Sunday, August 29, 2010

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. 

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