User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
|
Demarini, Easton and TPX Baseball Bats
|
AllianceTickets.com has cheap MLB Tickets. Get all your Colorado Rockies Tickets, Seattle Mariners Tickets, San Francisco Giants Tickets and all your favorite baseball tickets here. We also carry cheap Denver Broncos Tickets, Seattle Seahawks Tickets and Denver Nuggets Tickets. |
For wholesale prices on baseball gifts and equipment, check these stores out! |
Page rendered in 0.3321 seconds
50 querie(s) executed
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
All involved should be ashamed, as should those of you supporting this nonsense.
Hopefully Sean does not go along. If he does, it will diminish the integrity of b-r.
Oh c'mon Ray!
It's a smart move for Cabrera; good PR, as others have said. And given that he asked for it, why shouldn't MLB and the MLBPA go along?
There are a lot more people that would be upset with him getting the non-existent "Batting Title Award" than share your point of view.
In any case, I can't see how it's a big deal either way. Again, it's the freaking "Batting Title", who cares? Can you name me who won the last five "Batting Titles" off the top of your head? I don't even know last year's winner.
No one is removing stats from the record. I agree, that would be shameful.
So? Baseball has a duty not to let the game become a mockery.
If a player developed a batting stance that was both legal by the rules and which resulted in catcher's interference by the letter of the rulebook every time, I'd expect MLB to put a stop to it immediately rather than allow him to complete a season with a 1.000 OBP.
EDIT: yes, yes, cokes to many people.
I find it interesting when people try to apply concepts from the legal system to the work-environment of MLB.
Rights like "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt", no bills of attainder, rights to privacy, free speech, only exist in relation to protecting the citizen from the gov't. These rights do not exist in an employment situation.
The rights the players have are what's spelled out in their contract, and the labor agreement. No more.
If the union agrees that a "bill of attainder" rule change is within the scope of the labor agreement, it is.
Seriously? Positive PED test. Testosterone.
Interestingly, one of the news show had a feature on men using testosterone to boost energy, sex drive, and muscle gain. It's apparently common among cops, and the Police Depts. are cracking down b/c it produces aggressive behavior.
No, not seriously. At least I'm pretty sure it was not asked seriously. I prefer to read it as a straight line, and the correct rejoinder is therefore "It's just a technicality in the rules."
He cheated?
As I stated before, there is an implicit "no cheat" clause to anything like that. It doesn't change reality, though. It just changes what that reality counts for.
When those guys in the Olympics were, and are, suspended for using prohibited enhancers, do they still get a medal? No. Have they still run the race and won. Yes. Because they "cheated", though, they are just not recognized as the winner. Why is this so hard to understand?
If a player developed a batting stance that was both legal by the rules and which resulted in catcher's interference by the letter of the rulebook every time, I'd expect MLB to put a stop to it immediately rather than allow him to complete a season with a 1.000 OBP
This argument would be stronger if MLB, while suspending Melky, had also vacated the wins that he helped the Giants to earlier in the year. But the crime is not deemed to be that serious. All the records are valid, not just in Melky's personal scrapbook, but in the National League standings.
One can imagine a scenario in which a sports league could unwrite a record book – a far-flung game-fixing scandal, for instance, or clubhouse-spread poisoning of the visiting team before a play-in game. They don't remove games played on PEDs from baseball standings, for many good reasons, large among them being that it's just not the most serious offense one can commit.
The situation presents some interesting thought-experiments because it's so close to the edge. What if Cabrera had had that one PA, gotten a hit, and won the batting title under a very slightly different clause in the rules? Or what if his suspension had come earlier, he'd returned on parole and clean, and proceeded to win the title with a combination of his earlier "mockery" hits and his later legitimate ones? In those situations, there'd be no grey area caused by an "exception," there'd be no precedent for expunging a record, and there'd be an even more heightened sense of "we just find you embarrassing" if a guy was denied a "batting title" (and whatever one wins for that, which as some posters have said may be basically nothing).
EDIT: And as Morty's #108 shows, a team sport makes this a lot trickier than an individual race. You can strip a runner of a gold medal, but it's more complicated to strip the Giants of wins, or of Melky's hits and their contribution to those wins.
Everything having to do with things like that is a technically in some way. Some count; some don't. Pretty much like making laws. Some things we make illegal and some things we don't.
No less, either. So how is it that the privacy of the testing program that was collectively bargained by MLB and the MLBPA doesn't seem to carry any weight with you?
No less, either. So how is it that the privacy of the testing program that was collectively bargained by MLB and the MLBPA doesn't seem to carry any weight with you?
Because the MLBPA doesn't seem to care to enforce it. If they don't care, why should I?
It's probably unenforceable anyway.
Right. That was the joke. Sorry you didn't like it.
Marion Jones' relay teammates would like to discuss this further.
I loved it. That's why I made my point. But you weren't the only one making the technicality argument.
Banned for passing all of his drug tests during competition, and for refusing to wage an expensive "defense" against charges dredged up a decade later, on evidence the USADA has so far declined to share with other governing bodies.
Yes, the MLB should be more like sports dedicated to "honest" competition, and eliminate any forms of appeals and due process from drug testing and just make up new rules as it sees fit and apply them all retroactively at it's discretion.
As I referenced before, Norm Cash admitted he used a corked bat for much of the 1961 season, in which he won a batting title. Should that be stripped?
well seeing as how you are going to change rules retroactively, tony gwynn should have his title removed, too
and certainly norm cash should have his title took away from his seeing as how he cheated, too
but it won't happen because people really don't care about "cheating" unless it involved the player using testosterone and then they only care if the player happens to be any good. you notice all the screams of outrage that guillermo moto has been allowed to play and nobody wants to erase his stats.
or alex sanchez' stats. or the stats of ANY non-"important" guy who has tested positive
or alex sanchez' stats. or the stats of ANY non-"important" guy who has tested positive
Again, they're not erasing any stats. All Melky's stats remain in the record book.
They are simply changing how an award is calculated vis-a-vis a suspended player.
It's all right with me. It’s not a big deal—it has no bearing on the stats. If you think it’s that important, go for it. But, if Cash had been caught at the time, if there were protocols to do that with certitude, and if he made the same request as Cabrera, then, yes, he shouldn’t get the award.
It’s like, do you want to make someone high school teacher of the year who dates members of his class? It’s more image than anything—it looks like #### to make an award in the presence to a cheater. And, it’s cheating. It’s a violation of a big rule.
I would note that one would change something long ago in the past and the other has to do with now, and is changing a future award that the powers that be have the power to keep from being award now. It’s about honesty now. If we’re going to live in this idealistic frame of mind, why not nullify all awards during the time when only white guys could play the game.
But I believe awarding and re-awarding titles in the past has been done before. Recently for Jim Gentile. And some sources say Cobb won the 1910 batting title and some say Lajoie. But, the award was made. Now, it’s just a matter of statistics.
Look, if you're looking for a Platonic ideal to live by, you're not to going to find it. However, there is reason to not award in real time those who cheated. Jesus.
And, again, we have other sports where players are stripped of their awards. It happens all the time in the Olympics. And do I need to mention bicycling? There was an interview with Roddick or Murray or somebody where he said that tennis players are check quite often during the season (he says one year he was tested without warning something like 16 times). You think that was just for fun? Or you think it would have some effect. Yet, no one is going back to see if Rod Laver used PEDs. Is that an outrage? Should that render the testing now invalid?
That doesn't make the method of not awarding this particular award to Melky any less ham-fisted. Again, if MLB wants to institute a rule that steroid-suspended players are ineligible for awards, so be it. Retroactively, adopting a "one time amendment" to deal with this situation is just silly, and I haven't seen a reasonable defense of it in 120+ posts.
So you've never actually watched any Olympic medal ceremonies, or interviews with Olympic medal winners, or anything like that, have you?
Anyway, I'm going to reiterate the point I tried to raise on the previous page:
Wouldn't it have been far better for MLB to have modified rule 10.22(a) to simply state that no player who fails to accumulate the requisite number of PA due to suspension shall be considered to have qualified as an individual batting, slugging or on-base percentage champion?
Yes. But the good should never be the victim of the perfect.
I think it's very likely that if MLB had actually punished Melky with disqualification, and if the Players Association filed a grievance against that, then the Players Association would win. I don't really see how anyone can look at this situation without starting at the point that both Melky and the union saw this as the best outcome. When I first read this story, my first thought was, "Good, it looks like the union is taking some ownership of the testing policy," which after all probably helps protect the longterm health of the players as a whole.
Finally we know what WAR is good for!
Sorry Giants, you now have 83.4 wins.
Well, if you want to be fair, Cabrera failed to reach 502 PA not because of the suspension (because that was a future event not yet affecting his current outcome), but because of the 4 games he didn't play earlier in the season (prior event affecting current outcome). If he'd played those games, what would have MLB done in this case?
Technically (drink!), his failure to reach 502 PA was NOT because of the suspension, but prior missed games.
Which is why no one has suggested that MLB strip Melky or the Giants of anything. They just won't recognize him as being the batting champion if he goes on to lead the league.
But like I said earlier, I'm pulling for McCutchen and Posey to catch fire in their remaining games and make this entire silliness moot.
...or for those who tested positive for steroids during that same season.
I still disagree with this move my MLB. But I'm not gonna shed a lot of tears for Melky.
My guess is that it would just be considered as though he didn't have enough PA's to qualify.
Sure; which simply pegs this kind of "cheating" at the level of seriousness with which MLB currently takes it. It's serious enough to lose an individual some playing time and some pay, but not to trigger an investigation into how ill-gotten the Western Division title might be. So it's really not the "cheating" issue that strips Melky of his batting championship, I think. The Giants still get the full "benefit," if there was any.
And your opinion of it is that the actual medal is why the Olympians are emotional, and not the actual, you know, winning the event?
Actually no. The "Batting Champion" is a purely arbitrary construct of the MLB rules (you could pick any # of PAs, and BA excludes a random collection of things from the denominator).
There is no "natural" definition of "Batting Champion".
Did you know Gold Medals are <10% Gold? What a gyp!
This remains a delusional point of view. Cabrera winning the batting championship no more represents "reality" than Nadzeya Ostapchuk of Belarus winning Olympic gold in the shot put does. I watched the event and she put the shot the furthest. Then her drug test came back positive and she was no longer the winner.
The principle is simple: The competitive validity of the event's "reality" is merely conditional. You play 72 holes at the Masters in the fewest strokes, you still may not win if you sign an incorrect scorecard (Roberto DeVicenzo, ca. 1968). You throw the shotput further than everybody else, you've conditionally won the event, but still may lose (Women's Olympic Final 2012). You beat Kentucky in a fantastic national basketball semifinal, you've conditionally won (Michigan 1993). You run 100m the fastest in the Olympic final, you've conditionally won (Ben Johnson 1988).
Cabrera conditionally hit .346. The condition failed.
Next.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main