The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

As I wrote earlier, one of the other sports I follow is also, drug-wise, historically been one of the dirtiest: professional cycling. Doping is rampant, players get transfusions of their own blood, other people’s blood, they take all kinds of crazy drugs, and competitions are battles in the long war between the sanctioning organizations and shadowy labs across the world.

Last year’s Tour de France winner tested positive for synthetic testosterone, though he says it’s a lab issue, and they’re fighting it out in court. Think about how crazy that is: we don’t know the winner of last year’s crown jewel of the sport. It’s like not knowing who won the last World Series because a home run call is tied up in court.

Recent revelations of past doping (including a Tour winner) have rocked the sport again.

And yet for all this, bicycling is one of the most aggressive sports trying to keep drugs out. Lance Armstrong, for all the allegations against him, was the most tested human on the planet. Last year’s Tour de France missed a huge chunk of the top competitors because they were potentially linked to a Spanish lab – and some were guilty, and others missed a chance to compete, in a sport where riders are really only competitive for a few years.

This is the dark side of baseball’s future: an arms race, continued suspicion, retroactive scandals, the innocent punished along with the guilty.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that bicycling, unlike the sports fans are generally more familiar with, tests for drug use in more than one way:
- Is there something weird in your blood or urine test, like a drug, or synthetic hormones, or whatnot?
- Is there too much of something to occur naturally?

It’s extremely hard to detect many of the drugs that cyclists take to increase their red blood cell count, for instance, so cycling tries to detect those but also says “If you have more than 100 cells per million in the test, you’re an alien and you can’t race.”

Naturally, they all test at 95-98… but they’re trying to define, in a way, what it means to be human.

There are interesting analogues for baseball:
- If your testosterone is over this level based on age, you’re on something
- If your blood has more HGH than you should have for your age, you’re on something
… and so on, all the way to potentially measuring performance metrics (If you can hit a ball more than 600 feet…) and now you start skirting the ridiculous.

But once you understand that it’s almost impossible to keep up with the drugs – and cycling made that realization a long time ago – you have to start looking at ways to at least limit the harm participants who do use can do, by regulating the effects of those drugs.

I wonder how long it will take baseball to look at that enforcement route, or whether they’ll be content to pursue the fight as lightly as possible, tightening controls only when change is forced on them by scandal or regulation.

I’ve been chewing on this for a while, trying to decide how to say this, but he’s right, and maybe not in the way he intended.
When I turned in the first draft of the book, the drugs and steroids chapter was flat and boring, reflecting my disgust with the whole topic. My editor called me about it, saying that compared the rest of the book it pretty much sucked. I replied that I was so disappointed, so angry about the whole topic that it was hard to write about. Write about that, she said, and see how it goes.

The result is the chapter you get: it’s a lot angrier and pointed compared to the rest of the book, a lot more pointed, and contains a giant statistical digression into one of Bonds’ seasons that’s a little eye-popping.

I would apologize if I were Selig. Not for the players, or the entire scandal, but certainly for the huge part baseball’s owners played in it. As it stands, baseball’s pretended that it played no part in tolerating, much less encouraging, the use of performance-enhancing drugs for twenty years, and now they’re shocked – shocked! – to discover it was as prevalent as it was.

I would say, not in so many words, were I Selig at this point:

“Baseball’s leadership failed to act early when we had the opportunity, and we wasted subsequent opportunities. Our poor labor relationship hurt cooperation on issues, like steroids, that hurt the game as a whole, and I’m personally responsible for one of the most egregious examples. In fighting so hard over baseball’s revenues, we hurt baseball’s future.

“Many people in baseball didn’t see what was happening until it was too late, but many knew and did nothing. Some actively helped. While they all bear some responsibility, those of us who led baseball created an atmosphere where it was acceptable to look the other way, where those who spoke up or attempted to raise warnings were ignored. We helped to create a game where those who did not participate were faced with a devil’s choice – to potentially operate at a competitive disadvantage, or to shrug and join in.

“As owners, we created an environment where players stood to benefit hugely from using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, while facing no potential penalties. If nothing else, if even in an ideal world we could not have struck a deal for testing, we as teams should have looked for ways to reduce the financial incentives to players, by being more cautious in how we valued players.

“Our errors encouraged a level of hysteria that undermined the game. How could we dispute that half, or even three-fourths of players, were using steroids if there was no testing, no surveys of any kind to offer us a more accurate picture? In the absence of truth, it’s no wonder that lies and rumors flourished, and that’s our fault.

“Baseball made many mistakes both in action and in standing by, that harmed our fans’ perception of the game. We accept the blame, and I’m sorry for my role. We can’t undo what’s happened, but we will do better.”

That’s what I’d say if I were Selig. But if I were Selig, well…

Selig’s ducking of the topic, and particularly the embarrassing spectacle of MLB trying to avoid Bonds’ pursuit of the all-time home run record, is ridiculous. As a baseball fan, it makes me want to put my head in my hands. This is what we’ve come to: one of baseball’s greatest marks is being challenged by someone who clearly owes that challenge to sometimes-legal, often-illegal performance enhancing drugs, and the commissioner is hiding in his office hoping Bonds gets hit by a bus or tossed in jail for perjury or something intervenes to save Selig from having to face up to his own culpability.

There are many parties who played parts in this farce. That they can’t coordinate a group confession doesn’t mean that individual acknowledgment and contrition wouldn’t be helpful.

Jason Ferguson sent a link to this story of attempted cheating in a UT-Missouri game this month. Check it out:

In the bottom of the sixth with UT leading 5-0, Peoples stood on third base with two outs. Chance Wheeless popped up along the third-base line near home plate, and Missouri catcher Trevor Coleman, his back to third, called for the ball.

So did Peoples, who was running toward home.

“I thought, ‘I’ll give it a shot,’” Peoples said. “I didn’t know it was that illegal.”

Coleman cleared out, believing an infielder was behind him. The ball dropped to the turf, and bounced foul. Home-plate umpire Ken Eldridge called Peoples for interference, and the inning ended. Coleman, after collecting his catcher’s mask, barked at Peoples.

“I couldn’t really understand him, but I’m sure he had a few choice words,” Peoples said.

This kind of verbal interference was entirely common in baseball’s early history (this is in the book), and it’s always nice to see some reach back for a classic. You never now – as we saw in that other “pop up” story, sometimes the umps don’t make the call and you get away with it.

Tonight’s game, Casey Fossum facing Kenji Johjima.

- Fossum throws a breaking pitch into the dirt that may (or may not) have hit Kenji’s foot.
- Kenji protests and starts to argue when the umpire doesn’t award him a base.
- His manager, Mike Hargrove, comes out to argue.
- The umpire signals to Fossum for the ball, presumably to look it over for evidence that it hit Johjima: scuffs, discoloration, etc.
- Fossum throws the ball over the catcher to the backstop, ensuring that it’s scuffed, discolored, and useless as evidence.
- No base is awarded to Johjima.

That’s a great heads-up play by Fossum there. Making the throw plausible meant he avoided being ejected on general principle, too.

In light of the Torii Hunter/Mike Sweeney champagne payoff, I wanted to ramble a little about how a different sport handles this kind of thing. Baseball, with an eye to the extremely corrupt era before the post-1921 cleanup of the sport, has extremely harsh rules about transactions between players — technically, the punishment for Hunter and Sweeney was a three year suspension — but other sports take a radically different approach.

Take pro bicycling. Bicycling’s a much more complicated team sport, with many teams of differing strengths and weaknesses competing against each other at once. Every day stage is like a game, every race like a season.

There, payoffs are entirely normal, and it doesn’t undermine competition at all. A small, underfunded team might be employed by one of the stronger teams to perform a certain task: to attack at a certain point, or to take the lead and buy the stronger teams’ riders an easier day to recover, and so on. It means that the smaller teams make money, helping their long-term fortunes, and the stronger teams end up spreading the wealth while adding an additional layer of strategy and competition.

I think there’s a perfect baseball parallel: September games. When teams get to carry 40 players on their active roster, the game changes. Teams out of contention field lineups that are intentionally, knowingly not the best present-day competitive squads, because they want to see what some 20-year-old outfielder has, and armed with twenty pitchers, they can afford to burn two every inning playing petty matchup games if they want.

You’ll hear about it if a competitive team faces a squad way out of any race: if the out-of-it manager is old school enough, he’ll put his veterans out there and try and put up a good fight to “preserve the integrity of the game” while other franchises will argue it’s in their best long-term competitive interests to field younger squads and screw around to see what their prospects have.

This can affect playoff races. Say a week into September, the wild card teams in the AL are Detroit, Chicago, and Oakland, and they’re separated by a game or two. The White Sox face the Twins, the Indians the Angels, and Oakland the Rangers.

What lineups those teams face could determine who goes to the playoffs and who doesn’t. If the Rangers try out some fresh-faced starters and get socked around by the A’s, if the Twins hand out playing time to prospects up from their deep farm system and the White Sox score at will on their way to a series sweep, or if the Tigers face a Mariners team eager to get on with rebuilding, well, any of those teams could swing the race.

Why not, then, allow teams to openly pay off a team to beat their opponent, even to – to borrow more directly from pro cycling – to hire them to play the team that has the best chance to be competitive?

It would provide a way for the A’s to ensure that if they lose the wild card, it won’t be because the Tigers rolled over a half-asleep Mariners team.

You’d have to work out a way to make it above-board and if not public, at least disclosed within baseball. You could file, for instance, with MLB, and say “We agree to pay the Twins $1,000,000 per win against the White Sox, with an additional $500,000 if they sweep the series.”

The downside, of course, is that a team like Kansas City might use that as blackmail, setting a price per game and threatening to run out some AAAA-level pitcher if their price isn’t met. You could simply prohibit any offer except by paying teams, though that wouldn’t stop the kind of negotiation-through-media we see in other situations.

And moreover, the other problem is that it could be (as it is in cycling) a larger advantage for rich teams in races against poorer teams: New York could easily afford to spend the money to make sure a wild card opponent faced stiff competition through the end of the season, but Minnesota doesn’t have the kind of budgets to pay teams off to play hard against New York in the same way.

Besides, I don’t think it’s that huge a deal: the difference between giving the Royals an incentive to run out a lineup with a better chance to win that day and saving the money wouldn’t be all huge a difference. It’s certainly a lot less than the interleague draw, for instance.

There’s no chance that anything like this happens, but what turns out to be really interesting is bicycling’s approach to another one of baseball’s deadly ills: performance-enhancing drug use. It’s even weirder, and I think it’s the direction baseball will end up having to head.

Derek Jacques pointed me to this a beautiful example of heads-up, if unsuccessful, cheating.

In yesterday’s Yankees @ Mets game, in top of the 6th, the Yankees have Jeter at first and Posada batting, with one out (the AB starts about 5m into the top of the 6th).

Posada hits a line drive, Reyes snags it in his glove, and clearly has control of it as he raises it and grabs it with his hand, then almost sets it down on the infield as he reaches all the way down to put the ball into the dirt, as — well he’s hoping it’s as if he dropped it. He lets it roll a few inches, picks it back up, and throws to second.

What he realized might happen, in that split-second after snaring it, is that if he dropped it, he could get the force on Jeter at second and possibly even start a double play to get two. The worst thing that could happen if the force is on is they replace Jeter, a good baserunner, with Posada, who is slow.

Fortunately for the rule of law, the second base umpire got a good look it, ruled the catch was made, and Jeter returned to first safely.

Like framing the pitch, or the good tag, or when outfielders trap the ball and hold it up as if they’ve caught it, Reyes made an attempt to deceive the umpires to help his team. It’s dishonest, and baseball has a rich tradition of plays just like this. Reyes had the right idea. Maybe next time he’ll make it look a lot better, or catch the umpire not paying as close attention, and help his team through deception.

Yesterday, Mark Stacy wrote:

There’s a play I see sometimes that probably doesn’t strictly fall into the category of cheating, but … I call it “out on general principles.” Such a play occurred in last night’s Pirates-Marlins game.

Dan Uggla was on second with less than two outs, no runner on first, when the batter grounded to short. Uggla tried for third anyway and Jack Wilson threw to Jose Castillo at third for the tag out. Well … it was hard to tell from the replay, but let’s just say it appeared possible that Uggla beat the tag. But the out call stood and Uggla didn’t argue.

My take on this is that if you do something that strikes the umpire as dumb, such as try to advance on a ball right in front of you, you have to be really, REALLY safe (like the third baseman drops the ball or the throw goes into the dugout) or you’ll get called out whether you’re safe or not. “General principles” because the principle is, if you do something dumb you deserve to get called out.

I write about this in the book a bit, and it’s worth expanding on a little.

Umpires get a lot of calls wrong. They’re human, and perception’s a funny thing. There are two ways you’ll frequently see outs go the wrong way:
- as Mark notes, on many plays, there’s almost a default call, and you have to clearly be on the other side of it to be called out
- the umpire seemingly makes a decision based as much on the aesthetics of the play as what actually happened

It’s also true (as I point out in the book) that there are wide variances between umpires in how often they call out runners stealing second, for instance. But generally speaking, on close plays at first, the runner’s out. If you have a Tivo or similar DVR, watch how many plays the runner actually does get there in time: a couple years ago, when I was just starting the book, I couldn’t believe how severe the prejudice is. To be safe consistently, you really have to be over the base as the ball arrives, and even that doesn’t guarantee you’ll get the call.

Generally, this is accepted. In practice, umpires as a group enforce it on each play, so there’s no particular bias against any team or player.

More interesting is the “good-looking” play. I jokingly complain in the book about Derek Jeter’s sweep tags (because when he pulls it off against my home team it’s hard to appreciate his artistry), which sometimes don’t even touch the runner but still get him the call, but it’s true in many other cases. It’s much the same way umpires really are to some extent vulnerable to pitch framing, where a pitch may be called a strike if it goes where the catcher set up and they catch it cleanly but a ball if they have to reach across to snag it as it almost gets by them.

If a third baseman receives a throw from the outfield early, fields it cleanly, and applies a smooth tag, they’re far more likely to get the call even if the runner gets a hand in, and if the throw comes in off the base and requires the fielder to dive to make the tag, they don’t get the benefit of the prejudice to call an out.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, and as long as umpires are human (and that’s a whole other subject) it’ll be another area where players can find ways to take advantage of them, and why sometimes, the smoothness of the tag matters just as much as whether or not the tag is actually made.

After yesterday’s bit on protective gear and how it can encourage hitters to get plunked with potentially dangerous consequences, I did some more reading on it, and there’s another issue I hadn’t considered: batters wearing protective padding may encourage pitchers to act more dangerously.

For example, see this:

Bicyclists who wear protective helmets are more likely to be struck by passing vehicles, new research suggests. Drivers pass closer when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than when overtaking bare-headed cyclists, increasing the risk of a collision, the research has found.

While I’m not sure how much stock to put in it, it does raise a point: if you assume that pitchers generally don’t want to injure the hitters, but elbow protection and other protective gear makes hitters more aggressive about being in the zone, that may be compounded when pitchers now feel freed from any responsibility to not bean a batter — because armored, they can take it. More balls in and off the plate, even more plunkings — and the strategy evolves.

One of the things cut from the book was a discussion of equipment: uniforms and uniform code violations (which are common and largely trivial, unless they spark brawls).

The only thing I really miss is the elbow pad. One of the issues baseball’s had to deal with is the Biggio Problem: players who armor up and then take a ball off the padding for a free trip to first. Baseball’s struggled with how to regulate the issue, as it has with many similar problems, because there are several issues:
- Players being hit intentionally clearly is not what the rules intended to be a productive strategy for hitters
- Player safety is, rightly, one of baseball’s most important priorities
- Umpires traditionally have rarely enforced the rule that states being hit by a pitch that is in the strike zone does not result in a free base

Biggio, essentially, by hanging his elbow into the zone, is exploiting a rule designed to protect him. So far, baseball’s only real action is to require players to have a valid medical reason to wear armor up to the plate, but really, when Jeff Weaver can have one of the worst six-game starts to a season in baseball history and then go on the DL with an almost transparent excuse, we can admit it’s not hard for a player to get the team doctor to sign off on protective gear.

Other proposed solutions include not awarding a free base if the ball strikes the protective gear, which raises a whole other set of enforcement questions, and banning pads entirely, which would put players at greater risk of injury.

This last issue, though, is more complicated than it first seems. A player wearing padding may intentionally hang in on pitches trying to get hit, putting himself at far greater risk of being hit in an unprotected location.

For a good parallel, check out this article on NASCAR, where it appears that safety improvements result in more dangerous behavior and more accidents.

If allowing players to have pads has a similar effect, and the net result is more injuries, then the solution of banning protective padding entirely may actually end up reducing the number of hit batters and reduce the number of resulting injuries, by forcing players to act more safely.

Apologies for missing a few days there, I’m developing a couple fairly long posts and debating the double-play rules via email (I’ll write more about this later this week).

In any event – I came across a set of notes on something that never made it into the book that I found interesting. In the late 1980s, the game saw a huge surge of home runs that resulted in fairly wide speculation on what the causes were, from a juiced ball (which was investigated) to alternate theories like strike zone enforcement, a pitching drought, and so on.

I came across a fine example in a USA Today article at the Hall of Fame (undated, but it looks like it’s from a 1988 season preview) by Tom Barnidge, titled “Ball Didn’t Change, Did It? Naah”. He discussed what the possible causes were, how likely they seemed, including bat corking. Here’s what John Schuerholz (then with KC – he’d take over in Atlanta in 1990, where he’s done incredible work) said

“Sure, there are some corked bats. When I see bats explode, I believe they’re corked. But I really don’t think it’s all that pervasive. That’s not why we had all the home runs.”

The article ran a table, “Improved Outputs” listing “hitters who increased their home run totals by at least 10 from 1986 to 1987 (minimum of 400 at-bats each season)”. It runs, in part:

Andre Dawson, Cubs, 20 to 49
Will Clark, Giants, 11 to 35
Wade Boggs, Red Sox, 8 to 24
George Bell, Blue Jays, 31 to 47
Keith Moreland, Cubs, 12 to 27
[...]
Eric Davis, Reds, 27 to 37

The kicker is that there’s no one on that list – no one – who’s been tied into steroid use since. There are no Oakland players, though we now know that Oakland was, essentially, the infection vector for major league baseball, led by Jose Canseco (86 to 87? -2 HR, from 33 to 31).

I have a couple of observations on this:
- there was a home run surge at the same time as steroids started to come into the game, but the surge in large part was not due to steroids
- it’s possible that the huge surge in home runs actually drew attention away from the spread of steroids: after all, if the most prominent players having power surges were clean (and not at all the classic bulky muscle-bound guy we think of as suspects), then it’s hard to look at any specific cases, or team, and see a new factor
- because baseball had seen corked bats, rabbit balls, and the other causes before, those were the causes they speculated about. Now, we look to drugs for explanations of weirdness in baseball – but if there’s a new and widespread scourge, it’s quite likely it’ll be what no one expects, or even speculates is possible.