When did Manny start juicing?

Dan, I agree with you on the supremely self-centered comment, but I also think a case can be made for stupidity. With some of the biggest names in the game recently taken down by association with steroids, only a very stupid person would think either that he wouldn’t be caught, or, if he were caught, that the rules wouldn’t apply to him. Regarding the issue of the end of the 2007 season, how long does it take for a player to begin to feel the effects of steroids? Is it immediate, or cumulative, or what? It would be too bad if the ’07 championship was diminished.

Bob: I am saying even now that Youkilis’ behavior can be damned irritating. But even if 24 players wanted to go after him, the fact is that only one did.

Ugh. Honestly, is this even a topic that merits speculation?

mike_b1: Can you believe it? They’re posting about steroids in baseball despite your definitive last word on Monday, “there is no evidence that proves any correlations between steroid use and (improved) baseball performance.”Goes to show there’s no respect for authority nowadays. None whatsoever.

Nice comeback mike_b1.That’ll show ’em.

Have always wondered about most political lefty’s decided preference for baseball over football. Is it that there is some actual playing experience there, i.e., roaming right field in Little League? The usual explanation, that it is the thinking person’s sport with so much strategy involved, is weak given the fact that there is more strategy in one defensive series of an NFL game than there is in an entire weekend MLB series.

Mike, the problem is that there’s never been a controlled study, so it’s impossible to know what, exactly, the dominant factor(s) are. What role does age, body type, nutrition, weight training, DNA and other factors play, if any? Also, for every Brady Anderson you name, I’ll give you 10 guys named Joseph Billick or Grant Roberts or Pedro Lambertus … literally hundreds of guys have been suspended by baseball for juicing, almost none of whom you have ever heard of. So did it help? Apparently not.Moreover, what are the downsides? Are users more susceptible to major injury, thus actually hindering their careers, not enhancing them?No, the only denial is by those who seem to think that “science” comes down to “what my gut tells me.” As for me, give me the data.

Mike-b1, let me know when you plan to call WEEI to bring up your argument. Don’t want to miss this one.Simple enough: steroids and other performance enhancing drugs are against the rules of baseball (and football, hockey, basketball, cycling, olympic sports, et al). How do you propose your controlled study (and isn’t 73 home runs from a guy in his late 30s enough proof that something might be helping these guys to perform at a higher level?).

Mike B1: Is it possible to say that any one case of lung cancer is caused by smoking?

Dan, that specifically is a question that researchers wrestle over in every forum imaginable. And while I suspect you are serving it more in a rhetorical vein than anything else, I’ll take the bait because it’s a great example.As I understand it, much of the data surrounding cancer — and I’m not a cancer expert — are derived from two sources. One, test studies done on mice and rats, which are completely controlled, and generally accepted, given the similarity in physiology, as representative of what would happen in humans. Two, epidemiological studies. In the latter, they look hard at events known as a “cluster” — which is when the local incidence rate of a disease is higher than what would have been predicted for a particular place or time — and try to drill down to assess the “why” behind that. Example: Two college kids get sick and die. The cause is determined to be meningitis. Everyone freaks — it’s an epidemic! — except the doctors, who look at the history and learn that 1) college kids had colds (were immunocompromised; 2) college kids were at a party where people were smoking (enhancing the mode of transmission); 3) the incidence rate for meningitis in that area is 3 cases per year, in which case they are well within the probability.So the media runs wild, the public assumes the worst, and the experts shrug, because nothing is really out of the norm.(You’re making me recall my undergrad days, btw. It’s not easy.)So Bonds and McGwuire hit 70 HRs each one year. And both are known or suspected to have used steroids. But wait — literally hundreds of other players are caught (not suspected, caught) using steroids. And none of those guys hit 70 homers. None of them even hit 20. So did the steroids help?

The Woburn poisonings is a classic cluster. No question.As for baseball, great players do amazing things. It’s what makes them great. For example, Ted Williams hit .388 with 38 HRs in 1957 at the age of 38 (adjusted for all-time, that’s the equivalent of .404!). And he slugged .645 in 1960, at the age of 41. He most certainly wasn’t juiced. Randy Johnson has won 65 games and struck out almost 950 batters since turning 40. Juiced? Or just a great player?The thing about PEDs is that there’s so much we don’t know. So there’s lots of guessing from the cheap seats. That’s not science. There was a time the sun was thought to revolve around the Earth, too. The question I have is why, if steroids have such a supposed (positive) impact on baseball performance, don’t they apparently help all players equally?

Mike-bi1:Back to stats: Have you ever taken a stats course? Again, serious question. Because what you are referring to is called an outlier. And in statistics, when trying to understand the data, we would never mistake an outlier for a fact.But since you won’t take my word for it, do this. Call up a stats professor at any local college and ask them if one guy hitting 73 homers is clear and unambiguous proof that steroids enhance performance.And be prepared to be laughed at.Nope, just a dumb shmuck. Actually, I was a math/econ double major and now an actuary for over 25 years. Have had profs who have hung out with Nobel winners and a friend running his own economic forecasting firm who is on a first name basis with CEA head Christina Romer. So maybe I won’t take your advise. Have been around that block. Have you?Ever heard of Mark Twain’s famous quote: “there are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics.”From Curt’s latest posting (from that “knucklehead” source over at WEEI.com):For the past 19 years or so I’ve had suspicions, some stronger than others, but to sit here today and say I played on even one team that was totally clean would be denying reality I think. I’ve never personally seen a player inject, ingest, swallow HGH, or steroids but like every other player I played with that had his eyes open I saw the huge weight gains in one winter, I saw the hat size increase, I saw the acne in places a camel would be embarrassed to have it. I watched the player hit 20 more homers in one year than they ever had, then revert back, I saw the pitcher throwing 87-90 come to spring training throwing 95-97, I saw all of that. None of those are ‘no brainers’ — none — but they were hints, and when you get enough hints you can see the answer clearly if you are looking.I played pretty much my entire career in the Steroid Era.Mike_b1, not sure what your slant is here, but the fact of the matter is that PEDs do have an impact, and all sports (outside of the WWE) outlaw their use. Outliers my ass; when the tail gets that shifted, anyone actually trained in stats gets suspicious. And you’re missing one salient point from your analysis: even if PEDs are nothing more than a placebo, they are against the rules.

I remember when NBA teams were lucky to have one or two seven-footers, and there was no-one (or almost no one)in the NFL who weighed 300 pounds. If other athletes have become stronger and bigger in the last 35 years or so, why not baseball players? Steroids certainly may be one of the reasons for 70 homes runs in a season. But there is no way to know without actually doing some kind of controlled study, as Mike B1 says. Anecdotal evidence just leads to people seeing what they want to see.

Comical, Mike-b1, list of players. Of course you neglect in your cogent analysis (which means nothing) to remember that MLB only established a drug testing policy in 2004 after the Union finally capitulated. Think that might bias your results of your list a bit? Did they ever cover that part of understanding statistical analysis in your GED class?Remember that A-Rod only got outed because someone leaked his failure of the 2003 blind test to see if there was a problem. It only points to the stupidity of Manny Ramirez in the first place to get bagged in 2009.

You miss the point, Mike from Norwell (great town. All that actuary work has you really living large).Look again at that list. Count how many players are on it who have accomplished nothing. If steroids are so performance-enhancing, how come Nefei Perez hit all of 64 homers in 1403 major league games?And compared to most of the guys on that list, he was a slugger! Yes, steroids obviously helps. A lot.Now shut up and watch the Sox-Rays game.

Why don’t you put the dates on your list on when the suspensions were handed down. Then think back to when guys were putting up the big numbers. Then see who is missing the point.Do you see McGuire, Clemens, Bonds, Rodriguez, Palmero et al on your list? I wouldn’t hang your hat on the list of idiot players who got caught after they finally decided to officially test to determine whether PEDs make a difference or not in performance.

Let me put it this way (without this turning into some hissy fit on the Internet): MLB ddn’t issue bans for PED test failures until 2004. This was in large part due to the fact that the Union resisted drug testing (thanks Gene Orza). If you want to rely on statistical analysis to determine whether steroids influenced performance, the simple fact is that you can’t because there is no data available before 2004. And the explosion in stats and performance all occurred before testing was finally was put in place. So no matter how you analyze your data, your results are meaningless, so yes, you do have to rely on your gut instincts. And you’re pretty naive to think that there wasn’t something funny going on in the 90s up to 2003.Suggest that you (or anyone else out there) to at least read the Darryl Huff classic “How to Lie With Statistics”. Illuminating in a ’52 sense that still applies to sniffing out BS in numerical analsysis; heck, even ol’ Ross Perot went for a few examples back in his ’92 infomercials.

Dan, those data exist. BP has shown them a dozen times. I’ll dig them up in a bit — gotta go to Germany right now — but they don’t paint anything resembling a clear picture.

“Gut instincts” comes from thinking that an analysis that says steroids don’t do anything to enhance performance because there are a bunch of no names suspended by MLB might have a flaw in logic due to the fact that MLB didn’t implement drug testing until 2004.Gut instincts is what gets people to realize that numbers thrown out as “proof” may be fatally constructed. Another example was last week’s PR release that you’d save over $12k by taking public transportation. Gut instincts cause a reasonable minded person to wonder “how in the heck did they come up with number?” Also saw several posters over on Boston.com try to defend it by starting with baseline AAA mileage numbers of cost to run a car and then start adding gas, insurance on top of their “analysis” (without bothering to consider that the AAA number already factors those costs into 49 cents per mile). Gut instincts, BS sniffer, whatever you want to call it; how about healthy skepticism?

Dan and all: Read this piece by Jay Jaffe (and don’t skip the link to theI’m going to excerpt two key grafs:As flawed as it is, the Mitchell Report should serve as a reminder that we don’t really know what impact PEDs have on player performance. For every statistical outlier like Clemens or Bonds whose late-career greatness is supposedly attributable to steroids and/or human growth hormone, there are dozens of named players who allegedly used PEDs but who remained on the fringes of the majors, unable to win regular jobs even with whatever extra help they provided. Either that, or I simply missed the days of greatness of Adam Riggs and Phil Hiatt. Furthermore, there were many more named players who apparently turned to PEDs but simply couldn’t reverse the effects of age and injuries, and were out of baseball by their mid-30s. David Justice and Chuck Knoblauch, two players on this year’s ballot, come to mind.Add to that the fact that the rising tide of home runs most commonly associated with “the Steroid Era” is best explained by more fundamental changes in the industry, not by the drugs or the myriad changes that have taken place over the past two decades—newer (but not all necessarily smaller) ballparks, expansion, the changing strike zone, and interleague play. On the one hand there are the well-publicized changes in bat composition; maple bats, as used by Bonds and others, are slightly more dense then the typical ash bats, but also more durable, allowing for thinner barrels and lighter, faster-swinging clubs which maintain the size of the bat’s sweet spot. On the other hand, there are the more under-the-radar changes in balls, such as Rawlings’ decision to move its manufacturing base from Haiti to Costa Rica in the late 1980s, switching from hand-wound balls to machine-wound ones during the 1990s, and introducing a synthetic rubber ring in the ball’s core, one not covered by MLB specifications. A study commissioned by MLB and Rawlings done at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell in 2000 found that balls within the extremes of official tolerances could differ in flight distance by 49.1 feet despite being struck under the exact same conditions. Juiced balls, not juiced sluggers, likely represent the primary reason for those rising home run rates.http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=7074And then read this: http://steroids-and-baseball.com/(and in particular, this: http://steroids-and-baseball.com/actual-effects.shtml). CTs of balls used during the 1998 season definitively show the ball itself was juiced.You can argue all you want. But without reading the literature, you’re just pushing air around.(Aside to Mike from Norwell: Math is hard. Hang in there, buddy!)

I’ll make a counterargument: pretty much any analysis of major league players is inherently flawed since by definition they are “all” outlyers just to make it to that level. We’re not talking about whether steroids are going to affect some 40 year old Park League player; we’re talking about guys at the most elite level.From a stats perspective, totally wrong. We’re not talking about one or two subjects here. We’re talking about nearly 1000 major league players (each year), plus thousands more minor leaguers, all of whom form the statistical universe. With this number of subjects, you can most certainly compare elite to elite.Heck, look at cycling: that sport is pretty much destroyed due to rampant drug cheating. Forget the math: if you want baseball to sink to the level of pro wrestling, then just keep saying that steroids don’t make a difference.A point made in one of the links is that the same drug can have a different effect based on the sport. We tend to focus all our energies on a formula of steroids = homeruns when in fact, it has been shown that as many if not more pitchers have been users. Pro football almost certainly has a more widespread use of PEDs than does baseball. But because we don’t use the same depth of metrics to measure performance in football, we tend to miss (or choose to ignore) the use in that sport. Fans certainly aren’t running from football. Baseball has been publicly dealing with steroids for a decade with no clear negative impact on public support. In the past three decades it has survived multiple players’ strikes, an owners’ lockout, a canceled World Series, cocaine use, extraordinary inflation, etc. I don’t think the “pro wrestling” analogy holds. Yes, there are ethical and other aspects to this. But very little of the “analysis” deals with anything but the statistical noise.I’m reminded of Fred Gwynne’s classic line to Joe Pesci in “My Cousin Vinny”: “Once again, the communication process is broken down. It appears to me that you want to skip the arraignment process, go directly to trial, skip that, and get a dismissal.” The same thinking holds with less-than-rigorous approach being taken to determining the effect of PEDs in baseball.

I’ve been thinking about the whole notion of whether it can be shown statistically that PEDs do or do not result in improved baseball performance, and it strikes me that it’s besides the point. Players themselves are too variable.Here’s the issue: Is it or is it not a fact that steroid use increases strength? If it is, then it’s self-evident that some players are going to benefit from it. Doesn’t really matter that Manny Alexander never hit 50 (or 5) home runs.