Why baseball players use human growth hormone? Part I: Addressing the debate.

Cheating comes in a lot of forms.

This is the first part of a two part series on human growth hormone.

Performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are a difficult topic to discuss.  It is truly rare to find someone who is indifferent to them or at least not emotionally engaged in the discussion.  I find that we, fans, want to see amazing athletic performances, but want these to be as clean and pure as is possible.  We often create dividing lines between things like spitballs, corked bats, corrective lenses, cortisone shots, oxygen treatments, creatine, anabolic steroids, Viagra, caffeine, Ritalin, human growth hormone, and a bevy of other treatments that have been associated with improving performance.  Everyone typically has their own line and many fight for it vehemently.  The line drawn often rarely is with respect to how much certain aids helping in making a performance better and more often drawn by our emotional attachment to different approaches.

Emotional arguments are difficult ones to have as it is difficult to consider evidence that contradicts our position.  Turning a logical argument into an emotional one shifts the debate from one of merits of an idea to the mere capacity of intellectual thought.  This creates a conversational quagmire when trying to parse the data on a subject that is confusing and often misconstrued in the media, in the gym, and on message boards.  What I hope in this two part series is to set the emotional conversation back to zero and build it back up on the merits of the application of human growth hormone, in this case.  That way maybe we can strip the discussion free of our assumptions and weakly based convictions

More right after the jump.

Has the Orioles defense improved in 2011?

Motherwell's Mark Reynolds

Last week, I read through Andrew Gibson's work on using infield and outfield Defensive Efficiency on ground balls and fly balls, respectively.  I discuss that post over at the Baltimore Orioles Round Table (BORT), but on this blog I wanted to jumped in on something that I felt was slightly undone.  As you may have noticed, almost every statistic these days is converted over to runs.  It is the high falutin' goal of any respectable statistician to devise ways to convert all measures of player performance into how many runs are scored or given.  It permits a great deal of comparison and it is why when guys like us so repetitively use WAR and other run based numbers, others think we are making too much out of single statistics.  We really are not, we are just converting things over to a relatively easy model for comparison.  Converting numbers to runs does not remove problems with the original numbers.  We are all aware that a high WAR due to the defensive component is probably not an accurate portrayal of the player's talent.

My objective in this post is to take Andrew's numbers and convert them over to runs saved/given as well as compare that to other systems like DRS, TZL, and UZR.  All of that after the jump.

Oh, krikes!

I was just scooped.  I am halfway through my analysis on draft pick performance, doing almost the same exact thing.  I guess that is done for me.

Anyway, I have not yet gotten to it, but read this.

Looks like I will have something cool to read tonight.

Revisiting the Orioles International Effort

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Over a year ago, we had a succession of three articles assessing the Orioles apparent lack of interest in a Dominican Prospect League where amateurs played in games as opposed to scouts having to watch workouts (batting practice, fielding, running, bullpen, and live pitching).  Briefly put, ESPN Jorge Arangure Jr. posted an article where the Orioles were specifically mentioned by the founder of the DPL as being one of the few teams who did not have any scouts present.  Roch then chased down John Stockstill who said that they have and will see many of these players in workouts.  Finally, Mejia (founder of DPL) is re-interviewed and says that too much was made of comments, but that the Orioles are doing things their own way.

So that leaves us with the perspective that the Orioles are not involved in the DPL because they have seen these players in workouts and in-game situations provided during the DPL's 25 game schedule that most every other team utilizes is therefore of no interest to them.  Got that?

A few days back, Andy MacPhail appeared at the University of Baltimore to talk about his experiences and approach as a General Manager.  Upon being asked about the Orioles international effort, he said:

We're still not head over heels in international scouting. We get criticized occasionally for not spending enough there. But you've got to understand, in the Dominican Republic, the whole game has changed. It used to be you'd go there and see a lot of kids playing baseball. Now there is something called a buscón. They're agents, and what they'll do is they'll take a kid who is 12 or 13 and has some promise. They'll feed them, clothe them, and put them in a workout regimen. They're not playing baseball anymore. What these guys prepare them to do is to come in all these complexes -- and now we have one of them -- and they'll do workouts. They're not playing the game anymore. They're guys who have been developed over three or four years to look good in a three or four day tryout. And there are those old fashioned amongst us who are concerned that's not really the look we need to make a good read on a 17-year-old kid out of the Dominican. We would much rather see them play games. Just think about a lot of US players who wouldn't do that well in a workout, but they are good baseball players because they can play the game. We've lost an element of that in the Dominican, and where we apply our resources is somewhat of a reflection of that.

We are not in Venezuela nearly to the degree that we need to be in. We have our approach in the Dominican. It might not be the best, but Venezuela is definitely something we need to look into in a more studious fashion because the last time I checked, you've got 6 percent of players in the major leagues are coming out of Venezuela and we need to be more active there.

The background we have presented in our own coverage and this current statement do not jive.  MacPhail is complaining about how players in the Dominican Republic do not play baseball and for the Orioles to feel comfortable handing out contracts, they really want to see them play.  However, they were one of the few teams specifically mentioned as not attending games in a league designed to give teams a look at players performing in games.

This is a simple failure of logic.