Ben and Sam discuss a cricket replay review controversy, a few of Ruben Amaro’s regrettable moves, and the suspensions of Jhonny Peralta and Nelson Cruz.
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Trying to point out where the steroid era begins and ends, using data, is not as easy as you might think. While there are substances you can take to increase muscle mass, and that has direct consequences on athleticism, there just isn’t a clear moment where one the numbers pinpoint the beginnings of steroid usage in Major League Baseball. That might be because the pitchers were on them too, or that the steroid era reaches further back than we suppose, or continues more into today’s game than we prefer to think.
As good as Jose Fernandez is, there still exists a critical angle. Fernandez, of course, pitches for the Marlins, and the Marlins get a lot of things wrong. The Internet usually doesn’t let those things go by unacknowledged, and the Marlins, this year, placed Fernandez on their opening-day roster. Fernandez was coming straight from Single-A, and had the Marlins waited even just a couple weeks, they could’ve preserved an extra year of team control. Instead, Fernandez is due to become a free agent in five years, instead of six. Viewed objectively, viewed just on paper, that decision is needlessly wasteful. The Marlins had no plans to contend. Fernandez didn’t need to be up that quick.
But there’s no sense in letting that dominate the conversation, because let’s revisit the beginning of that paragraph: “As good as Jose Fernandez is.” Fernandez just, and I mean just turned 21, and he’s outstanding. It’s fine to talk about contracts and service time, and those details are important, but that’s not nearly as interesting as on-field performance. Though Matt Harvey’s drawn more of the headlines, Fernandez has more quietly exceeded most reasonable expectations, and in the interest of better appreciating what he’s done, I thought we could take a few minutes to dig in. Let’s go beyond “Jose Fernandez is great.” What are some of his defining characteristics?
Episode 367
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses, as reasonably as possible, the consequences of baseball’s most recent PED-related suspensions.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 39 min play time.)
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For a while, Biogenesis didn’t exist. Then for a while, Biogenesis did exist, but we didn’t know anything about it. Then we started to know a lot about it, and in particular a lot about its distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, but it didn’t seem like baseball would be able to hand out much in the way of discipline. Then it seemed like baseball would be able to deliver suspensions, but not until 2014, after appeals were dealt with. Now baseball has handed out suspensions and all but one will go un-fought. This Monday is the big day: on this Monday, players tied to Biogenesis have been given official discipline.
Naturally, people are going to have questions. What does a 50-game suspension mean? What are the rest of the consequences out of all this? It’s too soon to really have an FAQ, because this early no Qs have been FA’d, so consider this FAQ more anticipatory. Let’s focus on the suspended Nelson Cruz, and the suspended Jhonny Peralta.
| 3:59 |
Wendy — do we have information on how MLB will calculate the “50 games” for players who are in the minor leagues, where the seasons end in early September? |
| 4:03 |
: Welcome all. Thanks for the questions. I’ll do my best to get you answers.
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| 4:05 |
: MLB stated in its press release that all suspensions will begin immediately, even for minor league players, other than for Jordan Norberto, who is not currently signed with a team. Minor leaguers will serve suspensions via minor league games. If there aren’t enough minor league games this year to get to 50, the suspensions will roll over to 2014.
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| 4:05 |
Is the moral of Biogenesis that the league is wasting a large amount of time and money testing 1000’s of players for PED’s numerous times every year? |
| 4:07 |
: It can be frustrating to see this kind of situation years after the players and the league agreed to a rigorous testing program. A few things to remember. First, players aren’t tested every day. Second, the biochemistry of PEDs is often a step or two ahead of the testing. That doesn’t make the testing meaningless. It just means that some PED isn’t captured but current tests. Expect the testing regime and the punishments to be strengthened.
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| 4:07 |
Could/should/will the MLB ban the Levinson’s/ACES from representing MLB players? |
Major League Baseball suspended 13 players today for violations of the Joint Drug Agreement based on evidence collected in its investigation of Biogenesis, the now-shuttered “anti-aging” clinic run by Anthony Bosch.
Jhonny Peralta (Tigers), Nelson Cruz (Rangers), Everth Cabrera (Padres), Francisco Cervilli (Yankees), Jesus Montero (Mariners), Antonio Bastardo (Phillies), Jordany Valdespin (Mets) and Sergio Escalona (Astros) were suspended for 50 games and agreed to forgo the appeal process, and will begin serving their suspensions immediately. Minor-league players Fernando Martinez (Astros), Jordan Norberto (free agent, formerly with the A’s), Fautino de los Santos (Padres) and Cesar Puello (Mets) also agreed to 50 game suspensions. All but Norberto will begin their suspensions immediately. Norberto’s suspension will become effective when and if he signs a contract with another team. This is a first JDA violation for each of these players.
The FanGraphs staff made its obligatory preseason picks before the season (naturally), and I think it’s safe to say that none of us have psychic powers. My picks of the Angels and Blue Jays to win their divisions — they’re not looking so hot right now. In my defense, I was just blindly going along with what our preseason WAR estimates told me. OK, not the greatest defense, but I figured Steamer + ZiPS + FG-created depth charts could produce better guesses than I could on my own. Especially with the roster changes that have happened lately, I thought it would be a good time to revisit our projections. The Angels came up the series victors against the Blue Jays in their recent four-game Battle of the Disappointments, but both teams are still far below the expectations put on them. However, let’s examine: could they actually be good teams who have just been unlucky?
Most teams have played somewhere around 110 games this season. That leaves plenty of room for unpredictability. If you flipped a coin 110 times, you’d expect to get about 55 heads, right? Well, the binomial distribution says there’s only about a 49.5% chance of the heads total being within even three of that (somewhere between 52 and 58 times). MLB teams are pretty different from coins — they’re a lot more expensive — but I think you can apply the same principle to them. The above calculation for the coin assumes the “true” rate of heads is 50%. What would we see if we were to presume our projections’ estimated preseason win totals are actually representative of the “true” win rates for each team? The following table will show you: Read the rest of this entry »
Last year, the AL MVP debate turned into something resembling a culture war, with Miguel Cabrera representing the traditional methods of player evaluation while Mike Trout was the darling of the sabermetric community. In the final tally, Cabrera won in a landslide, receiving 22 of the 28 first place votes, but Trout and Cabrera were #1 and #2 on 27 of the 28 ballots submitted, with Trout sliding to third on just one ballot. While there was disagreement over which of the two was more valuable, there was broad consensus that they represented a tier unto themselves, with everyone else looking up to their excellence.
Well, it’s happening again. If you pull up the leaderboard for American League hitters, there’s Mike Trout at #1 (+6.9 WAR), followed more closely than last year by Miguel Cabrera at #2 (+6.4 WAR). While Trout blew away the field by WAR last year, Cabrera’s having an even better season in 2013 than he did a year ago, while Trout is just a little shy of last year’s remarkable pace. This year, instead of the big gap in WAR being between Trout and Cabrera, the gap is between Trout/Cabrera and everyone else; Chris Davis, at +5.1 WAR, is a distant third.
| 12:10 |
: Welcome to this Haphazardly Scheduled Special Edition of Dan Szymborskirama.
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| 12:11 |
BREAKING: Szymborski suspended through 2014 for Twitter hijinks. |
| 12:12 |
: Dave just got the link up now (good reaction time, he did it within a minute of me emailing him)
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| 12:12 |
: But right now there are only *10* live readers (usual is about 700-1000), so it may be slow for a few minutes.
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| 12:12 |
Mets: Top 10 rotation in August 2014? |
| 12:14 |
: Yeah, add in Montero and Noah Syndarg…Synderga…Smith and it’s looking pretty sweet with Niese, Harvey, Wheeler
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