Slothfart: You mean like the 19 year (1986-2005) conspiracy that requires dozens and dozens of former coaches, players, clubhouse staff, agents, etc (who Pujols shares) to conceal without a single peep until Canseco admitted it in his book.

You mean like the 21 year (1989-2010) conspiracy that requires dozens and dozens of former coaches, players, clubhouse staff, agents, etc (who Pujols shares) to conceal without a single peep until McGwire admitted it in an interview .

Both of those were open secrets just about the entire time. The only "coverup" was that no one cared.

Slothfart: DeWayne Mann: Pujols was NOT a 13th round pick nobody ever heard of. His freshman year of college, he hit ".461 for the year, with 22 home runs and 80 RBIs". That's after destroying his high school opponents...So, in order for the PED theory to make sense, he basically had to start in middle school.

You apologists are grasping at straws or just delusional. First it was the walls are too far at Angel's stadium. NOW it's he was good in High School against 16 year olds and hit over .400 at a Community College, so he COULDN'T be cheating up until this year. Everyone knows how tough those community college pitchers are. HE MUST BE CLEAN!

Well DeWayne Mann, seeing as how your baseball knowledge begins and ends with Albert Pujols stats, I've got some fairly recent baseball history to teach you. Barry Bonds was a major league baseball player. He was a multi-year MVP, perennial all-star and held a hr batting title. He was a very good player, some would say one of the best, AND it was against professional, grown up baseball players..not high school boys or community college kids. He was destined to be a Hall of Famer BEFORE he started juicing. I know, crazy, huh? If HE was that good and could/did cheat, why is it a stretch of your imagination for a kid who was the Maple Woods Community College batting champion to cheat?

I get it, you like him. He makes your hearts flutter with every swing. But he was a good player in an era full of cheats, AND shared a lot of the same characteristics and organizational ties with the cheats. It wasn't like he was on a team like the Royals with very little cheating stink on them. He was surrounded on a team with cheaters (McGwire)/enablers (LaRussa).
Which is more realistic? A guy who has literally surrounded himself in an organization for his ENTIRE career that has mass produced some of the most notorious cheaters and chokes the very first year he gets tested for HGH since A-ball. Or a superman, a genetic freak who nobly waved off the org ...

I'm laughing way too hard at this post to give a full response now. Sorry. If I tried, it would just turn into my pointing & laughing at how very, very stupid you are.

So, my apologies. I'll give it a fair shake in the morning. But until then, I'll give a few hints on what I'll bring up. Give you a fighting chance:

-Again, when did he start juicing? How can you tell? When did he stop?

-Did steroids work a lot better on Pujols than most people? If so, why? If not, why aren't more people hitting like him?

-How come a lot of the people caught doing steroids have been mediocre hitters (like Alex Sanchez, the first major leaguer suspended)?

-Take a look at my profile. Do I look like someone whose baseball knowledge "begins and ends with Albert Pujols stats?"

You know what? I'll throw you another bone. Look for posts by me in this thread:

http://www.fark.com/comments/7046997/The-head-of-MLB-players-union-s ay s-steroids-shouldnt-keep-players-from-Hall-of-Fame-Oh-he-also-wants-to -be-on-a-desert-island-with-Magic-Johnson#new

Did my giant reply break the thread? On the sports tab, the thread is listed as having 113 comments but in here it says 114. If I log out, or check the thread from my phone, my post is completely missing.

Does anyone else see my post? It's really big and was posted at 02:16:21 AM. Starts out like this:

DeWayne Mann: Ok, got caught up doing something else, sobered me up enough that I think I can do this.

Rex_Banner: DeWayne Mann: Did my giant reply break the thread? On the sports tab, the thread is listed as having 113 comments but in here it says 114. If I log out, or check the thread from my phone, my post is completely missing.

Does anyone else see my post? It's really big and was posted at 02:16:21 AM. Starts out like this:

DeWayne Mann: Ok, got caught up doing something else, sobered me up enough that I think I can do this.

I don't see it. You broke Fark

YAAAAY.

It threw some weird error about nested tags when I looked at the preview the first time I clicked post, and all the HTML tags got messed up (like that post quoting me earlier...everything was italicized). So I fixed all the tags by hand, found a few typos I made, fixed them, clicked post w/ preview. That preview looked fine and threw no errors, so I clicked post for real.

Like I said, I can see it no problem. It's long, so maybe that's the issue...I guess I'll just copy & paste it in two parts? WAY too lazy to fix all the HTML by hand again, so it'll look bad.

Here's the repost, part 1. Again, I'm not really gonna fix the HTML, so it looks bad, but it should be obvious what's going on quote-wise.

---------

Ok, got caught up doing something else, sobered me up enough that I think I can do this.

Before anything else,

Slothfart: And looking at your posts on this page you've done a lot of copy/pasting/linking

Yes, yes I do. This is because I tend to rely on things like facts, evidence, data, etc. I don't think it's too much for me to ask that you do the same, rather than using anecdotes, feelings, insinutation....

Ok, here goes:

Slothfart: You apologists are grasping at straws or just delusional. First it was the walls are too far at Angel's stadium.

First, you may have noticed that I never said a word about walls. This is because peterstork670 and I are not engaged in some sort of vast conspiracy, and, in fact, are allowed to say different things. This is not grasping at straws or anything else (I expect to see the phrase "moving the goalposts" at some points), it's called "having different thoughts and opinions."

Secondly, and somewhat more importantly, at no point have I tried to explain anything at all about Pujols's performance this year. I 100% refuse to draw conclusions on a month's worth of data. This is, again, because I tend to rely on things like research, and research shows that a month of data is almost meaningless.

Instead, what I'm disputing is the claim that "Pujols used to use PEDs, no longer does and therefore now he sucks."

And let me be very, very clear: the part of that claim i'm disputing is "Pujols now sucks because he's no longer on PEDs." I do not care if Pujols did or did not use PEDs. It has absolutely no bearing on what I'm saying.

Slothfart: Well DeWayne Mann, seeing as how your baseball knowledge begins and ends with Albert Pujols stats, I've got some fairly recent baseball history to teach you. Barry Bonds was a major league baseball player. He was a multi-year MVP, perennial all-star and held a hr batting title. He was a very good player, some would say one of the best, AND it was against professional, grown up baseball players..not high school boys or community college kids. He was destined to be a Hall of Famer BEFORE he started juicing. I know, crazy, huh? If HE was that good and could/did cheat, why is it a stretch of your imagination for a kid who was the Maple Woods Community College batting champion to cheat?

Again: when did he start? How can you tell? He has hit far better than his peers at every level (except for THREE games at AAA). Unless he was using PEDs before he moved to the US, your contention that PEDs turned him from a very good hitter to a great hitter has no real evidence.

Slothfart: chokes the very first year he gets tested for HGH since A-ball.

This is where I point out yet again that a month of data is almost completely worthless. You're building an entire case here based on less than 100 ABs.

In 1958, Willie Mays had a 112 PA stretch over 30 games where he hit .250/.356/.313 with 0 HR. He went on to hit something like 450 more HR in his career.

In 2006, Chris Shelton started the season by hitting .345/.415/.833 with 10 HR in 23 G (94 PA). He hit 8 more HR in his career, which was something like 400 PA.

Are these things unexpected? Yes. But a lot of stuff in baseball is. That's sort of the point. But using 100 PA to make any sort of declaration is really, really dumb.

Slothfart: "I'm doing it MY way and sure I bulked up the same and hang out with the juicers...but I'm Superman and I'm clean. After all I've ALWAYS been awesome...check out my high school batting average. But I can suddenly can no longer hit like a superman because the outfield wall is farther and I'm 32...that's pretty old."

My bad, didn't realize you'd been talking with Pujols in person. That doesn't SOUND like him, but...

Slothfart: when a person turns to insults instead of normal conversation you know the argument is lost and over.

Slothfart: are you that much of a Pujols slurper

Slothfart: Either YOU are really trolling with your bizarre excuses and insults where YOU end up being butt of...or you are just an extremely ignorant person.

Slothfart: seeing as how your baseball knowledge begins and ends with Albert Pujols stats

k

Slothfart: 1. sometime after being called up from the minors where there is strict HGH/Steroid testing.

Ok, so, here's your time line:

Pujols hits like crazy in high school
Pujols hits like crazy in college
Pujols hits like crazy in the minors
Over the offseason, LaRussa, Canseco & McGwire say "hey, let's get this awesome 20 year old 3B in the minors on HGH!" So they do, getting him nice & ready to crush the majors in a span of like 6 months.
Pujols hits like crazy in the majors

Because that's the only way your claim even comes close to making sense. I mean, from everything I've heard, you don't just use HGH and magically have muscles. It takes months of work. But the only multiple-month period where Pujols

A. Wasn't in the minors and
B. Wasn't hitting awesomely in the majors

was that offseason. And even then, there was NO GUARANTEE Pujols would start the season in the majors. If he hadn't had a great spring, their opening day third baseman would've been Placido Polanco, and Pujols would've been in (most likely) AA. That seems like a huge risk, right?

By the way, his first month in the Majors? .370/.431/.739, 8HR in 102PA. What does that mean? Well, nothing to me, but I'm sure it's a book to you.

If, instead, you're claiming that the PEDs started after his rookie season, you'll have to explain why he was so good that year.

And part 2:

--------



Slothfart: Ballooning in size while increasing stats

Again...which stats? Pujols actually has pretty standard aging curve. Compare Pujols to, say, Lou Gehrig.

Young players stats do normally improve as they get experience. You'll have to show how his stat increase can only be explained by juicing.

Slothfart: First of all not steroids, HGH. They started testing for steroids in 2004. Which means that could be the sudden bulk up from 2001-2004. This is the first year for HGH. They are both PEDs (performance enhancing drugs), but are different. HGH doesn't do damage to the brain and body like roids.

Apologies for messing up the terminology.

Slothfart: I never said he didn't have skills. It made his good skills better.

No, but you're claiming that without PEDs, he doesn't have skills NOW.

Slothfart: You make it seem like only scrubs juice. Just look at the MVPs and All-stars from both leagues who got caught since the late 80s.

No, actually, I agree. A lot of players over the last 20-30 years have juiced. Probably most of the players. To put it a different way, I'd expect more players over the last 20 years to have used steroids than players in the 70s & 80s used greenies...and a LOT of players used greenies.

So why is Pujols basically the only guy having a problem? Again, did the PEDs affect him differently?

Slothfart: Doctors say they'll be out 4-6 weeks but miraculously come back in two weeks.

And other times a pitcher might have tendonitis in his shoulder and will be out for 2 weeks, but then it turns out it was misdiagnosed and he'll be out for the season with a torn labrum.

Doctors are not magicians or fortune tellers. They make the best diagnosis they can, which can still be wrong, and then suggest recovery times based on how previous cases have proceeded.

More importantly, the human body is not a machine. You can't say exactly how a recovery will proceed day by day.

Put together, this means that there will be extreme outliers (just like how there are extreme outliers in, say, how well players perform over 100 PAs). The existence of these outliers cannot really be used as proof of anything.

Besides, if there's this MASSIVE PED coverup, don't you think the team doctors would be aware of it? I mean, if anyone should notice the effects, they would. So why wouldn't they help the coverup by underestimating the recovery time?

Slothfart: That is what Braun got caught doing, or a "see no evil" type person might say DIDN'T do.

If he was caught, don't you think he would've been suspended?

Slothfart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_substances_in_baseball_in_the_Unit ed_States

You know, you should probably read that, and the list of sources at the bottom. And here's another one for you:

http://steroids-and-baseball.com/

Slothfart: Was Sammy Sosa clean?

Don't know, don't care, probably not. As I said, I assume the vast majority of players juiced. I just don't think PEDs have anywhere near the effect in baseball that the average person does.

But that being said, in the current culture of steroids-McCarthyism, I feel that if you're going to accuse a player of juicing, or if you're going to use juicing to explain something else, well, you better have some hard data on your side. And you have none.

Uncle Pooky: You truly are the Sheldon Cooper of Fark baseball threads.

Hey, that's what the 2012 DeWayne Mann being an ass season is all about.

Ok, going to bed. I'll be around tomorrow. But before I leave, one final question: if we can use 100 PA to show that Pujols sucks now that he's no longer on PEDs...how come he was tied for the lead in spring training HRs? Personally, I don't think either sample matters...but if one does, the other surely has to.

Uncle Pooky: Damn you, I had forgotten about that. Well played.

I fully intend to run that into the ground. Cracks me up every time I think of it.

Uncle Pooky: DeWayne Mann: Uncle Pooky: Damn you, I had forgotten about that. Well played.

I fully intend to run that into the ground. Cracks me up every time I think of it.

You have my unwavering support.

Hooray, we agree on something!