Quote of the Day (Wall Street Journal, Comparing Nelson Cruz and Babe Ruth)

“In 37 career postseason games, [Nelson] Cruz’s production is largely comparable to what [Babe] Ruth did through the first 37 of his 41 career postseason games. Cruz has more home runs (16 to 13), more hits (41 to 37) and more RBI (32 to 27) in only two more plate appearances than Ruth had over the same span.”—Brian Costa, “The Count: Babe Ruth or Nelson Cruz? Not an Easy Choice,” The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2014

Few articles in The Wall Street Journal—even those editorials that sound like bad leftover musings of Gilded Age plutocrats—have left me sputtering with rage quite as much as the one quoted above. Oh, yes, Costa allows that Babe Ruth was a pretty fair pitcher during the postseason—an accomplishment that Nelson Cruz (pictured) can never hope to duplicate—and, if the writer wanted to explore defense a bit further, he could note that The Bambino, unlike Cruz, not only played the outfield on a regular basis but also that, early in his career, Ruth’s arm made him one of the better corner outfielders in the game.

But no—Costa is leaving out something far more fundamental. The only things that Ruth put into his body that could be considered outside the norm were gargantuan portions of hot dogs and beer. In contrast, Cruz, as every baseball writer knows, was suspended for 50 games in 2013 as part of the Biogenesis performance-enhancing drugs (PED) scandal.

Every baseball writer knows this, but you’d be surprised how few are inclined to bring it up this time of year—in fact, this year at all. The only notable exception I can think of was back in early July. At that point, John Lackey, then still with the Boston Red Sox, and smarting after a pasting (a homer, a double, and a single) given him by the Baltimore Orioles “slugger,” made one of those no-comments-that-say-everything: "I've got nothing to say about him. There are some things I'd like to say, but I'm not going to. You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff."

The media love a controversy as much as anything else, and they couldn’t have been happier when O’s skipper Buck Showalter retaliated with one of his own no-comments-that-say-everything: “Everybody needs to make sure that their own backyard is clean."

Now, sensing a feud, reporters were happy to provide a bit of context: Lackey was making a veiled reference to Cruz’s enforced sitdown, while Showalter had in mind the failed (and mysteriously unexplained and undisciplined) 2003 drug test by Bosox designated hitter David Ortiz.

I’m not a fan of Lackey, who showed class neither in downing fried chicken and beer as his old team choked in manager Terry Francona's last season nor in calling the resulting controversy about it “retarded.” But his sullen no-comment about Cruz was entirely warranted—especially the part about how “You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff." 

This time of year, on the air and in print, it’s all about how Cruz is killing the ball. Players, front offices, and broadcast booths all have vested interests in accepting retiring Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Bud Selig’s belief that everything is fine on the Good Ship Lollipop, and that nobody would even think of trying to circumvent the sport’s PED ban.

It is unpleasant to think and write this, but who is to say that Cruz is not resorting to PEDs again? Two prominent similar cases of this phenomenon have already occurred, involving Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez. In the case of A-Rod, the discovery of his continuing involvement with PEDs came not from a positive drug test but because of a lengthy and damning paper trail.

In fact, many of the players detected by the drug program have been minor-leaguers—i.e., too young and stupid to realize that human growth hormone rather than steroids is more likely to boost performance without triggering a positive identification.

You would think, then, given this background, that Costa might have learned the importance of avoiding categorical statements by looking at a past headline from his own paper, back in 2012: “Earth to Tigers: Stop Pitching to Nelson Cruz.”  That was printed at a time when, it is reasonable to believe now, Cruz's blazing postseason performance resulted from a steroid regimen.

When the Texas Rangers decided to part ways with their longtime player following his 2013 suspension, Cruz signed a one-year deal with the Orioles worth $8 million. As a free-agent following a monster year, he can now expect a sizable increase in his contract no matter what team he signs with—a nice bit of change for a player entering his mid-30s. All the more reason, then, why he might choose to go with the odds and try to resort to PEDs again.

Two weeks ago, Costa’s Journal colleague Daniel Barbarisi wrote about the icy treatment he received from Derek Jeter after a tweet that joked about meeting the Yankee icon and his latest glamorous girlfriend, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Hannah Davis, in an elevator.  Perhaps Costa dreads a similarly wintry reception from the entire Orioles clubhouse.

But Jeter’s annoyance, however seemingly petty, had a point: his private conduct, unless it was illegal, had no bearing on his on-field performance. The same cannot be said for Cruz: Almost certainly, the past PED use of  “Mohamad” (the nickname for the player on a July 2012 client list kept by Biogenesis head Anthony Bosch) meant that pennants had been decided, careers made or unmade, because of an unfair advantage he possessed.

So, with the Orioles having moved on now to the American League Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals, instead of the media launching the same, boring questions (e.g., “What was on your mind when you stepped to the plate late in the game with guys on base?”), let’s see Cruz answer these questions instead:

*If you are swinging the bat so well now, why did you feel the need to use PEDs in the first place?

*How long had you been using steroids before you were suspended?

*Do you retain ties to anyone who helped you get around the drug-testing program before, as Alex Rodriguez did with his "Cousin Yuri"?

*Did you use steroids in prior playoff appearances? If so, how can we be sure that you aren’t doing it again?

So, back to that article’s question: “Babe Ruth or Nelson Cruz? Not an Easy Choice.” Really? I mean, you’re kidding, right?

From ‘Cowboy Up' to ‘Band of Slugs': Red Sox Nation Suicide Watch II

As I write this, my New York Yankees have just fallen short of their annual goal: a World Series championship. Even in this case, however, the season won’t be wholly lost. The Bronx Bombers were awarded a consolation prize at the end of the season: the failure of their eternal enemies, the Boston Red Sox, even to make the postseason.

Faithful reader, do you, like me, feel that “Cowboy Up” was the most annoying neologism of the past decade? Yes, I know it was first baseman Kevin Millar’s rallying cry to his 2003 Red Sox teammates to show some grit and determination. But the phrase was so meaningless, so idiotic.

But then again, what other baseball team--especially what other World Series championship team, as the 2004 Bosox became--could not only embrace the term “Idiots” to describe themselves, but even come up with the word?

For most of this past decade, Red Sox Nation was full of itself. Intellectuals had romanticized their prior 80-plus years without a championship as a kind of Sisyphean struggle, an existential mismatch against the curse of a baseball deity (The Bambino) rather than the natural result of decades of mismanagement and worse. (To its shame, Boston was not only the last major-league ball club to sign an African-American--Pumpsie Green in 1959, a dozen years after Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers--but then took another decade and a half before it finally embraced its first homegrown African-American star, Jim Rice.)

But winning championships in 2004 and 2007 made the faithful insufferable. A populace mad with glee that they’d finally broken “The Curse” became as demanding as the Notre Dame alumni when they couldn’t repeat the successes of the Rockne and Leahy eras.

Red Sox Nation received its first jolt in 2009, when the name of David Ortiz (pictured here) appeared on a list of those who had tested positive for performing enhancing drugs (PEDs)--a seismic event I noted in a post from the time, “Red Sox Nation on Mass Suicide Watch.” Back then, I warned of an “end of the innocence” for Fenway fans, but few believed me. (A few die-hards even hoped against all reason and logic that his former teammate, proven heavy PEDder Manny Ramirez, only started using the stuff when he left town.) Without someone turning Big Papi’s life upside down ransacking for past and current misdeeds, as Selena Roberts did with the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez, the Bosox slugger's denial of PED use was taken at face value by the powers that be in major league baseball.

By spring training of this year, the Red Sox were regarded as a virtual lock for another American League pennant, if not a World Series title.

The latter claims were a bit rich. For all the sniping by Red Sox President Larry Lucchino about the Yankees' “evil empire," by the end of last year the team from Beantown had taken a page from the Bronx Bombers’ playbook by signing the most high-profile players for mega contracts. They had the third-highest payroll in major-league baseball, after the Phillies and, of course, the Yankees.

Perversely, Bosox fans wanted their team to be credited as underdogs even though it had been a very, very long time since they had been. All that stockpiling of talent and all that money were seductively whispering other things. The sports media listened to the sirens, and swooned.

Even in the closing week of this season, blissfully unaware of the train wreck then in full steam, Sports Illustrated, highlighting the new film adaptation of Michael Lewis’ bestseller Moneyball, with a cover story on its star, Brad Pitt, noted that A’s GM Billy Beane’s revolutionary thinking had been co-opted.

The perfect purloiners? “No team better defines the state of the art than the Red Sox,” helpfully explained writer Tom Verducci—the same on-air personality who, during the Yankee-Tiger series, did not pipe up about what had happened to the “state of the art” less than two weeks after his gushing article appeared on the newsstands.

As soon as I heard the news about the Red Sox losing the last, decisive game of the season—their 20^th loss in the final 27 games of the season—I knew that I had to check out The Boston Globe to witness the reaction of the faithful.

A journalism legend held that in April 1982, 73-year-old Jessie Bancroft Cox, from the family that owned The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones publications, had snapped, "What the hell's the matter with my Red Sox?" (perhaps more bluntly stated than that) before collapsing from a heart attack at New York's 21 Club. If Ms. Cox had reacted that way early in the season, what would today's faithful do about a late-season collapse invariably described with adjectives such as “epic,” “record-setting” and “monumental”?

Once I powered up my Kindle and downloaded that day’s issue of Boston’s equivalent of “All the News That Fits, We Print,” I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I hadn’t witnessed so much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth since I read Dante’s Inferno in college.

I sensed that Red Sox Nation was taking their team’s inexplicable squandering of their lead with typical rationality when I read the following level-headed analysis by Globe columnist Bob Ryan of what ailed this season’s much-vaunted free-agent acquisition, Carl Crawford: “The idea that the real Carl Crawford, the one who arrived here as a tough-out, run-scoring triple machine who also played a Gold Glove left field, had been kidnapped by space invaders and replaced with a look-alike might be the only conceivable explanation for his unrelentingly wretched performance this season.”

It got worse. The team that was supposed to have had a pitching staff surpassed only by the Philadelphia Phillies had seen it exposed pitilessly. Even the minor-league system that GM Theo Epstein had bragged about to Verducci was so thin that the GM desperately investigated a deal for another pitcher on the brink of the sudden-death playoff between the Sox and the Rays that never came off.

The team that couldn’t be beat was now discovered to have been fatally flawed: not just out of condition, but fielding a bunch of laggards and crybabies. Reflecting the swing in opinion was Globe writer Nick Cafardo, who took Red Sox management to task for its “kid-gloves treatment” of injured pitcher Clay Buckholz, then dared to criticize the once near-certain MVP Adrian Gonzalez for jogging down to first base, and even the once-untouchable Big Papi for the same sin.

“The hunger has to return,” Cafardo summed up the situation, “but how do you do that with the current band of slugs on the team?”

In the wake of all this sturm und drung, the departure of manager Terry Francona became foreordained, even if absurd and unjust. The parting of the ways was described as mutual, but Epstein’s bloody fingerprints could be found all over the ugly final scene. Someone needed to take the fall for this unprecedented failure, and it wasn’t going to be the aging boy genius in the front office.

How sad this all is! After all the Red Sox have given the Yankees over the years--Babe Ruth, Red Ruffing and other pitchers of the Golden Age, Sparky Lyle--it’s a shame nothing has been done in return.

I say we rectify the situation, starting with the conditioning issue that has so many in Boston so hepped up. I have just the guy in mind for the Red Sox, someone who, in fact, worked four years ago for the Bombers.

Just think: maybe he can do for the Sox what he did for the Yankees.

How Sweep It Is!

With all due apologies to Jackie Gleason, the Yankees’ 5-2 victory over the Red Sox last night should go a long way toward erasing any psychological advantage the Bosox once held over the Bronx Bombers.

Those eight losses earlier in the year were experienced by a far different club, with several components either malfunctioning or missing. This weekend, the Yanks set their divisional rivals back on their heels with defense (love those rally-killing double plays!), consistent starting and relief pitching, small ball and long ball (including by their most wondrous off-season acquisition, to my point of view, in many a year: Mark Teixeira, in the image accompanying this post).

It’s the Bosox’ turn to feel…shall we say, woozy—after a four-game sweep. It’s the greatest reversal of fortune in the rivalry since what a work colleague refers to as “the unfortunate events” of October 2004.

It’s the Bosox’ turn to worry—not just about making up ground on the Bronx Bombers (an increasingly hard road to go when you’re 6½ games behind) but even staying ahead of Tampa Bay and Texas in the wild-card standings.

And let’s not forget Big Papi. The only thing that could have been worse than his dismal plate performance over the past lost weekend would have been the lack of Players’ Association representatives by his side to back his contention that he wasn’t juicing.

Hmmm…that I-thought-it was-over-the-counter supplements defense…that I-was-never-told-I failed claim…Too bad A-Rod didn’t think of these all-purpose, get-out-of-jail-cards when he faced similar questions in the spring.

Oh well, no need to begrudge the Red Sox on this point. After all, they still have to lead the league in something.

Otherwise, what would happen to their precious self-righteousness and street cred with the intelligentsia and powers that be? (I still like Senator John Kerry’s slip of the lip concerning his favorite player: “Manny Ortez”: a nice blending of the twin towers—now discredited—of the Sox long-delayed return to glory.)

Red Sox Nation on Mass Suicide Watch

"I think you clean up the game by the testing. I test you, you test positive, you're going to be out. Period. If I test positive using any kind of banned substance I'm going to disrespect the game, my family, my fans and everybody. And I don't want to face the situation so I won't use it. I'm sure everybody is on the same page."—Boston Red Sox “slugger” David Ortiz, quoted by Nick Cafardo, “Deep Thoughts From Ortiz,” “Extra Bases: Red Sox Updates and Insights,” The Boston Globe, Feb. 16, 2009

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!

Sorry. It’s out of my system now.

Don’t get me wrong: I have no wish to poke fun at Big Papi himself. One of my cousins, a trustworthy, discerning fellow if I ever saw one, told me a few weeks ago at a party that he had had the pleasure earlier in this decade of meeting Ortiz in the Caribbean, where the DH-first baseman was playing winter ball.

My cousin was mightily impressed with the affability and lack of ego of Ortiz, who, at that time, expressed the hope that he might land with one of two contenders: the Yankees or the Red Sox. Obviously, we know how that turned out.

Ortiz could have gotten a dig in at A-Rod (who would have deserved it a thousand times over) earlier this year for testing positive, as more than one of his teammates have done in the past. Instead, he was the soul of graciousness.

No, my beef is not with the Bosox DH, but with the Red Sox Nation that lionized him beyond all reason. For the last year or so, they’ve been crowing an awful lot that they’ve won the World Series twice in the last six years, reversing Babe Ruth’s curse, and without benefit of the juicing that went on in the Bronx Zoo.

Now, it looks as if all that moral preening was a trifle premature. The Yankees and Mets (another New York sports team that administered the Curse of the Bambino when the Yankees were out of the running one year) were so heavily represented in the Mitchell Report on performing-enhancing drugs (PEDs) only because baseball's designated investigator (and Bosox investor) was able to land one hanger-on from these two ballclubs to point the finger at their teams. Only a bunch of idiots would have thought that their own club wouldn’t have their share of juicers.

But, as they’ve pointed out in the most tiresome manner over the last several years, the self-styled “Idiots” have all been up at Fenway, rockin’ and rollin’ their way since 2004.

This morning, wondering how Red Sox Nation was taking the news that Big Daddy had tested positive for PEDs, I got a copy of the nerve center for the crazed fans, the Boston Globe. There, tucked into the lower left-hand corner of the editorial pages, was the most expected, if predictable, of hand-wringing headlines: “Say It Ain’t So, Papi.”

Any publication whose parent company (The New York Times) possesses a 17% ownership claim in an organization they cover would, under normal circumstances, be afraid of conflict-of-issues questions—unless, of course, you’re the insufferably smug Globe, which has that close financial relationship with the Red Sox. Then, you cater to a fan base that at the moment looks bent on mass suicide over their favorite.

Several weeks ago, I had a friendly argument with a co-worker about my contention that Big Papi was taking steroids, HGH, or something else not yet detected. “Spoken like a Yankee fans,” he said dismissively.

Now, I could say that I take no pleasure in events proving me right. But if I did, I’d be like Big Papi, in the statement above: i.e., lying through my teeth.

Sorry. I couldn’t resist. It won’t happen again…

Where was I?

Oh, yeah…

I’d like to say that I had some special deductive powers that led to my conclusions about Ortiz. But I’m not Sherlock Holmes in the slightest. I didn’t have special knowledge that anyone who follows baseball with even mild interest didn’t have already. All the facts were in plain sight, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Purloined Letter.”

For me, three sets of circumstances clinched the case:

* Before coming to the Red Sox, Ortiz posted no special numbers in six seasons with the Minnesota Twins. As noted by Russell Wight on the Web site “Bleacher Report,” he averaged .266 and one home run in 29 plate appearances. The Twins, one of the better organizations at nurturing young talent, were willing to let him go—perhaps thinking he might find it hard to overcome his tendency to strike out often. By the end of 2003, though, Ortiz had hit 31 homers, on his way to a five-year stretch when he and fellow juicer Manny Ramirez formed the most devastating 1-2 punch since Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris in their 1960-64 heyday.

* How to explain, then, the home run surge? The consequence of batting in front of Ramirez? Of playing in a hitter-friendly park? Of a promising hitter coming into his own? Of superior coaching by the Red Sox staff succeeding where others had failed? Puh-leez. Overcoming a penchant for strikeouts, and for raising one’s home run totals and batting average, can’t be done so dramatically, so instantly, without better health or peace of mind. Unless you have pharmacological assistance, of course.

* By the end of the 2007 season, Ortiz was not only being hailed as the greatest clutch hitter in Red Sox history but as the greatest clutch hitter of his generation. A few even wondered if he might be the greatest clutch hitter of all time. It didn’t take me longer to figure out what was wrong with this picture.

Now, of course, it’s all changed. The criticism that Curt Schilling justifiably directed at Jose Canseco now applies equally well to Ortiz: he accomplished nothing significant in his career without the benefit of PEDs.

How different with other known users. Say what you will about Barry Bonds, but he was on the way to career totals of 500 homers and 500 stolen bases—numbers that, by themselves, would have guaranteed him a plaque in Cooperstown—before he made his disastrous decision to check out Balco's offerings. Even Alex Rodriguez (who, as my longtime readers know, I have little if any affection for) at least has been a five-tool player.

But Ortiz? Take away the home run and batting average marks that, we now know, were chemically enhanced, and what do you have? A guy who can’t throw, who is such a menace in the field that the DH could have been invented for him, and who can only steal a base when the entire infield decides it’s time for a mass siesta.

At the same time that Ortiz’s reputation is being reevaluated, we might want to do the same thing with the two wonder boys of baseball management, Billy Beane and Theo Epstein.

Earlier in this decade, with one playoff appearance after another, Beane’s "Moneyball" philosophy was the talk of baseball. Nowadays, with his team far out of the running, it’s fair to wonder if Joe Morgan wasn't right in wondering how much of its earlier success owed to all the talk about on-base percentage versus having some young guns on the mound and a guy who was hailed as the second coming of Lou Gehrig—a juicer by the name of Jason Giambi.

And Epstein? Even before the revelation about Ramirez and Ortiz, the Mitchell Report noted that the Sox GM used to inquire about players’ steroid use before going ahead with deals. Even after being told that reliever Eric Gagne had been a user, Epstein pulled the trigger on bringing him to the team. Not exactly rewarding integrity, was he?

Likewise, the Mitchell Report fingered Jeremy Giambi—who, incidentally, preceded Ortiz on the Bosox depth chart at DH at the start of ’03—as a PED user.

And this might not be all. Earlier today, pitcher Bronson Arroyo said he wouldn’t be surprised if he were one of the 100 or so unnamed players still left on the PED list from ’03, as he used androstenedione and amphetamines before they were banned by baseball.

Who else might be else on the list? Once I never gave a second’s thought to the possibility that Pedro Martinez might be, but since the revelations about A-Rod in the winter, it’s been known that the former great Red Sox pitcher was one of a number of players (including known users A-Rod, Miguel Tejada, Juan Gonzalez, and Ruben Sierra) linked to Angel Presinal, who major league baseball felt was so unsavory that it banned him from the private areas of every ballpark after he was caught with a "gym bag full of steroids" meant for Gonzalez in 2001.

The more Ortiz goes on, the more likely he is to damage the reputation he developed with fans ever since his arrival in Beantown. His latest statement is a beaut: “I am trying to find out what's going on. When I get my stuff together, I'll let you guys know.”

What’s there to find out? He used ‘roids or he didn’t, and can say so accordingly.

Ortiz is signed through the end of the 2010 season, but I wonder if Epstein might not buy out the contract and release him a year earlier. The “slugger” will be facing something he’s seldom known in his time with the Bosox: a skeptical press. The questions are going to mount about how much his recent slump is due to the normal injuries a 30-plus player has versus the sudden, irrevocable decline that so many PED users experience.

Like the Baltimore Orioles’ front-office power Frank Cashen in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Epstein has been remarkably unsentimental over the last few years, dealing fan favorites like Bill Mueller, Kevin Millar, Derek Lowe and Dave Roberts when he felt their time was up. I’d be surprised if he didn’t act in a similar fashion with Ortiz.

For all too many in Red Sox Nation, this week represented the end of the innocence. The shame of it is that they should have realized it sooner.