Wound Up Tight

I’ve always thought that it’s goofy to take the stats from pivotal week 1 or 2 of the Major League season and try to draw any meaningful conclusions from them. Would we pull the stats from, say, June 14 through 28 and, using only those stats, try to call the pennant races or top performers?

And yet, the debate on Baseball Tonight and on the sports web sites center on: Are the Mets for real? Are the Tigers for real? Will Schilling win 30 games? Will Bronson Arroyo hit 32 homers?

But perhaps even goofier than this gab is when people take two week’s worth of data and extrapolate a conspiracy theory. People like Dave van Dyck of the Chicago Tribune, who puts forth the opinion that the baseballs must be juiced this year.

His “proof?” Through games of Tuesday, 11 April, there were 108 MLB games, with 273 home runs. That’s an average of 2.53 homers per game, which is the highest average for April since 2000 (2.56 per game). And since MLB’s new tougher steroid testing is “taking the juice out of the players,” it stands to reason that MLB has done something to the ball to keep the offense rolling.

Van Dyck offers this empirical evidence that the balls are corked, or wound tighter, or juiced, or whatever you want to call it:

But the got-to-have-a-reason conspiracy theorists still believe something funny is going on. How else to explain Michael Barrett hitting two of his three homers when the wind was blowing in? Ditto for Derrek Lee?

How else, how else...? Boy, that’s a poser...

Here’s a thought -- maybe Lee is a real good hitter. Maybe Barrett had a hell of a week. Stop me if I’m getting too far into X-Files territory here...

[A brief aside: Thank God that the editors at the Tribune have no sense of irony. On the facing page of the paper, not twelve inches from van Dyck’s insight, the headline from the White Sox story read “Thome hits his 5th HR in 8 games.” No mention of juiced balls in that story, of course...]

To be fair, van Dyck might not be the only one peddling this stuff. From what I’ve heard on the radio, the theory has been floating around. To be honest, I haven’t tried very hard to find other citations.

Fortunately, this weekend featured many games with normal scores (you know, 4-2, 5-1, 2-1...even a 1-0 game at Coors Field). So hopefully this is the last we’ll hear about it.

Another sort of conspiracy theory comes courtesy of the Trib’s Rick Morrissey. Where van Dyck sees jackrabbit baseballs, Morrissey sees something darker:

I’m worried about human growth hormone, which baseball doesn’t test for yet. I’m worried about designer steroids that can’t be detected. I’m worried about cutting-edge masking agents that make performance-enhancing drugs invisible. I’m worried that Bonds still looks like a linebacker.

We all would like to believe baseball has put the clamps on cheating, but that would be naive thinking...Just because Congress has pressured baseball, just because MLB has gotten serious about testing and just because a recently released book seems to have caught Bonds with the goods doesn’t mean players have been scared straight.

It means that some of them might have turned to more sophisticated means of cheating. It means baseball needs at least to try to keep pace with science, even if it’s a losing battle...I still wonder, a lot, whether performance-enhancing drugs are alive and well in baseball. And it’s going to take a long time to stop wondering. That’s what getting burned does to you.

While I can understand Morrissey’s “fool me once...” attitude, I find it quite sad. It is foolish to assume that no MLB players are using. But it’s exceedingly cynical to take two homer-laden weeks and see nothing but users. In its own way, Morrissey’s position is as futile and pointless as van Dyck’s.