PEDs, banned substances and suspensions 2018

come on, getting nailed for Stanozolol is so five years ago https://t.co/hmErCqb3LU

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) March 18, 2018

robinson cano, 80 games

Oops.

pay the minor leaguers with major-league drug money https://t.co/YBeFLMoHj6

— Jeff Sullivan (@based_ball) May 15, 2018

Does the suspension include the DL time?

A good break for the Jays.

apparently the DL time will count toward the 80 games

lotta juicers -- cano, melky, a-rod, pettitte -- on that 2009 yankees team

hmmmmmm

was apparently appealing since ST; DL time counting in his favor prob led him to drop appeal

Is there no “cmon it’s the fuckin Mariners” appeal option?

Feel bad, but honestly, how stupid can you be?

Maybe this was the secret to Cano's amazing durability? Who knows. McGwire always claimed he only needed PED's to remain in the lineup.

Jeff Sullivan
@based_ball

pay the minor leaguers with major-league drug money

Braun claimed that too. Given he's out every other day, I kinda believe it.

Yeah, I'm sure there is a link when you play so consistently well and virtually injury-free into your mid-'30s. He absolutely won't go into the HOF now. Even writers who have softened on the first PED users--who make the reasonable case that there were no sanctions in place, the league and fans and writers looked the other way, etc.--a lot of them have gone on record as saying that getting caught now is totally different. It's cheating, plain and simple.

(Not saying at all that everyone who's durable is a PED user. But if you get caught, then that's a reasonable link to make.)

i'm not comfortable forecasting future attitudes.

welington castillo, PEDs, 80 games

this documentary could be worth a look

Director Billy Corben profiles the colorful South Florida characters who were responsible for supplying performance-enhancing drugs to the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez and other players. The film plays like a crime comedy in the tradition of Elmore Leonard. The behavior is so childish that Corben reenacts scenes with actual children playing Rodriguez and others, like a cross between The Little Rascals and The Thin Blue Line.

http://www.docnyc.net/film/screwball/

Red Sox pitcher Steven Wright has received an 80-game suspension without pay after testing positive for Growth Hormone Releasing Peptide 2 (GHRP-2), a performance-enhancing substance, in violation of MLB's Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) March 6, 2019

I Have a Peptide

second knuckleballer to get a PED suspension (after eddie gamboa) iirc

seems particularly dumb

3 stints on the DL in 2018... seems like his left knee cartilage was the culprit.

frankie montas, 80 games

damn

tim beckham, 80 games

The use of gas-station sexual-enhancement pills in baseball is so prevalent that MLB sent out a memo warning players that their use could lead to positive PED tests, as at least two players have claimed this year, sources tell ESPN. News: https://t.co/WD0gXgmXgs

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) August 21, 2019

why, one would almost think ballplayers pursue lots of sex on the road

Twins starter Michael Pineda has been suspended for 60 games for a drug violation, sources tell ESPN. He originally got an 80-game suspension, but it was reduced to 60 on appeal, as a compelling case was made that a banned diuretic he used was not a masking agent for PEDs.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) September 7, 2019

MLB, MLBPA agree to testing regime changes

• All samples collected under the Program will now be tested for the presence of Opioids, Fentanyl, Cocaine, and Synthetic THC (among other Drugs of Abuse). Any Player who tests positive for one of these Drugs of Abuse will be referred to the Parties’ Joint Treatment Board (composed of medical professionals specializing in substance abuse and representatives from the Office of the Commissioner and the Players Association) for an initial evaluation and, if appropriate, formulation of a personalized treatment plan for that Player going forward. Only Players who fail to cooperate with their initial evaluation or prescribed treatment plan may be subject to discipline.

• Natural Cannabinoids (e.g., THC, CBD, and Marijuana) will be removed from the Program’s list of Drugs of Abuse. Going forward, marijuana-related conduct will be treated the same as alcohol-related conduct under the Parties’ Joint Treatment Program for Alcohol-Related and Off-Field Violent Conduct, which provides for mandatory evaluation, voluntary treatment and the possibility of discipline by a Player’s Club or the Commissioner’s Office in response to certain conduct involving Natural Cannabinoids.

it's a Richard Linklater sport

Houston #Astros LHP Kent Emanuel will miss rest of season after receiving 80-game suspension after testing positive for Dehydrochlormethyltestosterone (DHCMT), a performance-enhancing substance.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) August 6, 2020

robinson cano again. the thread comes full circle.

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/30343634/sources-new-york-mets-robinson-cano-banned-year-due-ped

don'tcha know

rip

JAWS
Second Base (7th):
  68.9 career WAR / 49.4 7yr-peak WAR / 59.1 JAWS
Average HOF 2B (out of 20):
  69.5 career WAR / 44.4 7yr-peak WAR / 57.0 JAWS

ruh roh

https://www.si.com/mlb/2021/06/04/sticky-stuff-is-the-new-steroids-daily-cover

'This Should Be the Biggest Scandal in Sports'
The inside story of how rampant pitch-doctoring in MLB is pumping pitchers up and deflating offenses.

“I’m tired of hearing people say that players only want to hit home runs,” says Rockies rightfielder Charlie Blackmon. “That’s not why people are striking out. They’re striking out because guys are throwing 97 mile-an-hour super sinkers, or balls that just go straight up with all this sticky stuff and the new-baseball spin rate. That’s why guys are striking out, because it’s really hard not to strike out.”

“There’s some [pitchers] where, if you swing where your eyes tell you, you won’t hit the ball, even if you’re on time,” Blackmon says. “I have to go out there and if my eyes tell me it’s in one place, I have to swing to a different place. Which is hard to do. It’s hard to swing and try and miss the ball. But there’s some guys where you have to do it, because their ball and the spin rate or whatever is defying every pitch that you’ve seen come in over the course of your career. … I basically have to not trust my eyes that the pitch is going to finish where I think it’s going to finish and swing in a different place, because the ball is doing something it has no business doing.”

heh, one more long quote, sorry

If players have been doctoring the ball for a century, why is this all coming to a head now? Nearly everyone interviewed for this story mentioned one person in particular: Dodgers righthander Trevor Bauer.

In 2018, Bauer seemed to accuse the Astros of applying foreign substances to baseballs in a cryptic tweet replying to a comment about Houston’s rotation. “If only there was just a really quick way to increase spin rate,” he wrote. “Like what if you could trade for a player knowing that you could bump his spin rate a couple hundred rpm overnight...imagine the steals you could get on the trade market! If only that existed…” (Houston denied the allegation.) He complained to reporters that by ignoring the problem, the league was sanctioning illegal behavior.

Bauer said he had done tests in a pitching lab and found that sticky stuff added about 300 rpm to his four-seam fastball. He wrote in a Players’ Tribune essay that after eight years of trying, “I haven’t found any other way [to increase spin rate] except using foreign substances.”

He also tried to make his point on the field: He used Pelican in the first inning of a 2018 start and watched his four-seamer, which usually averaged about 2,300 rpm, tick up to 2,600 rpm. After the first inning, that number dropped back to normal.

“If I used that s---, I’d be the best pitcher in the big leagues,” he told SI in 2019. “I’d be unhittable. But I have morals.”

From March through August of that year, his four-seamer averaged 2,358 rpm, according to Statcast. In September, it jumped to 2,750. In 2020, when he won the Cy Young Award for the Reds, it was 2,779. This season, the first of a three-year, $102 million deal that makes him the highest-paid pitcher in history, it’s 2,835.

Before Bauer’s spin rate jumped, he had an ERA of 4.04 and the 228th-best opponent batting average, at .241. Since the increase, those figures are 2.31 and an MLB-best .161. The Athletic reported in April that the league had collected several balls from Bauer’s first start that “had visible markings and were sticky.” Asked about the report at the time, Bauer said, “MLB is just collecting baseballs to do a study. Like, they’re not doing anything with them. No one’s under investigation, or no one’s—like, just these gossip bloggers out here, writing stuff to try to throw water on my name or whatever.” (The league is indeed collecting balls from every pitcher for analysis, and there has been no finding that Bauer did anything wrong.)

the ball is doing something it has no business doing

I hate to victim-blame here, but the ball should just cut it out

Are umpires not noticing these balls are sticky?

They are

My sense is that everyone except a few outliers like Bauer think the status quo — not just in doctored balls but every aspect of the game — is such a fragile house of cards that they'd rather work within a fucked up but known system that gives them piles of money than fix it and risk having to learn new ways to excel. This doesn't make much sense for hitters, I admit -- maybe they don't want to get beaned on the field or beaten in the night by a bunch of guys with socks full of bars of soap? I guess there's an omerta for umpires as well. In other words, ¯\(°_o)/¯

right now there's absolutely no incentive to pitch clean. everyone else is doing it, there are no penalties, and it won't make your head expand or balls shrink. like the citigroup guy said: as long as the music is playing, you've got to keep dancing.

the league has ignored this stuff for decades and it's up to them to enforce the rules.

(tbh i don't think bauer cares one way or the other; he just can't keep his mouth shut when he thinks he knows more than everyone else)

possibly related:

It could just be that a made up game with rules from the 1800s doesn't really hold up great as entertainment when we apply the entire sum of human technological knowledge to optimizing performance against its constrictions.

— eric nusbaum (@ericnus) June 4, 2021

No! Baseball has always been perfect from the beginning and must never adapt!

Was Scalia a baseball fan?

I don’t think there are big lessons about the state of baseball to be learned other than the commissioner and his team are once again painfully slow at fixing an obvious problem.

supposedly bauer’s fastball spin rate is down significantly today, hmm

that si article confused me.

apparently, the league has already been collecting baseballs and analyzing them, but they have found no evidence that bauer did anything wrong ("The league is indeed collecting balls from every pitcher for analysis, and there has been no finding that Bauer did anything wrong."). but half of the article is about bauer and the rest of the dodger pitchers doctoring them more than any other team.

do they want the reader to interpret some hidden message in there? is it that the league isn't really doing its job and is playing hot potato with who should enforce the rule? so, according to the article, "In March, the league sent a memo to teams to warn them that it would begin studying the problem, collecting those baseballs for analysis and using spin rate data to identify potential users of foreign substances." but the league was already doing that. is this just the league saying, "hey guys, i'm serious. knock it off or you'll be grounded," as players continue to ignore it?

the article also says it'll now be up to the umpire to check baseballs and issue the 10-game suspension. so i assume the league is slowly trying to warn players (as they've been doing already?) to slowly introduce whatever punishment they will come up with next in a more transitional way.

also, how about some studies on how rawlings making the baseball 1% lighter is affecting the spin/movement?

honestly, i'm still confused.

i haven't watched much baseball for almost two years now, but i feel like the real story is if hitters are striking out more, casual viewers/goers don't really find the game as exciting, which, in the end, may translate into fewer ticket sales.

i'm still exhausted from the astros outrage i can't take the next 4 months of everyone suddenly deciding to be outraged by this. that article really flipped a switch didn't it

not ready to demonize like 5000 pitchers for lacking the moral judgment to reject slightly more effective concoctions when the slightly less effective concoctions have been accepted by all for decades. people really expecting gerrit cole to have had a dare to resist drugs and violence moment over shit that's never been enforced

This wrecking Gerrit Cole would be awesome. Fuck the Yankees 4eva.

Only thing better would be if Jason Giambi loses his bowels in Monument Park during old-timers day.

That was a very morbsian post.
Thank you.

I also don’t think there will ever be nearly as much outrage about stickyballgate™

Players have gotten busted from time to time and no one gets too hot over it. Unless we find about a team was pushing sticky substance use on its pitchers - I think there’s so many guys doing it to really give people a clear bad guy.

Baseball is just shit to watch now. Beyond all this crap, teams seem to make dumb dumb plays all over the place.

I think the sport is close to a collapse.

i love baseball, i'm watching it now

I love baseball, it's shit to watch, I'm watching it collapse now.

better enjoy it now because it's *really* going to collapse in december

y'all

come on. when i'm saying kip, maybe it is collapsing

does the belief in collapse correlate with how your favorite teams are doing?

This could be a bigger deal than steroids because there is actual evidence that can be correlated to performance.

So much talk about home runs and steroids ... but all the top HR years, league wide, have been "post"-steroids. Maybe they'll get rid of the sticky stuff, K rates will keep rising anyway, and we can downplay this scandal in a few years.

i don't know, it doesn't seem as scandalous as steroids to me, because pitchers have always fucked with the ball (i know players have also always used drugs to enhance performance but steroids seem like a step above amphetamines). it's part of the game. i do think they should probably start enforcing the rules against putting stuff on the ball more, but pitchers will still figure out a way to gunk up the ball or scuff it and that's OK. it's fun.

basically i think they need to clarify and enforce the rules better but i don't think players need to be penalized or stats asterisked or anything like that.

gunking the ball to essentially get a knuckler for free is one thing. but increasing grip to get a faster fastball or a harder slider feels more wrong

I thought this was an interesting article from a month ago:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fastballs-keep-pouring-into-the-top-of-the-zone/

It diagnoses the symptoms (fastballs with spin at top of the zone), but doesn't mention the potential cause (goop).

Also interesting about deGrom (NB, from a Mets fan):

https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/ntqy69/comparing_degroms_spin_rate_to_his_peers/

Gaylord Perry, Whitey Ford, and Joe Neikro very much enjoying all this.

Sheehan:

That drop in offense, with constant references to 1968 and its .237 batting average, has been one of the biggest stories of the year. Despite the evidence, MLB is unwilling to concede that the baseball is the reason for this, and has instead capitalized on the grip enhancement story as a means of misdirection. It is shifting the blame for the drop in offense to pitchers and their use of grip enhancers, deciding in the middle of the season to aggressively and publicly police a practice it had largely ignored for years. The league would rather push the story that baseball players are cheaters than address the root cause of the drop in offense -- MLB's own changes to the baseball.

So, no, you can’t just say “Spider Tack bad, pitchers bad.” Rule 6.02(c)(4) should be enforced. It shouldn’t be deployed as a weapon of distraction to win a public-relations battle.

It’s the trashing of the players that bothers me most. As part of this crackdown, MLB plans to have the umpires do random checks of pitchers on the field. Buster Olney reported that this could happen eight to ten times a game. That’s 800 to a thousand times a week that MLB will publicly frisk its players, telling everyone in attendance that baseball players are bad guys who need to be monitored carefully.

Baseball has spent my entire life trashing the players who make the game what it is. Whether calling them greedy or selfish or disloyal or druggies or cheaters, the league has spent 50 years telling baseball fans that it’s the players who are the problem, the ones standing between what the game is and what it could be. MLB is once again tearing down the players to protect itself.

yeah, it's convenient that this is happening during the CBA year

i disagree that it's just the ball though... the ball is still extremely juiced compared to the pre-juice years, pitcher performance and usage definitely plays a huge part in current K rates being what they are, along with the strike zone getting bigger

Is there a sport for which die hards are predicting the collapse of as often as baseball?

In 50 years there will be great baseball and we will be complaining about the state of it all.

Sure there are some problems (mainly due to despicable owners) but 'collapse' seems to be classic social media hyperbole. Just watch Fernando Tatis Jr games.

Donaldson and Cole face each other tonight:

https://nypost.com/2021/06/09/josh-donaldson-doesnt-regret-calling-out-gerrit-cole/

sheehan is a hard case but he's also usually right

and there is absolutely nothing off-limits to manfred/ownership in this coming labor battle. the owners are all insanely rich and do not care about killing the golden goose because on principle they will accept nothing less than obeisance, no matter the short-term losses

I’m sure comes december thing will get ugly, but I’ve seen hockey survive and even thrive after the lost season, and I think baseball will be no different.

Baseball will always have a complex about dying because of football’s ratings and luck in capturing 24/7/365 coverage in sports media.

It took them 50 years to turn the draft into an event (sort of) and they still limit the drama by not making every pick traceable.

Do you mean tradeable?

Yes, autocorrect strikes again.

People lament the death of baseball like they lament the death of french cuisine: every decade for the last 100 years.

The memo outlining the plan for foreign substances is coming tomorrow, sources tell ESPN, and it includes a 10-day suspension with pay for anyone caught with any sort of substance, from sunscreen mixed with rosin to Spider Tack. News story is free at ESPN: https://t.co/9rsIVnRhTK

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 15, 2021

this is pretty interesting

https://www.thescore.com/mlb/news/2180019

i guess i don't really doubt that any of this stuff is true but i wish it was being delivered by someone who was less of a clown about it

Everything that I am about to say was verified by more than one player. I do not mean to burn anyone, and I love baseball... I've just had enough of this bullshit.

— Ryan M. Spaeder (@theaceofspaeder) June 16, 2021

lol

I deeply regret everything that I said — it has turned my life upside down. It was a mistake, and I should not have reported on unfounded allegations. I sincerely apologize to all of those impacted — it should not have happened, and it will not happen again. Stick to stats.

— Ryan M. Spaeder (@theaceofspaeder) June 17, 2021

Umpires all over Max Scherzer tonight, even during the inning.

Bro leave Max Scherzer alone do you wanna die? pic.twitter.com/IAWgpHTPQj

— Eric Hubbs (@BarstoolHubbs) June 23, 2021

What did ace of spaeder say? I think i missed that.

Max Scherzer and Joe Girardi had a heated exchange after the 5th inning pic.twitter.com/JQIaA6ccna

— OPT (@OnePursuitTakes) June 23, 2021

pic.twitter.com/taoc2790V0

— Andrew Perpetua (@AndrewPerpetua) June 23, 2021

poly: https://www.crawfishboxes.com/platform/amp/2021/6/17/22538979/ryan-spaeders-statements-on-sign-stealing

ty

lol erik kratz

out of context (not reading the thread title, onethread) watching the umpire walk up to scherzer while he removed his belt - i thought he was about to take a piss in front of his mound in protest of something, and wow, that was compelling!

Saw a tweet (or was it a comment here?) saying something to the effect of "how long until someone strips in protest"

Well

Oakland A’s reliever Sergio Romo was checked for “sticky stuff” and might have upstaged Max Scherzer in the process. pic.twitter.com/wL1jqt4CgE

— Chris Halicke (@ChrisHalicke) June 23, 2021

Oh maybe I was just misremembering karlvs post, uh, one post up

I'm very tired guys

they're so desperate to feel persecuted!

I would not called them persecuted, however for the sake of a lot of things excluding the pitchers, it shouldn’t happen during an inning.

it looks weird. umpires shouldn't be out there patting down pitchers in the middle of the field. that's just not their job.

it’s really dumb. I’m guessing they’ll stop doing it in a couple of weeks.

Since the enforcement memo dropped:
* 63 pitchers (17%) have dropped 2+ standard deviations (spider tack level, 230+ RPM)
* 145 pitchers (38%) have dropped 1+ SD
* 230+ pitchers (60+%) have dropped enough to call the drop ‘statistically significant’ via @choice_fielder

— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) June 29, 2021

Cardinals pitching has certainly sucked big time since then. Maybe fans of most teams feel that way, I don’t know.

am i the only one that thinks it’s majorly fuckin weird that they’re coming down like a mountain on sunscreen but a literal ROSIN BAG is standard equipment on every major league mound? maybe make the rosin a wee bit stickier? or use tacky baseballs like in japan? surely fine control is a good thing?? and then move the rubber back a foot

i think it's totally reasonable that they come down on spider tack, but they have no good way of drawing the line between that and, say, sunscreen. but doing it in the middle of the season is a joke, and these post-inning inspections look ridiculous.

feel like this is another unintended consequence of statcast -- pitchers have always been able to do things with nicks or spit or whatever, but until like five years ago i don't think many people specifically correlated RPM with movement. and no matter what whitey ford and gaylord perry were using, they were still only throwing 85 -- today the stuff gives pitchers unearned command at 98. if pitchers were *really* worried about losing control and beaning someone, they could always ease off the gas . . . but no one wants to do that!

another unintended consequence: what if gerrit cole is merely an above-average pitcher without the stuff? the yankees still owe him $250m. as with robot umps making pitch-framing obsolete, suddenly a whole bunch of players have to be revalued on the fly

totally

i just don't understand why TREE ROSIN is not sticky enough for what pitchers want to do but i guess it's not