Saturday, June 15, 2013
Newsday: Shyman [sic] Das, former MLB arbitrator, breaks down baseball’s appeals process
(www.newsday.com)
If a player is suspended as a result of the Biogenesis probe and appeals the decision, the case will go to the current arbitrator. Das said the arbitrator’s role is to judge the ultimate fate of any player suspected to be in violation of baseball’s joint drug agreement, and the arbitrator’s decision is not likely to be challenged outside of baseball.
“Baseball, like most other private employment collective bargaining, is covered by federal law,” Das said in a recent telephone interview. [...] ...Read More...
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1 2 >Wow, that's like the most sad thing I've ever read.
I submitted this article, too. And, frankly, I think Simmons comes a lot closer to what Joe Six Pack thinks than what the typical Primate might.
In my circle of friends (twenty and thirtysomethings in NYC), the "who's using" conversation is very, very normal speculation and is factored into our assessments for fantasy league purposes (you don't want someone who seems likely to fail a drug test, obviously.)
Did he change it from iPhone to chainsaw after it was published? Hm. Silly.
Anyway, this is spot on, and not an argument you hear a lot:
What's the difference between taking HGH and Toradol, anyway? What does the word "performance enhancer" really mean? It's OK to borrow a dead person's ligament to regain your 95-mph fastball, but it's not OK to boost your testosterone for those same results? It's OK to travel to Germany to inject stem cells into your damaged knee to stimulate recovery and regeneration, but it's not OK to replace your blood with better blood to increase your stamina?
The one I feel sad for is Sammy Sosa. The only player to hit more than 60 HR in 3 seasons, and in none of them did he set a record or lead the league!
Seriously? We're not talking about it? I would kill to watch sports coverage on a regular basis that didn't discuss this stuff.
Edit: Coke to Jose.
As to the drug testing, if you are going to do it then do it right - blood testing, this biological passport thing (no idea what that is) or whatever. Random tests year round, increased for guys who do something suspicious (such as Jose Bautista with the Jays - he has peed in more cups than the number of hits he has had in the past few years I bet) just to help keep it from growing into a 'no way that is real' situation. The NBA having a 4 test rule is a total joke - I had no idea but I also don't follow it closely - yet somehow they get off the hook while baseball is still being held to the fire. Last I knew the NHL doesn't even do testing but people still ignore it all. Like I said though, do it full out or skip it, Olympics or NHL level - just don't do the sugar coating method the NBA does.
Also, football fans not only are OK with the players destroying their bodies* for the good of the team, but the fans seem to expect players to destroy their bodies. Gotta play hurt and all that ########.
*-Thankfully, this attitude seems to be changing.
They've had drug testing since 2005, and the WADA testing every four years for the Olympics (and World Cup) caught at least one player I know of (Bryan Berard).
Other than fat ass pitchers (and even then people will acknowledge the fat ass pitcher can throw), I disagree with this. People hate cheating in baseball but tolerate it in other sports because of the romanticism of baseball.
Jose Theodore for Propecia.
I would guess its more like of the major sports, baseball players look more like the average athletic guy, than the average athletic guy seriously thinks they are not far removed talent wise, but there is probably some overlap. Some of the romanticism of baseball comes from this id wager.
I've been making that argument for at least five years now.
I would've cut him a break for nearly losing his eye.
Preach it brother.
And Joe Six Pack is dumb.
Excuse me while I go look at Gifs of the Week.
Actually, Simmons is doing something bigger and better than rehashing the PED-in-baseball conversation we (fans) have been having here for years. He's doing an accounting of the disconnect between what fans do, and what sports journalists do when the cameras are not rolling, vs what the sportswriters do when they're on the clock. The first half of this column is a deadly needed bit of introspection that asks "why am I, Bill Simmons, famous sportswriter for ESPN, too scared to discuss the obvious things that I talk to death outside the office, while on the clock?" Kudos to him for writing this. More of the industry needs to grapple with the fact that the nut brigades at Baseball Think Factory have more in depth, nuanced and informative conversations about PEDs in sports than do the men paid to be "journalists" on the subject.
You'd think cheating in golf would be a huge issue based on this.
I am an average quasi-athletic looking dude and I look nothing like Justin Upton, let alone Aaron Hill or even Matt Williams.
(I had front row seats right next to the third base dugout entrance at Camelback last year, hence my comparisons.)
He's not asking anything new. No kudos for him. Or maybe he is and I missed it because I couldn't finish the article because he wasn't making any new points.
Isn't elite opinion almost always watered down/simplified/condensed/contorted when presented to the public via mass consumption? It's not as if USA Today is going to print something as analytic as Fangraphs or some other elite source. Ditto for whatever Fangraphs' politics/economics/philosophy counterparts are.
I just assumed its because Golf fans were all rich elite people who cheated to get where they are anyway....
<ducks>
Nobody wants to face the music that you can't just put everything in two easily defined categories of "oh that's not a PED" and "oh that's obviously a PED". The sooner we face up to this fact (and by we I mean as a serious society) then we can actually get to the real work of figuring out what we should ban and what we should allow.
I think there's more to it than that, though. If you recall a few years ago when a blogger made basically the same point about Raul Ibanez (though not quite, because the blogger set out to argue that Ibanez's stellar half season could be explained without PEDs), seemingly half the BBWAA went on TV acting scandalized that a player's reputation was impugned with only speculative evidence.
I think that there are still a lot of journalists who think it's unprofessional and ethically wrong to speculate in print (even if they're less likely to call out a fellow media member than a random fan blogger).
This may be true, but Tiger was one of the few who stood out as looking more athletic than Joe Six Pack.
(I watch about 12 minutes of golf per decade, so don't quote me.)
I'm sorry, but that sentence is a complete embarrassment.
It really is. Because when Bush had PEDs in the SOTU and Congress had a hearing on it that really cleaned everything up. It's up to the sports leagues to regulate themselves, they have the incentive, they have the means -- not the feds.
I'm really surprised that folks here would think that Simmons contributes to the discussion with this. It's not like he's suggesting having a conversation about the nature of drug use and athletic competition. He's almost making a threat: suggesting that either athletes agree to the most technologically advanced drug testing available, or else if they don't, reporters should start speculating "looks to me like so-and-so does PED" on the record.
Yeah, this sentence is stupid.
The rest of the article is not. I think he correctly identifies the crazy way the media currently treats PEDs. During normal, day-to-day coverage of sports they don't talk about them publicly. Then, when someone uncovers evidence of an athlete using PEDs it's treated as an aberration and the athlete is blacklisted. It both undersells the extent of the PED problem (assuming you think it's a problem) and overpunishes the athletes who get caught. Moreover, the media does privately speculate about who's using and acts on those speculations when it comes to things like the HOF. Better to speculate out in the open, maybe that way we can come up with semi-coherent and enforceable guidelines.
FWIW, I think most fans treat PEDs the way they treat most other things. It's a bad thing when a guy on the other team does it but understandable when it's my team. For instance, I think Roger Clemens is a dirty unrepentant cheater but Barry Bonds is a tragic figure who only turned to PEDs when his magnificent talents weren't properly recognized.
Yeah, but the standard Joe Public criterion for "gotta be roiding" is that the guy doesn't look like an average athletic guy. There's just no way any rational person could think Bonds's body was impossible while 240-lb linebackers can run 4.4 40s.
And the question of "how old are people"? I graduated high school in 1979 and the #1 overall NFL pick that year was Tom Cousineau who was 6'3" and 225 ... OK, I was only 6' but I matched the weight. :-) A guy named Mike Douglass played LB at 6' 220 (well, assuming I can kinda trust those numbers). Mike Webster, a center, was 6'1" 255 so all I needed to do was get in shape and put on some muscle. Ottis Anderson was 6'2" 200, Ted Brown was 5'10" 206.
Sure, if you were under 6 foot and weren't packing 200 pounds, you had a hard time relating physically to a football player I suppose. But there were some linebackers and some centers and certainly RB, WR, DBs who were "my size" or smaller.
It wasn't always the case that football players were this absolutely massive yet fast freaks -- that's happened in my adulthood and NFL fans didn't freak out about it one bit. Similarly the NBA used to be a place where a 6'5" guy would have been huge at point guard and might even play power forward to where 7 foot guys are putting the ball on the floor and NBA fans didn't seem to freak out about that. Here's a pic of old Bulls backup guard Bob Weiss ... your accountant could post him up.
They did this on Glee last week to prove that the preppy kids were taking steroids to help them with their glee clubbing. Maybe Simmons watched that episode.
Something none of the media wags paid much attention to was the massive proliferation of PEDs, specifically anabolic steroids, in professional boxing in the 1990s. There were a number of outstanding, singular talents making their cases for all-time greatness during that decade, and the majority of them have been linked to "the juice" with hardly a hiccup of media attention. Names like Tyson, Holyfield, Jones Jr, Mosley, Toney, and plenty of others are mentioned, and even the current heavyweight champions of the world, the Klitschko Brothers, admitted to having taken steroids when they were younger (purported before they turned pro, color me skeptical). Just recently Floyd Mayweather, arguably the only widely-recognizable boxer in the world now, said the following:
But nobody cares or has ever cared about boxers' health.
Did you just admit to watching "Glee"?
But what think is particularly interesting here is how fundamental that problem is for Bill Simmons himself. After all, he didn't rise to his current position by passing himself off as an expert (though I find him quite knowledgeable, particularly on basketball). He's the guy who tells you what he really thinks. That's his thing. And to a large extent, Simmons is struggling with the battle between the external media pressures on a guy like him (greater, I'm sure, at the WWL) and the very essence of why he is where he is today (candor/perceived candor).
It's problematic for an MLB beat guy every time he hedges on info to protect a player, or to make the six months of traveling with the team easier (and get a phone call a few minutes earlier about the next trade). But mostly, that's problematic for us, because we get inaccurate/incomplete info. Not for the beat guy.
But for Simmons? It cuts directly to his writing identity. I give him credit for attacking this problem head-on, even if I don't agree entirely with his conclusions. Ultimately, for instance, my belief in the paragraph quoted in 3 as making such distinctions largely irrelevant leaves me simply preferring less talk about the "PED problem", not more.
Still, I'm glad he wrote this.
Not only do they not care, but Mayweather is accused of ducking Pacquiao because he wanted stronger testing.
Vitamin D is a steroid. Why isn't fortified milk considered a PED?
The answer is that the only thing that corticosteroids and anabolic steroids have in common is the sterane backbone. There may be plenty of tough questions in this debate, but this isn't one of them.
And then Mayweather wouldn't agree to undergo the same testing that he wanted Pacquiao to go though. It was a dodge, though and though.
You're missing the forest for the tree. PED -- performance enhancing drug. If you take a shot, and it numbs the pain so much so that you can go out and hit a homer and trot the bases -- well that's a pretty nice performance enhancer.
The contrast has nothing to do with the chemistry of it, but everything to do with the actual effects.
This ish is hard to figure, that's the point.
To me, in the baseball world, as someone for whom the Hall of Fame has always been a very central part of my interest, it comes down exactly to this. Do you support the sportswriters, the BBWAA? Or do you support those accused of (or proven) of PED use?
And my answer is that sportswriters are so utterly lacking in moral authority that I will admire the alleged PED users more every time I read a rant against them by the moral midgets who make up the sportswriting profession.
Here is a writer who gets it. Great article.
I don't agree with all of Simmons' conclusions, but I think the key to appreciating the article is seeing that the "we" he writes about aren't sports fans, they're sports journalists.
Meteor.
No, I'm not missing anything. You just don't understand enough medicine or biology to know what you're talking about. And I'm also guessing that you've never had a cortisone shot yourself. Coritsone is an anti-inflammatory, not an analgesic. They add lidocaine to the injection mostly to know that they got the needle in the right place. Do you want to ban Nolan Ryan's Advil too? How about an athlete waking up with a headache? Is tylenol a PED for that guy on that day?
The actual effects are a direct consequence of the chemistry. You're lumping together effects that are actually enormously different. And the differences are not at all hard to understand with a little bit of common sense. There are grey areas, of course, but that doesn't mean that everything is a grey area. And I say this as someone who pretty much doesn't give a crap about PEDis in baseball or any other professional sport.
Now, there is a good argument to be had about why we allow (and even encourage) athletes to have multiple injections in the same joint over a short period of time so that they can play before an injury is healed, but that doesn't seem to be the argument you're making.
That's a better question, but it is not at all the same question as "why prednisone but not stanozolol?" People don't take anabolic steroids to recover from injury.
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