Fans Interested in Cheaters, Not Cheating

Yesterday, ESPN published an article on how Americans view PEDs:

New research conducted for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency finds that Americans rank the use of performance-enhancing drugs as the most serious problem facing sports today.

The USADA commissioned a study that surveyed about 9,000 Americans -- including adults, children, athletes, coaches and teachers -- to measure the impact sports has on values and culture in the U.S.

Strangely enough, of the last ten posts I published, my human growth hormone (hGH) post was by far the least viewed.  It brings up an interesting point though.  I think baseball fans are much more interested in being upset with pharmacological cheating than with the actual effects of pharmacological cheating.  I find this disappointing because the conversations would be much more interesting than the silly teeth gnashing we currently endure.

In a pure ethical sense, I can understand demonizing all cheating.  However, there is a difference between cheating and getting no advantage vs. cheating and getting an advantage.  Maybe that difference is merely a practical one, but I think that needs to be acknowledged.

What Cheer, Andrew Gibson?

When I first started out writing a blog, I was largely unfocused and unsure why exactly I was writing a blog.  It was shortly after I found out that there was a blog about the Orioles called Cookin' With Gas.  It mingled my more in depth interest (and perhaps too strong devotion at the time) to utilizing statistics alternative to those frequently used by more traditional scribes.  That is, why rely on problems with fielding percentage when you can use new things like total zone.  As far as I could tell, it was an oasis in the statistics barren field of Oriole writing.  What was disappointing to me was that the site had been recently defunct. So, I took to periodically writing in 2007 to fill the void. The hope was that my presence would somehow trigger others to write and then I could read them instead of writing my own work. 

It is now 2010 and I think there are several bloggers out there who are interested in the numbers.  Not merely what the numbers say, but how they are crafted, how they are calculated, and how effective they are.  People that seem to share that joy of mine in sitting down and re-engineering statistics.  Yet . . . I still blog.

Today, I would like to focus on a writer who has lately emerged and has written several interesting items.  Andrew Gibson has been posting over at Camden Chat.  He is someone to which I think you all should pay some attention.  In today's BORT, I am going to go over his piece on the Orioles Defensive Efficiency right after the jump cut.

Four Quotes about International Talent in the Dominican Republic

A little more depth on these things can be found over at Camden Depot, but I thought this might be a conversation worth having over here.  I should also have another post up here tonight or tomorrow.

Some administration news . . . I'm looking for reader submissions.  If you want me to highlight a news item or you want to take your own take on it for me to throw it up here, email me at camdendepot at gmail.  If  can find a few writers with top notch skills, I'll grant access for them to post at will.

Onto the four quotes:

ESPN's story on the Dominican Prospect League where unsigned Dominican players take part in a 25 game schedule.

"Also, though most teams' scouts have shown up regularly for games, Mejia notes that some teams -- like the Chicago White Sox and the Baltimore Orioles -- still have not had a regular presence at games."

Roch chasing the story with an interview of International Scouting Director John Stockstill.

"We do have people reporting to us," Stockstill said.

Stockstill also pointed out that many of these players are showcased at other events. "And many of them have probably been at our facility and our camp," he said. "And that's not just Baltimore. That's probably a lot of other clubs, as well."

In other words, the Orioles aren't depending only on this prospect league to evaluate the talent over there. On any given day, you might have 20 workouts taking place at various complexes.

Brian Mejia's, founder of the Dominican Prospect League, response.

This whole DPL and O's presences was blown out of proportion. I was asked a question by ESPN reporter and gave a simple answer. It's not like the O's don't scout, evaluate and sign players in DR. The question was asked, "how many teams are consistently evaluating players at the DPL games". I gave him a simple answer.

The O's have many other things to worry about than being at all 25 DPL games. They do what they do and sign who they like... Budget, sign ability, need and roster spots all come into play when making signing decision in DR. The DR is small but players are everywhere, I'm sure they are doing their due diligence, I'm also sure everyone in BAL FO wants to win asap, any opportunity they have to sign the right guy they will do it.

A year later and this is a quote from Andy MacPhail.

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. 

Do these quotes seem as peculiar to me as they do to you?

Camden Depot Articles on this.
Baltimore May Be Dropping the Easy Ones, Too... (January 6, 2010)
Roch Kobatko Chases Down Stockstill about the DPL (January 7, 2010)
The DPL Trilogy: The Agent/Co-founder Responds (January 9, 2010)
Revisiting the Orioles International Effort (February 13, 2011)

Re-BORTing with a Word on Steve Melewski

BORT (aka Baltimore Orioles Round Table) was originally designed to be a forum for a few Orioles bloggers and preeminent posters from a smattering of message boards.  As quickly as the solid gold idea was created, it came crashing down.  The platform was just not very conducive to everyone who was interested in taking part.  The interest probably was a bit too directed toward increasing traffic on our home pages as opposed to making genuinely interesting content on the BORT site.  So, after a couple years . . . why do we, or maybe just I, wish to re-BORT.


For me, the idea arose one year ago and has been festering since.  Then, an upstart and prominent Orioles prospect website was caught in a brew-ha-ha about blatantly plagiarizing professional prospect sites.  It was a typical story of a teenager who wanted to have more pull than he had the ability to do so.  Often with upstarts we see a craving to be important instead of organically growing.  It truly does take a lot of effort and loads of criticism to be a decent writer (I do not consider myself a decent writer).  Anyway, the aforementioned plagiatizing blogger repeatedly refused that he was doing such a thing when his site was completely borrowing from PG Crosschecker and other sites the would be unfamiliar to the common fan, but stick out like sore thumbs for many of us.  He even was selling all of this borrowed information as a book.  After a bit of a tedious runaround, he realized he had no avenue other than owning up and writing about how much he learned from the experience.  Apologies mean nothing to me (well, almost nothing).  What means something is how people change their behavior.  I consider that blogger reformed.  He now runs a relatively solid and popular website that is a great repository for information about Orioles prospects.  He does very little analysis because he is not well trained for that, yet.  He does provide lots of interview, focused information from Orioles prospects, pictures, and videos.  It is a blog that was needed within our loose group of blogs.  Again, though, it was tedious to get this change to occur.  A few of us joke how much effort it took to get this guy to act responsibly and how the large sites, like Jonathan Mayo and PG Crosschecker, did not care.  I thought then that a website that operated as a meta-filter reviewing and pointing toward other articles would have nipped this one in the bud.


However, a site just bent on a Puritan righteousness of how awful we are and our writing, but oh how we love our Orioles did not seem like a particularly fun concept.  What does seem like a fun concept however is a site that not only questions what some people write, but also praises what others write.  It is in this new incarnation that I suggest BORT now becomes a place where daily we try to highlight certain Oriole centric articles by bloggers ranging from Orioles Post to Baltimore Sports and Life to the School of Roch to Peter The Schmuck Stops Here.  Our ideas may not be grand or interesting, but hopefully this little experiment will work out.  Also, with great hope, we will hold our own articles on pillars and thrash them with equal measure.  To add more, the goal here is really to add discussion and to be more engaging as a community.  I hope this is not taken to be merely mean-spirited.

After the jump, a word on today's feature: Steve Melewski's Blog entry over as MASN.