My love for baseball comes with some pet peeves. The neighbourhood play at second base makes little sense to me. Same goes for vigilante justice after someone pimps a home run or replay rules that slow the game down unnecessarily.
But the part of MLB culture I least understand is the obsession with accusing their own of cheating. I’m not referring to stealing signs, corked bats or pine tar. I’m talking about players and media playing pet detective against others when it comes to performance enhancing drugs. The latest example is the innuendo surrounding Eric Thames.
In case you missed it, Thames has been on a tear. He set a Brewers franchise record with 11 home runs in April while posting a 1.276 OPS. After being tested for PEDs for the third time this season, Thames remained unfazed, “I’ll be here every day,” he told reporters. “I’ve got lots of blood and urine.”
The skepticism exists because he had never hit more than 12 home runs at the MLB level before this year. After allowing an opposite-field homer to Thames on April 17, John Lackey vented his frustration in a manner that implied guilt.
“You watch film on recent stuff and try to figure out a way, you know, to get him out,” Lackey said. “But I mean, really even the homer hit the other way, I mean, you don’t see that happen here very often. That’s kinda one of those things that makes you scratch your head.”
Lackey wasn’t alone. His pitching coach, Chris Bosio, went even further despite the fact that Jake Arrieta faced similar accusations just last year. On a Chicago radio station, Bosio implied that Thames must be taking performance-enhancing drugs.
“You start thinking about Ken Griffey Jr., Manny Ramirez when he went to the Dodgers, Barry Bonds,” Bosio said. “You’re talking about some of the greatest players to ever play this game. So, yeah, it’s probably a ‘head-scratcher’ because nobody knows who this guy is. And when he was here before, his body has changed. But, like I said, I’ll leave that to everyone else and we’re just gonna try to worry about how to pitch him better and get him out.”
To his credit, Thames has taken the allegations in stride. “I feel like we’re in an era of fallen heroes,” Thames said. “Throughout history—the last 10, 15, 20 years—a lot of things have gone down with PEDs. So, I do understand what people are saying because I did come out of nowhere for them. For myself I know what it was like to be in a hotel room drinking think I’m going to get a job at Safeway or Save Mart if I kept going down the same path I was going down. So, I had to change things up. I had to say ‘you know what, I have to make an adjustment here’ and I did.”
This obsession with potential performance enhancers is unique to baseball. Despite Eugenie Bouchard’s protests Maria Sharapova recently returned to the WTA to a warm reception after being suspended for using a banned substance. Jabrill Peppers was literally dancing for joy when he was picked in the first round despite being docked for providing a watered-down sample at the NFL combine.
Meanwhile baseball’s record book is so sacred that anyone seen as testing the purity of its numbers is persecuted to the full extent of the law. Circumstantial evidence like body acne (Mike Piazza), increase in hat size (Bonds) or rapid improvement (Thames) finds you guilty until proven innocent.
Thames didn’t struggle in the majors because he wasn’t physically fit. He struggled because he couldn’t help himself when he saw a steady supply of breaking balls. He went to a league where there isn’t much velocity. By default, he got a three-year graduate degree in plate discipline. While in Korea, he donated a dollar to the team clubhouse pot every time he chased a pitch. That fiscal punishment helped foster his plate restraint.
Furthermore, I’ve yet to see a pill that can help you hit off-speed pitches. If Thames got the modern-day equivalent of Balco’s “the cream” or “the clear” would it help him keep his hands back on change-ups?
Even if you adjust for inferior competition in the KBO you can still see over a three-year sample size that Thames took great strides in his offensive game. That type of improvement fuels skeptics, but his detractors fail to realize that his improvement extends beyond power. His pitch recognition is better, his walk rate is up, and he doesn’t have to worry about money thanks to his $16 million contract.
Even so, Thames might not be for real. He might just be the next Chris Shelton or Kevin Maas. This kind of run couldn’t possibly last forever, and pitchers might figure out how to pitch him. Should that happen, Thames would have to adjust, too.
If he does end up struggling, the criticism from the likes of Lackey and Bosio still wouldn’t be justified. If anything, it’d make it more unfortunate that Thames didn’t get to fully relish his time on top. In a game as hard as baseball, why not celebrate all that the journeyman has accomplished?
This is as fun an April story as MLB has had in a while, so why turn it into a negative? Believe it or not, the health of the game needs you to believe an Eric Thames story can be true. If the plan is to build baseball up for the next generation of fans, the first order of business should be to stop tearing it down because of the sins of its past.