Sports Thread #1 for 6/17/09: I Like Ken Rosenthal, But He Was A Real Jerk Here

Thanks to James, who may have more on this tomorrow, an important conversation from Outside the lines on Sunday, where Fox Sports' Ken Rosenthal attacks blogger Jerod Morris over Morris posting his speculation on whether Raul Ibanez could be taking steroids during a career year this year.

Here's what Morris wrote in his now talked about post on his site, which is really a thro statistical analysis of Ibanez production, something I really didn't expect, including:

From 2006-2008, Raul Ibanez’s ratio for AB/HR was 23.8, including his career year in 2006 when he hit 33 HRs. In his home games this season, Ibanez has hit 8 HR in 93 AB, which is a HR every 11.6 ABs. Based on the four-year averages of the HR factors of Citizens Bank Park (1.165) and Safeco (0.9225), we would expect Ibanez’s HR rate at home to increase 21%. It has improved much more than 21% however, more than doubling so far in 2009.

But Ibanez is not just taking advantage of his home ballpark.

In his road games this season, Ibanez has hit 11 HR in 126 ABs, which is good for a HR every 11.45 ABs. So his HR rate is actually slightly better on the road, which I did not expect since my gut-reaction thinking was that Ibanez was simply enjoying the more hitter-friendly home cooking at Citzens Bank Park.

So in actuality, and in opposition of my initial hypothesis, through the relatively small sample size of 55 games it is impossible to say that Ibanez’s prodigious jump in HR/AB has been solely a factor of his new ballpark.

But Rosenthal takes the snobbish approach, being condescending and lambasting Morris like he was a little kid.

Morris was rational in this debate, and something came to mind that really hit me. All the prominent baseball journalist of the 1990's were just as blind to the steriods era as the financial "reporters" on CNBC with the financial crisis or all the reporters leading up to the Iraq War. All were blind with their journalism, and are feeling the after effects of this. And Rosenthal is one of them.

More on this in a later post.