John Harper's Hypocrisy

By The Common Man

As Craig reminds us this morning, in 2009, Jerod Morris wrote an article on fantasy baseball that pondered a fast start by Raul Ibanez, and went through a few of the possible causes for that start. After running through various explanations, Morris wrote,

“It’s time for me to begrudgingly acknowledge the elephant in the room: any aging hitter who puts up numbers this much better than his career averages is going to immediately generate suspicion that the numbers are not natural, that perhaps he is under the influence of some sort of performance enhancer. And since I was not able to draw any absolute parallels between his prodigously improved HR rate and his new ballpark’s hitter-friendliness, it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that “other” performance enhancers could be part of the equation.

Sorry Raul Ibanez and Major League Baseball, that’s just the era that we are in — testing or no testing.”

Morris was excoriated by the mainstream press.  Somehow, his article got picked up by the Philadelphia Inquirer, who called it a “cheap shot,” and took it to Raul Ibanez. Ibanez vehemently denied using PEDs. Geoff Baker (a writer TCM has come to respect though he still believes Baker to be ridiculously pompous and out to lunch in this particular article), wrote about the differences between “basement bloggers” and “real journalists.” And various ESPN talents weighed in on the controversy.

Fast forward to 2011, and John Harper of the New York Daily News, a “real journalist” by Baker’s (and any others’) definition, speculates on the causes for Jose Bautista’s increase in offense and writes,

“Let's hope he's clean.

Sorry, but even in this drug-testing era, it's impossible not to be suspicious when someone suddenly starts hitting the ball to the moon in his late 20s. Unfortunately, steroids forever hardened us to the romance of a late-bloomer like Bautista, especially when baseball still has no test for human growth hormone.”

Re-Projecting Jose Bautista

By Bill


"Re-projecting" is something I would occasionally do early in the season at my old blog (at least in 2009; I don't remember whether I did it again in 2010). The basic idea is this: we know, or should know, that no matter how convincing a player's performance is after 18 or 20 or 30 games, his performance over the last several years -- adjusted for age, park, etc., as the various projection systems do -- tell us a lot more than these first few weeks do about how he's likely to perform over the next 120-plus games.

But the other thing about these early games, of course, is that they still count. Any given player is likely to match his projection from here on out, but these first few weeks still happened, and will impact his overall numbers. So what I did, and what I'm going to do again with one player right now, is look at one player with a particularly surprising start to the season, apply the projections to the rest of the season, and take a look at where his end-of-the-year numbers might end up.

The system I'm going to continue using is PECOTA -- not because I think it's better than the rest, but because I think they're all pretty fungible, and Baseball Prospectus puts nice descriptive words alongside their numbers (and, now, because I know and like a bunch of these BPro guys).

And the player is Jose Bautista.