Bias? What Bias?

It is with trepidation that I even wade into the cesspool that is the steroids debate, but Jack Cust opened his mouth, and the Yankees are currently playing Oakland, and I don't really have anything else I want to write about right now, so here goes....

For some unknown reason, Cust gave an interview with the AP yesterday, in which he touched upon his name being in the Mitchell Report and railed against the entire investigation, claiming it was biased due to George Mitchell's presence on the Red Sox Board of Directors:

With all the other stuff going on, with a lot of the guys coming out recently — big-name guys — to me it's kind of funny they spent all that money on the Mitchell Report and a bunch of hearsay and the guy who made all the money off it happened to work for the Red Sox. Were there any Red Sox on the report? To me, that's kind of a joke. How does that happen? It's coming out now with guys on that team. The guy worked for the Red Sox — they spent all kinds of millions of dollars — and then no one there had their name brought up.

That's not entirely accurate. Off the top of my head, two players were named in the report for events that took place during their tenure with the Sox: Paxton Crawford and Manny Alexander. Not exactly world beaters there, but it's a start.

I'm not sure where to begin this. First, the report was an absolute mess from the word "go", and will likely stand as the biggest in a series of blunders that has marked Bud Selig's now seventeen year tenure as Commissioner. While an investigation into steroid use in the sport was likely warranted, Bud jumped on that train about fifteen years too late, closing the barn door long after the entire stable of horses had run out. Choosing a principal investigator with a potential conflict of interest was a poor decision*. Sending him out to lead a multi-year, multi-million dollar investigation without any sort of subpoena power or any ability to grant immunity was a poorer one.
*As was naming an owner to serve as "acting" commissioner for six years, then letting him keep the job for an additional eleven and counting...

Without any ability to force people to talk to him, Mitchell was grasping at straws from the start. Exactly two active Major Leaguers spoke with him: Frank Thomas, of his own volition, and Jason Giambi who had the option of either cooperating or being suspended after he committed the cardinal sin of stating that baseball as a whole was wrong in the way they handled performance enhancing drugs.

Without player cooperation, nearly the entire Mitchell Report was based on the testimony of stool pigeons Kurt Radomski and Brian McNamee, who were forced to cooperate as part of federal plea deals. Radomski was a longtime clubbie with the Mets, McNamee a former strength and conditioning coach with the Yankees. Around which city and which teams do you think the majority of the report would focus?

While I do find it curious that there is a general lack of players from Mitchell's organization appearing in the report, I'd imagine that's more a result of the investigation being toothless than it is a function of any bias. If anything, the recent revelations of positive tests from both Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz (illegally leaked by employees of our federal government by the way, who in turn possess that information via a direct violation of labor law) should illustrate that no team, no clubhouse, not the Red Sox, not the Yankees, not anyone, was immune from this garbage.

As for Cust, I can understand his frustration with carrying the scarlett letter of being named in the Mitchell Report. His inclusion was tenuous at best, hearsay at worst. On a daily basis, Cust is likely surrounded by both teammates and opponents who did things as bad, if not worse, and haven't been outed.

That said, Cust was given every opportunity to respond to Mitchell, and like all card carrying MLBPA memebers, he refused to do so. From a legal perspective, I can understand that position. But if Cust, or any other of the accused, punts on his opportunity to clear his name, he loses much of his right to complain about it. And that see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil mentality is exactly how the MLB and MLBPA found themselves in this mess in the first place.

"Let's Move On"

Yesterday, I dropped the sentence above at the very end of the Manny and Ortiz post. It was met with some friendly disagreement in the comments so I just wanted to take a moment to clarify the point.

The overriding sentiment from the commenters was that the Sox fans had their fun with all the steroid controversy surrounding the Yankees and now it's time to give it back to them.

Sox fans were merciless with Jason Giambi until the day he left, no doubt. They got various steroids chants going for Andy Pettitte on the heels of the Mitchell Report, but those have largely subsided. They were anxious to point out that they had the "clean" years of Roger Clemens' career. But let's see how aggressive with the "You-Took-Ster-Oids" chants they are next time A-Rod comes to Fenway. Like any other fanbase Red Sox Nation has it's fair share of dickheads, but most people with a reasonable amount of frontal lobe activity are going to realize they are now the pot calling the kettle black. If any of the fackin' Sullies and Murphs do start to get mouthy, Yanks fans can counter with "So-Did-Pa-Pi". What are we going to do beyond that?

I'd be lying if I said there wasn't an element of personal satisfaction and Soxenfreude involved in all of this. There more certainly is. Aside from the Yankees, it's the most central theme of this blog, for fuck's sake. But any of the idiots who were foolish enough to point the finger at the rest of the league, and really thought they were going to skate away with no stars on the Red Sox being implicated in PED use, and thought that 2004 was a gift from God, pure as the driven snow, just took a shot to the solar plexus. And that's good enough for me.

This news doesn't change what happened in 2004 from our eyes, though. The '04 roster of the Yankees included A-Rod, Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, Jason Giambi and almost certainly some other guys who haven't been outed yet. Their cheaters were a microscopic amount better (or just luckier) than our cheaters.

What we are heading towards is a realization that almost nothing is free from the stain of PEDs, one player and subsequently one fanbase at a time. Very few individual accomplishments and absolutely no Championships in say, the last 15-20 years or so are going to above reproach.

Like always, the Yankees are at the forefront of this, like they are in almost every aspect of baseball. We as Yankee fans are again ahead of the curve. Whether you like dragging people into the mud with you is a matter of personal preference, but it don't get a whole lot out of it.

Welcome To Club 103, Fellas

Back when the news of Manny's positive test in 2003 came to the forefront, I asked "why couldn't it have been Ortiz?", but I must admit that this isn't nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be.

Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, the sluggers who propelled the Boston Red Sox to end an 86-year World Series championship drought and to capture another title three years later, were among the roughly 100 Major League Baseball players to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, according to lawyers with knowledge of the results.

First of all, thanks to the lawyers (Yankee fans, presumably) who chose two leak these two (and only these two) names out of the 98 or so that were still under wraps. If only the guy who conducted the Mitchell Report had any connections within the Red Sox organization, you might not have had to risk being held in contempt of court!

I think we can cast aside the notion that Manny's most recent test was an isolated incident. In light of this new information, given how steady his career numbers have been, it's hard to imagine when he was clean. With Ortiz on the other hand, his transition from Minnesota to Boston (in 2003) draws a pretty clear line. Whatever. Here's the fun part....

Hey David, are you ready to taste your own medicine and take a voluntary one year suspension?

"I would suggest everybody get tested, not random, everybody," he said. "You go team by team. You test everybody three, four times a year and that's about it."

And if a player tests positive for steroids?

"Ban 'em for the whole year," the slugger said.

Oops.

Objectively speaking, there is something pretty despicable about the fact that these guys were told the tests would remain anonymous, and now, one or two at a time they are leaking out like death by 1,000 papercuts. It's not fair, but like Omar Minaya would say, you can't put the cat back in the bottle.

The moral of today's news isn't that the Red Sox Championship is tainted, it's that we now understand the entire sport to be slightly more dirty than we previously assumed. It's not a good thing for the sport to have the accomplishments of the best players of an era systematically knocked down one by one. It's not going to be fun to look back in 10 or 15 years, when what timeframe actually defined the "steroids era" begins to crystalize, and realize that very few of the remarkable accomplishments we saw were as they seemed at the time.

Let's move on.

A Look Back at the Off-Season

Since the Yankees seemingly can't beat the Red Sox on the field, let's take a look back at the last time the Bombers bested the Olde Towne Team - the 2008-2009 off-season. After kicking the tires on CC Sabathia, presumably to drive the price up for the Yankees, the Sox made a real push for Mark Teixeira, only to have him surprisingly sign with the Yankees after some shrewd and stealthy negotiating by Brian Cashman.

The Teixeira signing capped an unbelievable off-season spending spree for the Yankees. CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, and Mark Teixeira were 3 of the top 4 free agents on the market (Manny Ramirez being the other). When all was said and done, the Yankees had committed 20 years and $423.5M to the three players.

Predictably, and perhaps somewhat deservedly, the Yankees took a lot of heat in the media and from the other clubs for spending what amounts to roughly the gross domestic product of the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa, and doing so in the midst of the country's worst economic crisis in more than seventy years. However, the Yankees operated within the context of the rules and were essentially leveraging the significant financial resources they have at their disposal.

Meanwhile, after losing out on Teixeira, the Sox made a series of lesser moves. Now I'm not one to believe that there's a media bias against the Yankees or towards the Red Sox. But, the way that the Sox off-season was framed as smart and economical in opposition to the Yankees gluttony was more than a bit hypocritical. Let's look at the Sox off-season moves with economic data courtesy of Cot's Baseball Contracts:

• John Smoltz signed 1 yr, $5.5M, with potential bonuses totalling an additional $5.5M

• Brad Penny signed 1 yr, $5M, with potential bonuses totalling an additional $3M

• Takashi Saito signed 1 yr, $1.5M, with potential bonuses totalling an additional $6M

• Josh Bard signed 1 yr, non-guaranteed. Reported value $1.7M, with an additional $0.8M bonus potential

• Junichi Tazawa, signed 3 yrs, $3.3M

• Rocco Baldelli signed 1 yr, $0.5M, with potential bonuses totalling an additional $7M

• Mark Kotsay re-signed 1 yr, $1.5M, with potential bonuses totalling an additional $1M

• Jason Varitek re-signed 1 yr $5M

All told, that's $23.3M guaranteed with bonus potential of an additional $25M. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what the Yankees paid out, but the potential $47.25M in 2009 for the Sox isn't all that far off from the $64.5M (signing bonuses included) the Yankees will pay their three free agent signees in 2009. These are some good high risk, high reward signings for the Sox. But what did they get for their money?

• In Smoltz and Penny, two pitchers coming off injury who combined for 122.2 IP in 2008 and a combined 5.43 ERA in the NL. Smoltz has yet to pitch; Penny has been average at best. And it's heavily rumored that Penny will soon be flipped for prospects.

• In Saito they picked up a good reliever who has been very effective in his career, but who has also been beset by injuries. So far this has worked out pretty well.

• Josh Bard, who the Sox traded very early in the 2006 season when they realized he couldn't catch a knuckler, had an even shorter stint this time. He was cut before Spring Training was over, leaving the Sox on the hook for $283K of his salary.

• Tazawa, who was signed through a potentially improper loophole in the Japanese system, is pitching at AA Portland.

• Baldelli has a lengthy injury history and has spent time on the DL this year. Ditto for Kotsay. Together they give the Sox two talented, but highly injury prone, back-up OF/DH/1B types.

• Varitek is 37. He hit .220/.313/.359 (73 OPS+) last year. He's doing better this year, buoyed by a SLG over .500, but his AVG and OBP are below league average.
  
  

Now the John Henry ownership group has done a tremendous job of squeezing every last penny out of the Red Sox brand and decrepit (charming?) Fenway Park. And good for them, it's remarkable that they've done so and it's commendable that they reinvest that money back into the team. However, before John Henry shoots his mouth off, making comments like "we have to be even more careful in deploying our resources"as he did in the wake of losing Teixeira, he might want to consider how few teams in MLB could afford to take on one or two of the above contracts, let alone all eight of them.

The Sox aren't some poor small market team. They may not have the financial resources of the Yankees, but aside from the Mets, Cubs, and possibly the Angels and Dodgers, no other MLB franchises can match the financial clout of the Red Sox. Perhaps the media should keep that in mind next time they want to laud the smart, shrewd signings made by the Sox this past off-season.

Manny Ramirez: Admitted Murderer, Rapist

From the horse's mouth [emphasis mine]:

"I don't want to be a distraction for this team," Ramirez said. "What happened, happened. I spoke to [owner] Frank McCourt, I apologized, I spoke to Joe, my teammates and I'm ready to move on.

"I didn't kill nobody, I didn't rape nobody, so that's it, I'm just going to come and play the game."

He seemed to understand sentence negation in the first paragraph, but then drops a cryptic and insidious clue as to his past evil deeds in the second one.

I demand an investigation into these crimes he didn't not commit!

A Man Of The People, A Walker Of Walks: Kevin Youkilis

[Ed: Note: Reader(s), I'd like to introduce you to our newest contributor, Matt. Although if you've been around here for a little while, you probably already know him.]

With Jay away this week, he's asked me to contribute to the site to keep some content going. Either that or he's gotten tired of the paragraphs long comments I've been leaving as "mmb1980" and figured I should leave my thoughts as actual posts. So to make my official introduction to all you Fackers out there, I'd like to tell you a story about a brief encounter I had with this little blog's namesake last year.

I've always had a bit of a different outlook on the Yankees-Sox rivalry. I'm by no means a Sox fan, but growing up in Connecticut, I've spent my entire life on the front lines of the Rivalry. Several of my closest friends, and even some of my relatives, are fans of the Sox. I spent the better part of four years living right in the belly of the beast while I attended Boston College. So you might say that compared to your average Yankee fan, I'm a little more tolerant of the members of Red Sox Nation - except for guys named "Sully" or "Murph". They are invariably drunk, ignorant, and looking for a fight.

So with that in mind, a few Sox fan friends of mine planned a trip to Baltimore last May to see the O's host the Sox. They invited me to come along, and since I was already going to be in D.C. that week for a family function, I decided to take them up on their offer. The Saturday game was scheduled for 7 PM - the game where Manny would eventually hit his 500th fertility drug aided career HR - allowing us all to sleep off our hangovers from Friday night before heading out for a late breakfast. As we walked back to the hotel from breakfast, it began to rain a little bit.

We arrived back at the hotel and stood waiting for the elevator when who should we find standing there next to us but Boston's crome-domed, goateed first baseman, his infant child, and his baby-momma. They were standing with a security guard, to whom Mr. Youkilis was explaining that they were intending to go for a walk, but were now unsure if they should go on account of the rain.

Having just been outside and wanting to be a good samaritan, I piped up. "It's not raining too badly. I think it's going to pass." No response. I was summarily ignored, big leagued by a Big Leaguer. So much for trying to be helpful. As the elevator arrived, Youk spoke again to the security guard, saying something along the lines of "I don't think we're going to go".

So there you have it. Kevin Youkilis: walk enthusiast both on and off the field, lacking in social graces, and quite possibly hydrophobic.

Realizing that we were staying at the Sox hotel, my old college roomate and I promptly returned to the lobby bar to do some day time drinking and see who we could see. Several players came and went over the course of the afternoon: Beckett, Wakefield, Delcarmen, Papelbon, Ellsbury, Jerry Remy. We saw that the players really enjoy their Starbucks, frequenting the barista next to our bar. We saw that Varitek, despite getting paid 10 million dollars to hit .220 last year, is a lousy tipper. And we saw that Manny utilized distractions created by his teammates to sneak in and out of a side entrance without being bothered. The throngs of Sox fans applauded and crowded around each and every guy, but I was unimpressed, and spent my time wondering if there was a way I could Nancy Kerrigan one of them without getting caught.

So that was my first meeting with the Sox last year. Later on in the season I had a little run in with Alex Cora and the artist-formerly-known-as Big Papi. If I don't wear out my welcome here, maybe I'll tell you all about that one another time.

Only A Year?

I hadn't heard of Matthew Pouliot before Circling the Bases was formed, but I've found myself linking to his thoughts pretty frequently as of late. He's got a theory about the Manny revelations today:

However, I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that he started up about a year ago.

I thought Ramirez was done as a superstar last May. His OPS dropped all of the way from 1058 in 2006 to 881 in 2007. He homered once every 12.3 at-bats in 2005, once every 12.8 at-bats in 2006 and once every 24.2 at-bats in 2007. The home run bounced back somewhat in the first half of 2008, but he finished the first three months at .286/.377/.514. It'd be a great line for the typical corner outfielder, but it wasn't typical Manny.

It wasn't just the numbers, though. Right-handers capable of throwing in the mid-90s and unleashing quality sliders were making quick work of him. Ramirez really is about as smart of a hitter that there is in the game, and he was still feasting on mistakes. But to my eyes, the quality pitches that he used to line for doubles were instead resulting in swings and misses. Ramirez was always a guy fans wanted up at the end of close games. However, that's when teams usually have their best pure arms on the mound and Ramirez just wasn't having any luck against them.

Ramirez had to know he wasn't catching up to fastballs like he once did. Maybe that's when he decided he needed a boost. A month or two to kick in, a trade to the easier league, a happier situation… the perfect storm?

Anyway, it's just a thought. It probably didn't go down like that at all. Nothing is going to surprise me.

It's an interesting thought, and it's just as plausible as any other theory you are going to hear thrown against the wall at this point.  

That's the frustrating part of all this PED bullshit. When there is some sort of dramatic reveal, it invariably only leads to more questions. All you get are intentionally vague half truths, which bring out the conspiracy theorists in all of us, trying to connect the dots.

While it's certainly tempting as a Yankees' fan to chalk Manny's .321/.411/.618 line against the Bombers to steroid use, we can't. His 50 2B, 55 HR, 163 RsBI and 448 total bases are all the highest totals against any opponent, and that's probably the reason behind the temptation. I got rightfully called out by Mass Hysteria earlier, for bringing the Sox' World Series titles into it. I still think it's a valid point, given the fact that the Mitchell Report (which is being exposed for the incomplete sham that it was with each passing outed player) named 9 Yankees on the 2000 World Series team, and we had to hear that bullshit too. 

But pointing back to previous World Series titles isn't going to change anything. They are in the record books. The emotions have come and gone and retroactively labeling them tainted isn't going to change them in our memories. I'll never forget going apeshit in Falcone 201 when Aarone Boone hit that home run. I'll still remember walking back to my dorm room on the sixth floor of Collins that night in 2004, and watching every elated Red Sox fan spill out into greenspace, losing their minds. 

It just goes to show how insidiously PED use weaved it's way into the game. It's like an invasive species. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to separate it from what originally existed. You can try to slice and segment what would or should have happened in Played X wasn't on Drug Y, but it's only imaginary, no different from re-playing the season on MVP Baseball 2004.

Even if you are a Yankees fan, I don't think there is cause for celebration. For every player who at one point or another who seemed beyond reproach is tagged for PED use, the less we have witnessed history. If baseball is ever able to get ahead of the drug use, much of this era will be dismissed in retrospect because so many of the best players were not clean.  

It's Cool Guys, Manny Was Just Trying To Get Pregnant

From ESPN:

However, two sources told ESPN's T.J. Quinn and Mark Fainaru-Wada that the drug used by Ramirez is HCG -- human chorionic gonadotropin. HCG is a women's fertility drug typically used by steroid users to restart their body's natural testosterone production as they come off a steroid cycle. It is similar to Clomid, the drug Bonds, Giambi and others used as clients of BALCO.

Why Couldn't It Have Been Ortiz?

As a Yankee fan, there is an element of schadenfreude in discovering that Manny Ramirez has tested positive for performance enchancing drugs. A former member for the Red Sox, who everyone assumed was clean, isn't. But this isn't good for baseball, and it really doens't help the Bombers either. The longtime Yankee destroyer now has a rather large blemish on his resume, but I can't help but think the Sox got off easy on this one. 

Testing has been in place since 2003 and only this year did Manny get busted. He has already pointed to the fact that he has taken and passed about 15 tests that have been administered to him in an attempt to contain the usage to this year, when he was conveniently not with the Red Sox. Everyone will speculate, but until the rest of the '03 test results are leaked with his name attached, there is not going to be any evidence that he was using before this. 

[Sidenote: How long until someone comes out with a Selena Roberts' style expose on Manny? It seems like there is a lot of money to be made in digging through accused steroid using baseball player's pasts these days. I don't think it would be too difficult to dig up some charming anecdotes on him, and I'd just love to know how much he tips at Hooters! Anyone want to give me an advance?]

How is the three-way trade with the Pirates and the Dodgers looking for the Sox now? Manny is gone for 50 games. That's over $7M of his $20M salary. Yes, Boston had to pay a lot of his freight and part with prosepcts, and Manny has been on fire since joining the Dodgers (.380/.490/.710 = 211 OPS+). But his replacement, Jason Bay has a solid (.299/.410/.559 = 145 OPS+) line, and that is presumably without the benefits of whatever drug Manny tested positive for.

In addition, the Sox organiztion has been largely spared the of embarassment of this going down with him still on the team. The graphics on SportsCenter and the MLB Network and ESPN.com will carry the Dodger's logo. He won't have to answer questions at Fenway about it. All those clips of him mashing in a West Coast, National League uniform really deflect the stigma away from their two World Series titles and Manny's WS MVP. That's what I care about: the Championships. 

Maybe he was only using with the Dodgers. Maybe he is really as dumb as he seems and accidentally took something that triggered a positive test. However, I would be inclined to believe that you don't pick up these sort of sloppy habits in your 17th season in the league. I just wish there was some proof. 

Who?

Oh, THAT Manny Ramirez. Thanks for clearing that up.

Alternative headlines that would have just as easily gotten the point across:

• Ramirez Selling Boston Condo, Asking $8.5M
• Manny Puts Boston Condo For Sale For $8.5M
• Ex-Sox Slugger Manny Ramirez’ Ritz Penthouse Hits Market
• Man-Ram's Boston Home Up For Grabs
• Manny's Condo Selling For $8.5M
• Dodgers' Ramirez Beantown Condo On Market
• Manny Back With L.A., His Condo Back On The Market
• Many Can Be Manny: Buy Boston Home For $8.5M
  

You Happy Now?

Nice work, Manny, you've accepted a deal that you just rejected under a week ago. Please step forward and claim the $5M you earned by forcing your way out of Boston. Hey, at least you got to shove around our anti-namesake in the process...

All it cost you was your hallowed place in the hearts of Red Sox Nation, your competitive integrity and your overall reputation! Isn't it rather heartwarming to see dubious move by a doobie-ous character go up in smoke? The economic environment certainly conspired against him, but karma can certainly be a bitch.

Rejoice, Yankee fans, because he officially will no longer be terrorizing the Yankees to the tune of .321/.411/.618 for 18 games a year. Good riddance Man-Ram, have fun in Cali. Joe Torre tells me the wheatgrass is amazing.

Poetic Justice For Manny?

As the number of suitors for Manny diminishes, his decision to force his way out of Boston looks more and more foolish. With the Yankees, Angels and Mets most likely out of the bidding, the Red Sox certainly not in the discussion and wavering interest from the Dodgers and Nationals, who will drive up the price on the aging slugger?

The corner OF market is semi-saturated with guys like Bobby Abreu, Adam Dunn and Pat Burrell. GMs of small or mid-market AL teams like the Blue Jays, Rays, and Mariners, with whom Manny would slot in nicely as DH, have been reluctant to spend, due to the state of the economy.

I thought this was just a media talking point, but it seems the way that Manny left Boston really has called into question his competitive ethic. Some think the media scrutiny and intense pressure of Boston got to him, while others question his desire to compete on a losing team for a full season. Unfortunately for Manny, the Nationals have the money to spend and a desperate need for a face to their franchise but fall into the later category.

Before the Yanks signed Teix I was rationalizing (and sort of hoping for) the decision to acquire Manny. However thanks to that $161M, I have now rid myself of that cognitive dissonance and am able to enjoy some schadenfreude and a hearty guffaw at MbM's expense.

I can't find a link, but I remember a local beat writer saying that the decision to opt out was supposedly inspired by A-Rod needling Manny at this year's All-Star game about how the last two years of his contract were team options and not player options. If this is true, it might be the single greatest thing A-Rod has done as a Yankee. So far, it has caused the Sox to eat a massive amount of salary and move players they would have rather kept. It has already resulted in the one guy who has done the Yankees the most harm in my lifetime to toil in free agent purgatory with an ever decreasing list of possible reprieves, and may ultimatley lead to him signing with a worse team for less money. Beautiful.