Raul Ibanez, a 37-year old outfielder for the Philadelphia Phillies, is having a career year. This is quite unusual for a major league player and, given the era we live in, it’s unsurprising that it would lead to speculation about how it could have happened.
This week, a sports blog, Midwest Sports Fans, put into words what many have undoubtedly wondered about: namely whether Ibanez might be taking performance enhancing drugs.
What followed was a firestorm of criticism directed at the blog for insinuating, without cause. The player himself blasted the blog, calling it cowardly (and repeating the favored criticism of blogs - that they are typed in parents’ basements), vowed that he could be tested from head to toe and called the speculation “cowardly.”
ESPN’s Outside the Lines ran a featured segment on the brouhaha, including the author of the blog post, Jerod Morris,aka, Jrod as well as Ken Rosenthal, longtime baseball writer for FOXsports and John Gonzalez of the Philadelphia Inquirer who wrote a column critical of Jrod’s post.
As Jrod noted in his discussion with Rosenthal and Gonzalez, he did not actually make an accusation. He was responding to a message board accusation left by someone who plays in the same fantasy baseball league as Jrod (and Jrod has Ibanez on his team this season). In fact, what he wrote was a pretty thorough analysis of Ibanez’ past performance, taking into account things like park factors, the pitchers Ibanez has faced so far this year and his performance away from his home ballpark. It should be noted this depth of analysis of player performance in what we’ll call mainstream sports media is almost unheard of.
After analyzing some of the relevant data, here’s what Morris wrote:
Now that we have gone ’round and ’round with all of these stats — my attempt to be an “objective man” in response to the message board comment from this morning — what can we conclude?
First off, we can conclude that I made one hell of a draft pick. Whatever the explanation for Ibanez’s great start, I’m just glad it’s happening on my roster and not on somebody else’s.
Secondly, we have to acknowledge the obvious caveat that 55 games is not a full season and is still a relatively small sample size. Ibanez could very easily slow down and finish with 30-35 HRs (which is actually my expectation for what will happen), which would still be an above average season based on his career stats, but certainly not as eye-popping and outside the mean as the pace he is on right now. The truth is that even I, the most ardent Ibanez supporter heading into 2009, do not expect him to maintain his current 600 AB pace and hit 52 home runs.
Thirdly, it’s time for me to begrudgingly acknowledge the elephant in the room: any aging hitter who puts up numbers this much better than his career averages is going to immediately generate suspicion that the numbers are not natural, that perhaps he is under the influence of some sort of performance enhancer. And since I was not able to draw any absolute parallels between his prodigously improved HR rate and his new ballpark’s hitter-friendliness, it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that “other” performance enhancers could be part of the equation.
Sorry Raul Ibanez and Major League Baseball, that’s just the era that we are in — testing or no testing.
Personally, I am withholding judgment until we see a full seasons’ worth of stats. Many players put together terrific runs of 150-250 ABs in the midst of otherwise normal or just slightly above average (based on their career numbers) seasons. Ibanez’s terrific 219 AB run since Opening Day is just magnified right now because it came at the start of the season.
Maybe he was energized by joining the defending World Series champs.
Maybe he is seeing better pitchers by joining a lineup that includes Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Shane Victorino.
Maybe he is in the midst of a run of good luck in which he’s seeing good pitches to hit at above-average hitters parks and finding himself facing terrible pitchers even at the tougher hitters parks he’s played in.
Maybe Raul Ibanez is simply a “freak”, and has been a late bloomer with a career track that refuses to follow the norm, as explained in this Bleacher Report post.
Maybe the 37-year old Ibanez trained differently this offseason with the pressure of joining the Phillies’ great lineup and is in the best shape he’s ever been in.
And maybe that training included…
Well, you know where that one was going, but I’d prefer to leave it as unstated speculation. However, if Ibanez ends up hitting 45-50 homers this year, you can bet that I won’t be the only one raising the question. And judging by my buddy’s message board post this morning, and questions like this in public forums, people already are.
For the record, Ibanez has denied ever using steroids. Back in 2007 when former Mariners OF Shane Monahan said that the clubhouse culture in Seattle led him to use steroids, Ibanez and Jamie Moyer came out and publicly lambasted Monahan while denying that steroids had ever been a presence in the Mariners clubhouse. Of course, as well (sic) all know, explicit denials of steroid use don’t really mean a whole hell of a lot these days.
It will be a wonderful day when we can see a great start by a veteran like Ibanez and not immediately jump to speculating about whether steroids or PEDs are involved. We certainly are not at that point yet, however.
And whether we ever get there remains to be seen.
In his Inquirer column, Gonzalez called Morris’ post a “cheap shot,” and lamented the changing nature of our media universe:
There was a time when a small, regional site like MSF could write something like that and no one would notice. Not anymore. Not long after the Ibanez post went up, Hugging Harold Reynolds - a popular national blog - linked to it on its Twitter feed. And just like that, we were off. Less than an hour later, I had several e-mails in my inbox asking if I read the MSF story and whether I believe Ibanez is chemically enhanced.
From zero to heated debate in under 60 minutes. That’s both impressive and distressing.
The MSF post, written by the previously undiscovered poet “JRod,” noted that Ibanez has bashed the majority of his 19 homers at hitter-friendly parks like the new Yankee Stadium, Great American Ball Park in Cincy, and Citizens Bank Park. It also conceded that Ibanez has taken advantage of some really terrible pitchers - guys like Daniel Cabrera, Scott Olsen and Saul Rivera, all of whom have badly bloated ERAs.
Then JRod dismissed all the evidence of opportunism, pivoted like a second baseman turning a double play, and fired his conclusion into the mitts of conspiracy theorists and amateur drug testers everywhere: “Any aging hitter who puts up numbers this much better than his career averages is going to immediately generate suspicion that the numbers are not natural, that perhaps he is under the influence of some sort of performance enhancer. . . . Maybe the 37-year-old Ibanez trained differently this off-season with the pressure of joining the Phillies’ great lineup and is in the best shape he’s ever been in. And maybe that training included. . . . Well, you know where that one was going, but I’d prefer to leave it as unstated speculation.”
Yeah, except when you put the words “under the influence” in close proximity to “performance enhancer,” that’s not really “unstated speculation.” That’s pretty much an updated version of the old “Hey, pal, have you stopped beating your wife yet?” trick.
I’m not a blog hater. I’m not an old-school newspaper guy who fears the Internet the way children fear what’s under their bed. Far from it. And I’m no apologist for Major League Baseball or the players who chose a quick way to get better and forever tarnished their sport as a result.
MLB started the fire, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep it going by tossing players and their Louisville sluggers into the flames. At a time when anybody’s opinion can be quickly amplified and the weakest voices can suddenly make the loudest noise, I worry about fairness.
Ibanez hasn’t tested positive, and he’s denied taking PEDs on multiple occasions. Until there’s proof to the contrary, shouldn’t all of us - from the traditional mainstream media to bloggers - be judicious about calling people cheaters? It’s easier to sling mud than ever before, which is why we need to be careful when taking aim.
I’ll come back to what Gonzalez wrote. On the ESPN segment, Rosenthal in particular was furious at Jrod, accusing him of being irresponsible and lecturing him on the power of the written word and of the need for standards in writing. When Jrod demurred that his piece was mis-read to some degree, Rosenthal essentially mocked that claim, blaming Jrod for that, declaring that the blogger was responsible for the eruption of the controversy and for the player’s reaction. Now I assume that Ken Rosenthal doesn’t really want writers’ to be judged exclusively by the most distorted readings of their work. Rosenthal has, in the past, written and spoken intelligently about the failure of his profession to do its due diligence during what everyone now assumes to be the height of the steroid era - the mid to late 1990s. And his frustration with what he views as perhaps an over-correction to that failure - by seeing PED use in every outlier performance - is understandable.
But both Gonzalez’ Inquirer column and Rosenthal’s uncharacteristically unhinged appearance on ESPN reveal more about the highly selective invocation of standards by mainstream media and its own bizarre professional prerogatives than they do about Morris’ post.
First, concerning Gonzalez, though he declares that he is not a blog hater, it’s hard not to detect a lament about the new media age - in which it is no longer necessary to land a plum columnists’ job at a big city paper to have an audience. Gonzalez clearly thinks that’s a bad thing, but the question has to be begged - if blogs were a more prominent part of the sports landscape in the 1990s, would Major League Baseball have gotten the free pass it did on steroids? I can’t answer that question with certainty. But I do know this: columnists and beat writers, in sports (as in politics) have proven themselves fatally compromised by their access. The journalistic justification for access is that it allows the media inside the workings of institutions of public interest in order to better inform the public. In reality, we know that insider access has been abused beyond all recognition. Greenwald has written repeatedly and incisively about how poisonous for our information environment has been the granting of anonymity to sources, leading not to a better informed public, but rather to spinning, score-settling and misinformation.
For example, Jeffrey Rosen’s now notorious original smear against Judge Sotomayor was based entirely on anonymous sources. After facing furious criticism for his reckless, ill-informed speculations about Sotomayor, Rosen tried to explain his behavior by claiming that the discredited smear was really just a “blog” post (it wasn’t). Greenwald destroyed that assertion.
The consequence of insider access in sports has been a tendency of sports media to play favorites - to speculate destructively about players media don’t like and to paper over possibly uncomfortable information about players who media do like. Typically, this game of favoritism is based on how friendly athletes are to those who cover them. If players are cooperative and give lots of access, they will invariably gain a reputation as a “good guy” with all the privileges that accompany that characterization.
I have heard it repeated endlessly in recent months that sports media had “no choice” during the 1990s when it came to airing their suspicions about steroid use. Why? Because of the threat of a lawsuit for printing unfounded speculation. Not having been in a newsroom during that time, I cannot say whether that fear was a pervasive one. I can say this - I have heard that excuse far more in the past six months than I had ever heard it before. This makes me suspicious that it was really a concern ten years ago. As Rosenthal himself has noted, there were people in the 1990s who managed to write about the issue, including a widely discussed column by Bob Nightengale for USA Today in 1995. In fact, Thomas Boswell wrote about steroids in the Washington Post as far back as 1989. And, as I noted back in March, when one writer raised questions about Mark McGwire’s performance in 1998, he was shot down not because of fear of lawsuits, but because other baseball writers didn’t like him killing their buzz over what was, at the time, one of the most exciting baseball stories in a generation. Finally, as I have pointed out a couple of times, when a player is disliked, there appears to be no restraint on repeating unfounded accusations. Selena Roberts’ very serious accusation that Alex Rodriguez conspired with opposing players to undermine his own team’s performance was based entirely on anonymous sources with no serious effort at independent corroboration.
In sum, the argument that baseball writers did as much as they legally could during the 1990s is simply bullshit. Furthermore, the notion that it’s only blogs that push speculation is also self-evident garbage. And finally, it is fair to suggest that the kind of insider-access that elite media enjoy are as likely to distort and undermine their responsibility to the public and the maintaining of standards of journalistic integrity as to promote those values.
Any fair reading of Morris’ post would not conclude that he “dismissed all the evidence” that he himself adduced to suggest that Ibanez’ performance could be legitimate, as Gonzalez claimed. In fact, among the striking facts about Morris’ post is how much more thorough it is than the typical newspaper column or quick soundbite on Baseball Tonight. Furthermore, Gonzalez’ cheap shots at the size of the blog, and Jrod’s status as a previously “undiscovered poet” are just petty.
Obviously, plenty of what appears on blogs is of questionable merit (present company included, of course). But the standards problem in modern journalism is not a consequence of the rise of blogs. It is a product of the growing insularity of mainstream media, where access long ago ceased to be a means to an end, and became an end in itself - a perk of being admitted to a club that only a few could ever hope to join. This increasingly problematic dynamic caused mainstream media to fail utterly in covering the WMD story (and other related catastrophes) and also led it to miss the biggest story in baseball for years. In fact, the rise of both sports and politics blogs owes itself in no small measure to the increasing inadequacies of traditional media outlets in covering their areas of responsibility.
I have never read John Gonzalez before and won’t presume to pass judgment on his talents as a writer until I see more of his work. And as I mentioned above, I generally like Rosenthal alot (though I cannot resist noting that anyone who draws their paycheck from FOX should feel at least a little self-conscious about insisting on high media standards). But watch the video above and read Morris’ and Gonzalez’ columns and ask yourself - which of these sportswriters has conducted himself in the most serious and conscientious way? From whom did you learn the most? And whom would you most trust to provide you with relevant, well-informed analysis in the future?
I had never heard of Morris before, but I know how I would answer those questions.
Update:
Morris has responded to many of the criticisms of his post with an updated entry, and acknowledged some of what his critics have said. Which only amplifies my point about his level of conscientiousness versus your typical mainstream sports media star.
Tags: Jerrod Morris, John Gonzalez, Ken Rosenthal, Raul Ibanez, sports media
major league baseball
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[...] Gonzalez clearly thinks that’s a bad thing, but the question has to be begged - if blogs were a more prominent part of the sports landscape in the 1990s, would Major League Baseball have gotten the free pass it did on steroids? … [...]…
Two things to note:
First, the self-described ‘real journalists’ point to Ibanez’ denial of ever using PED’s as proof positive that Jrod’s speculation (and it is just that, speculation) is specious. Were they in a fugue state when we watched Raffy Palmiero self-righteously wag his finger at Congress? They musta missed Clemens, too, I guess. Ibanez denies it. Great. Perhaps he’s telling the truth. Perhaps not. No matter what the case, his denial is not final, objective, empirical evidence that he did not use steroids. And as journalists, they should know that.
Second, there are plenty of shitty blogs out there, perhaps mine among them. There are lots of irresponsible bloggers. But, and this is based on my reading of Jrod’s Ibanez post only, this doesn’t seem to be one of them. The guy was thoughtful and culled through a ton of data. As you pointed out, he used oceanloads more analysis than newspapers typically run. The advantage that a blog has is that it’s not subject to Draconian word or inch counts, and because the writer is free from those constraints, they can exhaust tons of data and deal with various theories. Word counts/column space are very limiting, in my personal experience.
Third, okay, it was three things, not two, isn’t this eerily reminiscent of the dismissal of the SABRmetrics guys way back, before they were lionized by Michael Lewis? It was a new way to analyze data. It was painstaking and bordered on the obsessive-compulsive, but it turned out to be a very effective tool. Not the only tool available to ball clubs, but an effective tool to add to the arsenal nonetheless. And yet, for years, lots of baseball guys dismissed Sabrmetrics as hookum and it’s proponents as laughable nutjobs who, you got it, manipulated statistics and number in their underwear in their parents basements.
Just saying.
Jody
You’re dead on. What’s noteworthy about Jrod’s post is how thorough he was (including in his follow-up). Does the word “sample-size” ever make it into a mainstream sports column?
And, yes, your bonus third point is right - too. It is reminiscent of the long-time dismissal of sabermetrics, another important story in baseball that mainstream journalists were very late to, despite one low-budget team having a decade of success using sabermetrics (the A’s) and another reversing eight decades of “cursed” history once they gave their organization over to its principles.
And a fourth, bonus, bonus point. Given all we know about ballplayers, about Selig’s impotence (or apathy), about Don Fehr and a union that has fought even minimal testing tooth and nail; and given that we know the mice are always one step ahead of the mouse traps: every player is suspect. It makes me sad that I feel that way about a game that was such a big part of my youth, but there it is. So when an old guy like Ibanez starts hitting dingers like a young Reggie Jackson? Dude, there’s not a salt lick big enough for me to take that with.