Saturday, May 18, 2013
Murray Chass: ARE RED SOX REELING ALREADY?
(www.murraychass.com)
Read More...Shaughnessy is too good to have to invent anything. He neither invented anything in this instance nor accused Ortiz of using steroids and their cousins. What he did was take his skepticism and his curiosity, good traits for a newspaperman to have, and ask Ortiz about steroids. Ortiz’s responses did not indicate anger of being accused of wrong doing.
I would compare the Ortiz column to the columns I have written about Mike Piazza and my suspicions about his possible use of steroids. I ...
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1 2 >This doesn't quite jive with how often we say that reporters knew exactly what was going on in the clubhouses.
Nor with the actual reporters who routinely say that they had no idea of the extent either.
Everybody "knew" (by which I mean they suspected) that a few prominent individual players were using, but no one could prove anything until the government decided to blow through tens of millions of dollars investigating it.
There were always rumblings about one or two guys, but to know the numbers that really came out, I was really, really shocked.
What "numbers that really came out"? We reliably know of, what, maybe a couple of dozen players that did roids and most of those still claim they did them temporarily and/or to recover from injury. We've had wild-assed guesses of 50%, 70% whatever but there are no numbers that have come out to be shocked at.
And Thomas says this:
For many, many years I had a lot of teammates involved and I had no idea it was going on the way it was going on
Such as who? I don't recall any White Sox getting caught. By the time he got to the A's, the known roiders were gone.
And if there was one player to shut up around it was Thomas. Still, the Mitchell report makes it fairly clear that players went up to other players and asked them what they were using. It wasn't as open as amp use but if Thomas wanted to know how X had bulked up over the offseason, X probably would have told him ... or he'd have taken Thomas for a narc and pretend he didn't have a clue what he was talking about.
Maybe he's thinking of the number "103" - that's a bit more than "one or two."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/sports/baseball/31doping.html?_r=0
"Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, the sluggers who helped the Boston Red Sox end an 86-year World Series championship drought and capture another title three years later, were among the roughly 100 Major League Baseball players to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, according to lawyers with knowledge of the results."
104 out of 1400 or so tested positive in the 2003 survey test. But that's just the players who happened to be partaking when the test were administered; not every player who has taken PEDs is constantly on something.
Oh for ##### sakes Frank.
Nobody?
That's a fair point, I'd actually forgotten all about that. Still, 3.5 guys per team. Was he really shocked by that?
This is the person people have given credit to for speaking up about the issue? By his own admission he had no clue what was going on.
His first 8 years of stat lines are a thing of beauty. Pujolsesque. Then 1998 occurred.
He already is in the same place as others. That's what you don't seem to understand. There is no evidence that he's any cleaner than Bagwell or Sosa.
But my comment in post 20 was not about Thomas, but was about people, like you, who credit him.
A so-called whistleblower who by his own admission has no clue what is going on and can't identify any people doing what he didn't know about? Why would people credit this person?
okayyyyyyyyy
but frank SHOULD be in the Hall - i'm just tired of all the stone throwers
So, do I have the BTF rules straight? If it's steroids, it's not guilty until proven otherwise, and in court. If it's any other charge, we can just go ahead an assume guilt, especially if alcohol and domestic violence are involved. Do I have that right?
Which is actually rather Pujolsesque, in and of itself, given that the Albert seems to have his own decline underway starting at age 31.
Palmeiro's body type didn't change. He failed a test anyway.
Hell, Lance Armstrong has always looked the same to me. I haven't seen a picture of him at 20, but he has looked thin and lean for his entire career.
Look at the size of his head! He must have been juicing since he was around 12-14. There can be no other explanation.
It would be absolutely awesome if he got up there and did an Al Pacino "Scent of a Woman Speech".
"Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens. F*** you too"
Oh, no it won't.
you mean his "age 31" season.
hey, he's not a cardinal anymore ... i can say what i want.
hey, he's not a cardinal anymore ... i can say what i want.
MLB allows Pujols to use amphetamines because he was grandfathered in when they became prescription-only in 1965.
If I can help it, I avoid making assumptions about guilt or innocence without educating myself about the particulars. If there's not enough evidence to form an educated position, I try to avoid taking a position.
Frank Thomas may or may not have used steroids. I don't think anyone here has enough information to declare him either clean or dirty with any reasonable certainty. The same principles that cause me to reject punishing someone that might be (rather than is) dirty lead me to reject praising someone that might be clean.
But Sheehan seems to be heading in that direction.
"We don't know" - taken to its extreme - strikes me as a little silly.
If I told you we now somehow know for certain that 10 of the 20 famous names - split evenly among "considered guilty" and "considered clean" - took PEDs and 10 didn't, and you could bet money on which of the 10 did, would you say, "I don't know?"
Or would you go to the Vegas betting window and makes lots of money?
Granted, you might not get them all right, and there might well be a couple of surprises from each group. That's a very good argument for "Should we really be so confident that we are 100 pct accurate?" It's also a good argument for writers not being so smug and self-assured about their voting.
But "we don't know" - as if the perceived clean ones are as likely to have taken PEDs as the ones who are perceived guilty - seems, to use Sheehan's words, "utterly ridiculous."
Almost certainly, because I really don't know. (If we're talking about people that have confessed or failed a test, that's a different story.)
But "we don't know" - as if the perceived clean ones are as likely to have taken PEDs as the ones who are perceived guilty - seems, to use Sheehan's words, "utterly ridiculous."
I generally do not place a lot of stock in the evidence used to form those perceptions. Manny Alexander was the last player anyone thought would have used steroids.
Yes. I see absolutely no reason to proclaim that Griffey, Thome, Thomas, Jeter, or Maddux are a safer bet to be clean than the Piazzas and Bagwells. The notion is ludicrous. That is the lie about this whole thing, that we know which of the players for which there is no evidence are "clean."
And again, not all players have been treated equally. Not all players have been the targets of investigations.
Frankly, Manny Ramirez was also. He was seen as being too much of a space cadet, and too naturally talented - a natural born hitter - to be using.
I'm pretty sure this was never a thing.
Interesting choice, the two with the least evidence against them. Did you really miss my point by THAT much? You could have picked A-Rod, you know.
To be fair, if I get a chance I'll list 10 and 10, and then ask again.
I generally agree with you on PEDs, but nobody could possibly look at Greg Maddux and Jeff Bagwell and believe they were equally likely to be using PEDs.*
(* Unless you're talking about greenies, and we know the BBWAA members generally don't care about the use of those.)
Cycling is different in that you want to be skinnier. Lance lost 20 pounds in his cancer treatment. When he figured out how to keep himself in racing shape (he couldn't walk a mile but he could recover from riding) at that weigh, he made a giant leap.
That's not really fair. A-Rod isn't "suspected"; he admitted to using steroids for three years in Texas.
That's ridiculous.
If there was any active player that MLB would want to protect over all others, it would be Jeter.
He's MLB's golden child. If he gets tarnished, the entire league goes down.
He joins Cal Ripken Jr. and Ken Griffey Jr. as the (modern) MLB "Holy Trinity of All That Is Good and Pure".
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