make the case that they should be allowed, they are ill-equipped to do so.  Look at how they decide to paint Bagwell, and likely turn a blind-eye to Pettitte because he was contrite.  They basically ignored Kevin Brown.  Gaylord Perry admits to cheating, and was CAUGHT cheating… on the field of play no less, during a game!

And the punishment for Perry was whatever MLB said it should be.  Once MLB says whatever it says, then that’s it… we move on.  We.  Move.  On.

Basically, get the Holy Writers out of the character-judgement business, because they really really s-ck at that job.

re hypocrisy:  I did something wrong (put Perry, a cheater, in the Hall, stipulating that that is wrong) and so in order to avoid being a hypocrite I better keep doing the same wrong things (put the steroid cheaters in the Hall, stipulating that is wrong)?  That seems like a poor argument form to me.  By that logic a man who is cheating on his wife would be advised to keep doing so in order to avoid being a hypocrite.

Beyond this, though, many folks see a difference in kind between the cheating of Perry--an isolated case involving one individual that is a footnote in the history of the game--and the cheating of the steroid crew, which constitutes a whole era and is a major chapter in the history of the game.  That makes it natural, in my opinion, to feel it necessary to address the latter injustice and wink and nod at the former.  It is also natural to see no distinction and claim that cheating is cheating pure and simple.

re the statute of limitations:  You say it’s passed, I say it hasn’t, but both claims are arbitrary.  I think you’re just flat-out not as bothered by steroid use as I am.  It’s a question of values.  Feeling differently from me on the topic of steroids is perfectly reasonable.  It’s also, in my opinion, an artifact of a highly sabrmetricized outlook on the game, and I think most highly sabrmetricized fans share your view of the issue. (I am sabrmetricized, I would say, but it is not my default lens for experiencing and thinking about the game.) Again, that is perfectly reasonable to me.  I just feel differently.

re paying the price:  The potential HOFers haven’t really paid any price, except for Manny Ramirez.  Maybe you think they shouldn’t pay a price because it wasn’t against the rules at the time, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that they should pay a price and have already paid it.

re the BBWAA:  The “Holy Writers” is an apt moniker.  They are generally self-righteous, mostly poor writers, and almost universally nowhere near as intelligent as the leading lights of the sabrmetric community, present company (meaning you not me) included.  I wish the group in charge of populating the Hall was of higher quality but it isn’t.  That opinion of mine doesn’t change the fact that I just don’t want the steroid crew in the Hall, which is one of my favorite places in the world. (I used to live in the area and went at least twice most years.) What they did is deeply offensive to me and I hate the idea that they could end up a part of the Hall.  One (e.g., you) could feel similarly about the Hall and simply not be as offended (or offended at all) by what the steroid crew did.  Again, perfectly fine and reasonable.  We’re talking about values and feelings, and this is the kind of thing (unlike, say, Sandusky) to which a range of values, feelings, and judgments are appropriate.

BDF: first off, welcome aboard, and thanks for hanging tough.  I’m not necessarily the easiest guy to get along with (online anyway… in person, I’m pretty non-abrasive).

Anyway, on to your points:

1. hypocrisy.  The Holy Writers evaluated and made a judgement call on cheating with Perry.  They decided that they were ok with it.  That any future cheaters to that level would be fine as well.  So, a guy seeing that his buddy is cheating on his wife, and doing nothing about it, will then do nothing about a second buddy also cheating on his wife.  To pick and choose, ignoring Perry, while including others, is hypocritical. 

It’s not that they didn’t have a change to punish Perry.  It’s that they went out of their way to not punish Perry.  That is: they decided it wasn’t so bad to cheat on the playing field.

2. As for isolated Perry versus the culture of the 1990s: Perry was WORSE!  You take the opposite view.  But, Perry did something that no one else was doing, while the PED gang did what was tacitly accepted by everyone.  How is it cheating if everyone is doing it, and no one is being called on it?

In all the other sports, if you give someone an extra shove, and they don’t call it, even if they should, then that’s part of the culture.  It’s accepted.

Do you think that you are actually any different than the typical MLBer of the 1990s?  Please.  If 30% of MLBers juiced in the 1990s, then 30% of you readers out there would have done the same thing, if you were in their shoes.

There’s simply no way that you are morally superior to the MLBers.  You can’t judge it based on your own circumstances.  You judge based on THEIR circumstances.

And you will learn, quite quickly, that you are not qualified to be able to judge someone else.  So, let it go.

3. If you really card, MADD-cared, you’d do something about it.  Go watching the clean kids in Little League then.  I think almost all of this is phony outrage. 

Or, it’s finding out Santa Clause doesn’t exist(*).  Or, it’s the father protecting his virginal daugter, only to find out she’s been around the block a few times.

(*) If you are under 10 and reading this: forget I just said that.

Why not hold the players more accountable and give up the World Series?  Why not any team with a juicer has the year with no World Series awarded?

Oh, right, people don’t want to go THAT far… the fans will take the spoils of the World Series, and won’t give it up, if it’s determined that Schilling was a juicer.

4. Even if you NEED to exact justice, the Holy Writers is the worst way to do it.  Rather than taking the view of “better to let ten guilty go free than to incarcerate one innocent”, they take the OPPOSITE view.  That to ensure that no juicers make it, they make sure that Bagwell et al ALSO won’t make it.

They can’t simply deal with the ramifications of allowing Bagwell in, only to later find out that he was a juicer, because then, they’ll be pressued to ignore the juicing aspect in the future.

***

Basically, come in to this with a blank slate.  Right now, you have decided on an opinion, and you are going to bend and stretch whatever you need to get to this.

Personally speaking, I had this with Ben Johnson in 1988 (I’m Canadian).  I saw it with his sister, who claimed the next day, emphatically and emotionally that he was innocent.  Obviously, she was duped.  Her brother obviously didn’t tell her to sh-t up in time.

I was embarrassed by Johnson.  He was caught cheating when he won.  Had it been discovered that he was caught cheating 5 years later, I wouldn’t care.  Statute of limitations.  The past is the past, and let it live there.  That’s how I feel about Lance Armstrong.  If it’s discovered later that he cheated, then no big deal.  Let him keep his titles.  But, if a cyclist is caught, then you punish him based on the RULES AT THE TIME.

No retroactive punishment.

I was half-hoping you would get abrasive (because from what I’ve seen you reserve that for what you perceive as lazy thinking) with me and reveal a major flaw in my thinking so that I could stop thinking about this.  But I see you exactly as you see me, as bending and stretching to cling to an opinion!

re hypocrisy:  Yes, it would be hypocritical.  That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t do it.

re isolated Perry vs. steroid culture:  That’s a compelling point, and strictly considered I agree with you.  But my perception of the issue is defined by the history and the records, as I discuss below.

re what I would have done:  That’s completely irrelevant.  If I had grown up in a criminal environment rather than a pleasant green suburb I may well have thought criminal activity was perfectly fine.  That wouldn’t mean I shouldn’t go to jail for beating the ess out of a guy on the street because he’s from another neighborhood.  An analogous point can be made for sub-prime/credit derivative Wall Street.  Your implicit argument seems to be that it’s unfair for anyone (i.e., me or the BBWAA) to make a decision that hurts people who did something that any (or, at least, many) reasonable people would have done at the time.  To which I say:  TS.  Life’s not fair.  You can’t always anticipate the consequences of your decisions.  TONS of things in life are like this.  Besides, this one could fairly easily have been anticipated.  If Bonds or Clemens or McGwire had considered how it would look and even how it might affect their shot at the Hall if it got out they were steroid users, they ought to have known it well might have an enormous impact.  Hell, they may have even done so and decided it was worth it, or worth the risk.

But it’s also worth saying that the outraged faction (at least this sliver of it) isn’t outraged by steroid use per se.  This goes to why steroids are viewed so differently in football and baseball; in football they aren’t perceived to have altered the history of the game.  They are perceived that way in baseball by the outraged faction.  For the highly sabrmetricized, there isn’t and never will be enough data to determine whether this is true, and thus I think it’s easier for you to let it go.  But isn’t for me.  My epistemological threshold for “knowing” that all those incredible accomplishments were a direct result of steroid use is much lower than yours, and my attachment to the meaning of the records--which is purely subjective and thus less heavily weighted by the highly sabrmetricized, I postulate--is greater than yours.  And so I have difficulty letting go.

re MADD-caring:  That’s like saying that because I’m not actively campaigning against female circumcision in Sierra Leone I don’t actually think it’s a problem.  Besides, I *am* doing something:  I’m discussing it and advocating for my position in fairly widely read public forum.  I don’t have a job in the baseball community; this is about the extent of my ability to reasonably influence the outcome.

re Bagwell:  If viewed morally (as much of the BBWAA seems to view it) then it is a morally complex situation.  The thought process you outline is part of that complexity and doesn’t mitigate against excluding him.  I think this also goes to a sabrmetric instinct to deny that it is a moral issue:  If it is, the sabrmetric arsenal is not up to the task of answering the moral question.  That’s not what sabrmetrics is designed to do.  N.B. that this issue won’t come up with Frank Thomas, and if Bagwell (or any of the ones on whom we only have suspicions) had been vocal like Thomas was they’d have spared themselves all this. (Of course, maybe Thomas was playing the long con, juicing all along and knew that he was never going to be tested without enough notice to get himself clean if need be, in which case hats off to him.)

re Lance Armstrong:  I haven’t followed this story closely enough to know what current informed opinion is of whether he was a juicer, but if it’s proven or he admits to juicing when he won those Tour titles that most certainly is a HUGE deal.  It doesn’t follow that you have to strip him of those titles, but it also doesn’t follow that it’s not a big deal.

re punishment:  I hear this language all the time in MVP-type discussions ("Matt Kemp shouldn’t be punished because his teammates weren’t as good as Ryan Braun’s") and it drives me crazy.  There is no divine right to an MVP or the Hall.  Being excluded is not a punishment, it’s a judgment.  I don’t want to keep the steroid crew out of the Hall because they’re bad little boys who deserve be punished.  My thinking is much more straightforward, and I articulated it before:  I feel that what they did hurt something that I care about immensely--baseball--and I don’t *want* people like be part of a related thing that I also care about immensely--the Hall.  It is about the Hall, not them.

But it’s also true, as in every other case, that time heals all wounds.  I can already feel myself, as we get farther and farther away from the steroid era, to swinging around to seeing the steroid era as a part of the history that means so much to me and thus valuable, in its way, even if I’ll always wish that it never happened.  I’m not all that upset about Braun, for instance.  The wound is scabbed over and still hurts, but it isn’t bleeding any more.  I doubt that time will ever gift me with a perspective that wants all those guys in the Hall, but I can no longer rule it out.  This process is interesting to me.  Baseball’s capacity to accommodate is one of the coolest things about it.

"No retroactive punishment.”

This phrase of Tom’s is my essential position.

But BDF touches on what is the true reason why people care so much about steroids in baseball. The sanctity of its records. Home run records, in particular (people don’t care nearly much about the other records, it seems to me, though it’s not clear why that should be).

I love baseball history. I’ve been a student of the game since I was a kid. I used to feel the same way. But people need to get over it. They are merely records. They are meaningless.

I certainly went through a period where I didn’t want to believe that Bonds, et al, used steroids. Then I shifted to not caring. Why? Because I enjoyed that baseball. I don’t feel the need to disavow a decade-plus of enjoyment, because of some vague sense of moral outrage in a field of entertainment. What happened on the field in those years happened. It was the conditions of the game at the time. Just look at it as a period of high offense, like the 1930s.

One of the things that annoys the hell out of me is labeling guys as PED users or non-PED users when we really don’t know.  Like you said with Frank Thomas, he could be lying out of his ass but that doesn’t matter because the perception is that he is clean because he spoke up.  Maybe Bagwell (or others) didn’t want to speak up because they didn’t want to rat out friends of theirs that they knew cheated.  Bagwell’s silence doesn’t actually mean that he cheated.  Basically the writers (and many fans) are making judgment calls on who the PED guys are and who they aren’t based on highly unreliable assumptions, and it seems largely subjective to me.  I hear stuff like this from people all the time:

Jeter?  Oh he’s a great guy, the captain, he must be clean.  Michael Young?  Yep, another classy player.  No way he cheated.  Ditto for Greg Maddux.  Jeff Bagwell?  Well I don’t really know but he looks like he probably cheated.  So, yeah he’s a cheater and should not be put in the HOF.  Thome?  Yeah he has huge muscles too but come on he’s such a nice guy.  And he’s always smiling.  He must be clean.  Griffey?  Did you see how he went so quickly from being the best player in baseball to constantly injured?  That wouldn’t have happened if he was using PED’s.  He definitely had a natural decline.  He must be clean. 

And so forth.  But the truth is we don’t know if any of those guys mentioned above used PED’s or not.  Why is Thome be given a pass on the muscles if Bagwell is not give a pass?  I have no clue.  How do I know that Jeter or Griffey were clean?  I have no idea.  They could have definitely been among the cheaters but the public perception largely doesn’t seem to allow that possibility.  It seems like a bunch of bullshit to me.

As for the morality of it all, I am not going to sit there and judge the actual cheaters in that way because I very well might have done the same thing in their shoes.  I really have no clue.  If I thought I only had a 5-year window to make a huge amount of money in my life, and there was a way to possibly enhance my ability to make more money in that time or extend that time frame of making the big money, then I would have to consider it.  My family and the people I care about could benefit greatly from that money.  Why are these guys necessarily morally corrupt for cheating?  Is someone morally corrupt for trying to increase the quality of life for their family at the expense of the integrity of a game?  I don’t know that they are. 

And I do think the accepted culture of it makes it harder to judge them harshly in this way.  Have you ever found yourself driving the speed limit on a highway but realize that everybody is blowing past you at 80 MPH?  So then you increase your speed up into the 70’s perhaps, figuring that the police will have to pull all of those guys over as well, so you are probably ok for a little while at the faster speed.  And your speed is still less than theirs, so that makes you feel a little less guilty.  This happens all the time, I think.  Yeah I am still breaking the law, but I don’t think it makes me a morally corrupt person in any way to try to get away with what everybody else is clearly getting away with while nobody seems to care too much about it.

Oh, the driving speed.  Great example.  That’s exactly what I do.  I make sure there’s at least one other car going faster than I am.  And if I’m alone, I’ll go 5mph over the limit.

Indeed, my reckless driving (as per the state of NJ’s definition anyway) increases the chance that I will actually kill someone.

And yet, I still do it, and so do you guys.

***

And Bagwell did speak out in 2004, and again in 2010:
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/hof11/columns/story?columnist=crasnick_jerry&id=5963276

It’s a fantastic piece.

Oh, that’s a great Bagwell article. Thanks for posting it.

@16 Richard

“But people need to get over it.”

I would if I could.  I’m glad that you did and I don’t begrudge you that one bit.  The records are meaningless in the sense that they have nothing to do with my family’s health or the global recession or finding the Higgs boson.  In that sense almost everything that constitutes our lives is meaningless.  But they are meaningful because I care about them, which gives them meaning.  You don’t, and that’s cool.  I’m not trying to bring anyone over to my way of thinking/feeling about these things (or anything else, really).

@17 Frankie Futon

Couldn’t agree more about the Jeter/Young/Thome/Maddux judgments.  The Holy Writers are at their worst in talking about them and they undercut whatever claim to authority they might have had.

As for the morality of it, that’s not the issue for me, although if it were I don’t think “I might have done the same thing” is a very good moral justification.  For me the issue only has meaning in the context of the altered history and records.  It would be a blip if those hadn’t been the consequences and I would have no beef with them going into the Hall.

@18 Tango

Bagwell is absolutely not a member of the known steroid crew as I have been discussing them.  If I were going to argue that he shouldn’t be in the Hall I would have to say a good deal more than I have said here.  I’ve been addressing the paradigm cases.  And the members of the BBWAA do a terrible, embarrassing job of justifying their failure to vote Bagwell in.  Speculation is not enough.  I think there are credible arguments that could be made, but “he fits the profile of a steroid user” is nowhere near.

As long as The Holy Writers hold the key to the Pearly Gates, then the primary point is: “how do you handle the proven juicers?”.

Sammy Sosa, for example, has only copped to Creatine.  But, he’s linked with McGwire.  So, he’s not in the discussion.

Clemens has not been proven to have juiced.

What are the standards?  Whose the judge?  How do you appeal?

***

My favorite was when an NFLer who juiced (Reggie White?  LT?) was up for the Hall of Fame, and a writer said he was going to decide whether to vote for him based on whether he was contrite or not.  Can you believe that?

In any case, the player did not apologize, and he got 31 of 34 votes.

***

And if you revere these numbers, the 755, and whatnot, as something more important than what Bonds has done for you, then fine, that’s your life.

All I know is that even AFTER the Bonds stuff came out, the #1 draw on the road was the Giants.  People WANTED to see Bonds.  They wanted to see his run at 755.  That’s all there is to it.

Tango--

I feel like we have come to something of a meeting of the minds.  Thanks for a great discussion.  It’s a deeply imperfect system.  It always has been, but having writers complicit in the flowering of steroid culture now deciding the very important post-career fates of the monsters and non-monsters they helped create highlights just how deep the imperfection runs, particularly when they open their mouths or their pens to “explain” their “thought” processes.  It’s interesting that your questions are the same questions we ask about every controversial selection or non-selection, though.  How does Bobby Grich appeal?  How does Raines, or Gil Hodges?  What are the standards?  The answers are they can’t appeal and standards are those of the judges, who at the moment are the HWs.

I would have wanted to see Bonds, too.  I also would have wanted to see Eddie Gaedel and Pete Gray.  That doesn’t mean they should be in the Hall.

Let me ask you this, if you feel like answering:  How would you reform HOF selection procedures if you were in charge?  “Make the BBWAA voters smarter and better” doesn’t count.

Have (actual) historians vote, and based only on the accomplishments of players, as certified by the leagues.

fair, thanks