The #'s don't look good for New York

After the last blog entry and the number of affiliated players with the New York Yankees and New York Mets, I went on a rampid search of the Internet(thank you Google!)

I came across the following article on ESPN
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3153509

What really caught my attention about this article was of the top 6 teams listed with players in the Mitchell Report, the Yankees and Mets were again amongs the main culprits.

The breakdown of the top 6 teams was:

Yankees - 22
Orioles - 18
Angels - 16
Mets - 15
Dodgers - 15
Rangers - 15

Of those 101 players listed in the Mitchell Reports, it is astounding to find that 37/101 or 36.63% of them were Yankees or Mets.

Also, to again touch base on whether or not this may be a National League vs. American League Issue, the #'s based on those 6 teams and 101 players would tend to say that performance enhancing drugs are more of an AL issue. 70/101 players or 69.3% come from AL Rosters.

I don't know if these statistics against New York teams make me happy (being a diehard Red Sox fan) or even more offended by the entire situation!

Team Issue or League Issue ??

After taking a closer look at the data, I decided to look at what TEAMS should be flagged of the 138 players. I choose to look at the data this way because it allowed for a bigger pool to look at results. The results were still pretty shocking! In all, 11 teams had at least 5 players suspended for the use of performance enhancing drugs. Let's take a look at those teams:

Seattle Mariners - 8
Oakland Athletics - 8
New York Mets - 7
Pittsburgh Pirates 7
Chicago Cubs - 7
Atlanta Braves - 7
LA Dodgers - 6
Kansas City Royals - 6
New York Yankees - 5
San Diego Padres - 5
Cincinnati Reds - 5

Right off the bat, some "big market" teams jump out at you; including the Chicago Cubs, New York Mets and the New York Yankees. I didn't find this date to be that surprising. I fully expected at least one team from the NY market to be on this list and while it doesn't make my favorite team perfect in any way, it was nice to see the Boston Red Sox not appear on this list.

Looking at the data this way, also allows you to see some teams generally respected for the scouting they do (Braves, Dodgers, Yankees, Padres, Athletics) are also able to take more chances, because they have generally scouted well over the years.

Another interesting way to look at this data collected is to view the breakdown of those 11 teams listed above between their respective leagues. I have done that below:

American League (4 Teams): 27 total players
National League (7 Teams): 44 total players

At 1st look, it looks as if performance enhancing drugs are more of a widespread problem with the National League Teams, but after averaging the date from above:

American League: average of 6.75 players amongst the 4 teams
National League: average of 6.28 players amongst the 7 teams

And now just for fun:

The New York Yankees and New York Mets combined to account for 16.9 % of the 71 players used in this data.

Thoughts on data collected

Of the data I was able to collect it is quite astonishing to me that of the original list of 138 minor league baseball players whom were suspended for performance enhancing drugs that 21.73% of them have gone on to play in the MLB.

The data collected shows that one can argue that the use of performance enhancers does actually benefit one in terms of going forth to play Major League Baseball.

I am going to further break down this data of the 30 players who had a least a cup of tea at the MLB Level into what organization they were with when suspended for their use of performance enhancing drugs.

21.73%

http://thesteroidera.blogspot.com/2006/09/list-of-minor-league-suspensions-for.html

Of the 138 minor league players mentioned on this list that have been suspended for their use of performance enhancing drugs 21.73% percent of them have had the opportunity to play in the in the MLB.

Think about that... over one in every five minor leaguers who used performance enhancing drugs have had the opportunity to play big league ball. It is no wonder why Major Leage Baseball closed their eyes to this epedemic for so long.

The biggest name player I noticed on the list was Jon Nunnally. Nunnally was originally selected by the Baltimore Orioles in the 39th round of the 1990 draft. After attending college, he was then selected in the 3rd round of the 1992 draft by the Cleveland Indians.

He went on to play for the Kansas City Royals, Boston Red Sox, Cincinnati Reds and the New York Mets and also spent some time in Japan.

After hitting a home run in his 1st big league at bat, he went on to hit .246 over the course of 6 seasons. Nunnally appeared in a total of 364 games, while hitting 42 home runs and driving in 125 runs. http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/N/Jon-Nunnally.shtml

Pitchers just as likely to use

According to the chart below from my last blog; pitcher are just as likely to be users of performance enhancing drugs. 68 of the 139 players were listed, which results in 48% (almost a dead heat). I guess some of them feel the positives outweigh the negatives if you are able to add a couple of miles per hour onto your fastball.