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.

Being a persistent advocate for more testing though gives you more presumption of innocence than guys who did not do the same. This is only natural.

#39 is on point but takes it a bit too far. All players deserve the presumption of innocence but we do have more information about some players than others, and we are allowed to have greater suspicions about some players than others. I don't think that gives us journalistic license to print those suspicions nor do I think mere suspicions should keep a player out of the hall.

For example, I wouldn't keep Bagwell or Piazza out of the Hall (Sosa is more of a marginal candidate on the merits even without steroids. Although I'd probably vote for him, I also don't have a problem saying that he's more likely to have used steroids than Frank). Clemens is another guy that we agree on, Ray, and you've done a good job on this site poking holes in the case against him.

If there was any active player that MLB would want to protect over all others, it would be Jeter.

Yes.

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".

No. The league would survive a Derek Jeter positive test, in part because sportswriters would work overtime to rationalize it (just like they carried water for Andy Pettitte). And I don't think anyone's been emotionally invested in Ken Griffey Jr. for a decade now, even if he did make an All-Star team 5 or so years ago.

I put Ripken in a different category but more because of the era in which he played. If a bona fide star from the "pre-steroid era" was found to have used I think it would force a re-examination of even the parts of baseball history that were supposed to have been clean. It wouldn't kill baseball but it would be negative.

Let's boil it down - with a gun to your head, and you have to get it right, would you say Maddux or Clemens is more likely to have used PEDs? Some of you sound like you'd rather get your head blown off than to even take a guess.

Me, I'll take a wild stab at picking the guy whose own wife says she got injected by a very unsavory character - at least, to hear Clemens supporters describe him.

This is totally different than saying whether Clemens should or should not be kept out of the Hall of Fame based solely on suspicion. I'm not heading a lynch mob on any of that.

It's more about wondering if there is any common sense whatsoever, beyond "we don't know" anything at all. You're not on a jury, and you're not voting either guy in or out of the Hall of Fame here.

Let's boil it down - with a gun to your head, and you have to get it right, would you say Maddux or Clemens is more likely to have used PEDs? Some of you sound like you'd rather get your head blown off than to even take a guess.

Without a gun to my head, I'd say Clemens is more likely. I'm just not comfortable saying that he certainly did use or that Maddux certainly didn't.

too naturally talented, to be using

I'm pretty sure this was never a thing.

I read multiple writers in the aftermath of Ramirez's suspension(s) saying they didn't expect him to be using because he was a natural hitter. Feel free to disagree; I'm not going to push back that hard, because I'm too lazy to dig some of the pieces up.

Here's something from Joe Sheehan written April 2011 which kind of gets at this somewhat:

It's sad; I think of Manny Ramirez as someone who could wake up at 7 a.m. New Year's Day at the Playboy Mansion smelling of cheap women and expensive Scotch, grab a bat and rope line drives. Maybe he is that guy, but he didn't think he was, and that's sad. Manny Being Insecure is perhaps the one state no one ever considered.

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.

I do, and that's the point: nobody knows anything. Here are some pitchers linked to PEDs. How many of them are Greg Maddux types, either by body type or pitch type?

Kevin Brown
Andy Pettitte
Ryan Franklin
Rafael Betancourt
Juan Rincon
Felix Heredia
Jason Grimsley
Guillermo Mota
JC Romero
Edinson Volquez
Bartolo Colon
Ricky Bones
Denny Neagle
Ron Villone
Kent Mercker
Mike Stanton
Matt Herges
Jim Parque

Let's boil it down - with a gun to your head, and you have to get it right, would you say Maddux or Clemens is more likely to have used PEDs? Some of you sound like you'd rather get your head blown off than to even take a guess.

Umm, that's not an equal comparison. For as much as I've pointed out what a serial, self-confessed multiple liar McNamee is, Clemens is simply not in the same boat as Maddux since Clemens does have someone pointing the finger at him. That counts for something.

Before the Mitchell Report? I'd have gone with Clemens. On the grounds that he worked too hard and was too proud of what he did to be getting an edge via PEDs.

Me, I'll take a wild stab at picking the guy whose own wife says she got injected by a very unsavory character - at least, to hear Clemens supporters describe him.

Huh? All three people -- Clemens, his wife, and McNamee -- agreed that McNamee injected Debbie.

The dispute was not over whether McNamee injected Debbie.

EDIT: Oh, I guess you were questioning whether McNamee is unsavory. Really? A drug-dealing self-confessed multiple liar who was investigated for rape and who according to Rusty Hardin the authorities believed that he committed the rape? That character doesn't have any whiff of unsavoryness?

It's more about wondering if there is any common sense whatsoever, beyond "we don't know" anything at all. You're not on a jury, and you're not voting either guy in or out of the Hall of Fame here.

I'm only on a jury once every few years. So most days I go through life, I am not on a jury. And yet, I need to make decisions and judgments every day anyway. When I make my decisions and judgments, I tend to try to apply facts and logic.

In other words, I see absolutely no reason why the notion of being on a jury is relevant to the question of why we should think some players are clean but other players are not.

"I'd say Clemens is more likely. I'm just not comfortable saying that he certainly did use or that Maddux certainly didn't."

That's perfectly reasonable.

"The dispute was not over whether McNamee injected Debbie."

Correct. And the fact that one player's wife was injected by what you agree is an unsavory character who worked with that pitcher extensively suggests nothing at all whether that player is more likely to have used such substances himself? It is logical to not even be able to guess, not even 51-49, which is more likely?
Really?

Correct. And the fact that one player's wife was injected by what you agree is an unsavory character who worked with that pitcher extensively suggests nothing at all whether that player is more likely to have used such substances himself? It is logical to not even be able to guess, not even 51-49, which is more likely?
Really?

Really. It perhaps shows that Clemens has bad judgment, for working with someone who - according to Clemens - ultimately revealed himself to be untrustworthy, but I don't particularly see why a trainer who Clemens thought was a good trainer who helped him should be cast aside by Clemens because he had access to HGH. McNamee injected Clemens's wife? So? Did McNamee do so without Debbie's consent? No, so I don't really see what your point is.

Of course, you're only looking at one small piece of this, anyway. What about the fact that Clemens and Pettitte were best friends for years, teammates for years, lived near each other, trained together, trained together with the same trainer -- and so before Pettitte testified in his deposition everyone predicted Pettitte would know chapter and verse about what Clemens was using. And yet on the subject of Clemens using PEDs given to Clemens by that very same trainer, what did Pettitte witness? Nothing. What did Pettitte know? Next to nothing. Pettitte recalled one obscure conversation from years earlier in 1999/2000 where he thought Clemens told him he had used HGH, but where he also acknowledged that he may have misunderstood -- and in fact for years after a subsequent 2005 conversation "took it for that, that I had misunderstood."

actually i would suspect maddux more strongly because the government spent MILLIONS looking everywhere trying desperately to find SOME evidence that clemens shot up and all they could find was mcnamee who is just not believeable and i think that clemens has done more than enough to clear his name

maddux hasn't been investigated at all and so i have a lot more evidence that clemens did NOT use

actually i would suspect maddux more strongly because the government spent MILLIONS looking everywhere trying desperately to find SOME evidence that clemens shot up and all they could find was mcnamee who is just not believeable and i think that clemens has done more than enough to clear his name

Perhaps. I've always wondered just how much evidence the government expected there would be all these years later. It seems like a miracle that a few FedEx tracking slips and canceled checks survived. Beyond lucky pieces of evidence like that, it seems like all these cases were ever going to be is a "he said, he said" between players and shady people like McNamee.

Jim Parque

Clearly he was doing it wrong.

[stops banging head against blind wall]

He was 18 or 19 when that picture was taken. I'm inclined to believe that he didn't take steroids - some guys are just naturally huge.

Which gave him a terribly unfair advantage. Why not level the playing field? Now steroids are bad and dangerous and someone has to think of the children... so Harrison Bergeron is the way to go. How many HRs does Frank hit with 50 lb weights strapped to each of his elbows?

frank thomas had nooooooo idea what was going on yet he was calling for baseball to get rid of steroids in 94?

This seems like the key point to me. Thomas has been calling on MLB to get rid of steroids for years, and yet now he's saying that he had no idea how many people were using? That's a little odd.

#31 Armstrong didn't just use EPO. Among the many things he used was testosterone. No surprise there really. In his interview with Playboy he noted that one of the side effects from his cancer treatment was a low level of testosterone.

And #48 according to one commentator one of the secrets to Armstrong's success was that he lost bone mass to his cancer treatment. According to this report, he was every bit as strong as Jan Ulrich, just weighed less.

I've skimmed this thread now and there are no words for my utter disappointment that there is no baseball/roid version of the Stonecutters song here.

#65 Doesn't seem odd at all to me. Dead easy for me to see him having a sense that some players were likely getting chemical help without knowing how many, never mind who.

My knowledge of the serious workout culture in the 90s is strictly second hand, but from what I've heard, there's no way to avoid knowing that it was likely that a fair number of gym rats were using some form of chemical help. Nobody would have any real idea of the actual numbers, but given that top athletes are as a group both very competitive and not at all risk adverse it would be quite surprising if there weren't some players who were working out seriously and not using some form of PED.

there are no words for my utter disappointment that there is no baseball/roid version of the Stonecutters song here.

You can't handle the truth.

Thomas has been calling on MLB to get rid of steroids for years, and yet now he's saying that he had no idea how many people were using? That's a little odd.


Not really. In the moment he probably had a good idea that guys were cheating, perhaps that his massive natural strength advantage was being eroded away, and that he was against it. As time went on, he or others thinking of his position might remember it as being perhaps more strident than it really was. Today it's nostalgia time and he's mostly interested in polishing his bona fides as an anti-PEDs warrior, not hunting evil-doers. If someone would have pushed for names and numbers back in the day he probably would have backed off publicly, just as he is here. I don't mind his position then or now.

And regarding Maddux, I actually think he might have given more thought to them than most guys. He's more than a little driven, and as the Smartest Pitcher Alive he'd likely have discovering how to gain value from them while not drawing attention to himself. His whole game was precision, not power, and I'd expect his PED use to follow a similar path.

How many HRs does Frank hit with 50 lb weights strapped to each of his elbows?

317.


65. Yeaarrgghhhh Posted: January 28, 2013 at 09:58 AM (#4356433)
frank thomas had nooooooo idea what was going on yet he was calling for baseball to get rid of steroids in 94?

This seems like the key point to me. Thomas has been calling on MLB to get rid of steroids for years, and yet now he's saying that he had no idea how many people were using? That's a little odd.

I think it is odd, too. But here are some things I believe (though can't prove):

Frank Thomas is now in PR mode, trying to buff his image for the HOF vote. I think he wants in and can tell which way the wind is blowing.

Roger Clemens regularly used HGH.

Greg Maddux, at least once, used something other than greenies that has now been banned.

>50% of the people that played MLB between 1990 and 2005 at some point in their athletic career used steroids or HGH.

Andy Petitte is a lying little weasel.


Basically, I'm to the point of not liking anyone.

Not really. In the moment he probably had a good idea that guys were cheating, perhaps that his massive natural strength advantage was being eroded away, and that he was against it.

If we want to go this far, then Thomas's massive natural strength advantage was unfair, because other players didn't have such a massive natural strength advantage, and so Thomas was putting up numbers unfairly. In that case, he should have been forced to hit with a strike on him to offset this. If we're concerned about the playing field not being level, then let's level it.

In the absence of such being done, I will not credit Thomas's numbers and I don't think he belongs in the Hall. He made a mockery of the game by playing with an unfair natural strength advantage. Others tried to use steroids to catch up to him in strength because they weren't born with such a massive size advantage, and he spoke out against it and tried to preserve his unfair advantage. That really is pretty terrible, and indicates poor sportsmanship and integrity. He fails the character clause.

In the absence of such being done, I will not credit Thomas's numbers and I don't think he belongs in the Hall. He made a mockery of the game by playing with an unfair natural strength advantage. Others tried to use steroids to catch up to him in strength because they weren't born with such a massive size advantage, and he spoke out against it and tried to preserve his unfair advantage. That really is pretty terrible, and indicates poor sportsmanship and integrity. He fails the character clause.

Yeah. In fact, we should throw out all the pitchers, since they had a natural advantage by being able to throw a ball 90 mph. The hitters couldn't do that.

And we should throw out all the hitters. They had a natural advantage -- the hand-eye coordination necessary to make contact with a ball moving 90 mph. The pitchers couldn't do that.

And we should throw out all the managers. They had a natural brainpower advantage that non-Hall managers obviously didn't have.

And we should throw out the owners, because let's face it, they had a naturally-occurring financial advantage that people in Botswana could never hope to have.

And we should throw out the umpires, because they were allowed to wear more body armor than anyone else on the field, and that's an unfair advantage too.

And we should throw out everyone who played before desegregation, because hey, they had an obvious advantage that players of today don't have.

And we should throw out anyone who played after Free Agency began, since they have the ability to decide where they wanted to play, and players of yesterday couldn't.

And we should throw out the commissioners, since they basically set the rules, and that's not fair either.


The RDP Hall of Fame: Luis Aparicio and Red Schoendienst.

Ray: Frank Thomas is a helluva guy to make your argument with and it's not doing you any favors. If you can't parse out the difference between Bagwell and Frank, Clemons and Maddux, and you are indeed an attorney, then you're being intentionally obtuse.


If you're not, I feel sorry for your clients because they aren't paying for sound logic.

His position now bothers me a little because one of the main arguments the anti-steroids people are making is that steroids are different from greenies because there was a culture of secrecy (hence the headline). Players were more open about greenies, therefore using them wasn't really cheating. Of course none of us really know how many people were using and how many people were aware of the usage, but I can't help but feel that some of the comments from the media and Thomas sound like "I'm shocked that steroid use was rampant in MLB!"

Ray: Frank Thomas is a helluva guy to make your argument with and it's not doing you any favors. If you can't parse out the difference between Bagwell and Frank, Clemons and Maddux, and you are indeed an attorney, then you're being intentionally obtuse.

First, I certainly parsed out the difference between Clemens and Maddux. I wrote this in post 57 above:

Umm, that's not an equal comparison. For as much as I've pointed out what a serial, self-confessed multiple liar McNamee is, Clemens is simply not in the same boat as Maddux since Clemens does have someone pointing the finger at him. That counts for something.

As to Thomas v. Bagwell, no, I don't see any difference. It's not exactly shocking to me to consider that people who scream the loudest about something might be doing that something themselves. Human history is awash with such examples. Why people would think that just because Thomas spoke out he's clean is beyond me.

SI, 2004:

Boog Powell was on M&M's, not hGH. Frank Thomas of the White Sox was born gigantic. And Americans grow ever larger by the month. It's hard to believe now, but Reggie Jackson's playing weight was 200 pounds. The self-styled "straw that stirs the drink" was built like an actual straw, swizzle-stick skinny compared with Thomas, who is listed at 275.

If Thomas is clean, he perhaps spoke out against steroids because he didn't need them; he was naturally huge, and got a massive advantage over most of the other players due to his size.

Easy to speak out, in that case. I'm not moved by self-serving comments.

Here's a Verducci piece from March 2007, discussing the Rangers' signing of Sosa.

Note the comments re Thomas. What other slugger could predict the exact time frame when he would start to play well and not be accused of knowing when his steroids regimen would kick in?

That seems unlikely. Both Washington and Jaramillo are optimistic, pointing to the success of Thomas, who, at 38 and coming off a down season, rejuvenated his career with the A's last year. Washington, a third base coach with Oakland in '06, recalls that Thomas told the team he would need spring training and then 100 to 110 at bats to get started. "I think it took 103--and he took off," Washington says. ( Thomas hit .184 with seven homers in his first 103 at bats and .295 with 32 homers in his 363 subsequent at bats.) Sosa will likely get the same opportunity, seeing enough at bats in spring and the season's first month to find his stroke.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1108502/2/index.htm

I don't see any evidence that Bagwell used and Thomas didn't. Ray's position is completely rational here. I also don't think Thomas speaking out against steroid usage is particularly beneficial to his case, as he didn't start until his career was pretty much done and he had nothing to lose (if he did take steroids) and everything to gain. I also generally dislike players imposing their moral views on other players (although I'd much rather Thomas do so than Goose Gossage or Dale Murphy).

Ray, that conveniently ignores the fact that Thomas was coming back from a broken foot that almost ended his career. He was talking about getting back into playing shape after not being able to swing a bat for several months. Thomas didn't even get into a minor-league game until March 17 of 2006, but the A's wanted him to break camp with the big club (and he did).

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2119802

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2373029

Frank Thomas in 1987. He was 18 or 19 when that picture was taken. I'm inclined to believe that he didn't take steroids - some guys are just naturally huge.

Frank Thomas that was playing football at Auburn University? Sure, he'd have no exposure/access to steroids there!

Greg Maddux, at least once, used something other than greenies that has now been banned.

Wait, what?

Wait, what?

He said he believes it to be true, although he cannot prove it. It's a six impossible things before breakfast sort of assertion. He's not claiming to have knowledge or evidence or anything.