You've got to at least ask the question...

Damien Cox, a hockey "writer," voiced his, um, not quite opinion, not quite a question, not really any kind of reporting at all, about Jose Bautista's sudden power surge this year, complete with the requisite suspicion about PED's.  This wasn't in his column but his own blog.  The issue raised here and here has been about whether or not the lack reaction against his article, compared to Jerod Morris asking the same baseless questions (albeit in a much less accusatory, faux-noble and contemptible way) about Raul Ibanez last year, is a result of a double-standard between bloggers and mainstream writers.  Morris was raked over the coals for suggesting that, given the history of baseball stars and steroids, it was reasonable to be suspicious of any player who's had a dramatic performance jump.  Why hasn't the mainstream media attacked Cox the same way for the same kind of unfounded character assassination?  Buck Martinez and Pat Tabler went after him during, if I remember, the second game of the Jays-Yankees series but didn't mention him by name and didn't really drop the hammer.  Their criticism was mostly that he isn't around the team, hadn't seen how hard he worked, intangibles, blah blah, square jaw blah.  I'm here to fill in that criticism. 

My problem with the Cox article isn't that he thinks there's something funny about Jose Bautista's numbers this year.  I think every fan who's watched a game this year wonders how a guy with 100 career homeruns managed to hit 42 of them in two-thirds of a season.  It's not even the numbers; have you watched this guy hit baseballs this year?  It's like his bat is twice the width of a normal bat and he's hitting tennis balls filled with flying faerie juice.  His groundouts are hit harder than Ichiro's homeruns.  When he connects it sounds like missiles detonating against other missiles.  He's killing so many baseballs that Greenpeace activists throw buryric acid at him like he's a Japanese whaler.  Of COURSE one has to wonder why.  

Cox fails to understand that "just asking the question" is tantamount to an accusation, especially when you consider that Major League Baseball does indeed test for steroids.  There's no proof, no corroboration, not even an unnamed source he can point to as a catalyst for his article.  There's only a jump in numbers and, remarkable as Bautista's year as been relative to other seasons, a spike in numbers isn't remarkable in itself.  In fact, considering the rollercoaster Aaron Hill and Adam Lind's numbers are riding from last year to this year, we should be asking what performance-enhancing substance they were using last year.  Or, rather,  what performance-damaging substance they're using this year, depending on which season you think is the outlier.  Statistical abnormalities happen all the time.  To properly analyze stats, the analyst has to appropriately set the parameters of a player's sample size, otherwise, the comparisons are meaningless.  Cox, bless him, is a hockey writer and only knows about Stanley Cup rings, Heart, Soul, Grit, Toughness, Character and (as a Toronto newspaper writer) that fighting is bad.  It's common sense that the way you count and compare numbers is important, right?  When you look at the Raul Ibanez example this makes much more sense. 

This is terrific article on the Ibanez-Jerod Morris hulabaloo from last year.  Briefly, the story was that Raul Ibanez got off to an incredible start last year, hitting .329/.386/.676 with 19 homers and 54 RBI's in his first 55 games (all numbers from the linked article).  That's 55 HR's and 159 RBI's over 162 games.  In other words, preposterous numbers for a 37-year-old.  After some deliberation on the situation itself, Posnanski makes the astute point that the kind of stretch Ibanez started the season on was typical of many other hot streaks he'd had in his career.  He points out a number of other stretches of games where Ibanez got hot and put up similar numbers only to cool off later and revert to form.  These stretches, like any hot stretch for any player in any sport, seemed to come at random, either mid-season, playoffs, whenever.  Has Ibanez ever hit 55 HR's and drove in 159 runs in a season before?  No, but his career numbers suggest numerous occasions where he's been as good of a hitter.  The point is that when an analyst says a player's performance is outside their normal range of production, they have to be very careful that they know exactly how that past performance has been quantified.

Obviously, in the case of Jose Baustita, there is no 130 game stretch one can point to and see a similar display, therefore this season stands totally apart from the rest of his career.  TSN looks at outlier seasons here in an attempt to explain how Bautista's amazing season compares to other players whose careers had an unexpected jump.  There's lots of examples of players coming out of nowhere, having career years before disappearing due to injury or ineffectiveness.  That contextual lens makes more sense, doesn't it?  He's a guy who got into a good situation in Toronto, was given all the playing time he wanted, stayed healthy and kept getting pitches to hit because Vernon Wells started out strongly too.  Before long Bautista will be back platooning with some other average player and we'll all talk about his one amazing year.  Right?  Not steroids, just a fluke?

Or is it a fluke?  Carlos Pena is one of the top first basemen in the American League.  He's had seasons of 46, 31 and 39 HR's and is on pace for 34 this year.  He's won a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger, played in the All-Star game in 2009 and was in the MVP discussion in 2007 and 2008.  He came out of nowhere too; his breakout year was 2007 but he was drafted way back in 1998.  He only went to the Rays because Boston let him go as a free agent, as did the Yankees the off-season before that.  There's never been a hint of discussion about Pena and steroids.  Bautista could be another Pena, a star who comes out of nowhere and excels on a young team because he was given a chance to play every day.  It's not hard to see examples of players who've had seasons well outside their career averages, nor it is impossible to find players who've come from obscurity and turned into stars.  

I'm not stupid or naive, of course I wonder about Bautista's line drives that dent the centrefield restaurant, but nor am I a well-known sportswriter whose job it is to do some research.  Pena is a great story because he's the exception to the rule, as is Bautista and any other player who's toiled in the minors, been a free agent, been a Rule 5 or a waiver pick up only to find a home and have a great year or two.  The point is that there lots of examples of this kind of thing happening where steroids weren't an issue, yet Cox doesn't even mention an alternative.  Shouldn't he?  I guess he's not just curiously "asking the question" since to do so would suggest he's willing to look at any explanation, not just the one he's decided on.  His argument seems to be that because other players did steroids and baseball's rules allowed it, every player who's numbers go up dramatically is subject to pessimism and doubt.  Well, okay, that's actually reasonable.  We're all jaded and suspicious now.  Except that Major League Baseball does in fact test for steroids.  That's important isn't it?  Shouldn't Cox address that?  Well no because again, he's not actually accusing Bautista outright, he's just complaining about baseball's steroid history and tossing Bautista's name in the mud.  Let's see how it looks if I do something similar.  Ahem...

Don't blame me.  When it comes to Damien Cox, how is it exactly that one of his blog posts, normally ignored by everyone outside of Toronto, suddenly becomes one of most talk-about stories in Major League Baseball?  Chance?  New keyboard?  Diet (ahhh no, this is a sportswriter after all)?  New reading glasses?  Anyone familiar with the great Mitch Albom's brush with controversy should at least be willing to wonder about Cox's sudden transformation into the baseball writer king.

Shouldn't we at least be asking the question about whether or not Cox "borrowed" some ideas from someone else and "forgot" to credit them?  I mean, this recent blog post is pretty explosive, much more than his usual body of work, and plagiarism has happened before, not that Cox has ever been accused of this sort of thing but SHOULDN'T WE AT LEAST ASK??  Don't blame me, it's certainly not my fault that it's now up to Cox to defend himself against a totally baseless charge he did nothing to deserve.  I can't be held responsible for anything I write!  Why?  I'll tell you why?  BECAUSE SOME WRITERS SOMEWHERE HAVE PLAGIARIZED BEFORE!!!

Disclosure:  Cox Bloc did this same angle on Cox-as-a-plagiarizer.  I read it afterwards so I did NOT plagiarize, I'm just guilty of being less clever than I originally thought.  That was certainly bound to happen eventually though.  

Stupid Damien Cox.  Take some damn responsibility for your opinions, or do some research, or know something about steroid testing, or samples sizes, or innocent until proven guilty, or anything to do with being not just a reporter but, good God, the associate sports editor at a major newspaper. 

"Go Gay Go! SCORES!!!"

I was driving home from work today, as I often do, and was listening to an interesting conversation on the radio about gays in sports.  Mark Spector's recent column was the topic and Spector was on the show with TSN's Ryan Rishaug and Sportsnet's Jaime Thomas.  They were talking about how the pro sports world would react to whichever player was willing to come out and become the first openly gay active pro athlete in team sports.  There's been former athletes come out after their playing careers and several pro tennis players and golfers have come out (do your own research if you want to know who!) but so far nobody in any of the four major sports has been willing.

I say "willing" because, as was noted on the radio, the word "courage" would be somewhat disrespectful to players who aren't willing to make that public announcement.  It is their choice after all; it shouldn't come down to courage vs. cowardice dichotomy since it's hardly cowardly to want some privacy.  Yet it will be bold for someone to go public, that's a lot of attention on a personal subject and potentially a lot of backlash.  I suspect though that it won't be the kind of backlash we might think and that's what I want to eventually bring up. 

At the same time though, there's a pretty big benefit to being that first person.  Comparisons to Jackie Robinson will be made (and hopefully tempered heavily; there's sure to be some nastiness coming that player's way but it won't be as bad and there will also be a lot more support), there's TV appearances, certainly a book deal and maybe a movie.  I don't care if an athlete is gay or straight, they're all brands and you gotta cash in when you can!

There's two major challenges for an athlete in a team sport coming out.  First, obviously, is the degree to which they will be accepted by their teammates, opponents, fans and media.  I would think that teammates would be the group any athlete considering this announcement would be most concerned with.  They spend more time during the season with their teammates than with their family, after all.  It's not necessary that everyone be best friends of course, but a divided team will collapse at the first sign of hardship.  These are the truisms we've been taught by players and coaches so we'll just believe them and move on.  Imagine a team divided along lines substantially trickier than strategies and practice length and you can see how a player would hesitate at unleashing this kind of polarizing issue in their dressing room. 

That's where this debate becomes a little murkier and much more interesting.  Homosexuality in our society is a hot-button issue and gay marriage rights are the fault line of a major cultural identity crisis in the United States.  For a player contemplating this decision this kind of polarization is, seemingly, a major concern.  Is it though?  Here's a reasonable expectation for how each of the four above listed groups will react.

The media will be overwhelmingly supportive and congratulatory towards that player because, well, can you imagine what will happen if they are not?  Sure you'll get a few Rush Limbaughs who say exactly the wrong thing, there will be a few irrelevant preacher types who warn of the impending Apocalypse, but this will serve the player in the end because every else in the media will absolutely shit on their head.  Don't worry Mr. Gay Athlete, the media will be your loyal foot soldier because God help them or their editor if they are not. 

The fans will make jokes, be supportive, be spiteful, cheer loudly, boo when he (and this is a "he" we're talking about here, in no way are the same social issues present if Serena Williams says she's a lesbian) drops the ball or goes 0 for 5.  Fan will be incredibly supportive and caring, ignorant and horrible, distant and disinterested, and quickly distracted by the next game and a different channel.  The player will be pretty separated from all of that.  Players love the fans when they're cheering for them, are mildly annoyed or indifferent when they boo and are totally removed from any other opinion they might have.  Sure, that first game will garner them a pretty good cheer but after that fans will grow bored and will find something else to argue over.  It'll be a story that turns into a novelty and soon forgotten.

Opponents will be very interesting.  Which player is willing to be publicly flayed in the media and heavily fined over some comment meant only to get inside their opponent's head?  Apart from Sean Avery?  Think of the most famous attention whores in each sport.  Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco don't seem like they'd go that far, and besides that isn't about them so they won't care about it.  Fame sluts in the NBA only care about joining the Heat, baseball players don't often give those kinds of quotes, and even Avery or a Steve Ott might not push this one.  Hockey has its own set of accepted groups that are, apparently, considered fair game for discrimination: French Canadiens, Swedes, Russians, oh hell, all of Europe.  Homosexuality isn't the same and any trash talk in this direction would quickly go public and follow that linecrosser around for their whole career, like the Avery-Georges Laraque incident.  Leagues will come down hard on this kind of trash talking and it won't be worth it.

The most reactionary, backwards, ignorant comments, either from opponents or teammates, will come from league oddballs like... well, it's probably unfair to call players cavemen before they've done anything.  Carl Everett was a crazy, crazy man but he's retired now.  I really only wrote that sentence so I could link to those quotes.  Lots of people will agree with those comments but publicly only a minority will support anyone who comes out against homosexuals in sports and in society.  Maybe I'm being naive but I think that there's far more support for the first gay player than they think.  Those outlying voices will be written off and characterized as unfortunately relics of an era we soon hope to pass.

Here's where it's not so simple.  This player, wherever he is, will be a big, big deal when he comes out.  Interviews in every city, print and radio, for himself, his teammates, opponents, management, everyone. This will be a travelling circus long after the national interest has waned because each city will need to hear his story one more time.  Let's say then that the opposition this player faces from his own team isn't about his beliefs or his lifestyle but the distraction he'll cause for his team?  His teammates will all range in supportiveness but none will particularly enjoy the distraction after the novelty has worn off.  That's where the real centre of this debate lies to me because publicly the first gay athlete will be overwhelmingly hailed for his courage for paving the path for the future.  Again, maybe I'm naive, but I think it's a pretty clear path, media-wise, as long as the announcement isn't totally botched, like right before Game 7 or something.  It's the other public debate that will be misunderstood, miscontrued, poorly verballized and set up as a straw man:  Will it be okay to love the announcer but hate the announcement?