TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Monday, December 08, 2003

I just sent the following e-mail to the kind folks at Blogger.com:


Greetings,

The blog http://www.brew82.blogspot.com/ is using my photo as a banner. The picture of Miller Park is hosted at my site at:
http://www.thediamondangle.com..millerpark

This user is not only violating my copyright (and your TOS rule 4e), but is also stealing my bandwidth. In theory I can reach some type of agreement about the first issue (in fact, his link back is normally all I ask for), but I take offense at the second. I should not have to pay for extra bandwidth to make his page look pretty.

The e-mail account he provides on the page (brewmaster82@hotmail.com) is not valid. Please either contact the author with this problem, or suspend the blog.

Thank you for your time,
David Marasco



We are fairly loose with our copyrights here at The Diamond Angle. If you like what you've seen, drop us a line and we'll give you permission to reprint. We've had articles placed as widely as About's Economics Portal to Outsports, a gay sports site. What can I say, when we say "The Eclectic Baseball Magazine" we mean it. But bandwidth theft is another matter. If we go past a certain limit, we have to pay for every byte downloaded. For that reason, it's considered to be a high crime on the internet to use images not hosted on your own site.

If the guy had a working e-mail address this could be settled nice and easy. Instead we have to go to the service provider and play hardball. :(

posted by David 5:47 PM

Sunday, December 07, 2003

With all the recent talk about steroids in baseball, I can't help but think about Justin Turner. Who is Justin Turner? You won't find him on the witness list for the BALCO investigation, but he is a baseball player. He provided one of the scarier moments in last year's College World Series when he took a pitch with his face. He crumpled to the ground, and was rushed to the hospital for CAT scans and x-rays of his head. He was lucky, the damage from the pitch amounted to a cut lip, a chipped tooth and some bruising. No Dickie Thon this time around.

What does this have to do with steroids? Well, one of the big arguments that is always being floated is that steroids are bad because they demand an evil tradeoff - the health of the athlete in return for a boost in performance. When I saw the ball strike Turner's face, I felt the bottom of my stomach drop out. While in the end his injuries were not severe, that was a matter of luck. He could have just as easily suffered a crippling wound. But in the back of my head a little voice floated, "With their style of play, something like this was just a matter of time." Turner's team, Cal State Fullerton, had made it to the quarter-finals based upon an amazing offense. And a big component of this offense was ducking into pitches. The had 117 HBPs in 66 games, the third most HBP in NCAA history. It was part of their culture, they even incorporated it into their lingo. When you "took a dose" that meant that you had been hit by a pitch.

We don't know how much steroids help a player. We can look at a slugger and see that he's jumped his homer numbers by a big number, and then wave our hands and claim he's been juicing. But we don't really know if he has been taking steroids, and if he has, how much of his improvement can be attributed to the needle. On the other hand, we can judge what getting hit by a pitch can do for your team. Let's look at a player who uses this tactic, Jason Kendall. In 2003 he posted an OBP of .399, more or less the .400 OBP that is the benchmark of a very good player. Drop his 25 HBP and his OBP drops to a less-stellar .359. A willingness to get plunked accounts for 10% of Kendall's OBP. Now 10% is probably an extreme case, you wouldn't be able to generalize that to a team. Let's run the numbers on Cal State Fullerton. They posted a team OBP of .411, but only .384 when you drop the HBP. The "doses" acted as a 7% boost in OBP. What if we assumed that a normal team could boost their OBP by 5% by taking an aggressive stance on HBP, how would this affect their run production? Well a while back we ran a linear regression on runs and OBP when we looked at strikeouts. Take a team with an OBP of .340, they would be expected to score roughly 818 runs over the course of a season. Now crank up the OBP by 5% to .357, and the runs expected moves to 911. That's roughly 0.6 runs per game. If you told a manager that by a simple change in tactics he could lower his team ERA by 0.6 would he do it? Damn straight he would.

So ducking into pitches works. You can do the math and see how it helps the team. Yet the practice isn't widespread. Sure you have a Cal State Fullerton or a Don Baylor here or there, but for the most part this tactic is avoided. And it isn't because of pressure from above, the "you need to try to get out of the way" component of the HBP rule is almost never enforced. What keeps this from being practiced is a long sad list of names. Tony Conigliaro and Dickie Thon had their career destroyed by pitches to the face. One of my childhood favorites, Robby Thompson, took one for the team in the famed pennant race of 1993. Look at his stats, he never was the same either. Do steroids work? The answer to that question is maybe. With a proper exercise program to exploit their modified body chemistry, athletes can add muscle mass by leaps and bounds. Note that steroid use is often seen as a shortcut, but it does require a lot of hard gym work to add the bulk. If a couch potato took steroids, there would be no muscle gain, the result would be a person with small testicles who would attempt to kill you if you touched the remote control. Steroids will help to build muscles, but will they help you play baseball? Robert Nishihara wrote on this subject when the Canseco story broke. I won't repeat his arguments here, but I'll point you to his article. He believes the answer is no.

When it comes to leaning into pitches, players can see the risks involved in this style of play, weigh them against the benefits, and make up their own minds about how they want to approach the game. Yet somehow these same players can't make an informed decision about whether or not to put their bodies on the line when it comes to steroids. Both cases involve serious risks to both the short and long term health of the athletes, and both appear to have serious payoffs. Yet in one case the entire baseball world lets things be, and in the other there is a huge wail of scandal. Nobody says things like "we need to strictly enforce the Hit By Pitch rules, because otherwise players will feel pressured to duck into them because otherwise they will be at a competitive disadvantage with the players who do." There's a double standard here. There are good reasons to feel that steroids should be banned from the game, but claiming that players are forced into body-damaging modes to increase their competitiveness just doesn't fly; we let players decide if they will lean into the pitch, but somehow they can't make an informed decision when it comes to steroids.

Another double standard is the one involving athletes and actors. No, this isn't the double standard where A-Rod is the Devil but it is OK for Ray Romano to pull in $40M a year. This is the one where athletes aren't allowed to artificially boost their performance because of the possible damage to their health, but actors can have just about any kind of body modification. Check out awfulplasticsurgery.com for a display of some of the terrible things that have been done to keep actors look young. And of course the anorexic lifestyles of fashion models is also right around the corner...

Finally, I know some ex-highschool athletes who are angry about the moral high ground being staked out the anti-steroid crowd. The old players believe that steroid use is dangerous and wrong, but they are upset that so much of the sporting world is using the "players risking hurt to themselves is bad" argument. According to them, every time an athlete steps foot on a playing field, they are risking injury. More than that, many times this risk is cast in heroic lights. One of the career-defining moments for Emmitt Smith? When he came back for overtime in an important game after badly separating his shoulder. Three decades later, Knicks fans still talk about Willis Reed. "Playing through pain" is a central part of sports culture, even though pain is the human body's way of saying "back off". Listen to any sports talk show when the concept of pitch counts is raised. Most of the callers talk about how modern players are wimps, and back in the day real men would pitch complete games. Players who want to nurse their wounds are seen as crybabies, but nobody takes a step back and says "I guess he was right" when a Ken Griffey Jr. plays with an injury and then is lost for the season. This brings us full-circle to Justin Turner. After taking a fastball to the head, did he stay in the hospital overnight? No, he got a ride from the ER and went right back to the stadium. "It kind of gave us an emotional boost," starting pitcher Jason Windsor said. "We had something to work off and gave us something else to win the game for. Unfortunately, we just didn't get the job done." Even though he couldn't play in the game, Turner was viewed as a hero for leaving the hospital to be with his teammates. Players are always lauded for "taking one for the team". Sports culture gives a clear message to the young men who participate: part of the game is sacrifice, and one of the things sacrificed is your body. The sports moralists tell us that steroids should be banned because the health risks that some with them are too high. Tell that to the ex-athletes with the bad knees, tell them that sports should never cross a line where a person has to choose to take those risks. They will tell you that they got a different message.

posted by David 5:53 PM