MLB 2025 Season

BinauralJam

DewieCox wrote:

Yeah, it's so respectable to get away with cheating.

He didn't, your wrong, get over it.[/quote]

Yeah, he did
What's my wrong?
Nothing to get over.[/quote]


No he didn't
This is fun

RW81233

seriously what does any of us actually "know" about this story outside of what the media has offered up to us? anyone here close to brauny? the guy who fucked up the test? selig? the arbitrator? lawyers? on either side both camps have tons of "evidence" to argue with that we don't even know is true so how can either side say definitively that he's guilty or innocent? all this over the stupid idea that putting things in your body is cheating b/c the russians and germans beat us to it in the late 40s/early 50s - LAME.

Wobbie

The Juggler wrote:

i think bud selig oozes confidence.

he definitely oozes something

Monster Rain

Can Manny Ramirez really be this clueless? A reporter asked him, "Are you off the juice?" His answer? "I'm here." Later, the reporters asked him if he was going to test positive for steroids again? He answered, "Only God knows." The reporter had to remind Manny that he knows what he puts into his own body so he should know the answer, too. Manny's answer to that was, "You're right. You're right there. But God knows what you're thinking before you're even thinking about it." What kind of dumbass wouldn't say, "No, I'm not on steroids and I will not fail another test," when asked those questions? I wouldn't be surprised if he fails another test before his suspension even ends.

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/story/1746 ... he-as-need

Monster Rain

Fred Wilpon says he wants to own the Mets for as long as he can and when asked about the drastic payroll reduction said, "Don't forget, we cut a lot of payroll that wasn't producing." Hmm, I was under the impression that Reyes won the batting title last year and Beltran had a terrific comeback season. I'll allow him Oliver Perez's contract, but that's just a small portion of the payroll they cut. Reyes and Beltran both made more than Perez. Does Wilpon really think fans will believe that their cut in payroll was due to them cutting bad players when they let 2 All-Stars go between the trade deadline and Winter Meetings?

Wobbie

^^^^ good stuff as usual, monster rain.

Colin Cowherd is killing Ryan Braun this morning.....and he makes a lot of good points.

norm

Monster Rain wrote:

Can Manny Ramirez really be this clueless?

i'm assuming this is a rhetorical question

Monster Rain

imalive wrote:

^^^^ good stuff as usual, monster rain.

Colin Cowherd is killing Ryan Braun this morning.....and he makes a lot of good points.

The Braun situation is a huge mess all around. I think I'm withholding any final judgment until Das issues his report on the ruling because we really don't know everything that was presented from either side yet other than what's been leaked but I don't think either side is going to come out of this fully vindicated. MLB has a huge black eye for the way the sample was mishandled and the fact that they leaked news of the failed test before there was anything to formally report, which violated the CBA. Braun is never going to have 100% of baseball fans believe him even if he really didn't do anything wrong and even if there is something in the report that shows that a false positive is possible under the conditions that took place in his case.

Wobbie

12 HR, 49 RBI = $100M contract extension? :wtf:

pjl44

imalive wrote:

12 HR, 49 RBI = $100M contract extension? :wtf:

Well, he was hurt. Zimmerman's a .290/.360/.500 guy with plus defense at 3B. If he stays healthy, that deal looks good.

pjl44

Monster Rain wrote:

imalive wrote:

^^^^ good stuff as usual, monster rain.

Colin Cowherd is killing Ryan Braun this morning.....and he makes a lot of good points.

The Braun situation is a huge mess all around. I think I'm withholding any final judgment until Das issues his report on the ruling because we really don't know everything that was presented from either side yet other than what's been leaked but I don't think either side is going to come out of this fully vindicated. MLB has a huge black eye for the way the sample was mishandled and the fact that they leaked news of the failed test before there was anything to formally report, which violated the CBA. Braun is never going to have 100% of baseball fans believe him even if he really didn't do anything wrong and even if there is something in the report that shows that a false positive is possible under the conditions that took place in his case.

Unless someone can scientifically explain how mishandling a urine sample can cause synthetic testosterone to appear, I think it's pretty clear he took something. That said, if MLB can't follow their own dopey protocol for their dopey drug policy, then you can't hand out a suspension.

My final judgment: Meh...who cares. Glad Braun can play 162 this year.

Wobbie

pjl44 wrote:

Unless someone can scientifically explain how mishandling a urine sample can cause synthetic testosterone to appear, I think it's pretty clear he took something. That said, if MLB can't follow their own dopey protocol for their dopey drug policy, then you can't hand out a suspension.

word.

RW81233

Finally, someone makes sense with regard to the "steroid" problem...

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/762 ... ryan-braun
In Defense of Ryan Braun
The undeniable idiocy of baseball's steroids "crisis"
By Charles P. Pierce on February 27, 2012
PRINT
The system, we are told, worked. That's always the second-last refuge of scoundrels. The system, we were told after the Watergate scandal, had "worked," even though it hadn't, not fully. The system had been truncated by a cheap political pardon, thereby allowing the main miscreant to spend 25 years walking on the beach, fashioning his own myth of persecution and redemption. In the case of Ryan Braun, whose suspension for allegedly taking one of those drugs of which baseball disapproves was overturned by an arbitrator last week, the "system" did not "work" because there should never have been a system in the first place, and Braun does not have his own San Clemente in which to hide. He will have to go out in public at least 162 times this year and own somebody else's dreadful mistakes. I do not envy him that job.

A case like Braun's was the inevitable outcome of what Scott Lemieux of the invaluable Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog calls baseball's "War on (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs." From its very beginnings, the "war" on performance-enhancing drugs in sports, and especially in baseball, has been legally questionable, morally incoherent, and recklessly dependent on collateral damage to make its point. Long ago, I went over to the purely libertarian position on this question simply because any other solution seemed to me to be incompatible with civil liberties and an equitable sharing of power in the workplace — and because every other "war" on drugs that I'd seen had been an enormous waste of time, money, and manpower.

There always have seemed to me to be two main arguments against this position. The first is the question of the player's health. This is not one to be dismissed lightly, even though, in almost every other context in professional sports, it is always secondary to profits in the mind of management. And the second, more hazy argument is that it is somehow unethical to ingest a substance that will make you play better. Too often, it seems, the former consideration is used to camouflage arguments based primarily on the latter.

The health consideration is doomed to failure in the long run because, well, Science Marches On. Sooner or later, someone's going to invent a substance that enhances performance without any risk to the athlete involved. The reason this will happen is because whoever invents the stuff is going to get wealthy beyond Warren Buffett's wildest dreams. Eliminate the health-of-the-athlete fig leaf and all you're left with is the moral and ethical argument and, on its own, that falls apart with the slightest nudge.

Can someone seriously argue that it is ethical to take a drug to make a performance possible, but unethical to take a drug that makes that performance better? Isn't making a performance possible at all the ultimate performance enhancement? If there had been a drug that would have given us five more seasons of Sandy Koufax at the top of his game, how would that have been a bad thing, everything else being equal? Sports are rife with drugs. Without drugs of one sort or another, the NFL season would never begin, and the baseball season would end sometime in June owing to a lack of participating teams.

Now we have Ryan Braun's experience with the "system," and nobody can be surprised that his urine was badly handled. And, by the way, let's stop calling it "the sample," too, OK? That's misdirection by euphemism, and it works to hide the personal violation that mandatory drug testing truly is. Ryan Braun had to give baseball some urine, and the baseball official tasked with handling Ryan Braun's urine kept Ryan Braun's urine in his freezer for 44 hours, which is a long time to keep someone else's urine, to my way of thinking.

It can't have surprised anyone who's watched the casual way constitutional safeguards have been generally tossed aside in drug cases over the past 30-odd years. It can't have surprised anyone who's read the revelations about how the criminal justice system has been perverted by bungling crime labs and incompetent medical examiners. (Here in Massachusetts, we are rather the home office of the latter problem.) Ultimately, in any authoritarian solution, the people with the power get lazy, and stupid, and they start making enough mistakes that people get tired of living with them. It's one of the reasons we don't have East Germany anymore. And baseball always has had a sweet tooth for the authoritarian solution.

Translation: "The guy who hung on to Ryan Braun's urine for 44 hours did nothing wrong because our instructions were written by half-bright marmosets. We are now on a nationwide search to find smarter marmosets."
Until the late 1960s, baseball's fundamental economic structure depended upon the authoritarian device known as the reserve clause. In the 1980s, it engaged in the authoritarian — and monumentally stupid — collusion strategy to regain the control of its players that it had lost to courts and to arbitrators. It maintained its authoritarian attitude toward racial segregation for longer in its history than any other sport. (That was the direct result of baseball's hiring as its first commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who was so enamored of issuing authoritarian dictums from the bench that, as Tim Weiner points out in his excellent history of the FBI, some anarchists sent him a bomb through the mail. And that was before he demanded — and got — dictatorial powers from the baseball owners and authored his own authoritarian solution to the problem of the Black Sox.)

Indeed, looked at from a different perspective, the people who look to baseball because they yearn for constancy in a changing and accelerated world are expressing little more than what Lewis Lapham calls, in a different context, "the wish for kings."

The steroid frenzy is of a sad piece with this history. It began, as all drug frenzies do, with a series of scare stories guaranteed to terrify the rubes. Then came the rush to pass laws and regulations without really thinking them through because this was The Greatest Crisis There Absolutely Ever Was. Then came all the people who made careers out of the laws and regulations prompted by the original frenzy. Then came all the reporters and commentators who got rich enabling the people most directly profiting from the frenzy and/or being professionally outraged on behalf of "the fans" but, really, only expressing their own anger at not being allowed to be 14 years old anymore.

You could hear it all again over the weekend. Major League Baseball was crying doom to anyone who would listen. Rob Manfred, MLB's president of labor relations, took refuge in outraged bafflegab.

"The extremely experienced collector acted in a professional and appropriate manner," Manfred said in a statement. "He handled Mr. Braun's sample consistent with instructions issued by our jointly retained collection agency. The arbitrator found that those instructions were not consistent with certain language in our program, even though the instructions were identical to those used by many other drug programs."

Translated from the original Bureaucrat, this reads, "The guy who hung on to Ryan Braun's urine for 44 hours did nothing wrong because our instructions were written by half-bright marmosets. We are now on a nationwide search to find smarter marmosets."

The professional thumb-suckers in my business spent the weekend talking about "technicalities" and being offended by the fact that Ryan Braun held a press conference in which he excoriated MLB for the clownish way its "system" had hung him out to dry. People who denounce him for engaging in "victimology" overlook the fact that he really was a victim. Where does he go to get his name back? Why did we know about him at all while his case was still under appeal? Why, indeed, was any action taken at all while his case was still under appeal?

("No, no!" said the Queen. "Sentence first — verdict afterwards.")

The "war" on steroids always has been Kafka rewritten by Lewis Carroll. It is always going to have victims like Ryan Braun — or, worse, some player is guaranteed one day to be the victim of a demonstrably false positive result — because that is the nature of all authoritarian solutions. Once, when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards received preposterously heavy sentences after being busted for pot, a British newspaper thundered in response, "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?" New butterflies, same old wheel.

The Fixer

so the 2nd wild card team was approved.

We will see how this plays out. I think they should have just made round 1 7 games. This will give the division winners a distinct advantage in the playoffs though, so I guess it's ok

Monster Rain

I don't think I like this new extra wild card but I hope it works out well. I like the idea of teams like the Nationals, Marlins, and KC having a little more hope than they used to (and a little more reason to try to spend money to win more that 72 games) but I think it'll take away some of the excitement of September pennant races when there's a wide gap between the 5th and 6th teams and that 5th team is in the same position that teams like the Yankees have been in before (resting guys in the final week to prepare for the playoffs). Even though there might be a tight race for a division title making those teams want to play hard until the end, there will still be a team that knows it's only going to be the Wild Card that does the same thing in order to have its rotation set up to have its ace start that playoff game and its #2 guy start the first game of the LDS, so all they've done is shuffle which teams use that strategy.

Cliffy6745

Monster Rain wrote:

I don't think I like this new extra wild card but I hope it works out well. I like the idea of teams like the Nationals, Marlins, and KC having a little more hope than they used to (and a little more reason to try to spend money to win more that 72 games) but I think it'll take away some of the excitement of September pennant races when there's a wide gap between the 5th and 6th teams and that 5th team is in the same position that teams like the Yankees have been in before (resting guys in the final week to prepare for the playoffs). Even though there might be a tight race for a division title making those teams want to play hard until the end, there will still be a team that knows it's only going to be the Wild Card that does the same thing in order to have its rotation set up to have its ace start that playoff game and its #2 guy start the first game of the LDS, so all they've done is shuffle which teams use that strategy.

I like it more than the previous system. Puts more merit on winning the division aside from going on the road. The wild cards should have a distinct disadvantage. I am sure teams will try and line up pitchers and get ready. The only way to have everyone remotely close would be to go back to the winners of each league play each other and that's not going to happen. I would also like the division series to be 7 games but that's not going to happen either.

Cliffy6745

Olney says most players are pretty pissed off at the Braun situation and the way he handled it.

Newch91

Cliffy6745 wrote:

Olney says most players are pretty pissed off at the Braun situation and the way he handled it.

The way who handled it? Braun?

Jearlpam0925

ESPN is the absolute worst - Ken Rosenthal breaks news that they're going to the new format, and everyone knows that Rosenthal broke the story. ESPN, or Buster Olney - probably both - say "sources" say they are going to the new format. "Sources"? Everyone and their fucking mother knows that little midget broke the story. ESPN and Buster Olney are awful.

Cliffy6745

Newch91 wrote:

Cliffy6745 wrote:

Olney says most players are pretty pissed off at the Braun situation and the way he handled it.

The way who handled it? Braun?

Yeah, that he fought procedure and not the results. None of them believe him.