CenterStage with a scoop? That hasn’t happened since Cabbage Pump came on the show and announced they were going on tour!
Major League Baseball appears unlikely to interfere if Melky Cabrera wins the NL batting title while serving his 50-game suspension for a positive drug test.
The San Francisco Giants outfielder began Wednesday with a league-leading .346 average, seven points ahead of Pittsburgh’s Andrew McCutchen.
Cabrera has 501 plate appearances, one fewer than the required amount if the Giants play 162 games. Under section 10.22(a) of the Official Baseball Rules, he would win the batting title if an extra hitless at-bat is added to his average and it remains higher than that of any other qualifying player.
“We’ll see how it all plays out,” commissioner Bud Selig said Wednesday after taping an episode of CenterStage for the YES Network. “We generally don’t interfere in that process. We’ll take a look at it at the end of the year.”
Cabrera, the All-Star Game MVP, was suspended Aug. 15 for a positive test for testosterone and is missing the final 45 games of the regular season.
During the YES interview, scheduled to air for the first time Sept. 27, Selig was asked whether records set during the Steroids Era should be revisited.
“You can’t change records because once you get into that it would never stop,” Selig said. “It would create more problems than it would solve.”
Repoz
Posted: September 19, 2012 at 05:18 PM |
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1. ...and Toronto selects: Troy Tulowitzki Posted: September 19, 2012 at 05:58 PM (#4240440)Because he's a cheater! A dirty, rotten cheater!
"But what about Miguel?"
"I said no Cabreras. We're allowed to have one."
A batting title is not an honor, like MVP; there's no discretion involved.
Don't give Selig any ideas.
I should note that I'm not saying he should, just that he can (it seems to me). In my opinion it's stupid that there are statistics and awards that are actually defined in the game's rules in the first place. (By "statistics", I mean yeah, obviously you have to define what a run is and so forth, but there's absolutely no reason why things like batting average or OBA or ERA or whatever have to be defined in the rules).
That said, I hope McCutchen goes on a tear and beats out Melky. And I'm pulling for Miggy to win the Triple Crown.
Felipe and Matty Alou finished 1&2 in the NL/MLB 1966...But of course not 1st in each league.
They could change that rule without causing outrage.
As long as it doesn't retrospectively take away that one year that Tony Gwynn needed it.
And then change it back next season. Just to spite Melky. :)
Just change it to say that any player suspended during the season has to take an 0-fer for every game he's suspended to qualify for a title. That would drop him down to around .265.
If the award is best batting average as of 502 PA then McCutcheon wins it (I think, unless someone else was higher as of 502 PA). Either you should qualify or not without getting into make-believe plate appearances.
I feel like the MLBPA would find some reason in here to totally freak out.
In 1938, to qualify for the batting title, a player just needed to appear in 100 games.
Jimmie Foxx appeared in 149 games, had 685 plate appearances, and hit .349. (With 50 homers and 179 RBIs to boot.)
A man named Taffy Wright appeared in exactly 100 games, and over 282 plate appearances hit .350.
The American League decided to award Jimmie Foxx the batting title. Because it just seemed the most fair way to do it.
...If Selig were to do something similar in this situation, I doubt many people would object.
It is. It'll be a heck of a trivia question in 2062 when I'm the Harveys Wallbangers of BBTF 3.0.
i would be 129
i think i can pull it off
An 0-for who many? 0-for-3.1?
I think Sean Forman and Dave Smith limit the power of decisions by MLB on this front.
Take the 1910 AL batting title. MLB's position (last I checked -- they may have changed their mind) is that Ty Cobb won the title. But these days anybody checking is likely to go to BB-ref or retrosheet (with BB-Ref being far more likely) and you get Nap Lajoie as having the highest BA.
Similarly, MLB's position is that Steve McCatty won the era title in 1981. Check out BB-Ref. (For those wondering, the rules said to calculate ERA by ER*9/IP [rounded to nearest whole number of innings] Obviously a rule that goes way back to the time when everything had to be figured by hand. Simplification would be a good thing)
But obviously, we can't just erase those wretched 4506 PAs. The question is how much of a penalty to impose. So we dock Bonds 18% of his later statistics, because 18 was Andy Van Slyke’s uniform number and he and Bonds never got along. But even that doesn’t conclude our calibrations, because although Bonds was uniquely evil, he was not uniquely juiced. He was facing pitchers on steroids and fielders on steroids, and there’s just no telling how many screaming doubles he lost to Mark McGwire making incredible diving stops. So devalued Bonds is awarded a 6% bonus, which was calculated by the number of Daily News reporters who killed themselves after Roger Clemens was found not guilty.
That gives us a scientific 86.92% prorated base for Bonds’ fiendish accomplishments. But he played entirely in the non-testing era, when all of us were so staggeringly naive and Bud Selig’s perjury was a brave effort to save the game and the first thing you thought of when somebody mentioned Bill Conlin was “fat.” What Melky Cabrera did was against real rules that were actually written down on paper, as opposed to rules that existed in the hearts of small boys like Mike Lupica. To be fair, Melky didn’t break any records, so his cheating wasn’t that bad. But he still needs to be punished enough -- and the 86.92% penalty only reduces his batting average down to .301. That costs him the batting title, but it still lets him retain the honor of being a .300 hitter, like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays and Rusty Greer. So we’re going to apply a one-time Melky Being Melky handicap of 2 points, knocking him down to .299, thus sanitizing the league leaders board and restoring the steroid-free legacy of San Francisco Giants baseball.
I do, and so do others. Batting average and black ink are valuable. Sorry for you that MLB doesn't give a rat's ass about linear weights or WAR, which ironically will also be devalued in 10 years.
Correct, sir. The "record book" has become whatever website has the most traffic.
It sounds like MELKY ruled Melky ineligible for the batting title.
That's pretty interesting. I wonder how Sean will handle it.
Melky is agreeing not to take advantage of the clause adding 0-whatever to get to the qualification limit, so I'd imagine Sean would just list him as not qualifying. If the Giants miss a game for whatever reason and Melky qualifies then he would *win* the batting title.
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