Again, from the wonderful world of "You can't make some of this stuff up" sports, the Floyd Landis controversy bring up what I've been saying about drug testing in baseball for years.
People don't trust the testing to catch the cheaters (except if it's Bonds). If a popular player like Derek Jeter ever tested positive we'd hear, as we are now with Floyd, how unreliable the tests are, how they can be manipulated by anyone with an agenda. And let's face it, who doesn't have an agenda today?
So we have everyone and his cousin rushing to Floyd Landis defense with a myriad of reasons why he could have tested positive and still not cheated. THEN HOW THE F_ _ _ CAN ANYONE EVER BE EXPECTED TO TRUST THE TESTS AND THE TESTERS AGAIN? WHY HAVE TESTING IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Keep the tests, I don't trust them or the people administering them anymore. It's a joke and it always has been. Look at the Olympics over the past twenty or thirty years and the world of cycling and track. That's the path these idiots want to lead baseball down.
So this week, in walks Jeff Cirrillo with his "Soggy Balls" theory as to why offense is down in "Coors Canaveral". A stadium that in the past made the "Launching Pad" in Atlanta look like a pitcher-friendly ballpark in comparison,.
Runs in Colorado are way down, shutouts are way up since the club was granted permission by MLB to manipulate the composition of the baseballs via the humidor. I wonder how baseball knew that this would correlate to lower, more reasonable numbers. Of course, we have to have our statistical integrity, or the game will die.
They knew it would happen because MLB is the old pro at manipulating the consistency of the baseball to either raise offensive numbers or lower them. They did it before to raise the attendance level. They could also decide to raise the mound or lower it further, if they so desire.
All in the interest of manipulating offense to effect changes in fan interest and therefore attendance and TV ratings. That translates into dollars.
If you wanted steroids out of the game, make the consistency of the ball more like a bean bag and you could tell your steroid jackers, "Go ahead, swing for the fences, you muscle bound retard". A couple of warning track flyouts and a .230 average later and these guys will be looking for jobs as bouncers at Studio 54.
You can thank me later for solving the "Steroid Crisis" without involving Congress (they should be busy what with the Middle East crisis, Korean Missile Crisis, Terrorism, to say nothing about the myriad economic issues at home they should be dealing with), the media, WADA, USADA or any other group of idiots you can name who have been overly involved in the issue recently.
They're not going to move the fences back, that costs seats, expensive behind the plate box seats. And that's revenue students. So that's not going to happen. But it would be the easiest solution.
Devalue the HR a little bit, if you must. But then don't complain when fans vote with their wallets and attendance comes down after a plethora of 2-1 and 1-0 games unfolds. Or when teams start to value speed and the SB again. Remember the early 80's, the St. Louis Cardinals of Vince Coleman and Willie McGee and 70 HR's as a team? And four and a half-hour games because pitchers had to hold runners on so much. Gosh, who didn't love that style of baseball??
As always, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Other Interesting articles:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...section=si_mlb
Cirillo suggests balls at Coors Field are waterlogged
Coors Field is tied with Comerica Park in Detroit for the most shutouts in the majors this year with 10, including six by Rockies pitchers.
Cirillo, who played two seasons in Colorado pre-humidor, agreed the Rockies have better pitching now, "but at the same time, does that mean the rest of the league has better pitching, also?"
"It's pretty dramatic, wouldn't you say? Most shutouts in Coors Field, in the National League, when you take into account Petco, Dodger Stadium, where Washington plays. Those are huge parks," Cirillo said.
Runs have never been harder to score at Coors Field since the stadium opened in 1995. The average game now features a combined nine runs -- down from 15 runs that were scored a decade ago. Of course, the Rockies don't have the Blake Street Bombers hitting home runs all over the place as they did back then.
It was pretty well agreed by most in the know that PHDs were more rampant then, but perhaps more importantly The balls were juiced, too! Bug Selig all but admitted that the material used to wind around the pill was changed "around 1996" to a new synthetic that allowed 20% longer, thinner material, much tighter winding of the syntho-wool, and therefore a livlier ball that still conformed to the weight and diameter rules. The folks at Rawlings will only say all the MLB balls were once stitched in the Dominican Republic, then Haiti, and finally now in Costa Rica, but would offer no details as to the winding process or materials.
Evidently the Rockies can do anything they choose with the balls once they've been unsealed, but only if they are supervised by the umpiring crew. All conspiracy crybabies should be aware that the homeplate ump is the guy that puts balls in the pitchers hands, and likewise takes them out of the game.
Do you think the guys in blue would actually allow "heavy" balls to be used in the games they work? Cirillo just might be a few french fries short of a happy meal on this one.
and some excerpts from a Baseball Prospectus Article by Joe Sheehan
http://baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5386
If you’d told someone in June of 2004 that two years hence, one of every six or so games at Coors Field would end in a shutout, you would have been laughed out of the room.
How is this happening? Those close to the Rockies will cite a crop of young pitchers developing in concert, a younger team featuring an improved defense, higher grass and even a grand design before they’ll mention the humidor.
The humidor was first used in 2002 in an attempt by the team to control scoring in one of the greatest run environments in MLB history. According to the linked story by the Denver Post’s Mike Klis, the Rockies began storing their baseballs in a climate-controlled room at 40% humidity to keep the balls from drying out in Denver’s thinner, drier air. The idea wasn’t to make the balls dead, but to make them more like the ones used at lower altitudes. There was a great hue and cry over the issue, but Coors Field remained a great hitters’ park, the best one in baseball from 2002-2005, albeit not quite as extreme as it had been before. The Rockies, set astray by The Great Change-up Experiment in 2001 (Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle were signed to $170 million worth of contracts and proceeded to implode), weren’t any more successful in those years than they’d been in the previous four.
In any given season, one park or another might have been better for some event than Coors Field was--81 games isn’t a large enough sample to overcome variance, which is why most analysts use multi-year park factors for rigorous work—but no park was consistently in the top five of all three categories. You can see a drop in the home-run factor in 2005, a dip that may have foreshadowed things to come.
This year, the changed used of the humidor has made Coors Field, at more than 5,000 feet above sea level, a pitchers’ park. There’s no question, none at all, that Jeff Cirillo is onto something here. Coors Field has become a below-average place for run scoring, despite the thinner air at high altitude, and with no change in the park.
For years, Coors Field was the best place in baseball to make contact. You hit the ball, good things happen, more than they did anywhere. There was a wobble last season, which might well have been written off as a personnel matter--the Rockies had improved pitching and a wretched offense--if it hadn’t been followed up by this year’s line. Coors Field is now average in turning batted balls into extra-base hits and homers, and slightly above when it comes to doing the same with flyballs. For the first time I can recall, it’s also not the safest place for a ball in play. Even conceding that the above are park stats and not park factors, the extremes listed make a compelling argument that the natural order of things has been badly upset.
Think about why Coors Field is such a good hitters’ park. The air in Denver is thinner than it is at sea level, so it provides less resistance, less drag, on struck balls. Robert Adair, author of The Physics of Baseball, estimated this effect at 9% for an average fly ball. This is the biggest reason why Denver is such a great place to hit. Another reason is that the same thin air makes it harder to throw good breaking stuff, because breaking balls need that same resistance to do their dancing. Finally, a common complaint by pitchers was the dry Denver air made it hard to grip the baseball, adding to problems with command, especially of breaking balls, as the baseballs become slicker, harder and, according to some, smaller.
Now, soaking the baseballs in milk, or whatever it is they’re doing, addresses the first of those problems and the last. Heavier baseballs mean more resistance, which is one reason why there’s a cap--5 ¼ ounces--on the weight of a baseball. But they shouldn’t have much effect on the second other that some improvement in pitchers’ ability to grip the ball. The thin air is still not going to mix real well with breaking pitches.
As you can see, Coors Field has been a terrible place for pitchers to get results on their own. If the humidor is tuned to cancel out the effect of dryness--a problem that was only raised to crisis levels once the humidor came to be--it shouldn’t be enough to turn Coors Field into a pitchers’ park. Adair’s 9% should still be affecting things. The humidor is overcorrecting for the dryness, having a minor effect on command, but the real driver of run prevention is that the humidor is producing baseballs that simply don’t travel.
Now, the Rockies don’t want any part of this. They want to point to Jeff Francis and Aaron Cook and Jason Jennings and say that the lowered run scoring is the end result of having good pitchers. If this is about personnel, then the Rockies’ pitchers should be showing improvement at home and on the road, and in their peripherals as well as their ERAs.
HOME
IP ERA BFP/K BFP/BB K/BB BFP/H BFP/HR BFP/XBH
2006 494.0 4.03 6.44 12.95 2.01 4.23 37.04 12.87
2005 735.0 5.18 6.56 12.61 1.92 3.86 39.48 11.55
2004 733.0 6.27 7.02 10.32 1.47 3.78 31.15 10.57
2003 737.0 5.07 6.92 14.52 2.10 3.86 27.93 10.61
ROAD
IP ERA BFP/K BFP/BB K/BB BFP/H BFP/HR BFP/XBH
2006 451.2 4.32 6.52 14.12 2.17 4.20 56.05 12.58
2005 683.2 5.07 6.45 10.69 1.66 4.15 33.73 11.08
2004 702.1 4.77 6.77 11.06 1.63 4.27 35.33 12.29
2003 683.0 5.35 7.86 11.22 1.43 3.96 37.30 11.86
We’re on to something here. This is an improved pitching staff. Look at the road numbers: Rockies’ pitchers have cut their ERAs, improved their command and dramatically improved their home-run rate from one season to the next. You can see the effects of the humidor at home in the vastly decreased hit rate and extra-base hit rate, but it’s clear that this Rockies’ staff is not entirely the product of wet baseballs.
Over two years, the difference is even more stark. The Rockies allowed a .501 slugging and .194 isolated power at home in 2004. This year, those numbers are .420 and .155. Some percentage of that is the pitchers, and how you assign credit among the hurlers and the humidor depends largely on your proximity to Blake Street.
Earlier this year, I wrote about how the use of the humidor was a mistake because it homogenized the baseball world. While conceding that playing at altitude presented challenges for the Rockies, I lamented the loss of a unique environment. At the time, I didn’t think that Coors would play neutral all season long, and I was right; it’s become a better pitchers’ park as the year has worn on.
I don’t blame the Rockies at all. They’re convinced that their best chance to win is to deaden the baseballs and create a nine-run environment. That they had their most success as a franchise when they hit the snot out of the ball--while getting adequate starting pitching and great relief work--hasn’t registered. There’s nothing wrong with them asking for permission to alter the baseballs in a manner that fits their needs. However, they shouldn’t be able to turn a ballpark one mile high into what it’s become today, a slight pitchers’ park. MLB, which approved the humidor plan to begin with, has to step in and restore order. There’s no way--no way--that Coors Field should play neutral. You want to bring it with a certain distance of the other parks, that’s fine, but you can’t mess with the baseballs so much that it cancels out all the run-enhancing effects of the altitude.
In the case of the Rockies, they’ve implemented a solution that has radically changed the way the games are played at home. If the massive effects of the humidor are acceptable to MLB, then I believe it opens the door for teams looking to make less-radical changes. What I’d prefer, though, is for the league to step in and take a stand on how wet is too wet. Well, what I’d prefer is for no tampering with the baseballs at all, but I don’t think that will happen.
What I do know is that Jeff Cirillo is right. The baseballs in use at Coors Field have been modified in a way that completely changes the game played there. Where batted balls used to go for hits, extra-base hits and home runs, they now become outs. If you want to give some credit to the Rockies’ pitchers, you can, but the primary reason is the humidor. Cirillo’s conspiracy theories are wrong--there’s no swapping of dry and wet baseballs depending on the Rockies’ situation--but he’s right to point out what should have been obvious all along.
Joe Sheehan is an author of Baseball Prospectus. You can contact Joe by clicking here or click here to see Joe's other articles.
