Jeter Admits to Tarnishing the Record Books by Having Lousy Range

It's not that I mean to imply any particular reason to doubt that Derek Jeter was "clean." He insists he never used PED's, and I see no reason to assume that he, like Rodriguez, is lying; I just see plenty of reasons to assume he could be lying, which is the whole point.

“One thing that’s irritating and really upsets me a lot is when you hear people say that everybody did it,” Jeter said. “Everybody wasn’t doing it.”

I mean, fine, I certainly have never thought that "Everybody did it." But a lot of people had reasons to assume Rodriguez was steroid-free, and I don't know that there is some obvious reason why Jeter is more clear of suspicion than Rodriguez. Sure, Jeter was not a power hitter, but it's not as if we've been given a clear enough view of the scope of PED use to lead us to believe that they were only used by the homer-hungry.

The point is, while "Everybody did it" is obviously wrong, "Anybody could have done it" is obviously right. Not that Jeter isn't entitled to blow off some steam or whatever, but I hope he can just STFU and move on.

Because really, if you are talking about how players are remembered in the long-term, then loafing it on defense has probably been a substantial taint on the record books (since evidently "record books" has come to mean not the actual records kept of play on the field but rather some hodgepodge of conventionally well-known numbers devoid of context) for at least a few major stars in baseball history. And while PED use is bad in that it artificially raises the bar for everyone else in the league, bad fielding hurts the team's chances of winning, which, it can certainly be argued, is the bigger baseball sin.

I am not saying that Jeter loafed it on defense at any point in his career; the title of this post is for amusement purposes solely. But he certainly could have done so. Whether it was a calculated effort to help his team by keeping himself healthy or a calculated effort to help himself by cheating the team is like asking whether or not a steroid user took 'em to help himself or the team: sure, we can always use our opinion of the player to guide our own opinion, but we're just speculating.

I guess what I am really trying to get at here is that Jeter's argument - "Trust me, it was not everyone!" - reads like just another way of saying, "I am better than (some of) my fellow players," which is what PED use is all about in the first place. I just don't like any system that is based on the players jockeying for recognition among themselves. And Jeter is still playing the media/MLB game, hyping any star that has not fallen.

“I understand people have questions,” Jeter said. “I understand there are a lot of big names coming out. But that’s not everybody. You know what I mean? That’s the point I’m trying to make.”

Right, but there were a lot of clean players who weren't very good in the majors or who couldn't crack them; though it could be because we're getting the media filter, it sure as heck seems like Jeter is arguing that there were HOF-level STARS who were clean. Sure reads a lot more like Jeter's capitalizing on the scandal than that he is legitimately upset about it.

I don't want to make Jeter out to be a villain - he's just the other side of the coin. Sluggers and power aces are vilified in the mainstream for varying degrees of apparent culpability in PED use, and Jeter is vilified in the saberstream for not measuring up defensively. If Jeter wants credit for not taking PED's, when we know that anyone COULD have taken them and subsequently lied about it, why should I believe him when his assessments of his own fielding skills lead me to believe that he is less than honest about his performance?

Hell, maybe all the other SS WERE taking PED's and that's why Jeter's defense has fared so poorly over the years in contrast. (Hey, we already know that the best and worst hitters in the "better defensive SS than Jeter" group tested positive.) The point is, Jeter's not basing the credibility of his "I never did PED's and no one ever even suggested it because it's just that obvious they wouldn't help ME of all people" line on establishing honesty in his assessments. He is skating a fine line where he is trying to get credit for being too good (of a person) to take steroids on the basis of being too good (of a player) to need them. And that - well, how credible was the same defense from Alex Rodriguez?

The evidence available to me that Derek Jeter has been a poor defensive SS over the course of his career - and one certainly not deserving of any Gold Glove recognition - is stronger than the evidence available to me that he didn't take PED use. For me personally, we'll need him to comment honestly and intelligently about the reality that "he gets far more girls than his fielding talents should allow" before I choose to assume any degree of honesty or intelligence in his claims not to have used PED's.

While in all earnestness I do not think it likely that Jeter used PED's, all he's doing now is lounging in his stone house throwing glass bottles out the window. Put down the bottles and come outside if you want me to take you seriously (though you very likely do not).

Brief History of A Fraud

1. Major League Baseball owners profit considerably off of a monopoly. Over time this monopoly is exacerbated by a coalescence of government and media interventions; the cash cow is protected because it lets enough wealthy entities grab its teats.

2. Major League Baseball further develops its monopoly with the invention and growth of the minor league affiliate system, which entrenches the position of Major League Baseball (i.e., NL + AL) as the top of a hierarchical order of baseball.

3. Major League Baseball players, noticing that the monopoly leaves them with no professional option other than the indefinite servitude of an MLB contract, challenge the reserve clause.

4. Because of MLB's monopoly, free agency for all would likely exacerbate wage depression by flooding the market, as Finley hoped for. They instead fight for a more limited type of free agency and develop a system based on service time - essentially carrying over the previous system but allowing for the most successful class of players to earn bargaining rights.

5. The union spends decades basing its strategy for increasing the players' share of the pie on getting a greater amount of money for its stars; the portion of revenues paid to the lower classes of players continue to shrink. Pay for minor leaguers stuck in the affiliate system is not many people's idea of a living wage, and almost no one in baseball even seems to think that this is a problem.

6. Technological advances make a variety performance enhancement methods more effective, more readily available, and in some cases safer. Many come with long-term negative effects that often are undisclosed, and at least some players take treatments without informed consent, often from suppliers with little or no medical/scientific background.

7. A large, though debated, proportion of baseball players, presumably at all levels, use performance enhancing methods in order to gain an advantage on their fellows. The economic incentive to do so is immense at every level: a player drafted in the first round makes much more than a player drafted in the second round; a player in the high minors makes more than a player in the low minors; a player on the 40-man roster is paid more than other AA and AAA players; a player on the 25-man roster is paid much more than any minor-league player; a player with 3+ years of service time and talent beyond the margins is paid much more than a player with 0-2.5 years of service time; players with 6+ years of service time, provided they're within striking distance of average, are without exception multi-millionaires.

8. Some unclear changes in the game around 1993-1994 shift MLB to a more home run and strikeout oriented game. Performance enhancers that increase musculature, such as anabolic steroids, likely experience a surge in consumption among baseball players because they ostensibly can be better leveraged into high salaries than other performance enhancers. MLB teams appear to overvalue sluggers during the ensuing period and undervalue defensive contributors to some extent, though it is not clear that this was especially more pronounced than during other epochs.

9. The non-MLB entities in the baseball industry leverage the offensive explosion of the 90's into more profit, be it in media, merchandising, equipment, etc. Despite considerable ill-will among fans and bystanders alike stemming from labor strife that coincided with the offensive surge, the co-conspirators in the MLB monopoly work hard to turn a series of hunts for MLB records into renewed interest in the game, benefiting MLB, MLB players, and the rest of the industry alike. Furthermore, the baseball industrial complex works hard to spin the successes of new ballparks like Jacobs Field and Camden Yards into a wave of new stadiums receiving absurd levels of public funding.

10. MLB and the MLBPA agree overwhelmingly on labor peace, because it is clear that in the aggregate the present arrangement will yield the players a ****-ton of money. Not just in salaries from the MLB teams, of course, but also in compensation from other parts of the baseball industry.

11. The evidence that players employ performance enhancement methods in violation of federal law begins to amass, causing consternation for the entire baseball industry. Most afflicted and conflicted is baseball's fourth estate, who are charged with maintaining interest in the game among present and future generations but who also have journalistic ethics to consider. Of little help is the media landscape that privileges self-righteous opinion and sensationalist accounts as ways to hold audiences. More evidence begins to trickle out through the media, though there is an obvious phenomenon whereby many are keeping their mouths shut.

12. The Federal Government involves itself with all the resolve of a loose coalition of government officials seeking to justify their own positions or departmental fundings. Predictably, the government is more interested in going after individual perpetrators than going after the baseball industrial complex it has routinely aided and abetted, though some token references to MLB's anti-trust exemption are made here and there.

13. As evidence mounts of widespread use of dangerous and/or illegal performance enhancement methods, the baseball industry largely diverts its attention to allegations made against three of its biggest stars, capitalizing on pre-existing disdain for Clemens and Bonds and the overwhelmingly negative view of McGwire's testimony.

14. MLB, the media, and the federal government come together to release the Mitchell Report, hyping it as its generation's Valley of the Dolls. The joint venture appears to be a commercial success despite mediocre reviews from critics.

15. Capitalizing on pre-existing disdain for the game's biggest current star, the media co-conspires with several industry sources to violate federal law by reporting a result from an avowedly anonymous drug test - a result that contradicts the star's previous point blank denial. The media arm of the industry has a field day, once again attempting to advance a generalized pro-baseball spin coupled with anti-player vitriol.

16. The big star responds by apologizing for the indiscretion he has belatedly been caught in; his story is catered to protecting his own legal and financial interests, casting aspersion on only a brief part of his career and circumventing discussion of any of the technical details that could, theoretically, land him in legal trouble. He casts blame on the media (too much pressure), fellow players (too much culture), and the Texas heat, three things all parties involved have no trouble occasionally converting into scapegoats.

* * *

The reserve clause per se is long dead, but MLB is still in the aggregate treating baseball players with contempt and disrespect. The affirmative action program for the game's best players has not advanced the economic interests of lower classes of players; instead, a class of wealthy baseball players seems more or less content to keep collecting checks from the industry (during and after their playing careers), typically staying loyal to the industry and maintaining a willingness to sell out fellow players.

Minor league players work for a pittance, which no one in the industry bats an eye over because that sector doesn't bring in much at the gates. The contribution of the players in the minor leagues to the overall baseball industry is almost entirely overlooked for one simple reason: they are all deemed replaceable. It is quite clearly the case the players are able to become MLB players by facing superior competition in the minor leagues and that as such the minor leagues play an integral role in enabling MLB's star system. They also pump profits throughout the secondary and tertiary baseball industries (increasingly owned by MLB itself, as in MLBAM). The only reward offered to minor league players, however, is to make it at the top and to become part of the most privileged class of players.

Players even thinking about a baseball career are quite frequently put off by the economic realities of the situation. Players unable to garner financing from the very small pool of available lucrative signing bonuses and college scholarship have little incentive to continue in the game, even as these decisions are made at ages where the evidence of a player's future abilities is quite scant. Furthermore, there is a major edge for players coming from socioeconomically-privileged backgrounds, as technological solutions for building a better baseball player are increasingly available to consumers, and consumers with more room in their pockets are increasingly emboldened to see their children's baseball talents as potentially worthy financial investments. And in the international baseball economy, the system encourages less-well-off communities to invest heavily in trickle-down from individual players who can get large signing bonuses and, eventually, contracts; given the long odds of such investments, many community investments in baseball careers go unrewarded and many are not pursued in the first place.

Whether the status quo should be considered a systemic failure on the part of the players' labor organization or a systemic success of the multipolar baseball industry is certainly debatable, but the results are clear. Baseball can ultimately deem any of its players dispensable, from the rookie leagues to Bonds. It can render its players' rights dispensable, from urinalysis to endemic media leaks to control of players' off-field activities; despite the game's tendency toward panopticism, though, the strategic trickle of information about the players ensures that consumers are unaware of so much information that the information they do receive is bound to be misleading or deceiving with considerable frequency. The only right that seems to be consistently guarded by the Player's Association is the right to collect on a guaranteed contract. In fact, the protection of this right is so thorough that it ties into the backstory on Rodriguez's excuses for taking PED's: MLBPA vetoed his attempts to lessen his guaranteed salary when he sought to escape the Texas skillet and the pressure and heat that went with it; subsequently, his only option was to jump right into the fire, accepting a trade to the Yankees where MLB's financial obligations to Rodriguez would be fully honored but where the media, manager, teammates, and financially powerful fan base were, in the aggregate, quite content to take away everything Rodriguez possessed that couldn't be bought.

In the end, it seems the only reason that you would want to be a baseball player is the belief that you may eventually make millions, a belief tempered by the sheer bulk of ethical dilemmas and unencumbered attacks that most baseball stars will have to weather.

Who benefits from MLB's star system? The people already making a lot of money, plain and simple. Ultimately, the star system is about projecting the image that MLB always, and without exception, has the best players and therefore is the highest level of play. This functioning is tautological: MLB's business model is to prevent the best players from having any choice but to play in MLB other than quitting the sport. And players with sufficient physical attributes to develop into MLB players do quit the sport, and in droves. MLB is a system for eliminating the competition, not a system for delivering the best baseball possible to fans/consumers.

I don't think the immense profits of the baseball industry are generated because there is a great deal of value in the way that MLB is conducting itself; there is value in the game, and MLB just knows how to convert it to capital without adding any social benefit in the process.

The fans and the players are both always dispensable and frequently dispensed with in the status quo. The love of the game itself keeps the entire ship afloat between continued fan interest and the exploitative salaries of the bulk of the game's willing players (and even the bulk of the teams' staffs and the media establishment, many of whom simply want to work in baseball).

Do you want to fix baseball? Stop reducing it to its stars; stop trying to copy the Hollywood model, which has now been copied in a variety of US industries and been exported globally. Start trying to build a model that protects and honors its players and its fans. Start by assuming everyone in the game is entitled to fair pay. Give the players incentives to co-operate with their teammates at all levels instead of incentives to compete with them. Give players incentive to pursue a career in baseball even if it might not work out. Develop the entire pool of talent instead of creating a self-sustaining system where whoever is at the top is by definition the best (and where, by definition, the players at the top carry the burden of legitimating baseball even as its legitimacy is most threatened .

In short, cut out the industry profiteers. Give fans a stake in determining salaries that goes beyond merchandising and marketing. Give players at all levels a chance to make the game better by playing their hardest. The value in the game is generated by the dedication of the players and fans alike, something that the present arrangement further jeopardizes at every hour of every day. The role of MLB is to demand an obscene cut for their managerial skills, which themselves are calculated in self-interest and not general interest.

The MLBPA, like most unions in the US, is a sad caricature of collective labor organization. Until the players call for a truly radical change, the baseball industry will continue to perpetuate A Fraud like this one, recurringly and systemically. And until the fans develop a substantial and widespread interest in supporting such a radical change, the players will be largely powerless to move forward. To "save" baseball, we do not need fewer needles but rather a revolutionary ethic among the fan base that can build the coalition between the only two parts of the game that are worth a damn, the fans and the players.

"But that's why it's the hall of FAME"

What a lousy argument: a good player whose credentials are in order is deemed by many to be unworthy of the hall of fame because that player was not sufficiently famous during their playing career.

What does fame mean? Reputation, renown, report, rumor. Fame concerns public/popular discourse.

Why is there a Hall of Fame for baseball (or any number of things)? What is suggested by the argument "It's the Hall of FAME, not the hall of (excellence/outstanding achievements/value/etc.)" is that the HOF commemorates fame that has already been accrued. If you were famous enough, then a decade or two later, you will get a plaque!

This seems a transparently poor interpretation of the meaning of fame. Fame is not merely an arbitrary social phenomenon. Fame has to do with a universal characteristic of human language and hence social communication: famous people are used to demonstrate desirable and undesirable traits, and famous people permeate the discourse on human possibility. Fame is one of the many tools human societies use to invent members of their societies. That fame may typically go hand in hand with exaggeration as well as omission is telling, in that the general discourse of fame is not used to define the famous people in question but rather to assist in defining the society and the possibilities it offers for its people. Famous people are stories that we tell to develop people (some of whom attain fame and most of whom do not).

So, while some commentators explicitly or implicitly call for the Hall of Fame to catalogue which players were at one time famous, the Hall's criteria and patient selection process would seem to indicate that the Hall is designed to institutionally create and propagate fame, rather than to record it. The under-defined purpose of the Hall of Fame, to me, appears to be to have a way to remember those players that serve as a model for what players should strive for.

The Hall of Fame tells stories, and induction into it is about story-telling. The writers tell all sorts of stories that indicate that some players' contribution to their teams' victories are overlooked because other players exemplified different characteristics. It is fine that the writers want to
valorize milestones and want to valorize players who earned acclaim during their own time. But what stat-heads who are trying to evaluate players in terms of their value toward team winning are showing is that the writers are advancing stories that are less exemplary of what it takes to be a good ballplayer than the stories of Tim Raines, Bert Blyleven, et cetera.

Some people would prefer to have a baseball Hall of Fame that commemorates individual achievements in the form of particular types of acclaim or accomplishments in particular statistics. If the Hall of Fame is ultimately about encouraging players to win awards during their careers, or rack up a lot of singles, or to get good run support, then it seems quite logical that the writers/HOF voters would honor these accomplishments.

When these writers honor players who rack up singles or BBWAA awards but exclude players whose contribution to team wins is far superior, they are ultimately telling a story about the game of baseball and how it is played (and, crucially, how it should be played) that people such as myself find to be, at best, lacking. What is at stake is that the HOF truly does, as I see it, serve as an institution for creating and propagating fame and not merely as an institution for recording it. Like it or not, the Hall of Fame has been a major institution in baseball history, and I think it is strikingly naive to argue that it merely reflects the vagaries of the times when it seems to shape so much of it.

Roberto Petagine never got a real shot at the majors while Jeff Francoeur got gifted not just a cup of coffee but several caffeinated gallons (and the support of a delirious hackademic). Some would say that the HOF has no role in these realities, but I find that argument largely untenable. The HOF has played a major role in shaping what people expect from a baseball career; it is a substantial part of the episteme, and its influence on thought doesn't wash off once a player's career is over and they go into management or scouting.

But the point I am trying to make is not that the HOF has done baseball history a disservice by honoring the players it has and excluding other worthy players whose contributions were not better understood by selectors. We need not worry about what the Hall has wrought, and we need not criticize it for not having the technological blessings bestowed upon contemporary baseball analysts. All we need to worry about is what knowledge about the past and present we want to pass on in order to shape the future, as well as how to pass it on. And the question is, if we can show that Bert Blyleven and Tim Raines were flat out better ballplayers than Jim Rice or whomever, don't we want to use our institution for fame-making to honor these ballplayers? Don't we want to use an institution whose judgments are seen as relatively timeless to decide on whether players met the timeless standard of helping their team's win? Why should we use such an institution to confer timeless honor on players whose acclaim and fame stemmed more from the viewpoints of their time than from their contributions in that time?

We don't need a Hall of Fame to tell us who the most feared hitter of the 70's was. Nor do we need it to know who should have been the most feared hitter of the 70's. We need it to tell us who the great players of baseball history have been so we can build the great players of tomorrow.