The Ol' Ballfield

Some Rethinking, and Some Great Writing

A lot of my steroids rhetoric has been based on the "innocent until proven guilty" idea. I recently read an article in Prospectus' seminal book Baseball Between the Numbers that spins that argument into a more accurate light, which I think nails on the head why I argue that we shouldn't be so quick to indict Bonds or Giambi. The article, called "What Do Statistics Tell Us About Steroids", was written by Nate Silver. This is the concluding paragraph:

However, it is best to reserve judgment on these players. Not in the "innocent until proven guilty" spirit; the evidence that Giambi, Palmeiro, and Bonds have used steroids would hold up in a court of law (though Bonds has testified that he used one such substance contrary to how a player seeking performance enhancement would use it). Rather, I mean it in the conservative sense of the scientific method: We cannot reject the null hypothesis that the spectacular performances of players like Barry Bonds is the result of something far different than steroids use, such as good, old-fashioned determination and hard work. One of the beauties of baseball is its unpredictability. Every time we thought we'd seen everything, we see something else, whether it's the Red Sox and White Sox winning the World Series in consecutive seasons or a thirty-six-year-old shattering the home run record. In the Juiced Era, we have the right to be skeptical, but it would be a shame if we've become so cynical that we can no longer enjoy these achievements.

That last sentence there is pretty much exactly how I feel about the whole issue. The article is inconclusive about steroids, but provides some insightful data and asks some very original questions. Again, if you want to get an introduction to sabermetrics, insight into modern baseball thought, or even if you're a seasoned statistician, this book is an absolute must-read, broaching topics from Joe Torre's skill as a manager to players' performance in walk years to Alex Rodriguez's true financial worth to a ballclub. Info on buying the book is here, but it's also probably available at your local library.

Labels: barry bonds, sabermetrics, steroids

posted by Carnival @ 2/21/2007