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Still holding out for Griffey!

Griffey was clean, haters. Food was his anti-drug.

 

[Link]

Assuming this PED list thing is a current/new list, I wonder if A-Rod being on it and getting caught in a lie would allow the Yankees to void the rest of his contract?

Doubtful. They tried that with Giambi a few years back and it never happened. You're stuck with him.

 

[Mully]

Fucking AROD. I defended you in the playoffs this year because I thought you were done! I DEFENDED YOU!

 

[Dmncnby2k9]

Fucking AROD. I defended you in the playoffs this year because I thought you were done! I DEFENDED YOU!

 

[Mr. Enigma]

Fucking AROD. I defended you in the playoffs this year because I thought you were done! I DEFENDED YOU!

 

[Schattenjäger]

I'll echo my thoughts from the other thread..

D.R. has to be Derek JeteR!!!

 

[knicks]

I hope A-Rod gets fucked so the Yankees don;t have to pay him.

 

[Malo]

Fucking AROD. I defended you in the playoffs this year because I thought you were done! I DEFENDED YOU!

 

[matthewwhatever]

For 1 it is cheating and directly affects what happens on the field. 2, it sends a terrible message to young players that are coming up. 3, one of the big charms of baseball is looking at stats and trying to compare different players and now you really cant do that anymore since a huge amount of players have been caught doing this. Look at the outrage of Lance Armstrong, that is a much less popular sport and a solo one at that, and people are still really pissed off that he cheated and lied about it.

If only there were some way of comparing players across eras. Some sort of comparative stats that told us how good a player was in relation to the rest of the league, that took into account things like context. Alas, it's just a pipe dream, and we'll all have to live ignorant of how good players are and were.

Also, this:

I think the huge disparity in just raw HR numbers in this era compared to the late 90s is pretty telling. The quality of young pitchers we've had come up in the last three or four years probably is a factor in all that, but it's also impossible to say whether hitters were just ahead of the pitchers in the 90s.

is a horribly simplistic way of looking at things. Even if you buy into the idea that PEDs actually increased offense -- and I don't, since the pitchers were/are using just as much -- there were plenty of other reasons for scoring to be up: expansion initially led to weaker pitching across the MLB, teams started building more hitter-friendly parks, Denver joined the NL and was a launching pad for almost a decade, players finally started taking conditioning more seriously, umpires shrank their strike zones and stopped giving inside strikes...basically, there were a whole host of factors at play, and anyone who looks at the '90s and says it was all from steroids is delusional.

 

[yankeehater]

I'll echo my thoughts from the other thread..

D.R. has to be Derek JeteR!!!

OMG if that were true. I wonder who the Samurai is?

If only there were some way of comparing players across eras. Some sort of comparative stats that told us how good a player was in relation to the rest of the league, that took into account things like context. Alas, it's just a pipe dream, and we'll all have to live ignorant of how good players are and were.

I clicked those links but I am not seeing where they subtracted out or modified the stats to remove the effects of PEDs.

 

[Windu]

You can compare players of different eras still. Just can't use batting average etc... You need to use statistics that adjust for the league. For offensive statistics, you can use wRC+.

 

[yankeehater]

You can compare players of different eras still. Just can't use batting average etc... You need to use statistics that adjust for the league. For offensive statistics, use can use wRC+.

I still dont see how it is a fair comparison though when all the numbers are potentially tainted.

Edit: A stat like wRC+ still uses stats like runs and hits and such, so if a player used PEDs it is still going to boost his stats and therefore make any comparison to older players meaningless.

 

[Friggz]

If only there were some way of comparing players across eras. Some sort of comparative stats that told us how good a player was in relation to the rest of the league, that took into account things like context. Alas, it's just a pipe dream, and we'll all have to live ignorant of how good players are and were.

i cant believe you took the time to respond to his drivel

 

[Windu]

http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.as...am=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=19,d

 

[Friggz]

I still dont see how it is a fair comparison though when all the numbers are potentially tainted.

if all the numbers are tainted...then look at them equally.

 

[matthewwhatever]

i cant believe you took the time to respond to his drivel

It's a little slow at work today.

 

[rando14]

I hope A-Rod gets fucked so the Yankees don;t have to pay him.

lol fuck that, Yankees should pay him every damn dime they signed him to.

 

[Sanjuro]

I still dont see how it is a fair comparison though when all the numbers are potentially tainted.

Edit: A stat like wRC+ still uses stats like runs and hits and such, so if a player used PEDs it is still going to boost his stats and therefore make any comparison to older players meaningless.

...that makes it incredibly easy to compare then.

 

[Friggz]

i also dont understand why yankee fans hate arod. he doesnt deserve the contract he has at this point in his career, but hes still a pretty damn productive 3rd basemen. and his postseason numbers are essentially the same as jeters.

 

[yankeehater]

if all the numbers are tainted...then look at them equally.

LOL, steroid age numbers are tainted, olden time numbers are not. That is the whole point, it doesnt make sense to compare the different eras since their is no way to quantify the effects of PEDs.

 

[Dominican Power]

He should retire.

 

[CajoleJuice]

LOL, steroid age numbers are tainted, olden time numbers are not. That is the whole point, it doesnt make sense to compare the different eras since their is no way to quantify the effects of PEDs.

olden time ballplayers didn't even have to play against black players jesus christ shut up you mongo

 

[Sanjuro]

olden time ballplayers didn't even have to play against black players jesus christ shut up you mongo

...or face broken down Asian pitchers!

 

[Friggz]

LOL, steroid age numbers are tainted, olden time numbers are not. That is the whole point, it doesnt make sense to compare the different eras since their is no way to quantify the effects of PEDs.

and old timers didnt play against blacks, spanish, asian, etc. there isnt even proof that steroids/PED make you a better player.

 

[Windu]

introduction

Last week, we took a look at Weighted On-Base Average, wOBA, which represents a hitter's total offensive value. This week, we will attempt to both index a hitter's total offensive value to the league average and adjust it for park effects with Weighted Runs Created plus, or wRC+.

wRC+ was created in response to OPS+, which measures On-Base plus Slugging Percentage, OPS, against league average and adjusts it for park effects. Measuring OPS against league average essentially adjusts for the run-scoring environment in a given year. In 1925, the league average OPS was .765, while the league average OPS in 1967 was .664. Let's take two hitters, hitter A who played in 1925, and hitter B who played in 1967. Both hitter A and B each had a .765 OPS. However, hitter B did it in a season where the average OPS was .664 as opposed to .765. Hitter A was a league average player, while hitter B was approximately 30% better than league average, according to OPS+, where,

OPS+ = 100 * [(OBP/lgOBP) + (SLG/lgSLG) - 1]

As we can see, adjusting for the run-scoring environment of a given year is important in evaluating a player's true offensive value. OPS+ also adjusts OPS for park effects -- hitter C benefited from playing in Rangers Ballpark, while hitter D was hurt from playing in PETCO Park. The park adjustment is administered by adjusting each of the player's offensive outcomes by his home park factor and then recalculating the player's OBP and SLG. Adjusting for park effects is also an important step in the process of evaluating a player's true offensive value.

Constructing wRC and wRC+

However, since wOBA is a better measure of a player's offensive value than OPS, sabermetricians decided to create a league and park adjusted statistic based on wOBA: Weighted Runs Created. wRC, measures a player's total offensive value by runs. It uses wOBA to calculate the total runs created by a hitter.

wRC = [((wOBA - lgwOBA)/wOBAScale) + (lgR/PA)] * PA

It essentially takes a player's wOBA, subtracts the league average wOBA, and then divides the difference by wOBAScale -- a multiplier that converts wOBA to runs per plate appearance. It then adds the league average runs per plate appearance, and multiplies the resulting sum by the number of plate appearances that the player had.* The park adjustment is once again calculated by adjusting each of the player's offensive outcomes by his home park and then recalculating his wOBA. We now have a player's wRC.

In order to get wRC+, we simply divide a player's wRC by the league average wRC and multiply it by 100.

wRC+ = 100 * (wRC/lgwRC)

A wRC+ of 100 is average. A wRC+ greater than 100 is above average, and every point above is a percentage point above league average. For example, a 130 wRC+ means a player created 30% more runs than the league average. Likewise, a wRC+ less than 100 is below average, and every point below is a percentage point below league average. For example a 70 wRC+ means a player created 30% fewer runs than the league average. wRC+ indexes a player's offensive value against league average, while adjusting for park effects.

Conclusion

With wRC+, we can now compare Ernie Banks and Ryne Sandberg, even though they played in different eras.

Footnotes

* In other words, the formula first determines how good or bad a player is relative to the league, condenses that into a per plate appearance number, adds the league average runs per plate appearance to get the player's runs per plate appearance, and then multiplies by the number of plate appearances to get total runs created.

http://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2012/10/30/3567746/sabermetrics-101-wrc

 

[Talon]

Hey guys, let's shit on Boston media!

The Fellowship of the Miserable

Whiny, petulant, entitled, self-important—no, it's not Boston fans we're talking about, it's Boston sportswriters. How did the sports media in this town, once the envy of the nation, become so awful?

In late July, Red Sox first baseman Adrian Gonzalez sent the organization’s top brass a text message to complain about the team’s manager, Bobby Valentine. It was by then clear that the season was lost. Valentine had clashed with his players since spring training and, despite the team’s bloated payroll and perennially high expectations, the Red Sox looked certain to miss the playoffs for the third straight year. In response to Gonzalez’s message, two of the Sox’s owners, John Henry and Larry Lucchino, called a meeting with a handful of players to hash things out. The players, including star second baseman Dustin Pedroia, ripped Valentine behind his back. They didn’t just air a few petty grievances, they all but mutinied, declaring that they didn’t want to play for Valentine anymore.

That incident, plus several more that reflected poorly on the manager, were revealed in an explosive story published by Yahoo! Sports on August 14. Written by Jeff Passan, the article followed a June report by ESPN’s Buster Olney that called the Red Sox a “splintered group” and described the team’s clubhouse as “toxic.”

Whoever was at fault for the chaos that had descended on the team—Valentine, the players, ownership—it was clearly a massive story. Unless, that is, you happened to work as a sportswriter in Boston. While national reporters parachuted in to break a big story—as they’ve been doing with increasing frequency of late—the local press simply missed the boat. In fact, some of the Sox beat writers insisted in the aftermath of the bombshell story that Passan had gotten it all wrong. For instance, the Globe’s Nick Cafardo—who devoted so much effort to (bizarrely) defending Valentine throughout last season that he seemed to miss the larger story of a franchise crumbling around him—wrote a column arguing that what Passan’s piece showed above all else was that it was the Red Sox players rather than the manager who were the real problem. “The behavior of players as described in the Jeff Passan Yahoo! Sports story,” Cafardo wrote, “was downright disgusting.” Maybe so, but what was missing entirely from Cafardo’s take was any mention of what Valentine had done to create his own problems. Instead, Cafardo excused some of Valentine’s transgressions, including publicly questioning third baseman Kevin Youkilis’s commitment early in the season, a comment that Cafardo insisted would have been no big deal back in the ’70s and ’80s—decades that occurred, you know, 30 or 40 years ago.

Other writers simply downplayed the significance of Passan’s report altogether. Though he would later produce an article about the poor relationship between Valentine and some of his coaches, Globe Red Sox reporter Peter Abraham remains mystified as to why Passan’s story got so much attention. In journalism, it’s worth noting, there’s nothing more embarrassing than having a reporter from the outside come in and break news on your turf. “There was this perception that, well, somehow the Boston media got beat on this story,” Abraham told me. “I didn’t know what there was that we got beat on. I guess the fact that [the players and ownership] had a meeting.”

Actually, yes, exactly that.

Abraham continued: “Bobby, if anything, at the time, had his position strengthened. He didn’t get fired. They fired [the pitching coach]. And the team played better for a short time after that meeting. So when this thing came out, at least for me personally, I didn’t really know what the story was—‘Well, the Red Sox were upset three weeks ago.’”

....

 

[CajoleJuice]

I wonder how bat flips becoming widespread in MLB would affect numbers.

 

[Lazy Man's Wallpaper]

Griffey was clean, haters. Food was his anti-drug.

As someone who watched his waistline expand and his speed and recovery time decrease from 2000-2008, I can tell you he was definitely clean.

If he wasn't he was on the WRONG STUFF.

 

[Sanjuro]

I wonder how bat flips becoming widespread in MLB would affect numbers.

 

[yankeehater]

olden time ballplayers didn't even have to play against black players jesus christ shut up you mongo

That is true but I am not sure what it has to do with this discussion. At least then it was a level playing field for the people that were allowed to play, but if you want to discount all the stats from before baseball was integrated that is fine. It still leaves a huge amount of time between integration and the steroid era.

 

[andycapps]

http://www.bleedcubbieblue.com/2012/10/30/3567746/sabermetrics-101-wrc

 

[CajoleJuice]

That is true but I am not sure what it has to do with this discussion. At least then it was a level playing field for the people that were allowed to play, but if you want to discount all the stats from before baseball was integrated that is fine. It still leaves a huge amount of time between integration and the steroid era.

Plenty of players in the 60s used amphetamines. And hey, look at this SI article from 1969: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1082543/index.htm

 

[yankeehater]

Plenty of players in the 50s and 60s used amphetamines. And hey, look at this SI article from 1969: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1082543/index.htm

Has anyone ever tried to argue that amphetamines give the same competitive advantage as PEDs, and if so why arent players taking them now and are instead taking PEDs?

 

[Sanjuro]

That is true but I am not sure what it has to do with this discussion. At least then it was a level playing field for the people that were allowed to play, but if you want to discount all the stats from before baseball was integrated that is fine. It still leaves a huge amount of time between integration and the steroid era.

We should integrate World Series fixes into the game now, to keep things pure.

 

[CajoleJuice]

Has anyone ever tried to argue that amphetamines give the same competitive advantage as PEDs, and if so why arent players taking them now and are instead taking PEDs?

Has anyone ever tried to quantify the effect of either type of drug? And guys DO take amphetamines now; some players (Carlos Ruiz, for one, look at the year he had!) have been suspended for amphetamine use.

 

[CygnusXS]

Didn't Ruiz just get suspended 25 games for using amphetamines?

For the record I did not see Cajole's post when I wrote this!

 

[eznark]

Has anyone ever tried to argue that amphetamines give the same competitive advantage as PEDs, and if so why arent players taking them now and are instead taking PEDs?

If they don't give a competitive advantage why did the MLB ban them?

 

[Windu]

Damn I missed some of the Upton conference. http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?topic_id=16646230&c_id=ATL&content_id=25576819

He looks good in a Braves uniform.

 

[andycapps]

Damn I missed some of the Upton conference. http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?topic_id=16646230&c_id=ATL&content_id=25576819

He looks good in a Braves uniform.

Yeah it's on right now. It's on 680 The Fan for those tuning in via radio/Tune In.

 

[Mully]

I think Brian Cashman is a good GM, but I'm really starting to think he's not accidentally picking certain washed up pitchers and field players that suddenly play as well as they did in their prime when they're signed with the Yankees.

Bartolo Colon
Raul Ibanez
Andruw Jones
Sergio Mitre
Derek Lowe
Kerry Wood
Lance Berkman
Orlando Hernandez "El-Duque" (Long time ago, but really questionable now)

I'm a Yankee fan, and it's really odd that each year since 2008, we've struck gold with these types of signings and re-signings. Of which, we now know that most likely Colon and Mitre juiced. It's a real stretch, but maybe Cashman aided in their juicing or knew they started juicing and gave them a shot because of it.

 

[Dominican Power]

I think Brian Cashman is a good GM, but I'm really starting to think he's not accidentally picking certain washed up pitchers and field players that suddenly play as well as they did in their prime when they're signed with the Yankees.

Bartolo Colon
Raul Ibanez
Andruw Jones
Sergio Mitre
Derek Lowe
Kerry Wood
Lance Berkman
Orlando Hernandez "El-Duque" (Long time ago, but really questionable now)

I'm a Yankee fan, and it's really odd that each year since 2008, we've struck gold with these types of signings and re-signings. Of which, we now know that most likely Colon and Mitre juiced. It's a real stretch, but maybe Cashman aided in their juicing or knew they started juicing and gave them a shot because of it.

Like Cashman would put his career and reputation on the line for Bartolo fucking Colon.

 

[Mr. Enigma]

Has anyone ever tried to argue that amphetamines give the same competitive advantage as PEDs, and if so why arent players taking them now and are instead taking PEDs?

Jim Leyritz said once in 1990, a teammate gave him amphetamines before a game because he had a major hangover. He went from having no idea how he was going to play to going 3-for-5 with two home runs and four RBIs.

 

[yankeehater]

Has anyone ever tried to quantify the effect of either type of drug? And guys DO take amphetamines now; some players (Carlos Ruiz, for one, look at the year he had!) have been suspended for amphetamine use.

I had no idea that Adderall contains amphetamines but I just checked and it does indeed. MLB must think it isnt at the same level as PEDs though since they allow you to use Adderall if you fill out the proper forms, which Ruiz failed to do.

 

[Talon]

Fuckin' Jim Leyritz.

 

[Mully]

Like Cashman would put his career and reputation on the line for Bartolo fucking Colon.

 

[Sanjuro]

I had no idea that Adderall contains amphetamines but I just checked and it does indeed. MLB must think it isnt at the same level as PEDs though since they allow you to use Adderall if you fill out the proper forms, which Ruiz failed to do.

I thought the whole purpose of adderall was to fill out forms?

 

[matthewwhatever]

Has anyone ever tried to argue that amphetamines give the same competitive advantage as PEDs, and if so why arent players taking them now and are instead taking PEDs?

Fine, I'll say it: amphetamines -- those greenies that players like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays took by the handful from bowls in every clubhouse in baseball -- didn't just give the same competitive advantage as steroids, they have a bigger one. Why take steroids -- which require you to maintain a dedicated workout regime over a longer period of time -- when you could just pop a few pills and almost instantly be up and ready to play? Just look at the stats: offense declined immediately after they banned greenies, but well after steroids started being taken seriously.

RE: adderall, they allow it for medical reasons (specifically ADD). Obviously, that's wide open to abuse, but MLB isn't in the business of administering their own ADD/ADHD testing.

 

[Sanjuro]

Fine, I'll say it: amphetamines -- those greenies that players like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays took by the handful from bowls in every clubhouse in baseball -- didn't just give the same competitive advantage as steroids, they have a bigger one. Why take steroids -- which require you to maintain a dedicated workout regime over a longer period of time -- when you could just pop a few pills and almost instantly be up and ready to play? Just look at the stats: offense declined immediately after they banned greenies, but well after steroids started being taken seriously.

RE: adderall, they allow it for medical reasons (specifically ADD). Obviously, that's wide open to abuse, but MLB isn't in the business of administering their own ADD/ADHD testing.

tl;dr

 

[Mr. Enigma]

I remember reading a story that before the drug testing shit was in place, Craig Biggio and Adam LaRoche were the only ones who were on approved ADD medication. After it started, the number went from 2 to around 110.

 

[Sanjuro]

I remember reading a story that before the drug testing shit was in place, Craig Biggio and Adam LaRoche were the only ones who were on approved ADD medication. After it started, the number went from 2 to around 110.

There you go. Hope that scumbag never makes the hall when innocent players like Clemens get shafted.