Polanco's suspension

You probably heard by now: Jorge Polanco, the Twins shortstop, got hit Sunday with an 80-game steroid suspension. Not only will he miss the first half of the season, he's ineligible for the playoffs should the Twins get that far.

It's the second time in four years that Twins are coming out of spring training with a significant player suspended for testing positive for the steroid Stanozolol. In 2015, it was Ervin Santana.

There's nothing good in this suspension for the Twins. Polanco may not be the best defensive shortstop in camp, but he finished his roller-coaster 2017 as the Twins' No. 3 hitter.

But if there is a position at which the Twins have the depth to absorb losing their starter for half the season, it's shortstop. Presumably they can divvy up the job among Eduardo Escobar, who hit 21 homers lsst season; Ehire Adrianza, a superior gloveman; and veteran Erick Aybar, a former All-Star and Gold Glove winner whose career is on the wane.

But the possible (likely?) suspension of Miguel Sano in a #MeToo investigation complicates that. That trio may have to cover for two infield regulars, not just one.

A PED thought

This was Justin Verlander's reaction on Twitter Wednesday to the news that outfielder Marlon Byrd of the Cleveland Indians had tested positive (again) for PEDs:

😡 https://t.co/bKIsbaSFqW

— Justin Verlander (@JustinVerlander) June 1, 2016

Byrd is 38. Because this is his second time caught, he's suspended 162 games. There's a pretty good chance his career is over. But that's true of pretty much any player in his late 30s, much less one who was never really a star.

Byrd claims that he took a tainted supplement that wasn't on the approved list. Maybe so, but again -- second time. It's difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt. And according to Baseball Reference, he's pulled in more than $16 million since his 2012 suspension. On a risk-reward basis, considering where he was on the career arc at the time, there was an incentive for him to cheat, and if he was cheating the past three years, it paid off for him.

But looking at Verlander's angry emoticon reminds me: It's easy for players to denounce users on other teams. We didn't see or hear Verlander rejecting the return of Jhonny Peralta for the playoffs in 2013. Peralta hit a crucial homer in the postseason, then landed a $53 million contract from the Cardinals.

One can understand the frustration of clean players with the guys who appear to profit from steroid use. But it seems to me that the continuing cycle of clubhouse acceptance of those same players helps permit it. The guys who served as replacement players during the 1994-95 strike were never accepted by their teammates the way those who've tested positive for PEDs are.

When the players lash out at the positive testers who wear the same uniform, I'll take the outrage more seriously.

Ryan Braun's standing ovation

The fans in Milwaukee cheer Ryan Braun in his first
game back after a steroids suspension.

We all know the Ryan Braun saga: Winner of the National League MVP award, flunked a drug test, convinced the arbitrator to toss his suspension on the basis that his sample was mishandled, snagged anyway in the Biogenesis investigation, suspended for the final 65 games of the 2013 season.

Ryan Braun returned to action Monday in Milwaukee to a standing ovation.

My Twitter feed erupted with outrage from the press box types. How dare the fans of Milwaukee greet him like a conquering hero when he's a liar and a cheat?

Me, I expected it:

Standing O in Milwaukee for Braun. Of course. PED use is only bad when it's the other team.
— Edward Thoma (@bboutsider) March 31, 2014

It's not just the fans, either. The players are at best passive aggressive in their opposition to performance enhancing drugs.

It's an interesting clubhouse dance they wind up performing. The union and MLB just completed a reworking of the drug policy that steps up the suspension for first and second violations -- 80 games for a first violation, 162 (full season) for a second -- but allows a softening of punishment for an inadvertent violation.

And it includes what we might call the Peralta rule: Violators are ineligible for postseason play.

That provision follows the return last fall of Detroit's Jhonny Peralta from his 50 game suspension in time for the playoffs; he hit a crucial home run that helped advance the Tigers past Oakland to the ALCS.

The players, as a whole, were unhappy with the fact that Peralta was permitted to play. But I doubt any of his Detroit teammates wanted to give that game back, or didn't want him on their side last October. Peralta has since signed with the Cardinals as a free agent. I'm sure the St. Louis players also supported the Peralta ban now in effect, but I'll wager they have not given him as frosty a reception as, say, the replacement players who partook in spring training during the 1994-95 strike.

The players are conflicted. They want the sport cleaned of the drugs, but they want to win more.

If a cheater can help them win, great. Just as long as he doesn't get caught. That is the greater sin.

This is "potent"? Really?

Alex Rodriguez paid $12,000 a month for this?

I wasn't going to comment further on Alex Rodriguez' suspension. I did a post after the arbitrator's announcement; I wrote the Free Press editorial on  the subject, which ran in this morning's paper. I'd said what I have to say.

And then the US Anti-Doping Agency chimed in with this nonsense:

"... probably the most potent and sophisticated drug program developed for an athlete that we've ever seen ... a potent cocktail of sophisticated PEDs stacked together to deliver power, aid recovery, avoid detection and create a home run champion."

Ahem. Guys, have you looked at what Alex Rodriguez did while on the "most potent drug program we've ever seen?"

The last three seasons, in which Rodriguez was on this potent, sophisticated regimen, he hit .269 and slugged .441 while averaging just 88 games a season. They were his three worst seasons since he was a teenager.

The PEDs didn't work. I know Sunday's "60 Minutes" made it sound like Anthony Bosch was supplying miracle candy, but that report was infused with a noticeable lack of thought and skepticism throughout.

The truth is, A-Rod went into the kind of rapid decline and injury rate one should expect of even a talented athlete in his late 30s. Indeed, considering how high his production was in his prime, his decline might be even more rapid than one should expect.

Home run champion? The man hasn't slugged .500 since the summer he met Bosch.

Aid recovery? That was a nice hip surgery he had last year. It matched the one he had in 2009.

The Anti-Doping Agency has a self-serving reason to sound alarmed. Guys like Bosch are its reason for existence. But really, the foes of performance enhancers should be trumpeting the failure of this "sophisticated" approach to chemical enhancement, not talking it up.

Steroids and the Hall of Fame

A sign in the Hall of Fame museum regarding
steroids and other performance enhancers.

One reason for the heavy backlog of Hall of Fame candidates -- not the only reason, to be sure, but part of it -- is the issue of performance-enhancing drugs.

Baseball spent a decade or more with steroids an essentially open secret, tolerated if not encouraged by players, managers, owners. Then, suddenly, it wasn't OK. 

The Hall voters are now trying to judge the careers of players who thrived in the steroid era. Different people can have different views on the subject without being obviously wrong; my views have changed from time to time.

I do think this: The prevailing ethos in baseball in the 1990s -- and probably in the late 1980s as well -- said steroid use was OK. Indeed, I believe some organizations expected it, and that those players who declined to juice up were viewed as lacking in dedication.

Tony LaRussa -- who managed some of the most notorious juicers of the juicing era, who vociferously defended the likes of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire -- he's going into the Hall of Fame this summer. So is Joe Torre, whose Yankee dynasty was riddled with users suspected and confirmed. It strains credibility to believe either was ignorant of the steroid use by their teams. They were among the enablers, if not among the encouragers.

But McGwire isn't likely to be elected when the results of the writers' balloting is announced next week. Nor, presumably, are Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds -- who, if we take their numbers seriously, may well be the greatest pitcher and hitter ever, but who bear a steroid taint. Nor, presumably, will Mike Piazza or Jeff Bagwell, who are the targets of steroid rumor.

A portion of the electorate appears to hold the position that, lacking certain knowledge of who used, everybody from the era should be considered guilty. I don't see it that way.

It seems to me that, if there's room in the Hall of Fame to honor LaRussa, there's room for Bonds and Clemens, and certainly for the likes of Piazza and Bagwell. 

Pic of the Week

A Brewers fan displays his opinion
of the suspended Ryan Braun before
a game at Miller Park.

One aspect of the Biogenesis steroids case — which last week resulted in a 65-fame suspension for Milwaukee star Ryan Braun — that I don't think I've seen mentioned anywhere before is this:

Fifteen years ago, when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were pumping up in private and pursuing home run records in public, steroids were a quiet gray area. Technically they were a violation of the rules, but nobody — owners, players, media — was interested in enforcing the rule. Baseball's ethos — from spitballs to cutting the bases — has always held that cheating is fine as long as you don't get caught.

In that environment, nobody should be surprised that performance-enhancing drugs became widespread.

Today, however, is a markedly different environment. There is testing. There is a vocal outcry from the bulk of the players to get the PEDs out of the game.

We have gone, in a generation of players, from an implicit expectation that a player seeking to be better would use to an explicit contempt for users.

It is more understandable to me that a Barry Bonds would use steroids than that Braun would, just because of the time and place for each.

King Felix and the Melk Man: Perfect and Imperfect

A couple of significant news items in baseball Wednesday:

Felix Hernandez was perfect on Wednesday against the
Tampa Bay Rays.

Perfect: Seattle ace (and former Cy Young Award winner) Felix Hernandez threw a perfect game against Tampa Bay.

That makes three perfectos already this season (the other two belonging to Phil Humber and Matt Cain).

I offered some theories earlier this season on why we are seeing so many perfect games. The main one stands up for this game. Tampa Bay is a good team, but the lineup is built more for walks and power than for average. Such teams are susceptible to outstanding pitching performances, and King Felix provided that on Wednesday.

Humber and Cain, incidentally, have both struggled since their gems. Humber's ERA for the season is a bloated 5.87, 6.84 since the perfect game. Cain, a markedly superior pitcher to Humber, has had a 4.18 ERA in 10 starts since his perfect game, raising his ERA from 2.18 after the gem to 2.99 today.

Melky Cabrera and his All-Star MVP trophy.

Badly flawed: Melky Cabrera, the surprise MVP of the 2012 All-Star Game, was hit with a 50-game suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs.

The Giants outfielder, hitting.346/.390/.516, essentially admitted that he did it and is not appealing the test result.

Cabrera was a so-so player for several years with the Yankees and Braves, but had a breakout season in 2011 with Kansas City. The Royals traded him to San Francisco for Jonathan Sanchez — a pitcher who flopped with K.C. — and Cabrera was having an even bigger season for the Giants.

Until now. Cabrera's suspension will last the rest of the regular season, and it's bound to have a major impact on San Francisco down the stretch. The Giants are neck-and-neck with the Dodgers in the NL West, but their most productive hitter this season is now finished.

The Clemens verdict

Roger Clemens faces the media after Monday's verdict.

I am not a member of The Free Press editorial board. I once was, but that was many years and several publishers ago. But on occasion the bosses ask me to contribute. And being an opinionated cuss, I generally oblige.

The editorials themselves -- unsigned opinion pieces -- are supposed to reflect the thinking of the editorial board, not merely that of one member, so it's not unheard of for my offerings to be rejected, revised or reversed. Which is fine; it's not my name on the thing.

All this is preamble to what follows: my draft of an editorial on the Roger Clemens verdict. The editorial is to run in today's Free Press. I didn't work Tuesday, so I don't know how much, if at all, it was revised. What's here is my opinion; what appears on the Opinions page may be the same as this, or it may be different. Either way, there's no plagiarism involved.

----


As a pitcher of baseballs, Roger Clemens had few if any peers; as a citizen, he has many. A federal jury of those peers on Monday decided against convicting the seven-time Cy Young Award winner of perjury for telling a congressional committee that he had never used performance-enhancing drugs.

That acquittal largely mirrored last summer's verdict in the Barry Bonds perjury case. Bonds -- holder of the single-season and career home run records, among other records -- was acquitted of perjury in his testimony to a grand jury that was investigating a PED lab. (Bonds, unlike Clemens, was convicted on a lesser count.)

Then we have the multi-year, multi-nation, cross-continent investigation into bicycling legend Lance Armstrong, which was concluded recently without charges.

These outcomes do not speak well of the time, effort, talent and resources the Department of Justice has poured over the past decade into the legal prosecution, or persecution, of athletes suspected of using PEDs.

Bonds and Clemens were established superstars beginning the inevitable decline of age when they suddenly experienced new heights of accomplishment in their late 30s. Both insisted that it was their work and skills that revitalized their careers. Not everybody believed them, in part because the widespread use of PEDs throughout baseball was an open secret in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It seems noteworthy that neither Bonds nor Clemens was actually charged with using performance-enhancers. They were instead charged with lying about it.

This begs the question: If using steroids (or human growth hormone, or EPO, or any other substance the athlete turns to to get bigger-stronger-faster) is so vile an act that it serves the public interest to spend literally millions of dollars taking the athlete to court, why not charge him with the actual act?

And if the actual act is not a crime, or too insignificant to justify prosecuting, then why go after the athlete for denying it?

The courts are meant to deal with legal violations, not ethical ones. It would behoove prosecutors to remember that.

A Ryan Braun parable

Election Day, 1982: I am working for the newspaper in Detroit Lakes, Minn., spending election night in the Becker County courthouse watching the vote come in.

Ryan Braun: There is a difference
between "innocent" and
"not guilty." Either way, he
won't be suspended.

Becker isn't the biggest county in Minnesota, but it has some size to it, and Detroit Lakes is very near the southern border. Two Inlets Township, in the county's northeast corner, is a long haul to the county seat, made even longer by the fact that all the roads run east-west or north-south -- no diagonal shortcuts. If memory serves, it was close to 50 miles of driving.

We're starting to push midnight, everybody else is in, and we're still waiting for Two Inlets. The county auditor picks up the phone, calls the township clerk, wakes him up, asks where the ballots are.

The clerk says, Right here, I brought 'em home with me and I'll bring them in in the morning.


The auditor tells him that he will bring them in right now, and if they aren't in the courthouse within an hour he'll send a deputy out to get them, and him, and the clerk won't be going home until he gets bail.

That's what I thought of Thursday afternoon when I learned that Ryan Braun's suspension had been overturned, apparently on the basis that the guy who collected the urine sample took it home for the weekend rather than send it to the lab immediately.

You don't take the ballots home with you, and you don't take the urine sample home either. Same principle.

Ryan Braun, it's almost spring training. Do you know where your suspension is?

Baseball's drug testing procedure is supposed to be confidential, and it usually is. Nobody outside the process is supposed to know about a player testing positive (which is a negative) until the ruling comes down, and even then the specifics aren't revealed.

Ryan Braun in a happy moment
last September.

The Ryan Braun case has been anything but confidential. We learned, via leak, back in early December that the 2011 National League MVP had been tested during the postseason and found to have an "insane" testosterone level.

I regarded the leak itself as odd enough to be suspicious, raising the possibility that someone involved in the testing realized the result may be flawed and decided to muddy the waters by making it difficult for the appeals panel to toss out the result.

Braun had his appeal hearing last month. Normally there's a 25-day window for the panel to rule; in this case, it's been more than a month.

Maybe it's an innocent delay. Maybe, since there are no games, and Braun isn't even required to be in camp until Friday, the panel has seen no urgency in issuing its ruling. I would think, however, that if it were a cut-and-dried result, there'd be no cause to drag it out. Issue the suspension and get on with life.

Or maybe Braun has a legitimate case, and the panel is trying to find a way to exonerate an innocent man without damaging the credibility of the testing process. If that is the case, of course, the damage will have been done not by the appeals panel but by the leaker of a faulty result.

Ryan Braun's positive test

Last month, Ryan Braun was hailed as the NL MVP.
Now, he's labeled a steroid user.

Ryan Braun, the 2011 National League MVP, was reported Saturday to have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

The Milwaukee outfielder is said to have tested positive in a sample taken during the playoffs in October. He disputed the findings and the case is wending its way through the appeals process, which is likely to reach a conclusion next month — well before spring training, much less the season. There's no rush here. Or shouldn't be.

So why was the test result prematurely leaked, and by whom?

Likely not by Braun's camp; he gains nothing from the release of this information. His reputation has now been damaged; even if the appeals process rules in his favor, he's now been publicly connected with steroid use.

I'm guessing it came from somebody involved in the testing process who either (a) feared that baseball would cover up the finding or (b) realized that there is a legitimate chance that the finding is invalid and the case overturned and wanted to muddy the waters.

If (a), there was no need to leak the info now; waiting for the conclusion of the process wouldn't affect a single game. If indeed MLB would hide the positive result because it's an important player, expose them after they've done it. Doing it now is silly.

If (b), it speaks ill of the professionalism of the people involved in the testing process. And I think it's (b).

I'm in no position to judge the quality of the lab work or the validity of the conclusions. I do think that when there's a specific, quasi-legal process in place to handle a positive test, that process should be followed. It's already been violated here.

Shocker! McGwire 'roided up!

Somebody apparently convinced Mark McGwire that he can't just waltz into training camp next month as the Cardinals new hitting coach and expect that nobody's gonna ask him about steroids.

So Monday afternoon he issued a statement confessing to a decade of steroid use but insisting that the steroids didn't affect his play.

The statement is essentially cattle excrement from the very first sentence:

Now that I have become the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals, I have the chance to do something that I wish I was able to do five years ago.

Nobody, when he told that congressional committee he wasn't there to talk about the past, was stopping him from instead saying: Yeah, I used. It wasn't banned, there were plenty of others using, it was accepted in clubhouse culture. You may not like knowing it, but you sure enjoyed all those home runs, didn't you? You got what you wanted, I got what I wanted.

He didn't say it then. He won't say it now. But it's a lot closer to truth than what he said in the past and what he said today.

Here's some more organic fertilizer:

Looking back, I wish I had never played during the steroid era.

If we are to take his current version to be accurate — a big if, considering how long it's taken for him to come off his claims of innocence — he only used to recover from injury. If that's the case, had he NOT played in the steroid era, he wouldn't be significant enough for us to notice today.

I see two ways to view McGwire:

1. He tainted the game as badly as has been done since the days of the game fixers in the 1910s — in which case he shouldn't be back in uniform.
2. His steroid use was regarded as acceptable at the time and isn't now — in which case he hardly needs a weepy apology.

I'm inclined to the latter. I want a little less weeping and a little more honesty.

What we got today is McGwire saying he shouldn't have done what he did but what he did didn't make any difference.

Which makes no sense at all.