I’d like to see a cite for this assessment. After all, since some work stoppages have been either avoided completely or kept to a short duration, it’s only logical to suggest the players have not “ignored all pronouncements from every commissioner.”
Ummmm…testosterone is an anabolic steroid.
Yeah I’m with you a hundred percent. Poor owners and players, what a rough life they have, boo hoo.
I think this thread shows the fans care so much about steroids, its a HUGE, maybe top 2 issue to us. I doubt it will even be addressed by MLB or the players.
But what particularly irks me is that the players (having learned last time) are waiting for the post-season to strike, because they lost so much money striking in August.
This way they lose fewer checks. Who cares if the post season is lost (& renders the regular season moot).
And the players are who I see as the [maybe just 51 TO 49%] the good - or less bad- guys
Why? This isn’t football, where what matters most is simply being bigger and faster than the other guys on the field. McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, et al. can bulk up all they want – their strength will help when they do connect, but steroids aren’t going to do a thing for their timing, selectivity in swinging at pitches, or any of a host of other individual factors that go into being a successful hitter at the major league level. Steroids don’t draw walks at a rate of 1.3 per game (109 in 82 games) – Barry Bonds does. Neither does strength do anything for most of the component skills of pitchers; Pedro Martinez, Tom Glavine, Odalis Perez, and a bunch of other guys at the top of the charts for ERA, Ks, etc. are all 6-0 or less and 200 lbs or under, while Randy Johnson and Derek Lowe are tall but not particularly bulky. Given the level of acquired skill and understanding of the game required to play well at the major league level, I hardly see steroids as being worth worrying too much about one way or the other. Which is why I’d expect the players to accept some form of testing as a concession to the owners in the unlikely event that the owners reopen negotiations with some intention of reaching a settlement.
Do you have a cite for this? Because based on my understanding of things, the players’ leverage in these negotiations peaks sometime late in the season, as the pennant races come to a climax and the owners prepare to enjoy their most profitable dates of the year (the pennant races and postseason).
Spoken like a true fan . . . of football or basketball or hockey. Those are all sports where the regular season is more or less moot anyway – it’s like an extended exhibition season that determines seeding in the playoffs, which are the real season. In a baseball regular season, quality over the long haul generally wins out, and the addition of several rounds of playoffs just increases the chances that a hot streak or flukey performance will allow a lesser team to beat a better one.
Is the understanding of the situation among baseball fans so simplistic that people really think the players are striking over money? That’s too depressing to even contemplate. Money per se isn’t what this is about for the players. It’s about not allowing the owners to drag the players back to the bad old days when the players had to take whatever the owners offered them or quit the game (as Curt Flood did). The owners are crying and whining about competitive balance and their fictional losses, but there are any number of things that could be done to improve competitive balance without having to be approved by the players as part of collective bargaining – but they won’t, because such changes would hurt the teams with the highest revenues (Yankees, Dodgers, Braves, etc.), and the small-market owners that would benefit the most don’t really give a damn about fielding competitive teams anyway. Meanwhile, the owners who’ve been around for a while seem to care less about ensuring their own financial success than about making the players be the ones who have to eat shit this time around, since the owners have lost – badly – every time there’s been a labor dispute.
Doug Pappas’ Business of Baseball pages cover the whole baseball labor situation pretty thoroughly. I particularly like his article on why the players will win again this time.
I was under the impression that the steroids did help a bit with bat speed, but I could be mistaken. In any event, the point about steroid use isn’t that the pitchers are better or that players can draw more walks, it’s that balls are being hit out of the park at a record pace, which might - might - be attributed in part to steroid use by certain players.
It’s not that every slugger is guilty, but there are some out there who are getting an artificial boost.
And the attitude of some of the players is pretty bad, too. When the Caminiti story broke, Sammy Sosa said that if there was testing, he’d be first in line. So Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated said, would you take a test now? And Sammy got quite pissed. In other words, they can beat their chest all they want about being completely innocent, but if anyone dares ask them to prove it, they get indignant. How dare we accuse them!
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Jimmmy Quote
But what particularly irks me is that the players (having learned last time) are waiting for the post-season to strike, because they lost so much money striking in August.
rackensack quote
Do you have a cite for this? Because based on my understanding of things, the players’ leverage in these negotiations peaks sometime late in the season, as the pennant races come to a climax and the owners prepare to enjoy their most profitable dates of the year (the pennant races and postseason). **
I agree. I’m not sure where we don’t. The players lost paychecks from Aug-Oct. last time. This time, they are waiting for the post season when only a few would be playing anyway & the vast majority of the money to be made is the owners.
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Jimmmy quote:
This way they lose fewer checks. Who cares if the post season is lost (& renders the regular season moot).
rackensack quote
Spoken like a true fan . . . of football or basketball or hockey. Those are all sports where the regular season is more or less moot anyway – it’s like an extended exhibition season that determines seeding in the playoffs, which are the real season …
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- My point was more of the same above re the loss of another Series. Further, & incidentally(literally parenthetically) the regular season is moot, we players know and plan it to be so but give me my money anyway.*
Re steroids I think, & most commentary I’ve read & heard, surrounds the sluggers & hitting rather than pitching. As a knowledgable purist do you really think McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, et al. re-writing the record books ever year is good for the game? It matters a great deal if what, say 10 years ago, would be a double is now routinely a HR due to juice…that bothers me & I think alot of other folks… I doubt owners or players give a rats ass about that issue & I think its a shame
OK. We agree more than not. But at the risk of sounding like a hired apologist for the players, I really don’t think the number of missed paychecks is a huge motivator for the players. If several independent sources are correct, many of the owners have current outstanding loans with provisions making them due and payable in full immediately in the event of a work stoppage. The players know this, and know that the owners are likely to cave within a week no matter when the strike occurs, because otherwise those clubs will be immediately insolvent. Thus the players don’t stand to lose many checks regardless of what happens. What the players can’t do is wait until after postseason, when they have no leverage at all and the owners can then declare an impasse in negotiations and unilaterally impose new terms on the players.
I don’t consider it a problem that the record book gets re-written – it doesn’t bother me that almost none of the hitting records extant in 1915 were intact a decade later, so why should it bother me that one single-season record – total HRs – should have been broken twice in the space of three or four years? Literally hundreds of balls that were doubles or triples in the 1900s and 1910s became homers in the 1920s and 1930s – the game survived, adjustments were made, and then in the 1960s the pitchers took over the game for a while. There’s always something changing in the game, whether it’s the size of the ballparks, the resilience of the ball, the size of the strike zone, the height of the mound, or the strength of the hitters.
Here’s a thought experiment for you – assume that two of the three hitters to have hit more than 61 HR in a season (Bonds, Sosa, and McGwire) have used steroids to help them bulk up, and that one hasn’t. Doesn’t the one that hasn’t enhanced himself chemically demonstrate that it’s not the steroids that are hitting home runs? Players today do a whole lot of things to make themselves better players overall than players of past generations. Wouldn’t it be more surprising if players who spend year round working out and training for the game failed to exceed the performance standards of the generations of players who spent the off-season working as truck drivers, lawyers, and gravediggers?
My point originally was simply that while steroid use may allow an outstanding ballplayer to hit the ball a bit farther, perhaps coverting a few warning track outs to HRs, they’re not going to make a bad or mediocre hitter any better, because the skills and talents they lack aren’t affected at all by steroids.
I agree with you about the strike. I would rather go and watch a bunch of kids playing little league for the fun of the sport instead of paying $40. per ticket to watch a bunch of selfish assholes !!!