The evil of banality

Manny and Big Papi have joined the 2003 Leaked Names List, finally putting an official aura of anabolic steroids around 2004's Fellowship of the Bloody Sock. All of which ticks off Curt Schilling, but not nearly as much as the mealy mouthed excuses and half denials:

Female estrogen? I didn’t know what I was taking? I had no idea it was steroids? Do you honestly for one second think ANY player, ANY professional athlete who has been caught up in this allowed a cream to be rubbed, a needle to be stuck, or a pill to be taken and wasn’t aware that the substance was or was not a steroid?

Fans of Barry Bonds, the King of Control Freaks, take note.

Manny, of course, has already joined the Hall of Denial this year in L.A. And Ortiz always looked suspicious to me. The boost in numbers from his Twins career to his Red Sox career seemed a lot better than just a switch to Fenway Park would suggest. Here's his OPS+, which is park adjusted, as a Twin and a Red Sok:

Year  Age   G       OPS+
1997  21   15  MIN  107
1998  22   86  MIN  111
1999  23   10  MIN  -43
2000  24  130  MIN  101
2001  25   89  MIN  106
2002  26  125  MIN  120
2003  27  128  BOS  144
2004  28  150  BOS  145
2005  29  159  BOS  158
2006  30  151  BOS  161
2007  31  149  BOS  171
2008  32  109  BOS  123
2009  33   93  BOS   82

See a bright line there from 2003 to 2007? It's hard to spot, but try.

Here's Joe Torre's reaction, by the way:

I don’t think fans need to get chapter and verse on each individual and why and how much and when. We need to get their trust. I don’t think they need that information. I think they just need to know we’re doing everything we can to get this game back to where we want to have it.

That's so much garbage. Torre must think the guys at retrosheet spent the 1980s saying, "I'm not sure precisely how many hits Ty Cobb had in his career, but that's cool. I can let it be."

Chapter and verse is exactly what a large proportion of baseball fans need. We need to know exactly what happened, every season, every game, every play, every pitch, every trade, every minor change in uniform logo, every drug test, everything.

Screw your self-serving and idiotic confidentiality agreements. Tell us. Tell us everything.