Jose Bautista shot down rumors of steroid use before Monday night’s game:
“I haven’t heard it once,” Bautista responded evenly when asked for his reaction to the unfounded allegations. “Nobody’s said anything to me, and I don’t see why they should. Baseball has a strict policy against those performance-enhancing whatever you want to call them.”
No doubt the debate will continue, with Bautista increasing his major league-leading homer total to 40 with two more Monday against the Yankees – including the eventual game-winning run on a solo shot in the eighth inning to lift the Blue Jays to a scrappy 3-2 win.
I’m glad people are asking questions and wondering about this. Bautista’s season should raise every red flag there is about PEDs. His career slugging percentage coming into this season was .400 in 1754 at bats. He’s slugging .600 this season. Slugging percentage is a measure of distance around the bases per at bat, so he’s increased that distance by 50%. Secondly, he’s not a young player entering his prime, he’s coming to the end of that prime. He’s at the age that as an outfielder who is a poor hitter, he could easily lose his job as a major league player.
Of course, he could have just learned to hit better. It does happen. Dave Cameron points out that his swing has changed, and he hits more fly balls than in previous seasons. It’s not just the ball flying farther off his bat, he appears to have made a conscious decision to hit more home runs. If I were running MLB drug testing, however, I’d spring a lot of random tests on him just to make sure.
Update: Will Carroll says I’m wrong about the random testing. I did mean testing for cause. If enough red flags go up, test for cause. If the test come back negative, release a statement to the press that says, we test him six times in two months, and all the results were negative. Then everyone has a good idea the system is working.
I love the last line of this post!
@Dan: Thanks.
Even if you tested him everyday there would be people blankly concluding he must have taken PEDs before the random tests began. The clean players can’t win.
I’d be a lot more suspicious if there were any evidence that any PED in the universe really does make players hit more home runs. I say this not as any kind of defense of Batista, who I think is a schmuck, but purely as a general bit of skepticism.
In terms of age, I’ve heard him compared somewhat to Raul Ibanez – players who got a later start on their careers, and with less wear and tear, presumably, have their age curve pushed back a few years. Look at his timeline, makes sense to me. James, why do you think he’s a schmuck? That just is a ridiculous allegation. Because he’s hitting HRs and denies he’s using steroids? It’s not like he’s Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens.
@James: I share that skepticism. Having Bautista come back negative over weeks of tests would help so that skepticism might be right.
KG: Oh, no, his being a schmuck has nothing to do with any possible drug use.
Then maybe provide a shred of reasoning as to why you think he’s a schmuck? He’s been a pleasure to watch every day for the Jays.
Oh, sure. For instance, in yesterday’s game he almost started a brawl. Was that a pleasure to watch? It’s a hallmark of schmucks, in my book.
Reading some of the comments, some folks seem to forget there are designer steroids that can avoid detection. A negative test means little. HGH of course is not even tested.
Folks ask for evidence that PED’s help. Unfortunately, you can not examine it in a controlled setting. We don’t know exactly when players used, and only a handful have actually been caught. However, since players risk health and penalty to use them, one has to imagine it does help them, even if it is only a placebo effect. Looking at the top HR hitters over the last 20 years, a fairly high percentage have been tainted with steroids.
Also, if it helps hit HR, it also helps you hit more singles (SOB is higher). So I will not rule out any non-HR hitter as a potential PED abuser. Remember Manny Alexander I say, and pitchers have been known to use as well.
As for MLB’s testing program, the utter lack of transparency about who is tested and when/where (after the fact), and the fact few players at the MLB level have tested positive, makes me wonder if there is a hole in the testing program that can be exploited by the players (an intentional hole, wink wink).
As for Bautista, you can go back to a player before steroids existed, in 1967, in his 7th MLB season and see how we went from never hitting more than 20 HR and 16 HR in 1966 to 44 HR and falling back to 23 HR in 1968. He never even hit 30 HR again in a season after 1970, and hit 20 only 3 times over the next 13 seasons.
Yaz supposedly was motivated and did a lot of strength conditioning in the off season before the 67 season and landed a 3 year contract making 500 K over 3 years, more money than the President as my astonished grandfather liked to say.
Bautista seems to have a lot of company with the Blue Jays in terms of players having career years in HR. I mean, Alex Gonzalez had 17 HR before being traded. Might be their approach, they swing at the first pitch more than any team and have 42 first pitch HR, double that of most teams. They may also be storing the balls in a drier environment. Balls seem to jump off the bat in Toronto. As with most things, there might a combination of things at play.
My only disagreement is that I disagree with the public psychology of announcing you’ve tested him a bunch recently and he’s come back clean. I think at least as many people will take the fact of the testing as evidence that he has done something wrong (but managed to beat the test), as will think the tests prove him clean. For that reason I think a player, or a union, would have good grounds to resist the announcement that MLB has decided to test him because of red flags.
See Brady Anderson, 1996.