Rocket Fuel

No baseball! What am I supposed to do, read books or something?

The Rocket Who Fell to Earth is probably the best baseball biography I have read, though honestly I don't usually read sports biographies. I did read Cobb, which is excellent, and The Black Prince of Baseball, which is a great tale and has great research but could use a good edit.

Subtitled Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality, the book is a thorough and really fair look at the Rocket. As a Sox fan who remembers 1986, and all that followed, it is a must read. Remember when Clemens threw the bat at Mike Piazza? That gets a whole chapter. Those guys didn't like each other much.

I just started Juicing the Game, Drugs: Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball by Howard Bryant. Bryant is a former Herald columnist who wrote a book we should probably all read called Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. Bryant's book is different from, say, Game of Shadows. He begins by discussing the switch from Commissioner Fay Vincent to Commissioner Bud Selig -- the first owner to get the job. All commissioners worked for the owners (Bowie Kuhn most blatantly, the book says), and Vincent's error was that he forgot that and acted as judge, so they canned him. The connect-the-dots conclusion was that an owner/commissioner would care about profit. Personally I think the jury is still out on Selig, but the implication is pretty clear: all of baseball had motivation to look away from steroid use.

Perhaps you can see the common thread between these two books. Steroids have been on my mind lately. Do we think it's suspicious if a player hits more home runs in one season than he did in his entire previous career, which included slightly more than two full seasons? If that same player's base stealing total also dropped, is that suspicious? I don't know if it is -- really, I don't, and I'm not trying to make accusations. But as a fan, once I heard (in late July, I think) that Jacoby Ellsbury's home run number for 2011 had topped his total for all of 2008 and 2009, my eyebrow went up. When do we get to shake this hangover from the steroid era?

When I asked a few friends if they thought Ellsbury's power spike was suspicious, they said no. They said stuff like, "A lot of guys have jumps in their home run numbers after a couple of years." True enough, I said. Then I tried to find one. Alfonso Soriano jumped from 18 to 39 HRs in his first two full seasons, but then was very consistent. Nomar Garciaparra, Derek Jeter, and Rickey Henderson all had little jumps, but nothing dramatic.

David DeJesus is listed as "most similar" to Ellsbury by Baseball Reference. DeJesus has never hit more than 13 home runs in a year. (Most of the other "most similar" to Ellsbury batters are old time players.) Our own Dustin Pedroia has risen pretty steadily.

I need Bill James. It seems like there are more home runs hit than ever before (still, in the testing era). But there's no way this pajama-clad blogger can crunch all the numbers.

I heard an interview with Jeff Pearlman on Only a Game when his Clemens book came out. He declines to use the word "alleged" when it comes to Clemens and steroids. He's tired of excuses like "I never failed a test." I've heard other writers say they were caught off guard, didn't want to believe, etc.

I'm finding that harder to believe these days, about the writers. More and more I think that they knew, but there was always another story, and they didn't want to "make accusations" by raising flags. I don't either, but it also feels irresponsible not to raise flags. The question is when, and with who. I don't want to pick on Jacoby -- I want to enjoy the first 30/30 guy in the history of the Red Sox. Yes, the first. Such a great horse, and I have to go look at his teeth, I can't help it.

And I love the long ball as much as anybody. I went to the 1999 Home Run Derby, and I loved it. Ken Griffey Jr. won it, but Mark MGwire hit more home runs in total, and some of his shots literally disappeared into the night. I assume they came down somewhere, but we didn't see them come down. At one point Pedro Martinez ran to the plate and jokingly tried to steal McGwire's bat. Now there was a sight -- relatively short, wiry Pedro next to McGwire. Jack and the Giant. There was no sign of the magic beans, but now we know there were some in the clubhouse.