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Steroids, the 90s, and the Hall of Fame

Posted by EJ Fagan at 1:00 pm 12 Responses »
Jan 112011

We all know by now that Jeff Bagwell was snubbed on his first hall of fame ballot by the BBWAA. The collective excuse seems to have been that he was just too fit, too shaped, too good to not be taking steroids. At no point has Bagwell’s name ever been connected with steroids in any way, shape or form, but he was a big, strong hitter in the 1990s, so he is guilty until proven innocent.

Jeff Bagwell will not be the last victim of this newfound righteous indignation, and at some point he will probably be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but hopefully the ridiculousness of his case calls attention to the stupidity of the BBWAA’s voters and voting process. Jeff Bagwell’s only sin was that he played during the 1990s, a time when offense soared in the majors in part because of steroid use.

Here is the argument I would like to make: No player should be denied entry to the Hall of Fame because of steroid use – suspected, confirmed, whatever. For most of league history, a wide variety of performance enhancing drugs, including McGwire’s alleged drug of choice Androstenedione, were completely legal both in baseball and wider society. It is absolutely ridiculously that Mark McGwire – one of the best sluggers ever – is being kept out of the Hall of Fame because he benefited from the use of performance enhancers that were both ubiquitous and legal.

Furthermore, even if performance enhancing drugs are considered cheating, there is no precedent to use cheating (except in the case of gambling) to deny a player entrance to the Hall of Fame. Players like John McGraw, Ty Cobb, Joe Niekro, and Whitey Ford were notorious cheaters and dirty players, but were inducted without controversy. The biggest complaint against Gaylord Perry was not that he openly admitted to doctoring balls (and would literally taunt players on the mound by pretending to do so), but that his W-L record had too many losses. And let’s not even get into corked bats.

And let’s not pretend that steroids were some new, particularly powerful form of (completely legal and accepted) cheating that happened to emerge in the 1990s. Jose Canseco in his book claimed that he used steroids in the 1980s to get from the minors to the major leagues. Mike Schmidt admitted in his book that performance enhancing drugs were freely given out in his major league clubhouses in the 1970s.

The 1990s saw a huge surge of home runs for a number of reasons. One was probably that medical science increased the potency of the performance enhancing drugs that were already in use. But that was only one reason – ballparks were smaller, pitchers weren’t allowed to push batters off the plate, managers got stupid using relief pitchers, college players grew up using aluminum bats instead of wooden ones – among many.

This wouldn’t break a rational Hall of Fame voting process, but it does mess with the assumptions made by scores of retired BBWAA writers who are either too dumb or too disconnected to compare hitters against their peers and vote for the Hall of Fame accordingly. The home run surge of the 1990s probably messes with the “500 home run club = Hall of Fame” rule that the writers had leaned on so heavily for so long. If we let a worthy group of people pick who does and does not enter the Hall of Fame, this would not be a problem. If performance enhancing drugs – or corked bats, or doctored balls, or McGraw/Cobb dirty tricks – were generally accepted as a means of playing better, then we should have no problem judging an environment where many or most players benefited from their use.

The counterfactuals bear this out. If Mark McGwire hadn’t used andro (and no one else did too), do you really think he wouldn’t have been a top-10 hitter of his generation? Of course he would be – McGwire hit 49 home runs his rookie year, and set records in high school. If Barry Bonds hadn’t taken whatever he took, would he not still go down as the greatest hitter of the 1990s? Of course he would have. Had Roger Clemens not taken steroids, wouldn’t he still have been one of the best pitchers of all time?

I find it difficult in any way to defend steroids as some kind of moral affront without completely divorcing yourself from baseball history.

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Writers Who Whiffed On 'Roids Need To Avoid Sanctimony

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 1:19 pm 6 Responses »
Jan 052011

A few days ago, Mike Vaccaro of the Post made the following comment on Twitter:

1 more on Hall/PED: I think we did way too little to find out what was happening in ’90s, seem way too hellbent on meting out justice now

I think that Vaccaro is right on the money, and a search through the TYU archives will bring you to a number of articles in which I decry the inherent hypocrisy of writers condemning steroids well after the fact. This morning, Jim Caple of ESPN wrote a stunning article in which he rants about this point. I strongly encourage you to read it, but here is the money quote from my perspective:

Hey, I get that you think steroid use is really, really bad. Or at least, that this is your view now. Your anti-steroid stance wasn’t so clear when we were all glorifying these players a decade (and less) ago. And I’m with you — I wish steroids had never entered the game and I’m very glad they’ve been banned. And I sympathize with voters who are simply uncertain about the whole issue and the stats of the era and are holding off until they sort it out better.

But as for the rest of you? I would agree more with your pompous Hall of Fame voting stance if it weren’t so hypocritical, inconsistent and impossible to defend…..

It’s also hypocritical. We knew Mark McGwire used androstenedione during the 1998 season. We didn’t know he also used steroids but if we didn’t suspect it, we were even more naive than bloggers accuse us of being. And we didn’t care! We held the great andro debate for a couple of weeks and then decided it didn’t matter. We were having too much fun following McGwire and Sammy Sosa around for two months, glorifying both. Sports Illustrated printed special editions in their honor and declared them the Sportsmen of the Year, posing them on the cover in Roman togas with olive leaf crowns. I even compared McGwire to the original Spirit of St. Louis, Charles Lindbergh, saying that he carried the entire nation on his broad shoulders that summer.

We continued to praise these players up until 2002, when the excellent baseball writer Tom Verducci got Ken Caminiti to admit he used steroids. Two years later, President Bush used the bully pulpit of the State of the Union address to decry steroid use (though it would have meant more if he had mentioned this when he was the Rangers president and Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro were on his team). And ever since then we’ve cared a great deal about steroid use, vilifying the players we previously glorified.

In other words, we are holding them to a standard now that we didn’t during the majority of their careers. We are vilifying them for actions we not only condoned but unintentionally encouraged with our praise.

Vaccaro’s comments sent me into the archives to see how some prominent reporters treated this issue in 1998, and Caple’s comment provide the perfect segue into these articles.
Continue reading »

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Pierce: Amphetamines Mean Old-Timers Were No Better

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 7:00 pm 9 Responses »
Apr 022010


I do not often agree with Charlie Pierce, but he is right on the money here:

However, this is the most interesting part of the piece.

“When I came to the big leagues in 1970 with the Big Red Machine, the trainer told me, ‘You need to take these vitamins,’ ’’ Carbo said.

OK, can we all stop talking about steroids now?

Seriously, illegal amphetamines were being handed out by untrained team staff, without the faintest notion of informed consent, to rookies on behalf of the clubs themselves. Major-league baseball was pushing speed, and lying to the people to whom it was pushing it. This is precisely the way the dealers in the early years got the crack epidemic up and running. No wonder Carbo got hooked.

(And don’t even start with the argument about what “performance-enhancing” really means. Giving you speed while telling you that it was vitamin pills, and doing so clearly in the hope of making you play better, means that the trainer — and through him, the club — is trying to enhance your performance. Period. Unless words mean nothing at all, the debate is all useless semantics, except that I suspect more of the guys who juiced in the 1990′s benefitted from better medical advice than did the guys in the 1970′s who were gobbling speed like it was Jujubes.)

What do we do now? Take these guys out of the Hall of Fame? Obliterate them from the record books? Show up at Old Timer’s Days and boo them? (“AND WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN???????????”) Treat, say, Mike Schmidt like Barry Bonds? These guys all took illegal drugs and did so to play better. Unless you define your morality by what sounds best during your spot on Around The Horn, there is no moral difference in the two cases worthy of discussion.

Hank Aaron admitted to trying greenies once, and I think it is fair to say that a large chunk of players were using them in the middle to late stages of the 20th century. As I have noted before, cheating and inequity have long been a part of the game, as well as sports in general. It is always necessary to judge players by the context within which they acted. Babe Ruth played in the age of segregation and did not have to face some of the better athletes of his day. Hank Aaron played in an era where taking greenies were the norm. We cannot look at their accomplishments with reverence while dismissing certain issues as products of their era without doing the same with the players of the steroid era. Ignoring things like greenies because they interfere with our romanticized version of the past while making villains of current players for making a similar moral choice is simply unfair.

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A-Rod To Tell Investigators What Many Of Us Already Know

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 1:00 pm 6 Responses »
Mar 262010


A-Rod is expected to meet with Federal investigators today to discuss his relationship with Dr. Anthony Galea. Joel Sherman chimes in with the details on what Alex is planning to tell them:

A-Rod associates say there is nothing to worry about. This is about Galea, who is dealing with drug charges in his native Canada and an FBI investigation in the States involving illegal performance enhancers.

A-Rod is expected to tell investigators he was directed to Galea by chiropractor Mark Lindsay, who was authorized to work with Rodriguez by Dr. Marc Philippon, who performed hip surgery on A-Rod on March 9, 2009.

Rodriguez, The Post has learned, will claim he received five sessions of platelet replacement therapy, which he feels greatly accelerated his healing process and enabled him to get back to the majors by early May.
Rodriguez is planning to insist he had no prior relationship with Galea and never received any illegal drugs such as HGH. Instead, just like Carlos Beltran, Jose Reyes, Tiger Woods and many other top athletes in a myriad of sports, he went to Galea because of the doctor’s reputation for the platelet replacement treatment, which is legal.

My goodness, this is shocking stuff. We had no idea until this moment that there was a legitimate connection between Galea and Lindsay, or that Galea had a reputation for another sort of treatment plan other than injecting HGH. Oh, wait, we most certainly did:

To be clear, Dr. Lindsay and Galea worked together, and Lindsay was the doctor whom the Yankees and surgeon Dr. Marc Phillipon approved to take care of A-Rod’s rehab. Furthermore, Lindsay himself is apparently not approved to write prescriptions in the US, and needed someone such as Galea to deal with anything that required a scrip. As such, the perception that A-Rod went looking in the seedy underbelly of the medical world for treatment is silly and unfounded. He almost certainly was referred to Galea by Lindsay, who was the doctor in charge of the medical treatment related to his hip. While it may have been stupid of Alex to go to a doctor that was not directly approved by the Yankees, that does not mean that he went to Galea to get HGH.

That is what I wrote two weeks ago. Unless the investigators stumble upon some evidence that Alex was given HGH, it seems fairly clear that this story is a non-issue. As Alex has stated all along, this is about somebody else that he knew who happened to have committed a crime. While Alex probably should have gone to the Yankees to get Galea approved, all he is guilty of for that failing is stupidity. Do you think Alex will get an apology from Ian O’Connor?

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A-Rod meeting feds on Friday

Posted by Chris H. at 11:56 pm No Responses »
Mar 222010

To discuss his relationship with Canadian doctor, Anthony Galea, who is currently under investigation following drug (HGH, Actovegin) charges from last October, Yankees third baseman, Alex Rodriguez, will meet with federal agents on Friday, in Buffalo. A-Rod could presumably miss the game against the Phillies that day – it is at 7:05 pm – however, he will probably end up at the meeting earlier on, allowing him to attend the exhibition matchup in the evening.

I really doubt this will go beyond the meeting. Hopefully, after Friday, we won’t have to hear about it anymore.

Photo by the AP

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The Disingenuous World Anti-Doping Agency

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 5:00 pm 4 Responses »
Mar 192010

Jeff Passan wrote one of the year’s most biting and accurate columns yesterday, discussing the World Anti-Doping Agency’s recent criticism of MLB’s reluctance to use the HGH blood test that they have developed. WADA tends to issue one of these edicts every couple of months, and anti-steroid crusaders tend to point to those proclamations as proof that MLB is still way behind most sports in their testing program. What many do not realize, and what Passan highlights, is that WADA has their own interests here that have nothing at all to do with maintaining the purity of sport:

In a press release disguised as a concerned letter, WADA president John Fahey chastised MLB and the players’ association for not using blood testing to detect human growth hormone. Nowhere did Fahey mention that the reliability of these tests remains in question six years after WADA first suggested their use. Nor did Fahey admit the organization’s real motivation: to leverage MLB into fattening WADA’s coffers with its multimillion-dollar-a-year testing program…..

Fahey lives in a fiefdom where an employer’s right to stick needles in its employees is a fait accompli. Such decisions take nuance and discussion, and they certainly shouldn’t be the domain of dogmatists who profit from the testing.

Proper drug detection in professional American sports is not done in a vacuum. Whereas most Olympic athletes lack unions and find themselves easy prey for WADA and its compadres-in-corruption at the IOC, American athletes are shielded from unilateral enforcement. It’s not all about snuffing out the cheaters, nor is it about protecting civil rights at all costs. There is a place in between, one that values a sport’s integrity as well as its athletes’…..

It’s no surprise WADA keeps attacking MLB while letting other professional leagues skate. The NBA and NHL pour tens of millions of dollars into the Olympics by allowing their athletes to participate, and the NFL plays enough pattycake with WADA to stave off public interference.

Essentially, WADA continues to sully MLB in the press because unlike the other major sports, baseball has refused to pour money into the WADA coffers. It is very easy for WADA to insist that players concede some of their basic civil liberties in order to make them richer, but the league needs to be more prudent. As Passan notes, this is a very touchy issue in which a middle ground must be found in order to protect both the athletes and the sport. Simply implementing an unreliable test that would represent a greater infringement on the privacy of players in order to satisfy the curiosity of the public and the whims of WADA would be a terrible decision. Thankfully, MLB and the MLBPA have shown no such inclination.

Major League Baseball has the most stringent testing program in all of American professional sports. Hopefully, they continue to ignore WADA and do what is best for both the sport and its players.

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Testing For HGH: A Complicated Issue

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 7:00 pm 2 Responses »
Mar 162010

Bob Klapisch recently chimed in on the issue of blood testing for HGH, and echoed the sentiments of many skeptical fans:

Weiner is telling his constituents not to worry, the union has their backs on HGH. The war will be waged on the “privacy” issue, which means we can forget about blood tests for at least another two years.

That’s just fine with the same group of ideologues that prolonged the juicing era 3-4 years longer that it should have. Fehr enabled his players’ rights over steroids, now it’s Weiner’s turn with HGH.

“Blood testing is much more complicated in terms of the safety issues,” Weiner was saying on Saturday. That’s another way of saying the union would rather wait for the more-easily administered urine test, knowing that’s years away from being implemented…..

But times have changed. Drug-free players don’t want to be rounded up with the usual suspects anymore. This is Weiner’s chance to put his own, unique stamp on union of the coming decade. It’s his opening to be the leader to all his constituents, not just the stars looking for loopholes.

Derrek Lee is one of the good guys, telling USA Today he’s ready to “test for everything, get it all out. Then there would be no more questions.”

Klapisch, like many fans, believes that the union is just using the testing issue as a bargaining tool, and that the privacy considerations are not really vital to most of the players. Therefore, he paints those who have “privacy concerns” as being bad guys, while those in favor of using the currently available (and largely unreliable) blood test are the good guys. He wants players to sacrifice their rights simply to satisfy his own curiosity and to give him peace of mind regarding the purity of the game.

For a more nuanced opinion on the topic, I turned to the excellent Craig Calcaterra of Hardball Talk, a lawyer-turned-blogger who has written extensively about steroids, testing, and the union:

Me: Many have framed the HGH blood testing issue in term of “privacy issues.” What does that term refer to in a legal sense, and are these the sort of rights that generally fall under that umbrella?

Craig: I think when we hear “privacy issues” mentioned in connection with drug testing in baseball, the term is being used to describe practical considerations, not legal ones, dealing primarily with Major League Baseball’s handling of blood samples and test results. You’ll recall the matter of the 2003 survey testing which led to the famous list of 103? While the failure to destroy those tests falls on the union’s shoulders in my view, I think that example has given the union pause about letting any more medical information about players out into the ether than is already out there. There’s a reason, I think, that the union makes the existence of a dead-reliable HGH test a prerequisite to any discussion of blood testing, and that’s because a reliable test suggests a time frame in which samples could be disposed of in a routine manner.

Me: Do you believe that the privacy issue is actually important to the union, or is this more about holding testing as a bargaining chip?

I think the privacy issue is actually important. History has shown that Major League Baseball can be surprisingly cynical with information relating to drugs. In 1985 or 1986, the Pittsburgh Pirates sued Dave Parker to try and get money back they had paid him earlier in the decade on the basis of his cocaine use. This despite the fact that the Pirates had known of his drug use for some time. They took an opportunity, however, presented by the negative publicity of the Pittsburgh cocaine trials in order to make a grab for some money they wish they hadn’t spent. We’re in a different time now, I think — one in which the owners and the Commissioner’s office aren’t nearly as short sighted as those that preceded them — but I think there’s understandable concern on the part of the union that history could repeat itself and that, say, blood samples taken for purpose A could later be used for purpose B.

Not to say that the union doesn’t see the writing on the wall and that some day, some way, blood testing will become a reality. In light of that, if they can extract something from the league before inevitability sets in, hey, why not?

I think Craig is spot on here, as the issue is a lot more complicated than the union just trying to squeeze some extra concessions out of the league. Thanks to Craig for answering my questions.

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An Important Detail In The Newest A-Rod Controversy

Posted by Moshe Mandel at 7:00 pm 5 Responses »
Mar 092010

A few days ago, I wrote the following about the story connecting Alex Rodriguez to a doctor under investigation for distributing HGH:

If A-Rod had wished, he could have refused to speak with the investigators. Instead, he is being open about his connection to Galea, and has stated on a number of occasions that he has nothing to do with this and will simply be discussing “someone else.” While it is possible that A-Rod comes out of this entire situation looking bad, we have absolutely zero evidence at this point by which to make any sort of determination.

Since that point, Galea has said that he did indeed treat Alex for inflammation, and prescribed anti-inflammatories. One question that I have been asked repeatedly is that if Alex was simply getting anti-inflammatories, why obtain them from a shady doctor in Canada? Why not go through typical medical channels? To answer this question, I point to one small detail that seems to have been glossed over by those attempting to turn this into a huge story before any information is available:

The nature of A-Rod’s relationship with Galea, the Toronto physician who was arrested in October after authorities found illegal drugs in his assistant’s car during a stop at the U.S. Canadian border, is unclear. Mark Lindsay, a Canadian chiropractor who managed the Yankee third basemen’s rehabilitation after hip surgery last year, is an associate of Galea, however. Galea and Lindsay are principals at a Toronto sports medicine clinic called Affinity Health. Galea is being investigated in both Canada and the U.S.

To be clear, Dr. Lindsay and Galea worked together, and Lindsay was the doctor whom the Yankees and surgeon Dr. Marc Phillipon approved to take care of A-Rod’s rehab. Furthermore, Lindsay himself is apparently not approved to write prescriptions in the US, and needed someone such as Galea to deal with anything that required a scrip. As such, the perception that A-Rod went looking in the seedy underbelly of the medical world for treatment is silly and unfounded. He almost certainly was referred to Galea by Lindsay, who was the doctor in charge of the medical treatment related to his hip. While it may have been stupid of Alex to go to a doctor that was not directly approved by the Yankees, that does not mean that he went to Galea to get HGH.

If there was something illicit going on between Alex and Galea, it will be exposed in time. Until that time, let’s not jump to conclusions that are not supported by the available information.

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MLB to test MILB for HGH

Posted by Steve S. at 7:22 am 1 Response »
Feb 242010

MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT of the NY Times has the story. On the heels of a British Rugby player being the first professional athlete suspended for a positive HGH test, Bud Selig plans on ushering in a testing regime for all minor league players.

Major League Baseball, which had long been skeptical about a viable test for human growth hormone, now plans to implement blood testing for the substance in the minor leagues later this year, according to an official in baseball with direct knowledge of the matter.

But even with this latest breakthrough, some experts have still expressed doubts about this test and it’s effectiveness:

Nevertheless, Charles E. Yesalis, professor emeritus of exercise and sport science at Penn State and an antidoping expert, said Tuesday that although a rugby player had been caught he was still skeptical of the test’s efficacy.

“They have this test for some time and they only caught one guy,” Yesalis said in a telephone interview. “I wouldn’t bet my life on that test.”

A few observations. If you’ve read the IOC report on HGH, it’s not that big a deal. It doesn’t increase strength (just muscle mass) and most of the other reputed effects (faster injury healing, quicker recovery) were all found to be inconclusive. It did conclude that when used in conjunction with steroids it could enhance their effects, but doesn’t have the effect that steroids do. It may help a Baseball player get through the dog days of August, but long term effects like that weren’t addressed by the IOC report. Stimulants have been used by Baseball players for years to get them ‘up’ for a game, so I don’t think were tearing up the record books if that effect proves to be true.

To me, HGH has a bad rep for it’s prevalence among steroids users. Unlike steroids, it’s a naturally occurring substance that the body produces on it’s own. It simply wanes as you age, so to take a supplement to make up for it doesn’t strike me as ‘cheating’ or making you more than you could ever be on your own the way steroids do. But there are needles involved with HGH use, which further adds to the stigma. You can go to a vitamin store and buy Melatonin to help you sleep, which is another naturally occurring substance that wanes as you age. I don’t see much difference in a player taking HGH to maintain his body. But HGH has been seized upon by some shady medical practitioners as a ‘fountain of youth’ so again, it has a bad rep. I think unfairly so.

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No punishment for A-Rod

Posted by Chris H. at 12:20 pm 1 Response »
Sep 122009

From Michael Schmidt (NY Times):

The commissioner’s office has decided not to discipline Alex Rodriguez in light of its investigation into whether he lied about his use of performance-enhancing drugs in a meeting with baseball officials in March, according to people in baseball with knowledge of the matter.

From a practical standpoint, punishing Alex Rodriguez would have made little to no sense since he was outed and had to defend himself. Telling the truth was the best way in which to do that. Also, from a moral standpoint, it would have looked bad if the MLB decided to sanction or suspend one of the few players who actually did speak out on their use of performance enhancing drugs. In the end, they score some public relations points by holding an investigation to make it seem as though they care—that’s enough.

(props to RAB)

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