2012 MLB Regular Season Running Thread

There's no question PEDs help with recovery time. I think their use should be allowed in order to level the playing field. I say that because there are too many athletes who know how to beat the tests.

 

Question: Isn't a drug that helps a person recover from injuries faster medicine and not a PED? Is healing morally wrong in the context of sports? Or are society's attitudes on this issue just hypocritical and incoherent? I mean, if using HGH to recover from an injury is wrong, shouldn't Tommy John surgery get you get a 50-game suspension?

 

I agree with you. Good point.

 

Sorry, but that doesn't hold up.

Tommy John surgery doesn't have the side effects that steroids do. And some of the other stuff these guys use, we don't even know what the long-term effects are.

Tommy John surgery is legal in society and by the rules of baseball. Steroids are not.

 

Tommy John gets you typically a 162-game calendar suspension plus another half-season to get back up to full speed. So covered.

 

The high BABIP was the reason so many stat heads gave that Cabrera was going to fade this year. So much for that theory. The improvement in his game may have been chemically-enhanced, but it was real.

The other problem with this argument is we don't really know when he started using PEDs. People are just assuming it was before 2011 because that is when he started to break out as a player.

 

D'oh!

Newest Rangers acquisition Ryan Dempster either a) lost his passport or b) is embroiled in a divorce and custody dispute.

 

I have a theory. I believe the reason NFL fans are more blase about PED cases than are baseball fans is that football fans know (even if only subconsciously) how brutal and basically life-shortening the sport is, and hence are more willing to understand what players do to get over.

 

I agree this is the large majority of the reason.

I think there's a lesser but still powerful other reason -- parents can't ever see their kids playing professional football, but they can see them playing baseball, where normal-sized human beings exist. You just never hear the "for the kids" chorus start up regarding PEDs in any other sport. The fact that 99.9 percent of kids will never get far enough for PEDs to even matter at all doesn't seem to factor into the thinking.

 

The answer to that would be B.

 

Are the Reds doing this with mirrors? Or are they for real? I lurk here a lot, and if there's been much discussion about them, I've missed it.