Each MLB Team’s Players On WBC Rosters

Tim – Good exchange. We don’t need to agree. My anger at Selig and the role of the commissioner is probably greater than most since I have invested a lot of time proving that the impact of the change in the baseball accounted for the HR surge from 1995 to 2008 not steroids.

Self promotion seems to be a big part of seeking and performing the job of Commissioner. Manfred allowed criminals off the hook with the sign stealing catastrophe despite the clear precedent that had been set. The WBC seems to be the main event that Manfred is going to ride to gain fame as the commissioner. The Selig misdirect of “I saved baseball by removing steroids” after he condoned them as GM of the Brewers is far more hypocritical than Manfred pushing the WBC but in the end it’s for the same thing, a chance to make the HOF by exaggerating the impact of something he supported.

Each day I see Cora, Hinch and Beltran in a MLB uniform after what they did, I get sick to my stomach realizing how bad things have gotten due to politics in baseball. They deserved the baseball death penalty like the 1919 CWS and got a slap on the hand but Bonds and his generation are still paying for a misdirection by Selig. There is no justice in baseball. Seeing the WBC being promoted to support the current fad of world wide inclusion is nothing more than an opportunistic politician who rides the political waves with the greatest impact at the moment.

If you care whether kids in obscure countries that don’t know baseball because it’s not part of their culture get a chance to experience it that’s great. I simply worry about the cost to those who may suffer if a significant injury occurs whether by accident or by aggressive play. Remember, Boston lost Peddy thanks to Machado’s aggressive yet legal play in a meaningless regular season game.

The revenues from the games is a good business justification for playing but I’m sure it’s far more significant for non-USA teams. Think about the fact that the DR team will receive money yet if Devers gets hurt, it costs them nothing. Only the Red Sox and their fans pay for an injury to Devers.

Tim – Great story about Millar. I hadn’t heard that much about the incident.

Steroids and cheating are perfect examples of how topics get publicly misdirected by those who can gain most from it. I played college ball in the late 70s and on multiple occasions I sat next to a player taking steroids. I was not at a big time DIV I school yet they were prevalent. I can only imagine how the big time scholarship schools and players addressed steroids from 1975 to 1994. 20 years and no mention of too many home runs or cheating by using it. Why?

Because in 1991 the then commissioner Fay Vincent got concerned about Cocaine use in baseball. He made a proclamation about drugs in baseball banning all types of drugs. Among the drugs listed were Mike Schmidt’s favorite amphetamines, Doc Gooden’s favorite cocaine, Jose Canseco’s favorite steroids and many others. One key note about this proclamation is that many people refer to steroids as illegal in the 1990s after the 1991 proclamation by Vincent.

Vincent didn’t have the authority nor the buy in from the MLBPA to enforce his proclamation. It was more of a scare tactic but revisionist history tells fans that steroids were banned in 1991 by Vincent. NOT TRUE. The actual ban happened in 2004 when the use of steroids or the distribution of steroids was added to the CBA..

You probably remember the huge impact that the strike of 1994 had on baseball. What wasn’t so well publicized was the ousting of Fay Vincent by Bud Selig and his cohorts. Selig, a GM who condoned players using steroids wanted to move on and become commissioner so he lobbied several owners who didn’t like Vincent and got him replaced by Selig himself. This happened between the 1991 proclamation and the 1994 strike.

To help baseball rebound from the strike, Selig reintroduced a baseball that had mistakenly been used in 1987 when HRs jumped over 20% year to year. Once the league realized the new ball was a mistake they reverted back to the old source for the baseball and HRs dropped over 20% in 1988. It was common knowledge among MLB insiders that the juiced ball clearly impacted HRs so it was removed the following year. History shows it was the first time since 1871 that HRs/Game averaged over 1.0!

In 1994, with a strike looming and a new commissioner there was another 20% jump in HRs. The HRs/Game in 1993 was 0.888 and in 1994 it was 1.033. Beginning with Selig as commissioner the HRs/Game using his new baseball never fell below 1.0 from 1994 to 2009, long after the steroid era was supposedly over. Since steroids had existed since the 70s or possibly earlier and no prolific jump had occurred during those years, in fact, the 20 years leading up to the new Selig ball saw HRs/Game comparable to the dead ball of the 60s and early 40s.

Simple logic suggests if Steroid Use radically grew in the 1990s then the HRs/Game should have reflected that growth but that’s not what happened. The exact same oscillation from year to year that had occurred since 1871 occurred in the 1990s and 2000s. Steroids should have grown the number if there was a correlation between steroids and HRs but it didn’t because there was not a correlation..

So, if taking steroids is cheating in your mind is it because:
1 – It helped them hit more HRs? (data conclusively proves it didn’t)
2 – It was against the rules (the ban on steroids happened in 2004!! not 1991)
3 – It gave them more stamina or a temporary high? So did Schmidt’s speed, Gooden’s cocaine and chewing tobacco.

Would it be more accurate to state that taking steroids was attempted cheating? YES. It didn’t work but the juiced baseball covered up the facts. We have guys not in the HOF because Selig declared a “steroid” problem when he could have told Congress about the new juiced baseball but didn’t. The Selig scandal is the biggest lapse of integrity in the history of baseball.

In 1919 Commissioner Landis wanted to keep cheating out of baseball so he banned anyone who participated or had knowledge of the plan to cheat. The lifetime bans were a huge deterrent to cheating by changing the outcome of games until Houston jumped the 5 game cheating scandal of 1919 to an unknown number of outcomes that could have been as high as 90 games in 2017. There is no conclusive way to prove different outcomes in those 90 games BUT anyone who has ever played knows what an advantage it is to know when an off speed pitch is coming or a fastball.

The precedent wasn’t used like it should have been. The commissioner and MLBPA fell flat on their face by not convicting the guilty and embarrassed themselves with a one season ban for 3 people who planned the cheating. Should the 3 top guys have been punished severely? Absolutely. Should players have received 1/2 season bans like they do for breaking other rules? Absolutely.

Now put things into perspective. If a guy sees others taking steroids and sees the HRs rising due to a change by Selig that juiced the baseball, should those guys that mistakenly tried to gain an advantage be punished more than the 3 guys who built an elaborate plan for a team to know each pitch by the opposition in all home games during a season and post season?

As a former college student who might have participated in a few beer parties that were against the rules, I find it hard to believe that the guys standing at the keg are the ones being banned from the HOF and that guys that drank beer but had clean reputations are making the HOF with less talent and as if they did nothing wrong compared to the others who just happened to be at the keg.

Either ban the entire fraternity or simply have that fraternity make restitution to those that were hurt by the party. Banning them from the HOF for life or even just 20 years is absurd and a complete mockery that should embarrass HOF members, executives and the self righteous sports writers and commentators that claim like Palmeiro that they didn’t do it or never saw it being done. What a load of crap!!!

20 years earlier at non DIV I schools it was commonplace. Add to it that no HRS can be linked to steroids and you have a Salem Witch Hunt equivalent created by Selig and perpetuated by modern day writers, reporters and MLB executives that haven’t thrown Selig under the bus for lying or errors of omission that he is guilty of in front of Congress.

Any HOF without Bonds, Shoeless Joe, Rose or Clemens isn’t a real HOF. It’s a country club for baseball players.

Did you know that Selig got in the HOF in 2017? Yep, before Bonds and Clemens.

Did you know that a comparison of Barry Bonds and Hank Aaron’s home runs by year shows an extremely high correlation with the juice in the baseball. That’s why Bonds started slowly then took off with Selig’s juiced ball and Aaron started fast when the post WWII juiced ball was introduced and then faded after 1961’s peak level of juice? It’s not a question of steroids, it’s a question of which players played during the high juice eras.

The 1950s, 1990s and 2015 or later all saw juiced baseballs. When Aaron’s generation challenged the records of Ruth’s generation, who played with a ball that had half the juice of the 1950s baseballs, nobody complained like they did in the 1990s when Bonds passed the players from the previous generation..

Baby boomers wanting their heroes to maintain their records created the entire farce called the steroid era. The timing of the era is completely wrong since it started in the 1970s or earlier. The impact on HRs prior to Selig’s juiced ball never made anyone’s radar since steroids didn’t change HR totals. Sign stealing on the other hand was also an attempt to gain a big advantage and it worked very well. So how can anyone condemn the attempted cheaters from the steroid era and let the real cheaters off with a warning?

If the outcome of games being changed by an act of a player, coaches or both is no longer a reason for punishment I guess it makes sense that baseball aligned itself with gambling. The world of integrity in sports has taken an enormous downturn. Maybe not as big as the downturn caused by Bloom on the Red Sox organization but it’s at least similarly bad.

Will the next infraction be as politically acceptable as the sign stealing scandal? Will it impact anything close to the number of games impacted by Houston in 2017? Politics in baseball. It’s all about perception created by the media influencers not the reality of what happens.

Tim – I think the steroid laws are a bit unclear based on your comments. Drugs were illegal to distribute in 1991 including steroids but it was not against the law to take steroids in the privacy of your home or in public as long as you didn’t distribute them to others.

There was no clause in the CBA addressing the use of steroids. As I wrote, Vincent was against Cocaine since the 1980s were filled with cocaine suspensions. Cocaine was an illegal drug unlike steroids. Amphetamines and tabacco were used to get a stamina jolt but they like steroids were not against the law either.

So steroids
1 – Were NOT illegal to take, they were illegal to distribute
2 – They were NOT against the MLB rules according to the CBA

Next, HRs/Game/Year are recorded in Baseball Reference. If you trend the annual number you will find that from 1871 to 2022 there was one thing that was true about the fluctuations from year to year, they oscillated up and down due to the standard deviation of HRs from year to year. There were, however, clearly delineated plateaus that jumped the norm significantly and then returned to the pattern of behavior at a higher or lower level.

The events that create these plateau jumps are well documented. The 1920s was the live ball era. The ball literally changed and was recognized as having more juice. In direct correlation, the HRs jumped but maintained their oscillating pattern from year to year. The post WWII baseball was the single greatest jump in juice. It replaced the war time baseball and the pre=war baseball. The live ball that benefited the 1950s hitters suddenly disappeared right after Maris broke Ruth’s record. With the amount of hate that surrounded Maris’ push to beat the Babe it makes sense the MLB was worried about the fact that the ball was so juiced. They may have over-reacted with the ball introduced in the 60s since the numbers went down so drastically they chose to lower the mound. Did that help? Nope. Low HR totals kept happening until 1987 and the mistake ball. So as you can see by the history of the juice in the ball, this single element of the game played a huge role in when HR hitters flourished and when they fell off.

Your theory that steroid benefits may have been masked by the juice in the baseball is counter intuitive. The conclusive proof is the combination of growth and oscillation in the 1990s and 2000s. While taking steroids in the 70s and 80s players hit fewer home runs than they did in the 50s. In 1987, when the mistake ball got introduced, the HRs jumped to a new high that exceeded the high created by the ball used in 1961 (the previous peak). The next year it immediately dropped back by the full 20%.

So, using your logic a massive number of players began using steroids in 1987 and then went cold turkey in 1988 to 1993? Seriously? The steroids persisted from the 1970s unnoticed and suddenly when the ball changes the HRs jump and it’s got to be partially because of steroids? Every factor that impacts home runs has contributed to the 120 year oscillation in HRs. New smaller fields, new hitting concepts, more pitchers using sticky substances to add velocity and yes steroids. But because there is no upward growth directly correlated to the time frame when steroids were used or prolifically used as some suggest, how can you explain no change in the HR pattern?

It was the make-up of the baseball in the 1920s, it was the baseball post WWII, it was the baseball in 1987 and then again from 1994 to 2009 and then it was the baseball in 2015 until now that has created the surges in Hrs. It was an unfortunate coincidence that steroids became the scapegoat of a generation who didn’t want their heroes surpassed by modern day players. The same hate happened in 1961 for Maris. People knew he had to be cheating somehow but nobody had the opportunity to point to something specific like steroids to justify why Maris hit so many in 1961. In the end, it was simple. The ball was more juiced than previous years.

Sounds like we strongly agree about the sign stealing. But let me remind you one more time. Steroids were made illegal in baseball in 2004. The fact that other sports considered them against the rules is irrelevant. They were illegal to distribute in 1991 not take. You could be arrested for taking cocaine and many other drugs but not steroids. Unless of course you were selling steroids then you could get arrested.

Mark McGwire took steroids in college and when he became a pro in 1987. It was within the rules. He wanted to get bigger and stronger faster and steroids sped up the rate of growth. It was the harmful effects that caused Fay Vincent to warn against their use but as commissioner, he needed the approval of both the owners and MLBPA to enact a ban on any substances!!
That never happened!!!!

Illegal substances like cocaine were in the CBA but steroids, amphetamines and tobacco were not.

As a player who saw plenty of other players take them at a risk to their health, I can not condone taking them but I also see no evidence of cheating by taking them prior to 2004. I also see no evidence of any home runs by Bonds being correlated to steroids late in his career since the ball jumped in juice in 1995 and his big HR years happened when the ball was most juiced. He had 3 MVPs by the time the ball got juiced in 1995. To ban him from the HOF is a travesty. Especially in light of guy like RIcky Henderson getting into the HOF and steroids helping runners more than hand eye coordination events like hitting.

The HOF has chosen to ignore the facts about the baseball’s impact on HRs in the 1990s to save egg on their face for not validating HR growth directly attributed to steroids. Their study was a theoretical how much farther will the ball travel if a player has steroid produced strength versus non steroid produced strength. Just stating the premise makes it sound laughable. I believe they supported some silly hypothesis that steroids caused you to hit the ball 7 feet farther therefore all home runs that cleared the fences by less than that amount were steroid home runs. hahahaha the scientists behind that study should have been in marketing execs instead. No facts just modern metric contrived theoretical numbers. My data is all fact based.
Actual stats on HRS/GAME/YEAR for 140 years.

The data chart shows a standard oscillation through each decade with plateaus that align with changes to the baseball. Any factor that is cumulative in nature like a growing steroids problem, a growth in not white players, a growth in small ball parks, launch angle, exit velocity, etc. all contribute to HRs but because they don’t impact the pattern of HRs when they occurred, there is no justification for suggesting they changed the course of HR history. Only the baseball produces the significant jumps that explain the growth in HRs over time.

I keep looking for evidence to the contraty but after 2o years I haven’t found any.