The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

So this week we saw Bonds hit 755 and Neifi Perez get suspended for violating the league’s amphetamine policy (which is a whole different punishment schedule than steroids). It’s an interesting pairing to me because one of the things I really found in the years I took to write the book is that as far as we know from test results and anecdotal evidence in the grand jury testimony is there’s a huge split in steroid use between the marginal player, who stands to gain a lot if he can stay in the majors over AAA, and the huge sluggers, the Bonds-McGwire-level guys.

What I didn’t know, and I’ve been following this with great interest, is if that’s true of amphetamine and stimulant use. Historically, every account of players using uppers has made it sound that everyone in a clubhouse would do it, from the utility guys to the bullpen pitchers.

So far, though, you could really make the same argument. Bonds supposedly failed one of his amphetamine tests, and now we’re seeing Perez, a no-hit glove guy, get punished under the same policy. I wonder if, despite what we know about how the drug used to be used, the same cost/benefit tradeoff is driving the same players willing to use steroids to use other drugs, and what that might mean in the long term for baseball’s drug policy.

For a long time, I held two seemingly unrelated positions: I didn’t particularly care about the issue of drugs in baseball, from the cocaine scandals to the increasing steroids hysteria. I loved baseball and felt like without being able to discern who was cheating from who wasn’t, there was little point in condemning anyone.

At the same time, I was a huge Barry Bonds fan. I didn’t care at all that he had a poor relationship with the press, or teammates. I loved his game. Bonds was, for much of his career, the most complete offensive player I’ve ever seen: he hit for average, he drew a hundred walks a year, he hit for doubles and home runs, and he had speed on the basepaths too. I loved watching him play.

During the time we now know from Game of Shadows that he started using deca/THG/and so on, I wrote articles at Baseball Prospectus arguing that “hey, we don’t know, and he was awesome way back when” (and so on) in part because I’d followed him for so long, and felt like having seen all that, if anyone could be so productive so late in their careers, it would be him.

I look back at that, and I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how anyone could have condemned him, or any other player, for making the same decision to turn to drugs in 1998 after the Sosa-McGwire craziness. It’s especially hard to fault him for using THG when it was not only not tested for but technically legal. And yet today I look at my Bonds bobblehead and I don’t think of how much joy I used to get watching his performances at the plate, during the run where he was the best hitter in baseball and as far as anyone knows, entirely clean.

I feel the same way I do now, deciding whether I want to tune into a game and watch him possibly tie Hank Aaron’s home run record: I’m devoid of any enthusiasm, unable to find any thrill in his performance or his achievement.

I feel empty.

As I wrote earlier, one of the other sports I follow is also, drug-wise, historically been one of the dirtiest: professional cycling. Doping is rampant, players get transfusions of their own blood, other people’s blood, they take all kinds of crazy drugs, and competitions are battles in the long war between the sanctioning organizations and shadowy labs across the world.

Last year’s Tour de France winner tested positive for synthetic testosterone, though he says it’s a lab issue, and they’re fighting it out in court. Think about how crazy that is: we don’t know the winner of last year’s crown jewel of the sport. It’s like not knowing who won the last World Series because a home run call is tied up in court.

Recent revelations of past doping (including a Tour winner) have rocked the sport again.

And yet for all this, bicycling is one of the most aggressive sports trying to keep drugs out. Lance Armstrong, for all the allegations against him, was the most tested human on the planet. Last year’s Tour de France missed a huge chunk of the top competitors because they were potentially linked to a Spanish lab – and some were guilty, and others missed a chance to compete, in a sport where riders are really only competitive for a few years.

This is the dark side of baseball’s future: an arms race, continued suspicion, retroactive scandals, the innocent punished along with the guilty.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that bicycling, unlike the sports fans are generally more familiar with, tests for drug use in more than one way:
- Is there something weird in your blood or urine test, like a drug, or synthetic hormones, or whatnot?
- Is there too much of something to occur naturally?

It’s extremely hard to detect many of the drugs that cyclists take to increase their red blood cell count, for instance, so cycling tries to detect those but also says “If you have more than 100 cells per million in the test, you’re an alien and you can’t race.”

Naturally, they all test at 95-98… but they’re trying to define, in a way, what it means to be human.

There are interesting analogues for baseball:
- If your testosterone is over this level based on age, you’re on something
- If your blood has more HGH than you should have for your age, you’re on something
… and so on, all the way to potentially measuring performance metrics (If you can hit a ball more than 600 feet…) and now you start skirting the ridiculous.

But once you understand that it’s almost impossible to keep up with the drugs – and cycling made that realization a long time ago – you have to start looking at ways to at least limit the harm participants who do use can do, by regulating the effects of those drugs.

I wonder how long it will take baseball to look at that enforcement route, or whether they’ll be content to pursue the fight as lightly as possible, tightening controls only when change is forced on them by scandal or regulation.

I’ve been chewing on this for a while, trying to decide how to say this, but he’s right, and maybe not in the way he intended.
When I turned in the first draft of the book, the drugs and steroids chapter was flat and boring, reflecting my disgust with the whole topic. My editor called me about it, saying that compared the rest of the book it pretty much sucked. I replied that I was so disappointed, so angry about the whole topic that it was hard to write about. Write about that, she said, and see how it goes.

The result is the chapter you get: it’s a lot angrier and pointed compared to the rest of the book, a lot more pointed, and contains a giant statistical digression into one of Bonds’ seasons that’s a little eye-popping.

I would apologize if I were Selig. Not for the players, or the entire scandal, but certainly for the huge part baseball’s owners played in it. As it stands, baseball’s pretended that it played no part in tolerating, much less encouraging, the use of performance-enhancing drugs for twenty years, and now they’re shocked – shocked! – to discover it was as prevalent as it was.

I would say, not in so many words, were I Selig at this point:

“Baseball’s leadership failed to act early when we had the opportunity, and we wasted subsequent opportunities. Our poor labor relationship hurt cooperation on issues, like steroids, that hurt the game as a whole, and I’m personally responsible for one of the most egregious examples. In fighting so hard over baseball’s revenues, we hurt baseball’s future.

“Many people in baseball didn’t see what was happening until it was too late, but many knew and did nothing. Some actively helped. While they all bear some responsibility, those of us who led baseball created an atmosphere where it was acceptable to look the other way, where those who spoke up or attempted to raise warnings were ignored. We helped to create a game where those who did not participate were faced with a devil’s choice – to potentially operate at a competitive disadvantage, or to shrug and join in.

“As owners, we created an environment where players stood to benefit hugely from using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, while facing no potential penalties. If nothing else, if even in an ideal world we could not have struck a deal for testing, we as teams should have looked for ways to reduce the financial incentives to players, by being more cautious in how we valued players.

“Our errors encouraged a level of hysteria that undermined the game. How could we dispute that half, or even three-fourths of players, were using steroids if there was no testing, no surveys of any kind to offer us a more accurate picture? In the absence of truth, it’s no wonder that lies and rumors flourished, and that’s our fault.

“Baseball made many mistakes both in action and in standing by, that harmed our fans’ perception of the game. We accept the blame, and I’m sorry for my role. We can’t undo what’s happened, but we will do better.”

That’s what I’d say if I were Selig. But if I were Selig, well…

Selig’s ducking of the topic, and particularly the embarrassing spectacle of MLB trying to avoid Bonds’ pursuit of the all-time home run record, is ridiculous. As a baseball fan, it makes me want to put my head in my hands. This is what we’ve come to: one of baseball’s greatest marks is being challenged by someone who clearly owes that challenge to sometimes-legal, often-illegal performance enhancing drugs, and the commissioner is hiding in his office hoping Bonds gets hit by a bus or tossed in jail for perjury or something intervenes to save Selig from having to face up to his own culpability.

There are many parties who played parts in this farce. That they can’t coordinate a group confession doesn’t mean that individual acknowledgment and contrition wouldn’t be helpful.

Apologies for missing a few days there, I’m developing a couple fairly long posts and debating the double-play rules via email (I’ll write more about this later this week).

In any event – I came across a set of notes on something that never made it into the book that I found interesting. In the late 1980s, the game saw a huge surge of home runs that resulted in fairly wide speculation on what the causes were, from a juiced ball (which was investigated) to alternate theories like strike zone enforcement, a pitching drought, and so on.

I came across a fine example in a USA Today article at the Hall of Fame (undated, but it looks like it’s from a 1988 season preview) by Tom Barnidge, titled “Ball Didn’t Change, Did It? Naah”. He discussed what the possible causes were, how likely they seemed, including bat corking. Here’s what John Schuerholz (then with KC – he’d take over in Atlanta in 1990, where he’s done incredible work) said

“Sure, there are some corked bats. When I see bats explode, I believe they’re corked. But I really don’t think it’s all that pervasive. That’s not why we had all the home runs.”

The article ran a table, “Improved Outputs” listing “hitters who increased their home run totals by at least 10 from 1986 to 1987 (minimum of 400 at-bats each season)”. It runs, in part:

Andre Dawson, Cubs, 20 to 49
Will Clark, Giants, 11 to 35
Wade Boggs, Red Sox, 8 to 24
George Bell, Blue Jays, 31 to 47
Keith Moreland, Cubs, 12 to 27
[...]
Eric Davis, Reds, 27 to 37

The kicker is that there’s no one on that list – no one – who’s been tied into steroid use since. There are no Oakland players, though we now know that Oakland was, essentially, the infection vector for major league baseball, led by Jose Canseco (86 to 87? -2 HR, from 33 to 31).

I have a couple of observations on this:
- there was a home run surge at the same time as steroids started to come into the game, but the surge in large part was not due to steroids
- it’s possible that the huge surge in home runs actually drew attention away from the spread of steroids: after all, if the most prominent players having power surges were clean (and not at all the classic bulky muscle-bound guy we think of as suspects), then it’s hard to look at any specific cases, or team, and see a new factor
- because baseball had seen corked bats, rabbit balls, and the other causes before, those were the causes they speculated about. Now, we look to drugs for explanations of weirdness in baseball – but if there’s a new and widespread scourge, it’s quite likely it’ll be what no one expects, or even speculates is possible.

In The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, in the steroids chapter I put some stats together to test a theory. In Game of Shadows, Bonds complained that when he was “on” (actively taking steroids) he hit better those weeks, and when he was “off” (not taking them, so the body continues to naturally produce testosterone) he felt weak and ineffective (relatively). Using game stats, I tested that hypothesis (“Bonds will hit better for three weeks and then worse for a week, continuing through a whole season”) and the result’s in the book.

A reader wrote to take issue with its completeness, arguing that the benefits of steroids would come not just from having them actively coursing through the veins, but also in the training and muscle-building that would last all season. That off week is padded, so to speak, by the extra bulk built up and maintained by all the time on.

This is entirely true: the work in the book only attempts to measure whether the complaint in Game of Shadows can be turned into a theory and tested.

What about the other question, though – what’s the overall effect? Ignore whether he went up and down in a regular pattern during a season. How far did it get him? From what we know, it was the McGwire-Sosa home run chase of 1998 that so annoyed Bonds that he decided to begin using steroids the next season.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty napkin calculation. It doesn’t take into account how he should have aged or anything else. It’s really quick, though. From 1986-1998, age 21-33, Bonds hit a home run 21% of the time he made any hit. Then for 1999-2007, it lept to 35%. His lowest HR/H rate in that period, 2006, is 26.3% (only two are higher in the prior run).

If you use the 86-98 rate, he’d have hit 202 over 99-07 so far. Use a generous 26% rate, and you get up to about 250. In real life, he hit 333. Or, -131 in the first case, -83 in the second case.

Which on the career mark would put him at 602 to 660 – a season behind or possibly just having passed Willie Mays.

Obviously, that doesn’t do the topic justice, and it makes an unfortunate assumption that every year after 1998 is included, even after the collapse of BALCO. It doesn’t look at the intentional walks, and it also assumes that Bonds from age 34-42 hit home runs as well or better than his 21-33 selves. Still, it’s interesting to make a rough calculation like that and realize how quickly these things add up, and also how great a player Bonds was before 1999.

Kirk Radomski pled guilty to distributing anabolic steroids and laundering the money. The Smoking Gun has the plea agreement. Spoiler: no names in the agreement.

The short timeline: worked for the Mets 1985-1995, and then dealt drugs 1995-2005, when the police searched his house.

Interesting points:

He contacted some personally, but also did business through the telephone and mail. If this is the case, there will be phone records and other records to be traced back.

He’s agreeing to cooperate with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, including testimony, providing documents. This includes “f. I will not reveal my cooperation, or any information related to it, to anyone without prior consent of the government” and “g. I will participate in undercover activities…” both of which seem a hard to pull off now.

This is likely much bigger than the last dominoes: the Jason Grimsley roll-over, or the online pharmacy busts, which still haven’t affected anyone now playing.

We’ve only seen MLB punish one player (Grimsley) for a drug offense not related to testing positive. If Radomski’s cooperation provides a long list of players that he sent anabolic steroids to after baseball implemented its drug policy, it’s going to be an unwelcome series of decisions for the Commisioner’s office to make, and one, I’m sure, they’d rather not have to confront.

(hat tip to Thomas Nast for the Smoking Gun link)

Joe Posnanski’s new book on Buck O’Neil:

has a passage on steroids on p. 240:

People were always surprised that Buck did not have strong feelings about how bad steroids were for baseball. He did worry about kids ruining their bodies, but the cheating part did not move him much. In the Negro Leagues, he had known players to bend the rules to win – they corked bats, spit on the ball, popped amphetamines, stole signals, and even loaded up on coffee for the caffeine. They wanted to win. “The only reason players in my time didn’t use steroids,” he would say sometimes, “is because we didn’t have them.”

It’s interesting to fit this into the larger timeline of steroid use: later on, we’ll see that as steroids became available, players began using them immediately without any systematic means. My book touches on that a little, and I’ll write more about Tom House’s comments here soon.

Also, I laughed reading O’Neil’s reaction watching Palmeiro’s congressional testimony: “He’s lying.”

In the latest drug scandal, there are a lot of interesting issues. The country’s overzealous pursuit of doctors who prescribe pain-killers to patients with chronic pain helps to create and sustain a grey market in those drugs (and Viagra, and…), David Bell possibly being snared and exposed as taking fertility drugs, which could be for entirely legitimate, personal reasons, or for nefarious, performance-enhancing purposes.

I’ve been watching the Moreno vs Matthews fight. Matthews, on advice of his lawyer, has shut up and intends to ride this out. The guy who signs his paychecks, though, says not only that Matthews should be open and forthright about what happened, but he’s making ominous sounds about “resolving” the situation.

It seems unlikely that Moreno’s going to void Matthews’ contract. Players have clauses in their contracts that say they can be voided if they do dangerous things like x, y, or z, and they generally also have a “morals” clause that could void the deal (this is what people talk about when a player gets a DUI or like arrest). But on the news leaking out of the prosecution, there’s nothing to tie Matthews to something he did while under the Angels’ contract, and there’s nothing he did that violated an MLB policy in place at the time.

Voiding contracts on much clearer grounds hasn’t been done yet: Jason Giambi might have come the closest of any player, and the Yankees, with all their money, lawyers, and cantankerous owner, still didn’t go for it. In general, teams are generally reluctant to go after even players they know have violated specific clauses in their contract (like Jeff Kent, with the Giants).

If Moreno’s serious about pressing this, it would a little amusing because he’d be the first to put a significant new pressure on players to not use – the fear that they’d see their contracts voided – while at the same time he’d just reinforced with the contract that there’s a huge incentive for players to do whatever they can to get ahead in their career year. Taking this a step further, it would seem like if you’re in a contract year, you might as well give it a shot. If you’re caught, you’re SOL trying to crank out a career performance, but you won’t have lost much compared to what you’d have made not trying. And if you’re caught later, say the lab’s busted or whatever else might happen, that’s a longshot but you’re still going to be able to fight the action and likely settle, and if not, you’re stilll not behind where you’d be not going for it.

It’s a minimal disincentive compared to the amount of money a player can make with a breakout contract year.

Moreno, of course, has received general applause from the press for his statements.

Three posts in a row on steroids. Time for a topic change.

In the March 2007 Play, which I got with my New York Times, Bobby Valentine said

I always thought I was a smart guy. And then I realized I’m a dumb guy – because I was managing against the Oakland A’s and I was firing our conditioning guys because our guys weren’t getting as strong as the A’s. If I knew what was going on, I probably would have gotten very upset and either insisted that all my guys do it or I would have blown the whistle, I’m not sure. But I was stupid.

To start, Valentine’s a candid guy, and I took this as if he was serious.

When Valentine managed the Rangers between 1985-1992, he saw the rise of the steroid-fueled Canseco A’s, starting in 1985 but really catching on the next year. I wasn’t able to find a citation for Valentine firing his conditioning guys, which would have been great, but assume it’s true.

It means, at least, that during the initial rise of steroids, when the A’s were really the only team with more than one guy juicing and lifting, it was not widely known what was going on, and Valentine, in the same division and, as he notes, a smart guy, didn’t get wind of it for a while, long enough to get frustrated and can some people.

It also means, if Valentine fired more than one coach, that there were conditioning coaches who hadn’t figured it out, or at least didn’t tell Valentine, which seems unlikely.

It’s interesting if only to put these things on a timeline. 1985-?, the degree to which other teams realized what was going on and adopted use varies, but we know that it

Rafael Pamleiro, who late in his career failed a steroid test, saw a power spike that people have pointed me to during Valentine’s stay (pre-1990 vs post-1990). The 1991-1992 teams have a couple players (Sierra, Gonzalez) I’ve heard mentioned as possible steroid users. So if you accept that, it wouldn’t seem to have taken more than a few years for Valentine to pick up his own, though it doesn’t look like the whole team was on them (though… Jeff Huson did hit two home runs in 1991…).

The other interesting thing in his statement is his reaction: that he either would have encouraged everyone to use, or he’d have finked them out. We know reasonably that it didn’t take Valentine all that long to figure out what was going out, and as far as I know having read all the history-of-steroid books (which are quite depressing) Valentine didn’t go after the system. That leads us back to that last paragraph: when he figured it out, was it around 1990, and did he then encourage his big guys to get a-juicing?

Oh, for a chance at a follow-up question.

Also in the interview, Valentine talks about how the tight-knit, insular nature of Japanese baseball essentially prevented players from using steroids: it was too hard to go undetected, and the peer pressure against it was so strong that it never caught on. I’d add that the nature of Japanese baseball, where they play a lot faster, with more run-and-gun, bunt-for-a-hit strategies. If the game doesn’t encourage – and teams don’t financially reward – bulking up and hitting for power, players won’t do it.

Coincidentally, the Rangers fired Valentine 86 games into the 1992 season and not long afterwards traded for Jose Canseco.