f13.net

Pathetic.

Not that MLB doesn't already have it's share of pathetic behavior, but this is really the straw that broke the camel's back. I almost think they should just wipe all of the records of the past 20 years or so. Fuck all of these dudes. There probably haven't been truly legit, great ball players since, like Ripken Jr. or Ryan. Who were unbuilt geezers, no less.

I'm no fan of A-Rod, but I disagree.   Most of the players were either on Speed or Steroids or both or who knows what else.  A-rod just got caught.

And today, he fessed up.  At least he has the balls to own up to what he did.

It's entertainment. 

DID HE NOT ENTERTAIN???  :drill:

Records are records.  Some used, some didn't.  I don't see what the big deal is.  The player is taking 100% of the risk and will have to live with 100% of the consequences. 

The one guy who is already close to catching up with Bonds' record fairly early in his career, who was being looked at as someone who was going to hit those numbers legitimately, is a fucking cheat too.

The big deal, however, is that guys like Roger Maris and Hank Aaron did some amazing things, and these guys didn't. They need to be treated as such.

Pretty easy to fess up when you've already been killed in an article beforehand.

It's a big deal TO YOU.  I go to a baseball game to be entertained.  The bar has been raised so high that it's no wonder these guys take shit to perform at the best possible level.  I don't blame them one bit.  Had I to do my athletic career all over again, you can bet I would have used every means necessary to make it last as long as possible. 

If you were to go back in time and ask athletes of days gone by if they could have used something to enhance their performance, many of them would have said "hell yes".  Anyone that looks down their nose at this behavior doesn't understand the pressure to perform within the sporting culture.  The fans are due some of the blame. It is the result of substance use that brought them in droves to watch games.  Few fans these days appreciate real baseball. 

Seriously... complaining about athletes using steroids is like complaining about actresses having plastic surgery. 

That's a load of horseshit.

It's fucking cheating.  I go to watch athletes, not a chemical experiment.  Yes, I realize that even the non juiced athletes are almost as much sport science as they are skilled at what they do.  This goes beyond that.  You should applaud the guy that doesn't give in to the urge/pressure to do this, and villify the guy that does. 

This on par with plagiarism, fraud, and other moral/ethical fuckups.

edit:

The whole "are you not entertained?!!?!?!" argument is a load of crap.  If you want me to buy it as part of the game, better list the guy's roid regiment below his batting average so I can decide if his homerun is praiseworthy or not.

I'm just going to write off your response as a prank post.  :?

All I have to say about this thread is that steroids won't help you hit a fucking baseball.  That's one thing you all need to understand.  Sure, Bonds is strong (but he still only hits .275), but people who consistently hit over .300 are HOFers no matter what they took. 

The only thing the 'roids controversy takes away from is the number of long balls you hit.

The steroids don't take away from the fact that they are GREAT BASEBALL PLAYERS WITH EXTRAORDINARY HAND EYE COORDINATION WHO CAN DO WHAT YOU CAN'T.  If steroids made everyone superhuman baseball players, everyone could do it.  Fact is, they don't, and we can't.

Fact:  Think most people aren't juicing in the MLB?  Fucking get your head out of your ass.  Kids are taking shit they can get their hands on at 16 to give themselves a competitive advantage, and will continue to do so for as long as they can get away with it.

The lot of you who think that steroids are a magic equivalent to a long and prosperous baseball career should DIACF.

Do you know the fundamental reasons behind the banning of steroids in sports?  In part it's to protect the athletes from themselves (which I have concerns with since it IS their own body).  A bit is to prevent the trickle down use into amateur sport.  The only reason I support steroid bans is because most players willingly enter into a contract where they agree to not use.  I think the players should be held in breach of contract should this be the case rather than treated as some type of monstrosity.  Medically speaking, HGH is going to be a more significant player in the future and I'm not sure much can be done about it.  

As for this particular case, steroids probably give A-rod a 2% edge in power.  Combined with a swing designed to hit the long ball, this will have a significant effect on homeruns.  I will remind you that major league baseball has done a lot more to improve the number of homeruns over the years than steroids could ever do.  New, more active baseballs and shorter fences in a number of the newer parks are among these.  Then there are the lighter schedules, training facilities, enhanced science and nutrition, among others.  If we're going to say that these guys are ruining the integrity of the sport, I think MLB starting doing that a long time ago.  

Plagiarism?  These guys aren't stealing IP from anyone to create art for god's sake.  They're just taking extra hormone.  Let's try to keep this in proper context.  

What does this have to do with anything anyone has said here? What does them using steroids have to do me? Or magic, for that matter. :uhrr: As far as I can tell, the only comparisons I've made are with non PED using record holders.

You don't seem to have contradicted anything I've said.  Seriously.  :|


They're cheating.  All I'm doing is equating one form of it to another.  I don't think it's much of a stretch.

I found myself agreeing with Tony Kornheiser today.   Stats of known steroid users should have that mentioned in the hall of fame.  That would really piss off Barry Bonds.

Edit: I do find myself respecting him for admitting it.  Granted, he's lied about this in the past, but at least he's not chosing the road Clemens, McGuire, and Bonds.

Fortunately, all of them have killed their chance to make it into the Hall of Fame. They might hold records, but A-Rod, Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, Clemens, and others are probably screwed. I mean, if Pete Rose is for what he did as a manager, then they probably are for what they did as players.

Anyhow, no one said they were incapable of playing baseball. Nor did I make a comparison with myself, as if I am personally jealous and somehow think they are magically in the MLB because of drugs, and I'm not. Fuck off with that, please. This isn't about me.

I wasn't trying to contradict you.  Rather, just make my own point clearer.  

I personally don't think athletes taking steroids is a big deal.  It's a bunch of men chasing after a white ball on a really nice field of grass.  It's hard to take the whole thing very seriously.  

You probably don't take it seriously for the very reason that these guys have taken the romance and the real accomplishments out of the game.  :grin:

Baseball is a joke.

Maybe so. Fuck off then. :-)

I was recruited in college to play baseball but decided to play football instead.  You don't need to lecture me on the sport.  As for the rest, the best athletes in the US stopped playing baseball in the 60's.  I think that's a big part of the problem that MLB is facing. 

I'd be interested in seeing how much money MLB has made off of steroid use.  People love the long ball.

Seriously man, I'm not lecturing. You're actually surprising me with waving this to side is all. I would have had you pegged as someone who would have taken a different point, or at least, expressed the same points in a less careless way (which is how it seems you're being).

Anyways, I have to wonder if it's athleticism or even health for that matter that produces record breaking performances. So I'm not saying these guys become supermen because of it per se. I mentioned Nolan Ryan. Guy was old, still pitching no hitters, still beating the daylights out of young bucks charging at him, and still retaining those records. Babe Ruth was overweight. Mickey Mantle was an alcy. Roger Maris didn't really have the most impressive physique. There's probably too much focus on athleticism in sports. Basketball is the same problem. So many people get scouted and drafted on that basis alone. A lot of them are busts, and just don't know the game. While in many cases, your biggest badasses in history, like Bill Russell was a small center (at 6'9"), still has a career record of 20 pts 20 rbs. A fucking monster. Or Jordan. He was a skinny tweener. Or Barkley. A chubby tweener.

Steroids are bad for your health, they are outlawed by the powers that be (who did a SHITTY job of regulating it, and hold just as much blame for this), and they piss on the reputation and records for baseball.

For anyone who makes the argument of "who cares about the records, it's entertainment," you don't understand baseball at all. Baseball is and always has been the end-all-be-all-stats-mean-everything sport. It's 162 games, and there are literally hundreds of stats to track. Every player knows at every time exactly how well they are peforming in not only games, but individual strike zones, cities, matchups, and day/night games. Baseball = stats. It's quite awesome because you can compare players over a span of 100 years, AND you have massive respect for those records (like Connie Mack's winning record) that still hold up today.

Steroids piss on the history of baseball, and also on a great deal of American history by proxy.

1) You cannot compare baseball records through history directly.  They are not 100% equivalent.  Any baseball historian will tell you this as will any baseball player from another era.  There are baseball greats that transcend time, but let's not get carried away by nostalgia.  Baseball is VERY different now than it was in the 70's, than it was in the 40's, than it was in the dead ball era.   I can't imagine how many homeruns Hank Aaron or Babe Ruth would have hit had they played today's game anymore than I can envision how many fewer complete games Christy Matthewson would have pitched in the modern era.   

2) Steroids don't make the player.  Can a great player can be made a little better, yes.  Fact remains that they still need to be great to begin with.  This is why I think people get worked into a froth over nothing.  Over the course of their careers A-Rod and Bonds benefit as much or more from modern training, fields, and conditions.  Yes, the steroid boost does help.  Perhaps enough to overcome the number of pitching specialists and intentional walks they have had to endure. 

3) I'd venture that HGH has a much greater effect on player longevity and their ability to break career spanning records.

Baseball today isn't the same game.  Steroids are a TINY part of this.  Hitters are being trained differently, pitchers are being used differently, and science is being applied in ways that noone ever dreamed.  Globalization has also had a HUGE effect on the way the game is played.  Don't like steroid use... that's up to you.  It's not the primary factor that has changed baseball from the game this country once called the national pastime.   
 

The whole asterisk attaching business is a bit interesting to me, since it usually fails to account for the fact that these guys are hitting against pitchers who are taking steroids too.

I'm more or less in Nebu's camp here. Anyone who doesn't think that nearly all the significant power hitters in the game aren't juicing is engaging in a severe case of wishful thinking. It has been going on for years. People think that Barry Bonds put this huge stain on the game, but he is just the tip of a huge fucking iceberg.

It also just goes to show what a hypocritical joke the fact that he didn't play this year is.  :oh_i_see:

EDIT: As for comparing players over the last 100 years, etc., you can't make a direct comparison unless you adjust for park effects, the era, etc; once you do that, the funny thing is, the comparisons are valid even when steroid users are involved, simply because you're looking primarily at how a player did relative to those he played against, and then taking those adjusted numbers and comparing them to each other. As it happens, those steroid-using players are competing against a bunch of other steroid-using players. You don't just sit down and compare raw stats directly if you want the comparison to tell you anything.

If you like baseball history:


Fielder Jones wrote this in the 1930's shortly before his death. 

It's wonderful that we're passionate about the game, but we have to be objective about assessing the impact of time.  The fact that there exist records from long ago is a statement of ability that those men had.  But we have to remember that it was a different game of a different time. 

If steroid use only netted a 2% gain, even after an admitted 3 year usage period that A-Rod did (and more than likely, much longer for other players), then they should kicked out for insanity then. :oh_i_see:


It's silly though to make such a conservative estimate. The drugs do make a difference. It's not the simplest thing to quantify, but they wouldn't even be taking them if it only effected them in such a miniscule way.

I'm not saying you can make direct comparisons, but there are many records that survived the tests of time and that's what makes them fantastic. Baseball is getting consistently better for sure. Training, free agency, stadiums, global appeal, and management have all changed significantly in the last 20 years. Stat tracking and information that the players have changed very significantly in the last 10 years alone. The wealth of knowledge we have now about everyone's tendencies in pitching, hitting, zones, and fielding are practically everywhere, including being updated live in-game.

Here's the black and white truth. When the governing body you agreed to play for draws a line in the sand and you step over that line, you cheated. I don't care what reasons they have or why that line existed. Pete Rose is demonized because he was a gambler, but everyone else seems to want to forgive these guys under the principles of "everyone was doing it" and "it's entertainment." If that's the kind of ethical thinking we're all comfortable with, it's not a big wonder why people apply similar lessons to marriages, businesses, and general life in America.

Sure they would. That 2% difference can be millions of dollars when contract time comes around.

It should probably be noted that A-Rod's positive test was from 2003, during a 'fact finding' test before they instituted their PED policy. It isn't, strictly speaking, accurate to say that the governing body had drawn much of a line at that point.

EDIT: Some more grist for the mill: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=8487

Calculate what 1 hit per week will do for a player's batting average and you'll see how the little things add up.  

I used 2% because it's impossible to quantify the effects steroids have in a game like baseball.  This especially the case in two players as gifted as A-Rod and Bonds (the two best players of this era).  Maybe it's 5%. I don't know.  There are just too many things influencing the modern game to think that their crazy homerun numbers are solely due to steroids.  Diet, training, prescription meds, and HGH could be adding a lot as well.  These guys have swing coaches and all sorts of stuff players of the past never even dreamed of.  

Paelos: Noone likes a cheater.  I agree.  I'm just saying in the relative scheme of things this is a trivial matter.  We're talking about entertainers using drugs to enhance performance.  It's not like genocide or cancer or anything.  Certainly nothing that demands congressional investigation.  

The culture of sports and athletes is severely broken.  Expectations and pressure on these guys are tremendous.  I can't even begin to comprehend how high.  It's easy for me to understand why some would turn to steroid use given the output demanded on a daily basis.  I wouldn't be surprised if, given their salaries, it wasn't almost an unwritten expectation.  Of course, management would never admit to it.  I can tell you that all through college there were hints of expectation and rampant abuse of prescription medications to enhance performance.  The sports culture pushes the line hard from all angles.  These athletes aren't hired for their moral fiber or ability to be a role model (like Sir Charles said "I'm not a role model").  They're hired for their physical gifts.  Seeing them cave to pressure doesn't begin to surprise me.  Pro sports are a crazy business.

I believe A-Rod already this long 10 year contract in effect during these years when he admitted to using (it was a TX contract, but carried over to NY). Doesn't appear that some significant increase in pay was an issue. So taken as simply as a performance increase for the shit he will have to deal with now is not worth it. If, according to you guys, it actually is a small increase. I would think that level of risk would only apply when you're getting more out of it.

Like I said above.  Pretty impossible to guess the effect.  Some will guess high.  I'm thinking my guess may be low. 

True, to a certain extent.  Hand/eye coordination is everything, as is bat speed which is what generates power.

What steroids do (for a hitter) is make the power lost on a slight mishit negligible.  So, the ball still has some serious wood behind it, moreso than if the the batter had been 'weaker' and his forearms/wrists been allowed to flex or cave away from being caught off the end of the barrel (as example).  You will generate a bit more bat speed by being stronger, but also by being stronger you can use a heavier bat (which also decreases the power loss on a mishit).  Essentially, you're 'muscling' through a bad hit - away from the sweet spot.

Take Bonds' superhuman hand eye coordination (seriously, that man is a freak), add in solid mechanics, and power and you get league records.

Anyway, baseball has this mythical history and massive library of literature behind it.  Mostly fueled by angsty old Jewish white guys from New York that grew up idolizing the Yankees.  But the angst behind this is mostly driven by old guys that can't or won't accept that baseball is no longer America's Sport, and has been passed by the NFL (or even possibly College Football).  There's a misguided perception that baseball is somehow supposed to be above all of the trash that pervades other pro sports.  But baseball has had a stink on it since the 90's during the labor disputes and lock outs.  They lost fans, and followers. 

Nebu is right.  Baseball (and pro sports in general) are nothing but entertainment outlets now.  And it really does come down to a 1 more hit.  One more on base.  One less strike out (or one more, if you're a pitcher).  Those ever so small improvements are what get you the gazillion dollar deal or into Cooperstown.

http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1109905/1/index.htm

Just thought I'd throw that out there. When I was a teenager, the thought of players using steroids bothered me, but now I'm too focused on paying bills to let my emotions be strummed by mercs with baseball bats. I still care about baseball, but hell, it's still just a game.

As Obama just said about A-Rod, "I think it's depressing news on top of what has been a flurry of depressing news."

I understand what y'all are saying about it being entertainment, but I think you're taking it a bit too far where you make it sound meaningless. I don't care for the other extreme view either, where people get all sanctimonious about sports. There's an in-between area, and even in that one, steroids are still weak sauce (not to be ironic there).

Would that be the same Hank Aaron who admitted trying amphetamines to improve his performance?
You'd be lucky to find 10 HOFers total from the post WWII era who didn't use "greenies" as performance enhancers.

We've already devolved in this thread to "its not cancer or genocide?"  Protip:  everything that isn't cancer or genocide...isn't cancer or genocide!

If you excuse me, I'm going to go on my lunch break now and steal ice cream cones from toddlers walking down the street while shoving kittens into traffic.  You're getting worked up?  Why?  Its not cancer or genocide!

...jesus.   :roll:

When thinking about records and such, keep in mind that the guys who actually have the largest incentive to use steroids (and the ones where you actually see the most positive tests from everything I've read) are the borderline major leaguers, not the stars - the difference between making a big league roster and being stuck in the minor leagues is a lot of money.

Anyone with incentives in their contract has a reason to consider steroid and HGH use.  Managers on a short leash also have an incentive to turn a blind eye toward it.  Like I said before, the culture of big money sports indirectly encourages it from high school on.  When a coach tells you privately that you'd get more PT if you were just a little faster/stronger you begin to weigh your options. 

My flip response to this earlier was more a reaction to the fact that our society places a high value on sports and entertainment almost to our detriment.  Couple that with our need for instant gratification and things begin to steamroll.  

He only fessed up when it was obvious his secret was going to get out. That's not noble, that's ass-saving PR.

Fuck A-Rod in his melon baller. Another useless cheating cunt.

Yes but contrast his actions with people like Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sosa, and Palmeiro. People tend to be forgiving of those that fess up and apologize profusely.

Edit: add Miguel Tejada to the list too

I'm pretty sure he only did that precisely because he learned from them (or more to the point, his lawyers did). It's fortunate to have some asshats to learn from, I guess. Just a year ago though, he denied it in an interview.

A-Rod is a narcissistic cunt with no redeeming qualities outside of his athletic abilities. I hope his junk rots off, be it from steroids or Madonna contact.

You're just mad he isn't on the Mariners, right?  :grin: