Shaughnessy vs Ortiz

[Boom_70]

Did not see this anywhere etc etc
Figured this deserved it's own thread etc etc

In a Boston Globe column Wednesday Shaughnessy gently suggested that Big
Papi was using PED's

Big Papi answers by playing the discrimination card.

The story highlights the quandary that baseball writers had in "The Steroid Era"

Dammed if you do / Dammed if you don't

http://tracking.si.com/2013/05/09/david-ortiz-dan-shaughnessy-steroids-racist-discrimination-peds/

 

[Songbird]

Papi is a good guy and an even better person, but if he's clean he should have just said "I've never taken a PED and resent that Dan Shaughnessy suggested I did." It's a little bit of a deflection. Because now if a test comes back positive ...

 

[Boom_70]

Papi is a good guy and an even better person, but if he's clean he should have just said "I've never taken a PED and resent that Dan Shaughnessy suggested I did." It's a little bit of a deflection. Because now if a test comes back positive ...

But wasn't he on the 2003 list? That would make it hard to say that he never took
PED's.

 

[Songbird]

Was he? I can't remember. Either way, he tries to backdoor his way out of things, it seems.

 

[Boom_70]

Was he? I can't remember. Either way, he tries to backdoor his way out of things, it seems.

I would have gone with the "I'm not going to dignify the column with any comment"

 

[Stoney]

but if he's clean he should have just said "I've never taken a PED and resent that Dan Shaughnessy suggested I did." It's a little bit of a deflection. Because now if a test comes back positive ...

All that righteous indignation did seem to be missing an actual denial, didn't it?

 

[AtticusFinch]

Shaughnessy obviously has every right to ask such questions, but because it's Shaughnessy, I think the reaction is more like, well, "that's just Shaughnessy being Shaughnessy."

But yeah, Ortiz would have been better off with a stronger denial than that...

 

[Michael_ Gee]

Any player asked that question now has a built-in answer. "I am a participant in the MLB drug-testing program and have not been subjected to any penalties." He doesn't HAVE to deny it. There's a system for catching users, and it hasn't caught him. End of story. It's more fun for some souls to insist that all performances above the norm are drug-aided, but at some point, you have to invoke the presumption of innocence created by the testing system.

 

[Dash 7]

Expectation has been a funny thing with ortiz. When he's started slow in recent years, people have jumped on the "he's done!" bandwagon. Now that he's having an uncharacteristically hot start to the season, someone accuses him of steroid use.

Papi's gonna have stretches like this. He'll also have long runs where he's utterly useless. At some point we will stop overreacting to these things.

 

[TheSportsPredictor]

Good thing Shaughnessy's not a blogger in his mother's basement. Now all the tools can defend him.

Rob Neyer ripped Shaughnessy's assumptions apart by using analysis so derided by old-school baseball media.

 

[Boom_70]

I'm glad he asked the question. Tom Veriducci has been vilified and rightfully so for never
asking Clemens about PED's when he wrote all those SI stories that proved to
be less than accurate.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

There's nothing wrong with asking the question, it's what you do with the answer. In this case, Dan played it very straight. Good for him.

 

[Boom_70]

There's nothing wrong with asking the question, it's what you do with the answer. In this case, Dan played it very straight. Good for him.

Agreed. It's a question that needed to be asked instead of being the elephant in
the room as it was during the steroid era.

 

[Football_Bat]

I'd have been more shocked if Dan had written that Ortiz was clean as a whistle.

 

[armageddon]

Was he? I can't remember. Either way, he tries to backdoor his way out of things, it seems.

Yes, he was on the 2003 list. But he gives a much stronger "denial" in the original column.

 

[Bruce_Shoebottom]

This is the same Shaughnessy who referred to Ortiz as a "giant sack of you-know-what" when the Sox signed him as a free agent heading into 2004. It was meant as a slam on Theo Epstein's GM capabilities. An astute baseball mind, that Dan Shaughnessy.

 

[Chef2]

"This is my ****ing needle."

 

[tapintoamerica]

Also important here is the context of the original question. The impetus for that question was the chant of Jays fans: "PED! PED!" So Shaughnessy didn't simply come up to Ortiz and ask, "Are you juicing?" He asked him, as I understand it, to comment on the fans' chants.