Sessh
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Posts posted by Sessh
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You are not old enough for it not to be part of baseball. Are you?
I'm 36, so yes I am. :laughlol:
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People actually sit back and hope others get caught?
The Three Ring Circus Sideshow AKA MLB steroid scandals continue.... I miss when this wasn't a part of baseball.
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Nobody did more 'roids than Arnold and looks pretty good for 70.
Good point about Arnold. Stallone, too. Vince McMahon, too. I am certainly open to the idea that we've been lied to about steroids and PED's VIA exaggeration of health risks just like with recreational drugs which we're
finally starting to see the light on.
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As far as the wrestlers go I think pain killers and brain trauma are bigger factors.
For sure, but especially back in the 80's those guys were on something. I'm sure all the steroids didn't help though on top of all the other stuff. Mixing stuff like that is never good and the head trauma is definitely a factor
as well.
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Attitudes towards various substances change with time and sophistication. The days of reefer madness e.g. are behind us and pot will be legal every where in the not too distant future. The same for PED's IMO. the AMA never wanted steroids to be banned by the FDA, congress did it any way for political reasons. Today the drugs are very sophisticated and the days of the Lyle Alzado horror stories have gone the way of reefer madness. Just how harmful are today's PED's? What evidence do we have? If not then why shouldn't they be available to every one?
Probably not as dangerous as they once were, no. I personally don't get it myself. You could point to all the pro wrestlers that have died early deaths and say "Ah ha!", but those guys seem to take far more of that stuff
than would be advantageous for a baseball player. Have there been any reports about baseball players that took steroids or PED's that have suffered negative health effects later in life? Bonds, McGuire, Sosa (though he
has gone off the deep end in other ways. He's pulled a Michael Jackson. Have you seen him lately?), Canseco etc.. they all seem fine. I have to wonder what how dangerous they really are myself.
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I don't care about the effects of PEDS on these players health. Feel free to 'roid up every day. Just not in my elite club of 700 of the best at the sport without them. I think one strike is half a strike too many. Heck feel free to body modify and amputate for fun if that is your bag. But not in baseball.
It doesn't matter to you that many of those 700 used PEDs? Mantle, Aaron, Mays and the list goes on? Good article here about amphetamine and Bud Selig admitting amphetamines had been in baseball for seven or eight decades. Your "700 best" contain many, many players who used PEDs and set many, many records with their assistance. That's your elite club and it's the same as the players in the game since the 80's who have taken most of the blame for things that had been in the game before they were born.
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I don't support prohibition when it comes to recreational drugs. But performance enhancing drugs are entirely a different matter, because they give you a competitive edge in the short run, while harming your health in the long run.
Going laissez-faire on PEDs would give players the awful choice of juicing to stay competitive at the expense of long-term health, or staying clean and falling behind players who are juicing.
In the end, baseball would wind up in a prisoner's dilemma equilibrium, where everyone is juicing, nobody gets ahead of everyone else, and everyone is endangering his health.
If there are PEDs that have no adverse health consequences, then baseball should allow them. But anything that is harmful in the long run needs to be banned and rigorously tested.
You do realize that baseball has been like this for a very, very long time right? Personally, I think personal accountability and responsibility is becoming a lost art. If someone wants to smoke cigarettes for example, they
are responsible if they get cancer and they knew the risks beforehand and did it anyway. It's really the same with PED's to me. It's their bodies. If they want to do things that may harm their bodies, they have to deal
with that. I just don't like this whole idea that we need to protect people from themselves. These are adults that made a decision and they will have to deal with whatever consequences that decision brings. It's not like
they didn't know the risks beforehand.
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Prohibition of PEDs in MLB and affiliate baseball better work. And should work. This is not wrestling, NFL, or MMA.
As long as there is demand, the black market will be there to supply. It is no different, really. There is money to be made and someone is going to make it.
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Rights don't apply to people making a lot more than me!
I wonder what Lew Ford would think of that? :laughlol:
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I think there need to be limits and a balance of testing vs. intrusiveness. But also get the feeling that popular opinion might side with getting the rich baseball player out of bed at 3am and canceling his family vacation so we can be extra sure he's not taking HGH.
I would be surprised if players found that to be reasonable. At that point, you'll be disrupting family life for players based on constant suspicion without a shred of proof to warrant it. I think that would be a deterrent to
being a baseball player at all. What if they have kids that wake up at 3AM and can't go back to sleep making the parents have to get up instead of getting up 4-5 hours later with the extra rest. I think disrupting life to
that extent is too far and will elicit push back. I wouldn't stand for being subject to that kind of invasion of my private life based on nothing but baseless suspicion. Ridiculous. I think a compromise is the way to go.
Prohibition doesn't work.
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How about allowing tests at time time and any place, including your home or the team hotel at 3 AM or 8 AM? It would disrupt family life and sleep but everyone would be subject to the same rules, and it would address Conte's theory that you can take some substances after you get home from a game, and they will be out of your system by the time you get to the park the next day.
That crossed my mind too, but it seems to cross a line. Should this stuff be so intrusive that it is disrupting the lives of entire families? I think that is going too far. We can only go down this prohibition road so far, but I
really don't get why this is still the preferred approach to drugs. It has never worked anywhere it has been tried, so maybe it's time to try something new. Does everything have to be banned? Can there be some kind of
compromise where we allow some PED's, but restrict dosages and require constant monitoring by a doctor and maybe even administration of the drug by a doctor? I just think this road has been traveled enough times to
know that it simply does not work. This bullheaded, prohibition approach only creates a black market that will always be better than your testing program. You just can't win this way.
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The hardest thing will be marginal major leaguers. You could devise punitive measures that keep established players from using, mostly. Like a three-year ban and voiding of contract for a 2nd offense.
But how do you stop guys who're making $10-30k a year in the minors? If the take PEDs and make the majors it's a ~20x increase in pay. Massive raise. Far, far more than they could make outside the game. If they're caught, so what? Barely worse off than making a pittance playing for Canton-Akron. I don't know how you fix that, the incentives are too great.
Good points, but I don't think the increased penalty you propose would do anything except motivate players to do a better job of not getting caught which I guess comes down to finding a better chemist.
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See, there's also the fact that PED's have been in baseball for over 100 years. The MLB testing program is a much younger entity and has a lot of catching up to do. The black market for PED's is well established and new
suppliers will pop up as fast or faster than others will be caught. I just don't see how this will stop so long as there is money to be made and demand for the products.
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Friend told me it used to be over 70% but now around 25% and different stuff.
If it is as easy to get around the program as these articles suggest, then it may be much higher than 25%. At the very least, it shows that the testing program really isn't working all that well if you have to be "dumb" to
get caught.
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Dirty Players, Sloppy Chemists or both? Another twist in MLB's PED Problem
It?s an explanation Victor Conte, former founder of BALCO whose doping clientele included some of the greatest athletes in the world, has too often heard, along with the rest of us.Still, something about this is strange. Colabello is at least the fourth major leaguer busted for that drug since last September, but yet, Conte struggles with the concept that Turinabol is making a comeback.
Conte instead wonders if this is the latest wave of athletes utilizing inferior chemists.
Find a good one - as 14 of the 16 players ensared in the 2013 Biogenesis scandal taught us - and you can avoid detection by baseball?s drug testers.
?If you?re smart, you?ll never get caught,?? Conte told USA TODAY Sports. ?The research shows that if you go home from the ballpark, and take a fast-acting testosterone, it will peak at 1 in the morning, get down before the 4-to-1 TE ratio by 4 in the morning, and by the time you get to the ballpark, you can?t test positive. That?s what (Alex Rodriguez) and all of those guys in Biogenesis were doing.
?So to get caught now, you?ve got to be pretty dumb. And to use Turinabol, that?s dumber than dumb. Nobody with any brains are using Turinabol. That?s just stupidity.?
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Lest we forget, MLB?s investigation into an Indiana anti-aging clinic continues, after it was made famous by Peyton Manning and ultimately ensnared free agent catcher Taylor Teagarden, who was suspended for 80 games. Teagarden never tested positive for a banned substance.
In time, perhaps in the next collective bargaining agreement, the punishment for first-time offenders will be an entire season, and not 80 games. Off-season tests should continue to rise, too: 528 tests were administered during the winter of 2014, compared to 7,630 tests during the 2015 season.
?If baseball really wants to catch these guys,?? Conte said, ?the offseason is when the testers need to be putting the hook and line in the water, because that?s when the players are biting. If you don?t do it then, it?s like grabbing your fishing pole, putting it up against a tree, putting on a straw hat, and taking a nap.??
Major League Baseball and the players union have made dramatic strides this past decade. They proclaim, correctly, that they have the most stringent drug-testing program in North American team sports.
Yet, it takes only one mind-boggling success story, almost too good to be true, or perhaps even a faulty dishwasher, to subtly remind us that we can?t still can?t trust everything we see.
Baseball's drug program will never be perfect, but how close can it get?
"Every time a guy gets popped who didn't test positive, it's kind of like, 'Why are we even going through this?'" Verlander said in an interview with FOX Sports."If you want to cheat, there is a window to do it. Guys are finding ways around the system. It's pretty evident, pretty well-known that the people who are making these illegal substances are ahead of the testers."
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"Do I think guys are still out there doing this? Yes," Nationals right-hander Max Scherzer said. "I really don't think the number is that high. But at the end of the day, you never know. This is a dark cloud within the game. It's something that is never going to be revealed.
"That's why as players we always have to be open to changes to the Joint Drug Agreement. If anything (more) can be done to detect illegal substances, we have to be open to that."
Added Dodgers left-hander Clayton Kershaw: "If there was a type of testing that guaranteed every person that used PEDs would be caught, I would be all for it. I don't think the problem is the length of the suspension, but more the improbability of being caught."
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People in baseball ask: Outside of further increasing the frequency of tests, what else can the sport do?
"We ban every substance that we know of," said baseball's chief legal officer, Dan Halem. "We use the best laboratories. We test for every substance for which there is a test. We drug-test players frequently, randomly, mixing the times of the day so there is no discernible pattern.
"There is not much more you can do from a drug-testing perspective, which is why we have a whole department of investigations, a whole program designed to catch players who are violating the program and don't test positive. Biogenesis obviously was the best example of that. You need both to have an effective drug program."
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"We recognize that the suppliers will always work hard to stay ahead of the testing. That's why we work hard with scientific experts whose sole function is to help us design -- and re-design -- a program that is on the cutting edge.
"Are we assured to catch every violation? No, that's not realistic. Can I look players in the eye and say with confidence that we leave no stone unturned? Without question."
One problem with testing is that many PEDs do not remain detectable in a player's body for long. A regular user likely will be caught if he is tested, say, five times a year. With a sporadic user, it's more luck of the draw.
Players recognize that testing can accomplish only so much.
"Are they ever going to be able to stay out in front of science and some of these guys who are making it their life's journey to stay in front of drug testing? I don't know if it's possible," Cardinals left fielder Matt Holliday said.
"I'd love to make sure there is nobody doing anything outside the lines whatsoever. I just don't know how realistic it is outside of doing blood testing on a day-to-day basis, which isn't realistic . . . I don't know how much blood testing we are willing to do before it gets absurd."
Scherzer, too, sounded a realistic tone.
"As players, we're always aware that the science to cheat will always be ahead of the science to detect," Scherzer said. "We understand that there is always going to be an incentive to cheat. We just hope that the deterrent to cheat is greater than the incentive."
Is it?
"That's the million-dollar question."
Scherzer runs the equation in his head: How long of a suspension would be necessary to deter all players from using PEDs? How can baseball adjust its penalties to remove the incentive for all 100 percent?
But Scherzer knows -- all players know -- that some will cheat no matter how substantial the risk to their reputations, to their careers.
"I don't care if you're banned for life, people will still do it and try to get away with it," the Blue Jays' Donaldson said.
As with the war on drugs, I don't think stiffer penalties will have any effect whatsoever. If people really want to make an impact, you have to put a dent in the main incentive; money. The huge amounts of money players get for doing things that PED's help you do more of is the main incentive and as long as there is a demand, someone will be there to supply. Increasing penalties for recreational drugs did not do a thing to deter use and neither will stiffer penalties in MLB. This is an outdated approach that has been proven time and time again to be completely ineffective. I believe the #1 reason people play professional sports is for the money and anything they have to do to get more of it, they will do. Even if they get popped, they still have their money.
Anyway, I just stumbled on to these articles on MLBTR and thought they were interesting reads.
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So? Why is that a problem? I'd much rather have someone click a pointer on the guy's letters to define the top of a strike zone than have the ump calling 10% of balls strikes. Defining a batter's zone is far less subjective than guessing balls and strikes. There are different levels of human subjectivity and automation in processes, and with free will we can decide what makes sense.
And there's no chance the person doing the clicking has bias for or against one of the teams playing just like umpires can be prone to? The human element remains with the same risks just manifested a different way.
Computers are only as accurate as the people telling them what to do. We will still have "umpires" deciding what the strike zone is only it will be done with a mouse pointer and a computer will be the middle man.
The page I posted shows definitively that the accuracy of umpires calling balls and strikes is increasing. The problem is no one is rewarded for good performances. The worst home plate umpires are still calling balls and
strikes even in high profile games. There's the problem. The best umpires at calling balls and strikes should always get the job over someone who is not as accurate. Umpires are rotated without any attempt to position
them based on their strengths or weaknesses.
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I don't think it would be hard to have Pitch F/X adjust its strike zone. Pitch F/X does not really call balls and strikes, it just tracks location and velocity. As long as that piece is done accurately, you could have a computer program or a human being determine whether it is in the zone from batter to batter.
It would have to be adjusted by a human being and then we're right back where we started with the human element being a factor, though. I do like the pitch f/x however.
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Yea, don't overthink this. You don't need sensors. Pitch f/x type data is fine.
It's not. Pitch F/X data does not change when a taller batter comes up. It is static. The zone changes based on who is at the plate, their height and their batting stance. The zone is not exactly the same the whole game.
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Even if we put sensors in player's jerseys, we would just start seeing players tampering with the jerseys or lowering their stances intentionally to get a strike at the top of the zone called a ball. Not even the Pitch F/X
boxes are always accurate are not even always the same on TV as they are in reality. Besides, umpires have been getting better overall, not worse.
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I think the problem is not evaluation by players and managers. That's like tabulating votes on a hotline to answer the question "Is life fair?"
This screams out for electronic evaluation, even if an electronic strike zone is not employed. That will give feedback to the pitches missed that, when paired with video, will help umpires reduce the number of calls they miss.
An electronic strike zone is inevitable in time, but I expect there will always be a home plate umpire as backup to make a call if the system fails. It's an attractive option to speed up play, because there will no longer be any target for argument. And I don't think any sport in which replay is now used is suffering any significant backlash from the process, so we have electronically assisted officiating in just about every sport.
Do you think players and managers will be dishonest in such a case where the players at least have some input? They all know who the bad umpires are and who the good umpires are more than anyone else. You don't
think having them help to pick out the good and bad ones won't help? I don't care how they are evaluated so long as they are evaluated somehow to determine if they should be calling balls and strikes.
Also, what does replay have to do with replacing umpires? Nothing wrong with using it to assist with things like replay, but MLB is as close to removing umpires from the game as they are to allowing players to use aluminum
bats and eliminate wooden bats. That's why I say it's not a realistic solution because it's not going to happen any time soon if it ever does. If MLB would just hold umpires to some quality standards, we wouldn't have these
problems. Obviously, MLB has little to no problem with umpires being this way, so what makes anyone think they are going to kick them all out based on performance and spend a bunch of money installing new systems
any time soon? If umpires are ever replaced, it's going to be the end of a long, gradual process. There's a big difference between computer assisted and computer controlled.
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The problem is no one is doing anything to begin to fix the problem. They say umpires are evaluated, but they are clearly not or they are evaluated by incompetent people. Holding umpires accountable for calling games
like this is the answer. Proper evaluation and putting only the highest rated umpires behind the plate will fix the problem. Letting managers and players rate umpires after every game based on their strike calling will help
fix the problem. I find it baffling that so few people even touch on any realistic solutions. There will be no electronic strike zone any time soon if ever. MLB has caused this problem by making umpires unaccountable and
untouchable and as a result, they don't care about their performance because they know they will still have a job the next day regardless of how they do and no one can say crap to them because they're umpires and
MLB says they are always right even when they're wrong. That is the problem. Players and managers should rate performance after every game and then, we'll have the best umpires behind the plate and umpire performance
overall will improve. It's about accountability and right now, umpires have been absolved of every last bit of it.
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Givens is going to have to find a way to be more effective against lefties. Doesn't he kind of have a change-up? Maybe he should develop it and his slider could be better, too. Fastball is electric, though. He has allowed
runs in two of his four appearances this year and lefties are 5-for-6 against him with three doubles.
PED Suspensions Coming
in Orioles Talk
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I meant the part where everyone cares what people are doing or using and it's this huge distraction. I didn't mean the PED's themselves, I don't care about those. I did before I found out how far back it all goes, but once
I uncovered that reality, I stopped caring because it's all so silly.