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Report: U.S. government may subpoena as many as 104 MLB players
ESPN.com news services
May 18, 2008
As many as 104 Major League Baseball players could be subpoenaed by federal investigators in connection with the BALCO steroid distribution case after the United States attorney's office obtained positive steroid test results from 2003, according to a published report.
The results, according to The New York Times, were part of the 2003 tests conducted by Major League Baseball that were intended to be anonymous. But through some deft legal maneuvering, the U.S. government seized the records from two different companies hired to provide the tests.
An anonymous source told the newspaper that the federal government plans to question all 104 players about their positive steroid tests and how they obtained whatever substance was found in their urine sample.
The potential list of suppliers named by the players would be sent to federal prosecutors around the country. The investigations that result from that information could lead to player names being revealed in court documents.
Players who tested positive for steroids may have to testify before grand juries or as witnesses in a jury trial. Their names may also be revealed in documents used to obtain search warrants or in charging documents for a specific case involving an alleged steroids distributor.
The 2003 anonymous tests came about when Major League Baseball and its players union were coming under intense public scrutiny about alleged steroid abuse in the sport. There were no planned punishments for positive tests, but if more than 5 percent of tests came back positive, then a punishment phase would kick in.
While each urine sample had a code next to it and not a name, one company hired by MLB possessed the samples while a second company had the corresponding list of names that matched up with each coded sample, according to the report.
The BALCO connection came to light when federal prosecutors in California wanted to see if 10 players who had testified in the San Francisco-area case had lied to a grand jury.
In their search for those 10 names, the U.S. Attorney's office issued a subpoena for the 2003 tests. The two testing companies -- Comprehensive Drug Testing and Quest Diagnostics -- refused to comply -- and were prepared to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to The Times.
The MLB players' union told prosecutors they intended to file a motion to quash the subpoenas. The government then moved quickly to obtain search warrants and executed them the next day, according to the newspaper.
In their search, federal investigators came upon the full list of 104 players, far more than the 10 they believed may be linked to BALCO. With the list in hand, investigators then went to the other lab and matched the codes and names with the positive test results.
The players union continues to battle the government in hopes of keeping the test results confidential. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco ruled in January that the government acted within the law and could keep the results. The court may still rehear the case at the union's request.
Once the legal process is exhausted and if the government prevails, it may be a matter of weeks before the 104 players are contacted by federal prosecutors, according to the newspaper
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Combing through history to explain Cliff Lee
By Jim Baker
May 19, 2008
In one of the more left-angle surprises of the young season, Cliff Lee of the Cleveland Indians began the year with seven consecutive quality starts, only one of which came anywhere near the bare minimum required to meet that definition. They were seven of the better-pitched consecutive games ever to start a season and have all sorts of spectacular mini-streaks buried therein.
Even though he suffered his first loss on Sunday, Lee and his tiny 1.37 ERA have given us a glimpse of pitching paradise. The question is, where do you stand on what is to come for Mr. Lee for the rest of the year?
(A) He has ascended to godhood; one worthy of being carried about on a litter by the leaders of the world's greatest nations; one to whom maidens will be brought daily to sacrifice their virtue to his greatness. He's one for whom whole beasts will be slaughtered so that he may take just one bite of their flesh; one whose very sweat will be a publicly traded commodity. His current stats will extrapolate to a 21-3 season, with a 1.37 ERA and 17 walks and 159 strikeouts.
(B) He will come back to earth, but to this point still has set the stage for a career season.
(C) He will run off a series of lines that look like his line Sunday: 5.2 10 6 5 1 2; and in so doing, his season stats will end up looking pretty much like the stats of every other Cliff Lee season.
(D) He will be visited upon by a plague of 1,000 earned runs. He will go a month without getting past the third inning. His April and early May were a fluke for which the process of normalization will exact a vengeful and heavy toll. He will be out of the rotation by August and banished to Buffalo soon thereafter. His fall will be so great that he will be pitching indie ball by this time next year.
Let's examine the choices in more detail:
(A) Godhood
Wouldn't you love to see a pitcher break the record for most wins with one loss (18-1, Elroy Face, a reliever in 1959), or two losses (19-2, Greg Maddux in 1995)? As irrelevant as won-loss records might be, seeing a pitcher go 23-1 would be a lot of fun. Having said that, the chances of Lee keeping this up, as Sunday proved, are pretty remote. Remember that Fernando Valenzuela exploded on the baseball scene in 1981 with an 8-0 record and an even better ERA than Lee has at this point. All eight of his starts were complete games and he allowed just four earned runs in the process. What followed were a number of more pedestrian outings with two disaster seven-run starts in the mix. He was much more human the rest of the way. Another seemingly great start -- at least in terms of won-loss record -- was registered by the Orioles' Dave McNally in 1969. He got to 15-0 before finally losing a game. What is not usually mentioned in conjunction with McNally is that he also had 11 no-decisions before getting that first loss.
(B) Immediate Greatness Without Lasting Immortality
Finding precedents for what Lee is doing is difficult. Valenzuela, for instance, was a rookie. McNally had established himself as a very strong pitcher by 1969. Let us assume Lee goes on to pitch one of the best 100- or 200-best seasons of the past 50 years, a feat that wouldn't even demand he keep pitching at his current unconscionable pace. How many of the 200 best seasons since 1958 (as valued by Baseball Prospectus' Value Over Replacement Level Player) have been rendered by midcareer pitchers who were basically at league average before the big season? Not very many. So curious is Lee's emergence that it is nearly impossible to find comparable pitchers with similar outbursts at the same stage of their careers. If this were Pedro Martinez or Randy Johnson in 1999 or 2000, or Roger Clemens in his Toronto sojourn, we would not be shocked. These are the men who dominate the upper reaches of the best seasons of the past five decades. Who are the Cliff Lees of yore?
Several names jump out:
Mike Norris, 1980 Oakland A's (22-9, 2.34 ERA): Norris differs from Lee in that he was four years younger when his big season hit and that he never had posted an ERA+ better than league average. What's more, he had never had what you could define as a breakout season in the minors. More telling, he had never thrown more than 157 innings in a professional season. When manager Billy Martin, who treated his A's staff like it owed him money, had him finish 24 of his 33 starts, nearly doubling his seasonal innings pitched (284) from his personal high, something was bound to give. That something turned out to be his arm, which barely survived the Carter administration.
Esteban Loaiza, 2003 Chicago White Sox (21-9, 2.90 ERA): Like Lee, Loaiza had been pitching for quite a few seasons, mostly at a level below league average. Suddenly, though, batters just started striking out more against him, and he ended up with arguably the best season in baseball in 2003. He hasn't whiffed nearly that many (207) since, yet on he hangs.
Mike Caldwell, 1978 Milwaukee Brewers (22-9, 2.36 ERA): Caldwell had been decent in 1974, but he was mostly below league average in ERA+ until, at the same age as Lee, 29, it all came together for him when he pitched six shutouts and finished second in the Cy Young voting to Ron Guidry of the Yankees.
Mike Witt, 1986 California Angels (18-10, 2.84 ERA): Witt pitched more consistently well than Lee did up to the point of his big season, but '86 was a big jump up in adjusted ERA. He immediately went back to being himself for a couple of years before arm injuries set in.
Darryl Kile, 1997 Houston Astros (19-7, 2.57 ERA): The late Mr. Kile posted adjusted ERAs that were consistently worse than league average until 1997, when his BABIP (batting average on balls in play) and walk rates dropped to make for a much better-looking line. He returned to mediocrity for a couple of years before putting up a very similar season in 2001, his last full season before his untimely death in 2002.
Joe Mays, 2001 Minnesota Twins (17-13, 3.16 ERA): As I mentioned, finding exact comparisons for Lee is tough. Mays, for instance, had his big year in his third season in the bigs at the age of 25. It did not follow what came before, and 233 2/3 innings may have been too much for him, as he hasn't been the same since.
Though all of these pitchers added their names to the list of best seasons of the past 50 years, none really sustained their bursts.
(C) Getting Normalized
Coming into the season, Lee had a very nice career winning percentage of .600, despite mostly routine numbers. What Lee always has been able to count on (except, ironically, this season) is outstanding run support from his fellows. In 2004, the Indians got him 5.78 runs per start, good for 18th in the American League and well above average. The next year, that climbed to 6.46 per game, fourth-best in the league. In 2006 it was 6.50, sixth best. Last year it was even better -- 6.84 -- which would have ranked Lee sixth had he pitched enough innings to qualify.
Apart from that, a lot of things conspire against Lee's chances of maintaining what he's been up to. For one thing, he has stopped giving up home runs. He has allowed three so far, including two on Sunday. He used to be a lot more generous in this category, usually giving up a little more than one per start. Another thing that has been going his way is his BABIP. Lee's is currently at .244. Even with the American League collectively forgetting how to hit for the time being, that's pretty low. Only seven starting pitchers this decade have recorded a lower BABIP. Playing in Petco Park helped San Diego's Chris Young to a .230 count in 2006. The next lowest was the .237 by Derek Lowe and Tim Wakefield in 2002 and .238 by Pedro Martinez in 2000. The former was one of the greatest fluke seasons ever, and the latter is one of the greatest seasons ever, period. If Lee can sustain his .244 average, he'll have one up on fate.
(D) Falling Down Hard
This seems unlikely. In fact, Lee probably will start catching more of a break on run support the way he did in 2005, when he rode a fairly unspectacular pitching performance to an 18-5 record on the backs of his hitting comrades. This way, when he stops being near perfect, his mates will pick up the slack, and he'll still keep winning.
Jim Baker is an author at Baseball Prospectus and a frequent contributor to Page 2. You can e-mail Jim at bottlebat@gmail.com.
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Falcons sign QB Matt Ryan to 6 yr., $72M contract
By CHARLES ODUM, AP Sports Writer
May 20, 2008
ATLANTA - For the second time in eight years, the Atlanta Falcons opened the vault and dropped a ton of cash on a franchise quarterback.
Matt Ryan, the No. 3 pick in last month's draft, signed a $72 million, six-year contract Tuesday. The announcement of the new deal came with smiles, confident talk of the future and no mention of Michael Vick, the first pick in 2001 who signed a $130 million extension, the richest in the league at the time, in December 2005.
Team owner Arthur Blank and the Falcons were especially eager to sign Ryan, avoid a holdout and help the franchise move away from the Vick era with new general manager Thomas Dimitroff, new coach Mike Smith and now a new quarterback.
"The circumstances are always different when it comes to a player, and in Matt's case the research that Thomas did and Coach Smith did, they were extremely comfortable in Matt and what Matt stood for and what he's going to be for the long term," said team president Rich McKay, the Falcons' lead negotiator.
"I don't think there was any hesitancy because of the experience we just had."
Vick last year began a 23-month prison sentence after he confessed to bankrolling a dogfighting ring.
The Falcons' haste in finalizing the deal with Ryan received a boost when word leaked the NFL owners, who met Tuesday in Atlanta, were about to opt out of a labor deal with the players' union in 2011. Before the owners' unanimous vote, the deal could not have gone through 2013.
The Falcons and Ryan's agent, Tom Condon, already had agreed on six years as the basis for their deal, and to make that happen they needed to complete the negotiations by Tuesday.
"We couldn't have gotten a six-year contract if we didn't get this deal done by 4 today," Blank said.
"That was the urgency in getting it done today. The structure of the contract would not have been permissible because of the opt out."
McKay said he was involved in negotiations until 3 a.m. Tuesday and started again at 6 a.m.
Ryan is guaranteed $34.75 million. His guaranteed money is $4.75 million more than that given to Jake Long, the No. 1 overall choice who also is represented by Condon.
Ryan worked behind quarterbacks Chris Redman and Joey Harrington at his first minicamp with the team this month, but he's getting paid to be the starter. He said he'll enter training camp expecting to play immediately.
"I think that's certainly the goal, to prepare to play, to do everything you can to be on the field and play," Ryan said. "That's what I'm going to do. I think I did well picking things up in minicamp. I know there's still a lot to learn. I think I've done pretty well so far."
Redman, Harrington and Byron Leftwich shared the starting job last season. Leftwich was released after the season. Ryan will join Harrington, Redman and D.J. Shockley in the quarterback competition in training camp.
Redman, who finished the 2007 season as the starter, is the favorite to open 2008 with the job. Redman worked with the first-team offense with newly signed running back Michael Turner in minicamp.
The 6-foot-5 Ryan ranked third in the nation with his school-record 4,507 yards passing in 2007.
"It's highly unusual to get a first-round pick this high in the first round signed in the month of May, and it's indicative of the kind of person he is," Blank said.
"We're anxious that he be part of the team and show that kind of leadership."
Ryan said he wasn't surprised to have the deal done so soon.
"I knew everyone had made the commitment and wanted to get it done," Ryan said. "I'm just excited and happy. ... I'm proud of the fact I'm an Atlanta Falcon."
Blank said he wanted to sign Ryan early to avoid a repeat of quarterback JaMarcus Russell's holdout with the Oakland Raiders last year. Russell, the top pick in last year's draft, missed all of training camp, signed three days before the 2007 season and made his only start in the final game of the season.
"We don't want to go through a situation like they went through last year in Oakland," Blank said. "This young man wants to come in and compete."
McKay said he experienced a holdout while with Tampa Bay when the Buccaneers drafted quarterback Trent Dilfer No. 6 overall in 1994.
"I really felt it affected the player and it affected the franchise," McKay said.
"I thought it was not just the right message for the franchise but it's the right thing to do for the quarterback if you can get him in camp on time so that he doesn't at all fall behind and have one of those rookie years where he doesn't catch up.
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