Gomez: How We Operate…at the BBWAA.
Let us begin with this tweet from ESPN’s Pedro Gomez on the intertwined subjects of Jeff Bagwell’s Hall-of-Fame candicacy and his whispered (and thoroughly unproved) use of possibly-performance-enhancing drugs:
@pedrogomezESPN
You notice Bagwell has never denied using? “@Ben_Oehler: @pedrogomezESPN too many voters think like you. Keeping guys like Bagwell out wrong
25 Apr 12
When it’s pointed out to Gomez that Bagwell did, in point of fact, deny using PEDs, he comes up with this.
@pedrogomezESPN
Bagwell DID deny. Fine. You join BBWAA for 10 years, you get to do what YOU want with your vote.
Even though Gomez’s stated reason for suspecting Bagwell of PED use is roundly disproven, he decides to, in essence, stick out his tongue and appeal to his own misplaced authority. (You may recognize this approach to argument from its formal title, “Rhetorical Techniques of the Chastened Pre-Schooler.”) As Hall-of-Fame voting privileges go, it’s a dereliction of duties.
...So what is Gomez left with? This: A player nebulously suspected of PED use in some “eyeball test” quarters must deny having done so in order to earn Gomez’s vote, but even if he does deny it he won’t earn Gomez’s vote. That’s the “logic” to be drawn from his recent comments.
The Hall of Fame is a wonderful place, but it deserves better gatekeepers than Gomez.
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What a mental midget.
(Love the "Dayn Perry | Baseball Blogger" tag, by the way.)
I don't think they have the foggiest clue.
"I think they think they know, based on their time in locker rooms. But that's the sort of thing that leads to bacne accusations."
I would suggest that they probably don't have a very good idea here, compared to, say, which players cheat on their wives. That's easier to see or at least hear about.
Does Pedro's boyfriend know about this infidelity?
Well, they think they know, based on their time as idiot sportswriters.
But yes - does anyone think Murray Chass would have gone with just bacne, if he'd had more on Piazza?
I don't know how Bagwell sleeps well at night with all these media types looking to prosecute and shame him.
That raises a very good point. If Gomez was able to shadow Bonds 24-7 without breaking the story that Bonds was using PEDs, how much are his incidental observations about other players to whom he was paying much less attention going to be worth? He's the Mr. Magoo of the PED beat.
This can't actually be true, can it? CAN IT??!
This. Lots of times this.
This isn't true. They aren't held up as "paragons of virtue," they're held up as "players whose statistical records are essentially trustworthy."
Other than that, yeah, what everyone else says. Gomez is a hot, steaming turd.
Frequently the latter turns into the former. Not always, but frequently. You had to be a real scumbag to get vilified then. Now you just have to be big and bulky.
how could he sully the memory of troy neel and mike mohler?
Pedro, I would never join a club that would have you as a member.
"I'm not suggesting he should do this, but, say Bagwell never took any PED's, what are the chances of him winning a libel suit against a Pedro Gomez or Bryant Gumbel?"
The discovery process can be brutal.
Did he ever know about ANYONE taking ANY PEDs? Better not hold back with that answer, for instance....
But Bryant also makes it clear that experience showed that for a beat writer to pursue 'dirt' on a ballplayer had the potential to turn the whole clubhouse against such a beat writer. One of the few means that a beat writer has to atone for his or her part in a this 'institutional failure' is through a Hall of Fame ballot.
We ought, perhaps, to get used to the idea that the writers are going to kick the can down the road and leave the Hall of Fame case for players like Bagwell to the Veterans' Committee.
I have no doubt that this is all true but what is the point of the beat writer then? The beat writers and MSM crowd keep telling us that by being there they have access to stories that the mother's basement crowd can't give us. If they whiff on this, either through a failure to see it or a failure to report it, how are they more useful than bloggers?
Virtually none. For one thing, Bagwell is a public figure, which means the standards of winning a libel suit are much higher - he''d have to prove actual malice on the part of Gomez and Gumbel, rather than just that they were mistaken.
For another thing, he'd have to present convincing evidence that he never took PEDs. I have no idea how he would do that.
This. If all they're actually good for is getting cliched post game quotes ("I'm just trying to do a better job of locating my pitches," "We're looking to make things happen on the bases," "We've got to work harder and get better," etc.), then they don't actually provide any value at all.
According to Bryant, they are sort of marketers. They sell baseball to the reading public. Baseball attracts readers, so the newspaper feeds off the popularity of the 'news'.
how are they more useful than bloggers?
Basically, they have had a level of institutional support (that newspaper paycheque) that ensures they can continue doing the job for ten years or so, and thus build up an understanding of baseball as an institution that some recent college grad in mom's basement just won't have. I know young people will look at this view with a jaundiced eye (I certainly did when I was a young person), but over many years one build's up a body of knowledge that does give a degree of perspective that is immensely valuable. Most of the best bloggers rarely last beyond 3-5 years of steady writing.
Also, it's hardly the exclusive fault of the beat writers that they have to be wary about the story that can poison their relationship with the clubhouse. It is human nature to resent some nosey-parker sniffing around one's dirty laundry.
Plus the more fundamental problem that Gomez has not affirmatively stated that Bagwell took PEDs.
"for a beat writer to pursue 'dirt' on a ballplayer had the potential to turn the whole clubhouse against such a beat writer."
It would be ridiculous to assume that this means that no beat writer would chase important stories, however.
But this is mainly because they don't receive the steady paycheck that a newspaper writer does (did?). I'd argue that the blogger in mom's basement would build up a much greater body of knowledge than the newspaper writer if the former was given the financial means to do so in the long-term. That guy is willing to do his best for free, as a part-timer, with the odds completely stacked against him. Give him even a little access, with the financial security to write full-time, and an already established reader-base? There's a lot of potential there.
I would say less based on time in locker rooms, more based on favorite sources with axes to grind, sources who were just ##########, or sources were genuinely upset about PED use and whistleblew quietly to media conduits.
I'm not sure if it's 40-40-20; 30-30-30; or what -- but any info someone like Gomez has is really just someone feeding him stuff.
EDIT: Took out the post number reference since it's borked. Only partial cokes since I added a little bit of detail.
Just because they CAN do the job for 10, 15, 20+ years doesn't mean they should be doing it. My point earlier was not that some of these guys are not good writers, but if they are not breaking this type of story, they lose the right to tell me that they provide value over and above what something watching the game on TV and writing a blog can provide.
This is Peter Abraham's piece for the Boston Globe's online site (boston.com). Read this and tell me if you get anything of value that you couldn't have gotten watching the game. The closest thing is Cody Ross saying "I'm not even sure how I did it, but I'm fine, We're just being careful." about leaving the game early with a knee injury.
Perhaps "paragons of baseball virture" would be accurate.
It's very likely that modern players were also using amphetamines. So in one very narrow sense, it's consistent to criticize neither old or new players for the same drug.
I asked Heyman directly about why he didn't go "out-on-a-limb" like Kellerman and Bryant Gumble. (We went to school directly; Ironically, I delivered the paper to his family when I was a kid.) He said that his bosses were extremely concerned over the potential legal ramifications.
I think you're in the wheelhouse here. It strikes me as plausible - and somewhat likely - that Gomez and other prominent members of the BBWAA have very reliable sources who allege steroid use by stars of the ... Steroid Era. Robothal, Buster Olney, Tom Verducci, Jon Heyman, Will Carroll (it's like a Murderer's Row of BBTF hate!) have all said something similar.
The strongest open allegation against Bagwell is his wife's trainer or something like that - pretty flimsy (it's not Operation Equine/BALCO/Mitchell or even the NY Times.) There's no sense in going out on a limb, particularly at this stage in the game. Withholding a HOF vote speaks loudly enough, while an article that says "I heard Bags juiced!", especially from a high profile writer, would probably make too much noise.
Full disclosure: As I've said before in related threads, I think Bagwell probably used steroids. However, there isn't a positive test and there certainly isn't enough circumstantial evidence for something like a non-analytical positive to be drawn. If I had a vote, it might mean letting a juicer into the HOF, but I suppose that's my line. It's imperfect, but workable.
I have no reason to believe he was or was not using PEDs. I suspect every player in baseball does "something" to enhance their performance whether it's guzzle Red Bull like it's going out of style or jam horse semen directly into their blood stream. I think the idea that we can identify who is or is not a user based on body type or performance is strongly refuted by players like Alex Sanchez, JC Romero and Manny Alexander to name a few.
For that reason and I simply feel that trying to play "gotcha!" is not something I want to do and I think is unethical by a journalist.
Which was promptly denied by the trainer.
And they'll get trapped by the same institutional pressures that ensnare beat writers. What we really need is a way for bloggers to make a living from writing for free. Let me know when you figure that one out, because I'm raring to go.
if they are not breaking this type of story, they lose the right to tell me that they provide value over and above what something watching the game on TV and writing a blog can provide.
But you are self-evidently not a newspaper reader, and by that fact you might not perceive value. You can watch the game on the television and read a few blogs. Not everyone does it like that. I rarely watch a game on the television, but I don't read newspaper accounts either. I get all my baseball news from blogs and listening to radio broadcasts. But all these sources — blogs, broadcasters in whatever medium — are influenced by newspaper coverage, just the same as the newspapers are influenced by them. As far as that goes, the beat writer will provide value indirectly.
For example, the radio broadcasts presented by both the Yankees and Reds regularly feature a beat writer talking about the team. I have learned things from them that I did not learn from any other source. That's a consequence of the beat writers' access to the clubhouse. But it's also a consequence of the interaction between beat writer and radio persons.
What is irksome is that these beat writers vote for the Hall of Fame. And it is irksome that they appear to have decided to pass on the verdict about players in the Sillyball Era. Maybe we should be more understanding of the predicament of the beat writers, or maybe we should get angry with the Hall of Fame for being so twentieth century in limiting access to ballots.
Personally, insofar as I blame anyone, I blame the players and the owners for creating a situation where we still have only the vaguest understanding of what went on in the Sillyball Era, and what it means for statistical records.
Option J?
"Can you explain your creative process, Mr. Bryant?"
"Well, I was going to do my job the right way, but that sounded like it'd be hard, so I said #### it."
Put it this way: A skilled veterinarian would have a better chance of saving the turkey in the sandwich I am going to eat at lunch today.
I think this misses the boat, and that the answer is very simple: nobody cared about this nonsense at the time, so nobody investigated it.
It was only later that everyone was like, OH MY GAWD, STEROIDS.
Actually I read the Globe pretty frequently. If not every day, close to it and I check their online blog regularly. I'm not saying the newspapers are terrible or anything like that, but the party line is generally "we give you something you don't get anywhere else" and I don't see that as being the case.
To Ray: Kenny Rogers and Rick Helling cared about it............but your overall point is certainly correct.
Did he explain how dumb that is? Because it seems strange to me that a writer would go out of his way to brag about how he and most of his colleagues are cowards who are not very good at their jobs.
Prove my statement was false. Maybe then you will understand why some of us avoid making accusations without evidence.
That's exactly what a child molester would say. Not to mention that you didn't actually deny his allegation!
Also, your name is an anagram for "Jehad Rogue", so you're probably an Islamic terrorist, too.
I guess whores don't care whether people think that they're whores, as long as the check clears.
And even if he DID deny. Fine. You join BBTF for 10 minutes, you get to do what YOU want with your posts.
he didn't make an accusation - he asked a question.
And being a weightlifting muscle-bound baseball player in the 1990's is evidence of using steroids, although weak and circumstantial.
1. It's not true - writers had no idea what was going on (I find that unimaginable, but it's at least possible).
2. All of the most highly-regarded baseball writers of the era are chickenshat. If they all knew, why didn't they report it? Teams weren't going to throw out every writer, and they certainly weren't going to compromise their national exposure.
I could care less if players used steroids or not. I still think the writers knew and didn't care until it became cool to; for a guy like Gomez to pontificate now is the height of hypocracy.
I'm thinking he's proven that he has impulse control problems.That's good enough for me!
I used to assume this, like McCoy notes in what should be post #2. But the Bagwell vote has actually convinced me otherwise. Most HOF voters DON'T write a column defending their votes. Some have their ballots simply reported without explanation if they work for some orgs with a lot of voters (MLB.com, ESPN, Chicago Tribune), and a large number just never publish their ballots at all, simply sending them in anonymously. For such voters, there's not really a big downside risk to voting against somebody that they KNOW used steroids. And there simply aren't that many such voters punishing Bagwell. He got 56% of the vote last year. In contrast, Mark McGwire got 19.5%. I think it's much more likely that the guys not voting for Bagwell because of his PED use (and I think this number is fairly small, also - maybe 10-15% of the total electorate at most) are doing so because they SUSPECT he used, probably on no more evidence than is available to anybody in this thread. If Bagwell's steroid use was an open secret among baseball writers, I think he'd have much lower vote totals the last two years.
########. The phrasing of his question made it am implicit accusation.
Ok, but I for one won't be convinced until you sue Randy and prevail.
So it appears you think it's important that anonymous internet posters have hard evidence before asking questions that contain implicit accusations?
What is your yes-or-no answer to his question?
Some evidence beyond "he was a professional baseball player" would be nice when throwing around steroid accusations, yes. Hence my first response to his post.
The answer to his question is not yes or no. Sorry, but we don't live in a fairy tale world where everything is simple and easy to figure out. I don't really know if Bagwell ever used PED's, it's certainly possible. Until I see some real evidence of it(something better than "he looks big", "he hit a lot of home runs", or "he played in MLB in the 90's") however, I will default to the opinion that he did not.
Well, it's that he was a professional baseball player AND he was a muscle-bound weightlifter AND this all took place in the 90's. It's still weak, but it's more than just "he played in MLB."
I expect that dejarouehg would prefer the same treatment with respect to the possibility of him being a child molester.
edit function is broken currently, so have to quote myself.
that's a false comparison. Accusing Bagwell just because he was a jacked-up power hitter in the 90's would be like accusing a catholic priest because he was mysteriously moved around from parish to parish in the 70's/80's, it is NOT like accusing someone because he ... is on the internet posting about baseball.
However I'm OK with somebody saying he has no direct evidence but thinks it likely that Bagwell used. It's the "everybody knows it's true" tone to the way the question is posed that sets me off, and I suspect the same is true of Randy. Note that he hasn't come down on posters in the thread who've done this -- only the one poster using the innuendo style that is so common in attacks on Bagwell.
Yeah this is valid, and he was wrong if he thinks everyone here believes Bagwell used.
I don't blame roger for refusing to play along with being labeled as designated Goat, but he did everything and everyone said he had to do to "prove" his innocence and nothing made a bit of difference.
I remember the steve wilstein andro in the locker room incident REALLY clearly. And I remember the beatdown he got from ALL THE OTHER WRITERS/MEDIA as well as buddy boy selig who had NOOOOOOOOO idea what might could have been going on.
I don't know what pressure the teams actually have on the media to deal with them, but i sure can say that at least in houston, the media is extremely heavily censored when it comes to the astros - at least it has been since i started blogging back in 04 - and it was more than obvious when they all refused to/weren't allowed to do any reporting on crane whatsoever - maury brown did pretty much ALL the work and naturally, that wasn't near enough to do anything.
I think i might could have told this story before, but jose valverde joined the astros in 08 and when i heard he was being traded, i looked up his stats and one thing i noticed was that he had the same birthday as barry bonds. the next year, his stats were all reported - yahoo, bbref, mlb, espn - but his birthday had changed to april and he was born the previous year. i wasn't mistaken, my mama had a paper copy of the official astros media guide and we checked and sure enough, i was right.
So i wrote to the local beat reporter, jose de jesus ortiz, and told him about my find. He looked into it, found out it was correct and the team told him that jose had confessed/done correct paperwork etc and they were putting it behind them, or something. None of the media outlets noticed or cared, they had just re-input the new data into their stats. But jose published it in his column - Valverde ages by 1 year!!! and not real too much longer after that, he was "transferred" to the soccer beat.
I could understand beat guys keeping their mouths shut about things that might could get them fired. but after all this time, if they KNOW steroid juiciness FACTS, they'd be heeee ROES for stepping up, naming names, etc. And all i ever read is - well, little guys like bagwell can't hit homers in the Dome unlike that giant monster jimmy wynn did and besides, all he hit at double A was doubles, so THERE!!! and that he used to be friends with caminiti 2 years before he went to san diego and this means that he must have gotten drugs/drug teaching. and besides, he lifted weights and every guy who lifted weights besides nolan ryan must be a steroid user
BAH!!!
Maybe evidence is the wrong word, maybe 'indication' or something else instead.
If you see a kid with dreadlocks and red eyes oustide a Phish concert, you would think it likely he was a pot smoker even though you had no evidence (using a higher standard of evidence). And for a lot of people, having a guy being a muscular power hitter in the 90's makes it likely that the guy was a steroid user.
That's still a long way from thinking he is based on stereotypes and telling people he's a pot smoker or punishing him in some fashion for smoking pot.
not unless you are going to say that ALL the muscular power hitters in the 90s HAD to be using roids. in that case, jim thome is not included WHY???
if every guy in the 90s who was a serious weight lifter is going to be labeled as a steroid user, why are there no accusations against nolan ryan? throwing 95 MPH in his late 40s with no injuries and he NEVAH gets accused?
cmon
I think dejarouehg was clearly bringing it up in terms of what people here believed, not in terms of punishment
he probably will be once he retires.
My guesswork, though, is that Bagwell is more likely than the average sillyball era hitter to have used PEDs. He hired a weightlifter as a trainer in 1995, with the explicit goal of just getting bigger. Given that there was no enforcement of the PED ban, given that he was hiring someone from a field with a very heavy incidence of PED use, and given that his explicit workout goal was one that would be significantly aided by PEDs, well, that's my guesswork.
I don't think it bears any meaningful similarity to child molestation. (1) Bagwell isn't being accused of hurting anyone, so it's a far less meaningful accusation. (2) The worst outcome of a false accusation is that a wealthy, beloved athlete is unfairly excluded from the Hall of Fame, whereas a false accusation of child molestation - I don't need to keep making these comparisons, right? (3) Lots of baseball players used steroids, and the level of social sanction for steroid use at the time was quite low.
Well, he's posting on a sabermetrics site, so he's obviously doing so from his mother's basement, and therefore incapable of forming a long-term relationship with an adult (male or female). And he has a stated interest in a game popular with young children - what kind of man puts himself around kids all the time like that, without some sort of ulterior motive? And he reacted to Randy's innocuous question with a threat of violence, so he's obviously got a vast store of repressed rage that he takes out on those smaller and weaker than himself. What other evidence do you need?
I bet that right now, he's sitting in front of the computer naked as the day he was born (except for a jockstrap and a soiled Primer Thong), tufts of hair sprouting wildly from every pore, and laughing gleefully while he wallows in his own filth and feverishly masturbates to mental images of unspeakable perversion.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
Even if that kid looked pretty much the same in a picture from 5 years earlier when no one thought he was smoking pot? The just-look-at-him standard of evidence is pretty weak to begin with, and applying it to Bagwell doesn't work out as well as you might expect.
Do some of you still not have dejarouehg (pronounced, I believe, douchebag) on ignore? Seriously, why do you waste time on the most obvious of trolls?
Frankly, you could build a case against anybody if you try hard enough. I've seen some fine (although obviously tongue-in-cheek) scenarios for guys like Greg Maddux. It is this line of thinking that causes some writers to say that they will vote for nobody who played in the 90's, because they were all either juicers or enablers.
It was on steroids.
Or because the site is being a bit wonky today. The post wasn't deleted, they just aren't being numbered properly.
It didn't. Furtado did an update recently(last night?) to BTF's engine and it broke some stuff. All threads start at #2 on each page, edit function is broke, and the hot topics bar was blank for a while this morning, although that is fixed now.
Actually, if you want to go there, I don't see Mike Lupica writing any scathing columns about his buddy Bill Conlin. But I do see Lupica attacking Ryan Braun as if Braun were... a child molestor.
Yes; I've pointed this out in the past. Frankly, if I were going to accuse people without evidence, one of the first people I'd accuse would be Frank Thomas, for just the reasons you've laid out.
But of course, to the people here, he couldn't be a steroids user because... he spoke out against it! What? When has that ever been an indicator that the person speaking hasn't engaged in the underlying behavior?
I really have to wonder what people here are smoking when it comes to Thomas. If anything, speaking out against something seems _more_ likely to indicate that the person did it.
That's true, and it's also true that nobody's ever hinted at even secondhand hearsay that either of them ever juiced up, not even a trainer who denies he ever said it.
------------------------------------------
I really have to wonder what people here are smoking when it comes to Thomas. If anything, speaking out against something seems _more_ likely to indicate that the person did it.
Or not. Or maybe speaking out doesn't necessarily mean anything one way or the other. It could be a mask, or it could be just an honest opinion, but unless something specific and credible about the player comes out you should assume it's the latter.
Well, it certainly worked like a charm for Clemens.
Your concern for treating players fairly on this issue is touching, coming as it does on the heels of you leading a crusade against them. It was people like you who brought us to this point with regard to the Bagwells.
It seems like twitter turns sports writers into trolls.
This made me check whether Jeff Pearlman is on Twitter. I can't believe he's not!
Yes, Ray, because I don't want to see steroids in baseball, I'm therefore responsible when morons like Gomez want to tar players like Bagwell, about whom there's no credible evidence of juicing. Makes perfect sense in the wild and wonderful world of DiPerna. The only way you can "consistently" defend Bagwell is to also defend Barry Bonds.
This is what passes for the BTF version of political correctness, I suppose, but it's about as pathetic as the Tea Party's or the Communist Party's versions of the same simplistic mentality.
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