Arbitration deadline
Tomorrow is the deadline for teams to offer arbitration to their free agents. If they do not tender an offer of arbitration, the team is unable to sign the player until May 1st. In essence, if you do not offer arbitration to one of your free agents, you are choosing to let him go. Free agents not offered arbitration no longer qualify for compensation, so the signings will pick up after tomorrow and teams no longer fear giving up draft choices for marginal players overvalued by Elias’ ridiculous ratings.
I’m expecting the club to offer arbitration to both Dan Wilson and Ron Villone, though it is possible that they will work out an agreement with Wilson that he will not accept the offer of arbitration. This will give the team and player until December 19th to work out a deal. The M’s want Wilson back and he wants to come back, so I’d expect an agreement will be reached, probably not before tomorrow however.
Mmm… steroids and dear readers
So it took me a full day to write “Steroids and Condemnation” and when I posted it, I was worried. I turned off comments and braced myself, as I’d seen this topic go badly every time I brought it up, here or in a column at Baseball Prospectus.
And nothing happened. The article didn’t get spread around that widely as I thought it might in the wake of the news, but a lot of people read it, and everyone who dropped me a note wrote kind emails that were often long and well-put. No one started flame threads in other articles… everyone was cool.
Thanks. I love this crowd.
The USSM Reading List
People ask me all the time what books I recommend to get into baseball analysis, or strategy, or cool stuff like that — “I’m new to baseball. How do I get smarter in a hurry?”. This is going to change a ton, but here’s a start, and I’ll edit this as I think of more. Read more
Site protection upgrade
Because the other site info update comments are coming thick and heavy, I figured you folks were insatiable for site information!
I’m doing some work this weekend on implementing a, uh… widget of some kind (cough) that should significantly reduce the amount of time I spend fighting comment spammers. It is, however… um, how about this — as always, if you see something screwy with the site, email us. Particularly this weekend.
If you’re at all interested in what the site would look like had I not started to arm the server, check out the second page and after of comments here on some political blog — ignore the actual comments, please, and just check out how these spammers do drive-by after drive-by. I found that page looking up information on one of the more heinous and persistent attackers here. If you ever wonder why I’m in a bad mood about comments sometimes, on a bad day we’ll have 5-6 distinct comment spam attacks go at us.
Hence my new… widget. Hee hee hee. The less said about it, the better.
Update: seriously, hee hee hee.
Nooooooooooo
John Hickey writes over at the PI that if the Yanks try to drop Giambi, they’ll be after Delgado/Sexson.
Which, to me, is fine — knock yourselves out on those guys. Particularly Sexson. The more the Yankees want to spend, the better.
The piece that really disturbed me is this:
With former Seattle general manager Pat Gillick having paid a visit last month to Delgado in Puerto Rico, the Mariners were considered the favorite to land the slugger.
I’d really hoped Gillick was spending his time in Toronto working on his resume and calling friends in baseball looking for new work, so that the team could finally move on and commit to the new team. That he’s recruiting isn’t that bad, but that he’s active and involved makes me cringe.
Or, alternately, there’s this:
The Mariners apparently are looking into the possibility of signing Jeromy Burnitz, a left-handed hitting outfielder with power.
He is left-handed, yes. And he does hit for power sometimes, sure. But he hit really badly in LA, which is a decent comp for Safeco if you want a rough estimate, he’s 35 and not a good fielder. That’s not what the M’s need.
Outage and comments, comments, comments
Couple things. We were down late last night for 3133t h4x0r-related reasons. I wish they’d fricking get their attacks co-ordinated at least, and decide whether they want the site up so they can fight me and my anti-comment-spamming tricks, or if they want to try and use the hosting company to launch DoS attacks on their IRC buddies or whatever’s angered them that day.
In other comment news — I got some pretty nasty flack over deleting a lot of comments w/r/t steroids and another thread. “I don’t appreciate you deleting my comments” “You [foul adjective] [insulting noun]” and so forth. So, two responses, in general, and one specifically. First, the comment guidelines are pretty clear about what’s going to get deleted.
Second, if on a topic there is an even more specific note that says “please, do not do x here,” I have no sympathy for people who feel insulted or hurt because they did x and their comment got deleted. If you inadvertantly kick something off and I prune too enthusiastically, particularly if you did so before a note like that, sure, that sorta sucks, and generally I try to drop a note and say “sorry”. Sometimes I’m too busy deleting stuff.
Third, insulting people in general. People have taken offense at some of my judgements about what crosses the line for civil dialogue. This seems to be particularly frequent when someone’s going after site mgmt and they’re warned about tone. I’ll say this — I really do regard USSM as a never-ending get-together (like the Feed!) except without the face-to-face and the pizza. If someone’s at a party and starts to harangue the hosts (“I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a long time — you stink! And… this free booze is terrible! And there’s not enough of it!”)… yeah. If theyre comparing someone to something for the direct purpose of embarassing them or associating the target with something bad, even if no one’s swearing, it’s running up on the whole civil dialogue thing again, and the party hosts get to be judge of when someone gets asked to leave.
Okay, and four — we have been extremely slow to put down bans for being an assbag in general. Spamming comments to promote sleazy products, instant ban, yes. Jerkishness has gotten a long, long leash. People we knew were eventually going to be banned got a lot of rope.
Which actually brings me to five — I know that the disappearing nature of comments must make this seem strange from the user side sometimes. People sometimes write out reasoned, kind replies to morons and see the post is gone before they’re done with their reply. I’m sorry. Some people who got banned for being assbags spend their energy off-site, claiming they’ve been wronged for espousing particular views, when there was actually a comment seen by (say) me and Dave and ten, fifteen readers that finally forced us to get the stick out — and because we don’t have a hall of shame or something, if anyone wanted to figure it out they’d have to go back through that user’s post and extrapolate what they probably said in the deleted posts.
Allllllllll of that said, I think the discussion’s been going well. I wish it took a little less time to run, obviously.
Yankees overhaul bullpen
Slipping under the wire of that other big story today were two trades the Yankees made. One makes a lot of sense. The other, not so much.
Trade A: The Yankees send Kenny Lofton and cash to Philadelphia for Felix Rodriguez.
Despite the fact that Joe Torre refused to use him in the playoffs last year, Lofton was still a fairly useful player, almost exactly league average as a center fielder. His speed is almost gone, but he still gets on base at a decent clip and covers enough ground to not embarrass himself in center field. However, he turns 38 next May and is due $3 million next year, and the Yankees decided they needed bullpen help more than they needed an expensive fourth outfielder. Felix Rodriguez isn’t the dominating setup man he was in 2001, but he’s still pretty darn good, posting good numbers across the board. He’ll become the Yankees third best RHP out of the pen and give them some depth in the middle innings. Total cost to upgrade the pen? About $1 million, plus the bonus of removing a player they didn’t want around.
This trade makes a lot less sense for Philadelphia, unless they spend that $1 million really well. Lofton isn’t the flycatcher the Phillies need in between Burrell and Abreu, and he’s not the leadoff hitter they’ve been looking for. He’s a nice spare part now occupying a position where the Phillies had an opportunity to get significantly better. The opportunity cost of filling the CF gap is the real problem here. The Phillies saved some cash, but they just made it that much harder to improve themselves. Ed Wade continues to spin his heels with a roster that should be much better than it is.
The best news out of this deal, though, is that those infernal Randy Winn for Ryan Howard suggestions can finally die. Hallelujah.
Trade B:
The Yankees sent Felix Heredia to the Mets for Mike Stanton and $1 million in cash.
Heredia was the Yankees version of Shigetoshi Hasegawa. He posted a superficially solid ERA in 2003 and earned a nifty little two year deal for his work. His ratios said the performance wasn’t sustainable, and wham, a 6.28 ERA in 2004 earns him a trip to Queens. Ironically, the Yankees may have made almost the same move they did last year when they gave Heredia that extension. Stanton’s 3.16 ERA for the Mets last year might remind some of his 2001 dominance in the Bronx, but he clearly wasn’t the same pitcher. His ratios have plummeted and his effectiveness against southpaws is almost completely gone (they hit .269/.370/.426 against him last year). Heading into his age 38 season, there’s little chance Stanton will post an ERA below 4.00 again, and he’s a decent bet to end up with an ERA somewhere around Heredia’s.
The money the Mets are sending only covers half the difference in contracts, so the Yankees paid another $1 million for this supposed upgrade. Don’t be surprised when Stanton is filling Heredia’s role as the Lefty-That-Joe-Torre-Is-Too-Afraid-To-Use next October, however.
More fun with Jim Street
Okay, I’m not trying to be mean here, but doesn’t Jim Street have some kind of responsibility to his boss to make sure that he writes things that aren’t so factually incorrect that they can be refuted in about 45 seconds?
In response to a question about moving the fences in, Street answers:
If Bavasi and manager Mike Hargrove want to have the fences moved in, it would be considered, but no such request has been made. The Mariners have enjoyed tremendous success at Safeco Field since the facility opened midway through the 1999 season and actually have hit better at home than on the road (emphasis mine). The club hit 71 home runs at home last season and 65 on the road, while opposing teams hit 108 home runs at Safeco. So, why move the fences in and make it easier for opponents to hit home runs?
Mariners, 2004:
Home: .255/.322/.385, 3.81 runs per game
Road: .284/.339/.407, 4.81 runs per game
Mariners, 2003:
Home: .264/.342/.398, 4.86 runs per game
Road: .278/.346/.422, 4.95 runs per game
Mariners, 2002:
Home: .264/.346/.397, 4.54 runs per game
Road: .285/.354/.440, 5.50 runs per game
In each of the past three seasons, the Mariners have posted a higher batting average, on base percentage, slugging percentage, and number of runs scored per game on the road. Yes, they hit 6 more home runs at Safeco last year, but over the three year period of 2002-2004, the team hit nineteen more homers on the road. Not only is six home runs over 6,000 at-bats statistically insignificant, it was a statistical fluke.
The sad part, honestly, is that Street obviously looked up the home/road splits in order to publish the home run numbers. That he could look at these numbers, then publically state that the Mariners hit better at home than on the road just baffles the mind.
Steroids and condemnation
This took me almost a day to write, so please, forgive me if it’s a little dense and long.
There are a couple of distinct and separate issues with the BALCO testimony and Barry Bonds in particular, and it’s important before I go on to make these clear.
What exactly came out of this last leak, and what does it change?
Is the use of performance-enhancing drugs bad, in general or for specific types of drugs?
Do steroids help players?
Did Barry Bonds use steroids, and if so, knowingly or unknowingly?
Am I a Bonds partisan who is only defending him for nefarious reasons?
To the last one, I long ago admitted that I thought it was only matter of time before it came out. My approach, in the steroid controversies as in all baseball things, is that I try to see where reason takes me, and if it doesn’t get me all the way there, when I write about it I try to be good about what’s fact and what’s my interpretation.
For steroid use, this has meant that I weighed the evidence and found it lacking. The appearance-change argument is the weakest of all arguments, but none of them met the standard I’d require to come out and say that a particular player used steroids. To be entirely clear — I think there are players on these drugs. I think I could make a list of guys I was pretty sure about, and if we could conclusively prove it one way or another, that list would be proven out.
But I don’t want to write about rumors and speculation like that. I want to be a good analyst, a decent humorist, not a dirt-monger, and I think there’s a huge difference between trafficing in M’s front-office gossip and writing something that potentially helps taint a player’s career.
All the rest of these are far more complicated than coverage so far has made them.
To dismiss another one quickly: “Do steroids help players?” I’m not convinced that they do. We don’t have data on this. They clearly can make players stronger, but whether the overall effects translate into better performance, we don’t know, and we won’t ever know, because it would require a long-term study with many players who do and don’t use, and we’ll never get that.
So to the issue of morals. “Is the use of performance-enhancing drugs bad, in general or for specific types of drugs?”
I oppose any athlete using a drug that produces a short-term gain for a long-term cost in health. Legal or illegal, it doesn’t matter to me. I agree entirely with those
who argue that if you’re a normal, healthy athlete, you shouldn’t have to make a choice between keeping up with another player using harmful drugs and behing healthy enough to play catch with their kids in ten years.
This is part of why I have such trouble watching football: these 300+ pound lineman are offering themselves up to diabetes and all kinds of joint problems for the rest of their lives for a four, five year career in the trenches.
But the line between what’s going on is entirely unclear. Elite athletes all use supplements of one kind or another. It could be super-concentrated meals-in-a-shake recovery drinks, or vitamain and mineral supplements. Many use legal supplements that are natural… sort of. Like creatine, which may help build twitch muscle bulk. You could get that kind of creatine in your system naturally. You would have to drink fish smoothies all day, but it could be done. And yet no one really knows what the long-term effects of creatine use are — and even the performance studies are inconsistent about the benefits. People use it like crazy. But it seems like it should be safe (except for the flatulence and need for super-hydration… no, really).
Now, steroids like the one Jason Giambi supposedly testified taking, that are illegal for healthy people and can have all kinds of side effects: clearly wrong.
But what about new, unproven, legal drugs, like THG was? Or the now-banned set of steroid precursors like andro that Mark McGwire used? These are almost like creatine: they directly or indirectly change the body in a way that would be difficult to practically do without them.
If an athlete is taking a legal but unproven drug, is that bad, or just aggressively searching for an advantage?
This is an entirely practical question. I’ve written before that designer steroids are decades ahead of testing, and the THG scandal’s proven that. Conte comes out and says it in his interview with ESPN. If Bonds and Sheffield and Giambi are all tossed out of baseball tomorrow, there will be many, many other athletes in many sports using THG-like drugs and testing negative for banned performance enhancing drugs.
And we’re never going to know if these are safe. Much of what goes on with players who use these drugs is vodoo without the oral history of what’s effective. Each athlete’s relying on someone to come up with schedules, etc, based on their best guesses for effectiveness and safety, which in turn is based on their ability to do research on (for instance) trials of similar products on sick people. The people working on this stuff are really smart, but without wide clinical trials… there’s a degree of uncertainty those who use choose to live with.
So now go back to our mythical innocent player, using legal, healthy supplements and working out all the time. He knows the guy competing with him is using something crazy, a new testosterone enhancer called NMM, say. No one knows if it’s safe, or how effective it is, though he’s asked his trainer, who asked around and reported that the word is it’s safe, undetectable, and great for building muscle mass. It’s legal because no one’s heard of it.
What’s this guy do?
I don’t have an easy answer. I don’t want him to face that question, but in a sense, it’s the same question he faces over creatine, or any other supplement, except that there are far more unknowns and potential harm with NMM.
So do you legislate what supplements can be taken, limiting that set to a small number of drugs that have gone through wide clinical trials? Limit trainers to a set of qualified, certified people who understand that list and its application thoroughly?
And then if NMM’s undetectable, aren’t we back where we started?
There’s no easy answer. I applauded MLB and MLBPA when they ignored the Canseco-incited hysteria to come up with a reasoned, measured approach that tried to determine the extent of abuse (though that test was, I understand, pretty laughable) and included work on trying to educate players coming up on the risks involved. Because you’re not going to catch the NMMs, enforcement of a banned substance list can only be part of any solution.
I know, it sucks. I wish I had a brilliant solution in here, too. I don’t. No one does.
This leaves us with two questions:
Did Barry Bonds use steroids, and if so, knowingly or unknowingly?
What exactly came out of this last leak, and what does it change?
Many people have looked at this last leak and said Bonds admitted using steroids. But he doesn’t. He says he trusted his friend, and took a bunch of stuff for other problems. He says he doesn’t believe his friend would have given him steroids.
The prosecution questions him at length about how Anderson had drug schedules, and how the items Bonds describes using (which Bonds claims he thought was flaxseed oil, for instance) are matches for these substances, like “the cream”.
Bonds’ line here is pretty much that he took stuff, didn’t know what it was, certainly didn’t know it was steroids, and doesn’t think it was anyway.
I’ve followed Bonds’ career most of my life, appreciating both his accomplishments — regardless of what people argue about his late-career surge, Barry’s been an elite player for his whole career — and acknowledging that he has problems dealing with the press, comes off as arrogant (and why not, I said, he’s Barry Bonds).
The same qualities that led me to defend him: knowing how fanatical about his workouts he was, how serious he got about nutrition late in his career, all the things he did that allowed him to age so well and explained his performance, these things all now make the case that he used the worst BALCO had to offer, and that he’s lying about it now.
I can’t believe that Bonds, this fanatical trainer, eater, control-freak about his work, would use random supplements handed to him by anyone without a good explanation. Or that he would continue to work with this guy knowing he was involved in some really strange stuff. Though Barry’s got little use for image, he must have understood the risks that ran. Even as I believe in the world of the elite athlete it must be hard to find trainers who don’t have some connection, it seems strange to me that Bonds wouldn’t actively seek to keep his reputation cleaner.
It’s possible, too, that Bonds knew he’d be given something without knowing how, and so he’d be supplied with stuff to take, and with full knowledge that there was something in one of them, took the vitamin supplement, applied the oil, drank the cola… and maintained deniability that he didn’t know that any of those items specifically contained the magic pixie dust.
Which then brings up a new question: assume Bonds was using THG. At the time, it was legal. What if he was using something illegal, too, like HGH? Does the difference matter? What does this mean for him, and the game?
It’s bad. You can agree with me that the issues around supplements are complicated and also see that this is bad for baseball. I don’t understand why people see steroid use by a player as worse than gambling on games, but they do. I don’t understand why there’s a desire to tear down his marks (would you restore them in the future when strength-building drugs are legal, safe, and widely used?) and yet I know there are people who want to see that happen.
More than anything, I feel let down. I’ve always known these truths about the choices elite athletes make, and there’s something Conte touches on in his interview that rings particularly true: for someone who has always dreamed of competing in the Olympics, for instance, many get to a point in their career where on top of everything they’ve ever done, they need to inject something strange and unknown, or their ascension will stop. Punishment is meaningless in that choice: it’s either become the best, or fail, and failure by way of drug testing may be more shameful than failure by way of competition, but it is still not the goal they strived for.
It makes me sad that athletes have to make that choice. But like everyone else, I don’t have a good solution, or soothing words to salve the conscience. Bonds and Giambi and the rest may fall, but the problem would remain, and as long as it’s there, I will get no satisfaction from the temporary victories in prosecuting a few who got caught.
The starter/reliever prospect post
My distaste for having good minor league pitchers relieve in the minors has come up before, so by request here’s my view in a little more detail.
If a minor league pitcher has good stuff, even if it’s only two good pitches, they should start until their progression stalls. You want to get these kids as much experience as you can, and the regular, pitch-count protection of starting allows a team to get them a lot of playing time (starting pitcher: 200+ innings, reliever: 50-80) throwing to live batters in game situations. Between starts, you get quality side sessions with the coaching staff. If they’ve got two pitches, that’s a lot of time to try and figure out how to spot a new pitch.
Even then, a two-pitch starter can be effective if those two pitches are nasty enough, and the way to refine craft is to get them experience and instruction, and that’s starting.
There’s a case that pitchers who are unsucessful starting can succeed in relief, because they can put more on each pitch, not worrying about endurance, plus repetoire limitations become less important.
I agree — but I don’t want to concede that before you absolutely must.
Another argument is made relieving is different, that coming into a game in progress is so crazy that pitchers have to be prepared for it — that you can’t have a starter convert after a couple years of minor league experience. If you think someone’s a reliever, you should train them to be a reliever. I’ve never seen any evidence to support this. Relievers are, by and large, converted relievers. Few elite relievers were minor league relievers.
I think the opposite is true, though. If a team drafts a college closer, has them close all through the minors, then take over the closer’s job for the big team, you’ll never know if that guy could ever have been a quality starter. While there may be many starter candidates for conversion to the bullpen, someone who builds their whole career off a couple pitches thrown as hard as they can until they fall over is rarely going to be an easy conversion project.
Let your most talented pitchers start until the force a move to relief on their own. It’s that simple.