"Turns Out Craig Counsell Was Actually Best Baseball Player Of Steroid Era"

To go with the Milwaukee Brewer's hiring Craig Counsell as their new manager, we also have a big win from The Onion. I approve!

Mistrial!

Wow! I can't say that I expected this outcome: Roger Clemens's perjury trial has been declared a mistrial. There might well be another trial, but this was still unexpected.

Oh, and here is perhaps my favorite quote from the article: Clemens and his lawyers remain under a court gag order, so they are unlikely to comment on the development.

Ya think? (However, I do really love how the author of the piece is holding
out some hope...)

Quote of the Day: Bitter Baseball Veteran Edition

I love the quote "Hell hath no fury like a Bash Brother scorned.", which Jerry Crasnick used to describe José Canseco and his tell-all book about steroids in baseball.

I think that particular phrasing is wonderful.

A-Rod in The Onion

I love this article, especially the headline:

A-Rod Finally Leads Rangers To World Series


Now that's a big win!

Another Take on Mark McGwire and Steroids

I try to minimize the number of posts I have here about steroids in baseball, but this article in The Onion is just too good not to post. I approve!

(Tip of the cap to Kevin Hickerson.)

Gentlemen, I think we have a loose cannon.

I'm trying to minimize how much I discuss PEDs in this spot (because, frankly, I am sick of it and I would not be surprised to find out about possible use by anybody in professional baseball---there are just more interesting things to discuss), but on occasion I make an exception. It seems like Reds pitcher Bronson Arroyo is showing a mixture of refreshing honesty and some opinions that I find a bit perturbing. I respect the fact that he's speaking his mind---though I think he's going to ultimately get himself derailed if he keeps at it (he's being 'honest to a fault', which also happens to be one of my specialties)---but I really don't like the attitude he's showing. It seems to me that part of what he's saying is that he believes that using the stuff is ok as long as one doesn't get caught. OK, so he's far from the only person who believes that and is distinguishing himself mostly by openly admitting it (and also showing a rather familiar cynicism about what other people think), but to me it's patently obvious that issues about getting caught are not the only problem here.

Anyway, we'll see how this plays out.

The Drug Culture of Sports

As several sportswriters have now pointed out (I saw this recently in blog entries by Peter Gammons and Rob Neyer), the drug culture in sports isn't exactly new. Will the people crying bloody murder stop pretending that they didn't know anything? Take a look at this article, which appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1969!

I was planning not to blog on another steroids scandal, but...

I told myself that I wouldn't blog about the whole A-Roid thing (sorry, but I can't help snickering about the new nickname), but former Major Leaguer Doug Glanville has made an excellent point in his New York Times opinion piece, and I think that is worth bringing up. Namely, the 2003 tests---i.e., the one that A-Rod failed---were agreed legally by the players as a litmus test to try to gauge just how rampant performance-enchancing-drug abuse was in the sport. It was the massive failure (over 100 players) on those tests that led to the testing system currently in place. One of the conditions for those tests was that all results were supposed to be anonymous and without that stipulation that testing would not have taken place. So, while A-Rod gets skewered for being caught (and don't think for a second that he's the last big name who will get similarly skewered---one shouldn't be surprised to see any name!), let's also remember that basic privacy rights associated with anonymous testing are also being breached here. Why is this issue getting lost?

(Tip of the Cap: I found out about Doug Glanville's article from Rob Neyer's blog.)

Ken Griffey Jr. hits 600th career homerun

Ken Griffey Jr. hit his 600th career homerun today. The fan who seemingly caught the ball did something very slick. (The balls are specially marked, so we'll see if this guy has the actual ball.) Try to catch the video on YouTube if you get a chance.

I haven't mentioned it in this spot before, but the Lords of Baseball have pissed me off with how they've advertised the now-obtained 500th homerun for Manny (about which I didn't end up blogging earlier) and 600th homerun for Griffey. The advertisement for Manny was ok, as it showed some other players getting their 500th homer and advertised watching to see when Manny would do it. The similar advertisement for Griffey's 600th showed Babe Ruth's and Hank Aaron's 600th homers. In their eternal attempt at whitewashing history, Major League Baseball's advertisement never mentioned Mark McGwire Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa. I fucking hate that. Hey, Dudes: Trying to pretend steroids never happened neither works nor helps!

Update: Of course, I managed to inadvertently mention McGwire instead of Barry Bonds, so maybe I'm wrong about the whitewashing not working!

Tales from the ArXiv: Steroids and Power Laws edition

Here is the abstract of a paper that just got posted on the arxiv:

\\
arXiv:0804.0061
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 03:59:08 GMT (41kb)

Title: Statistical evidence consistent with performance-enhancing drugs in
professional baseball
Authors: Alexander Petersen, Woo-Sung Jung, and H. Eugene Stanley
Categories: physics.pop-ph physics.soc-ph
Comments: 9 pages, 4 figures
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
\\
Statistical analysis is a major aspect of baseball, from player averages to
historical benchmarks and records. Much of baseball fanfare is based around
players exceeding the norm, some in a single game and others over a long
career. Career statistics serve as a metric for classifying players and
establishing their historical legacy. However, the concept of records and
benchmarks assumes that that level of competition in baseball is stationary in
time. Here we show that power-law probability density functions, a hallmark of
many complex systems that are driven by competition, govern career longevity in
baseball. We also find universal power laws in the distributions of all major
performance metrics for pitchers and batters. The use of performance-enhancing
drugs has a dark history, emerging as a problem for both amateur and
professional sports. We find statistical evidence of performance enhancement in
the analysis of home runs hit by players in the last 25 years. This is
consistent with the findings of the Mitchell Report [1], a two-year
investigation into the use of illegal steroids in major league baseball, which
revealed that over 5 percent of major league baseball players tested positive
for performance-enhancing drugs in an anonymous 2003 survey.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.0061 , 41kb)

The Collected Poetic Works of Roger Clemens

I've purposely been avoiding blogging about the whole Roger Clemens steroid hearings in Congress because (simply) I think there are better ways for all of us to spend our lives.

However, Rob Neyer's blog included a link to this article in Slate that is so amusing that I had to break my moratorium and post the link here. Perhaps with a brief nod to Find me Guilty, this article takes word-for-word quotes by Roger Clemens and compiles them in poetic form. Fantastic!

For example, the following haiku ("Offensive Haiku") occurred in the 2/5/08 deposition:

I am offended.
I will be honest with you.
I am offended.

I approve!

The Steroids Social Network

On this website, you can find a visualization of the social network (apparently with some community detection, at least by hand) of the players mentioned in baseball's Mitchell Report on steroids.

Curt Schilling on Clemens and Canseco

Rob Neyer's blog today had an interesting entry with some excerpts and discussion of a blog entry by baseball player Curt Schilling (among the more thoughtful players in the Major Leagues).

Shocked!

Do you know what I find really shocking? In fact, I'm completely outraged!

It's this recent firestorm that has hit baseball with the unsettling, horrifying, completely shocking news that Josias Manzanillo used steroids!

(People who follow baseball will certainly get the sarcasm above, and I imagine that the rest of you will get it from the context of the rest of the comment. For those in the Old World, I purposely mentioned a no-name player in the comment above. Obviously, none of this should be surprising at all at this point---especially when it comes to people like Roger Clemens and Eric Gagne whose names had surfaced repeatedly in rumors.)

Sigh...

Bonds indicted for perjury

Breaking news: Barry Bonds indicted for perjury and obstruction.

Cue the Dragnet theme...

Interesting article on Barry Bonds's former trainer

Here is an interesting article on Greg Anderson, the former personal trainer of Barry Bonds.

The beginning of the article discusses one person who spent some time as Anderson's cellmate in prison. His crime spree, resulting from junk food addiction, was quite a strange one. Describing his arrest, this guy commented, "The fucking pie filling went everywhere."

Oh, and the elk semen thing is just gross.

Bonds record homerun ball to be affixed with asterisk

The votes from the fans are in, and the person who won the auction for the ball Barry Bonds hit for his Major League record 756th homerun will be affixing an asterisk to the ball and then sending it to the Hall of Fame. I approve!

Move over, Henry. Here comes Barry.

Barry Bonds his his 756th career homerun today, passing Hank Aaron to become baseball's all-time homerun king.

The title of this post is a reference to a song that was recorded when Aaron passed Ruth. I believe the song lyrics (and title) refer to part of the call an announcer made when the record was broken. (Well, people might have started using those words when Aaron was on his way to breaking the record -- the song was certainly phrased in that manner.)

More Homerun Milestones (and Nomaaaaah update)

Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th homerun today. At 32 years and 8 days of age, he has become the youngest player ever to join the club. Also today, Barry Bonds hit his 755th career homerun, which ties him with Hank Aaron for first of all time. See this page for ESPN.com's milestone tracker.

In other news, Dodgers third baseman Nomaaaaah Garciaparra has been hitting much better lately (including for power!) and his OPS is now (barely) over .700. If he keeps this up, he may actually get his OPS up to a decent level in the reasonably near future. Of course, we've been losing lots of games lately and we've now fallen 3 games out of first and 1.5 games out of second. That sucks.

Headline: Bonds does not tie or break the record against the Dodgers!

Although the Dodgers are losing to the Giants 3-1 today, there is nevertheless some excellent news. Namely, Bonds has not hit a homerun today and Fred Lewis just pinch-ran for him. Today's game is the last of the series, so bonds will not be tying or breaking Hank Aaron's homerun record against us. Dude! That is just so bloody awesome!

I am reconciled to the fact that Bonds will get the record. I just didn't want it to be against us. And it's not because of the steroids (and it's certainly not because he's ornery because I have both sympathy and empathy for that); rather, it's because he's a fucking Giant and I hate the Giants.