WHY NO LONGER GREAT TEAMS IN BASEBALL? WHY NO 100-GAME WINNERS?

2001 Seattle Mariners led by Ichiro was the last team to win 100 games with  a MLB record 116-46

No team since has managed to win 100 games    Greatest Teams, steroids in baseball, drug use in baseball, #Giants PEDs, #PEDs, Banned substances in baseball, baseball drug testing, baseball players on drugs, cheating in baseball,The History of Baseball, Best Baseball Teams

WHY NO LONGER GREAT TEAMS IN BASEBALL?   NO 100-GAME WINNERS SINCE 2001.

Top 100-Game Winning Teams:

1928 New York Yankees 101-53          (154 game seasons)
1929 Philadelphia Athletics 104-46
1927 New York Yankees 110-44
1932 New York Yankees 107-47
1939 New York Yankees 106-45
1941 New York Yankees 101-53
1954 Cleveland Indians 111-43
1942 St. Louis Cardinals 106-48

-teams only played 154 games prior to 1960-

1961 New York Yankees 109-53           (162 game seasons)
1968 Detroit Tigers 103-59
1969 New York Mets 100-62
1967 St. Louis Cardinals 101-60
1970 Baltimore Orioles 108-54
1975 Cincinnati Reds 108-74
1976 Cincinnati Reds 102-60
1984 Detroit Tigers 104-58
1995 Cleveland  indians 100-44
2001 Seattle Mariners 116-46

(above courtesy of Bleacher Report's 50 Greatest Teams)

Bleacher Report has ranked the top 50 teams including ones winning less than
100 games. Not surprising they don't include either of the 2010 or 2012 Giants
teams but they do include some, like the 1989 Oakland Athletics, for, which we would NOT include or give a PED-aided askerisk  

1927 New York Yankees, backed by the Sultan of Swat won 110 games - in only  154 games. (Teams prior to 1961 only played 154 games.)

Interesting to note the dearth of great teams today. Sure, it's great to have competitive  races but this is ridiculous. Only one team, the Los Angeles Angels currently has a record
over .600 on a pace  to win 100 games - and that could change in a flash, just as have teams' records this year. If it does, it would be the first team since 2009 to win 100 games.  What's even more shocking is that teams play more games now (162 per year) vs. 154 prior to the mid- 1960s.  This makes all the pre-1960s 100-game teams that much more amazing. In the prior 4 decades before 2009 (1969-2009) 45 teams have won 100 games but in the last five years NONE have won 100 games




Since 2009, no teams have won 100 games, yet prior to that 45 teams had 100 wins in the four decades prior - that's over 10 teams per decade.    There have been no dominant teams since then, only sporadically effective ones during seasonal streaks. Even those that have won over 100 were usually by one or two games. Why such a drop-off in quality teams, despite 
the advantages of free agency and no salary cap?  



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 If anything , one would think there would be more disparity among teams since free agency. When wealthier teams today CAN PAY - as we have seen most recently in the Los Angeles Dodgers and its $220 million payroll faring less well than, say, the Oakland Athletics with a payroll in the low $100 millions.




In recent years we've never seen such mediocrity,or , shall we say, ups and downs, in baseball,
where teams will have great streaks only to suddenly drop off to bad losing streaks, ending up
with so-so records - no longer any 100 game winners. This is especially surprising that even
since free agency in 1975 the richer teams and lack of salary cap are not necessarily performing better. Richer teams are not necessarily faring better than than lower salaried teams. 
One might expect just the opposite, that there would be a much greater discrepancy than pre-free agency baseball. 



So, again, why no great baseball teams in over a decade?

The only theory we can come up with    focuses on   the steroid or PED  era.
Since the 1990s - or even the late '80s - estimates of up to 50% of major leagues players have
been using performance enhancing drugs. (We saw 20 players CAUGHT through the Biogenesis leak last year, without 
benefit of effective MLB drug testing - no major leaguers have been caught in years to our knowledge, not due to a lack of tainted players.)  Players must go off and on the drugs around
testing times, resulting in spikes of lower performance  . With slightly more frequent testing and stronger penalties today, players must be more careful and when they temporarily go off the drugs, the performance drops. The drug tests are - for whatever reasons - usUally announced ahead, and this is likely why we may see mass drop-offs by teams weeks before and after testing. It may take some time for a player to get back to his 'enhancement' , thus, the prolonged drop-offs of sometimes 2-4 weeks or even months - as we saw with the Giants.




With new baseball rules, testing is required a minimum of two times during a baseball
season (to our knowledge) - it used to be only required in spring training. So, once
tests are given , say, for example early and mid-season,  players can go back on
the juice knowing they probably won't be tested again and, if they are they'll usually
be given advanced notice, anyway.  This is how we see the Giants go on their late season
surges with even the weakest players hitting 30-80 points above their non-enhanced
(prior) averages.

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The trend has  never been more apparent this year than with the San Francisco Giants. People actually thought the Giants had the NL West wrapped up after the first two months of 2014
with a better than .650 record and eight games ahead of the second place Los Angeles Dodgers.
But as quick as they could do no wrong, the team could do no write, finishing with
the worst losing streak in baseball over most of June and July. Once again,
the Giants turned this around with one of the best records during late August and
early September as they closed the gap to two games behind the Dogers as of September 7.
The Giants have done similarly  in recent years they won the World Series, 2010 and 2012
finishing with majors' best win loss records in September both years. 
Other streaky teams have included the Boston Red Sox, Detroit Tigers, BalTimore Orioles,and Washington  -depending upon what you call a streak.The San Francisco Giants have had the longest overall streaks  of any team as described above.




What happened to consistency by teams? A good team should stay generally 'good'
through the season without drastic ups and downs. Even a blockbuster trade or
acquisition shouldn't make that much difference in baseball where you have teams
of 25 players including strong backups. Nor should injuries make that much difference - all
teams have injuries - and with good backup players it shouldn't be a problem. And, we see similar trends happen year after year as described elsewhere.



Now with numbers of KNOWN PED users allowed back in the game after their 50 (now 80) game suspensions, we've seen  most of  teams with 'PED' players making the playoffs, perhaps thanks to at one or two of those players.    It's not to say they're all still 'using,' but one doesn't have to be blind or 'dumb or dumber' (to quote Balco's Victor Conte) 
to see some of these players continue to hit well above their career averages - and getting
away with it, propelling their teams often to playoffs and World Series victories.  So, PEDs not only make for an uneven playing field , they pose a threat to player health and now, also seem to be bringing mediocrity to the game.(Perhaps the powers that be and others like the more even distribution we're now seeing but baseball without great teams - or real weak ones, for that matter - is NOT baseball.  It's ARTIFICIAL baseball - in more ways than one, in our opinion. 




GOLDEN YEARS OF BASEBALL - Which were the truly greatest teams

Giants' Juan Marichal with Willie McCovey, 1962 World Series runner-ups, Runners-up best team



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WHY NO LONGER GREAT TEAMS IN BASEBALL?   NO 100-GAME WINNERS SINCE 2001.

OLBERMANN Says New MLB Drug Testing Misses the Mark

OLBERMANN Says New MLB Drug Testing
Misses the Mark  


Say what you will about Keith Olbermann, there's one guy who actually read the new Major League Baseball (MLB) drug testing rules, unlike most of the reporting media, and didn't hesitate to  tell  'This Week's   George Stephanopolous March 30 why the new rules will do nothing to reduce drug use in baseball - similar  to what this column said yesterday (see previous post below). 



Olbermann is the only sports commentator to date, to our knowledge, to have come out against the tests, again,  for much the same reason as we pointed out (below) yesterday: THE ISSUE IS NOT THE LENGTH OF PENALTY BUT FAILING TO  PUT  IN PLACE A TEST THAT  WILL  CATCH USERS OF CERTAIN PREVALENT DRUGS,  IN THE FIRST PLACE. You can make the penalty any length and it won't help. Sure, it looks good on paper to the average person, not
really observant or paying attention.


Olbermann notes - the video from the news show  has yet to be posted on the internet -
that the 19 players caught up in the Biogenesis indictments last year did NOT result from testing  but  came about only because of  an informant, as we also previously noted, below.

The new drug policy does nothing to change the test for catching players using the new synthetic testosterone and other to now undetectable drugs, according to the provisions noted in the Hardball.com quote, below (Hardball is the only source to have actually outlined the new drug policy, in full - and even they failed  to note the folly in the policy)


According to Oberman, the Biogenesis convictions actually  work against the Commissioner, who claims baseball has 'cleaned up' the use of drugs, pointing out
 1) that players are still using PEDs
2) that players are 'beating' the current drug tests (at least for the most prevalent drug, testosterone, for which the tests were not changed, to our understanding, from the Hardball information


It's a pretty clear cut matter to which even the top sports critics have either turned a blind eye
or simply aren't paying attention / doing their job.  Even before the new testing measures were announced you had writers like  Huffington Post's Len Berman claiming, in regards to the then-prospective new policies,
 'This is huge...They'll also increase their efforts to detect increased levels of testosterone. ...'
Not so.  Please find us another critic who sees the light - or tell us we're all wet, with proof.








Previous to new MLB drug test rulings, Olbermann chastised Barry Bonds and the San Franciso Giants on Bonds' one week return to the Giants as Spring Training hitting coach. Again, say what you will about Obermann he stands up for the Grand Old Game and is probably speaking for a lot of 'old timers'  like dethroned home run king Henry Aaron (by Bonds) and even Willie Mays, Bonds'  God father, who might like to say what Olbermann felt more comfortable saying. It seems there are two opposite  camps   reacting to Olbermann's comments,  as you can see by viewing the site's comment section .   Younger fans, who grew up with the drug culture, generally feel Olbermann is out of line while older fans who grew up on Aaron and Mays don't appreciate how Bonds 'blew past them' (to use Obermann's words) to the all-time homerun title. To quote Olbermann, opening his sports commentary program in a late March episode, in what he called ' the shame of San Francisco Giants,' comparing Bonds use of performance enhancing drugs to the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. 



He goes on, first charging the Giants as a team that has 'sanitized his history and pretending there is nothing at least controversial about his performance in a major league uniform and resumed what they had been doing seven years later as marketing hims as one of baseball's most noble assets and not the symbol of baseball's darkest time sine the 1919 Black Sox scandal. And now he's back without an apology, without an acknowledgement... And, the latter point is the key. Others have been brought back, such as Mark McGwire, current Dodgers' hitting coach, who, as Olbermann noted, made at least a 'half -hearted attempt' to apologize and rehabiliate his image. As you see in the video, Bonds appears pretty much the same aloof, joking figure, hardly concerned about what he has done to the game, in our opinion. Again, the primarily younger fans commenting on the video, which appears on Youtube, mostly castigate Olbermann, rather than Bonds, for his strong rebuke. We see this reaction much as a similar split that seems to divide the nation, politically.


Olbermann has also backed up his words with some science, noting that without PEDs Bonds would only have had 611 career homeruns , well down the list of  career homerun leaders , extrapolating his  pre-steroid  era homerun output (when he only hit as many as 46 homeruns one time) to his full
 career.

 OLBERMANN Says New MLB Drug Testing Misses the Mark