A year ago, Dee Gordon’s surprise emergence as a batting titlist with the Miami Marlins caught the baseball world off-guard. Not long ago, Gordon had been widely shopped by the Dodgers in potential trades. So amid the 27-year-old second baseman’s 2015 breakout, there were some unpleasant conversations within organizations that hadn’t taken advantage of a buy-low opportunity.
Using the traditional 20-80 scouting scale on which a 50 is a solid regular and a 70 is a star (with an 80 representing a virtually perfect player — a Clayton Kershaw, perhaps), one American League scout who’d been responsible for evaluating the Dodgers turned in Gordon as a 45 — a second-division regular.
“Then he goes out and has a 65-70 year, and [you’d hear], ‘Oh, boy, you really nailed Dee Gordon,’ ’’ said the scout. “You have to listen to that. You’ve got to sit there as a scout and say, ‘Man, I screwed that one up.’
“Then two months later, you find out the guy was on PEDs and you’re sitting there saying, ‘See, I told you the guy couldn’t play!’ But you might be sitting at home because you got fired because you made two or three bad calls that an organization looked at like, ‘Wow, we could have had this guy and it didn’t happen because of your non-recommendation.’
“Guys can lose jobs because they make decisions on whether they want someone or don’t want someone in their organization. The money situation is so huge. Then you come to find out you’re not getting the same player you thought you were looking at because he gets busted. That’s just not fair.’’
Much like players, talent evaluators around the game are grappling with the question of what to conclude in the wake of the 2013 Biogenesis suspensions, and the positive PED tests that resulted in suspensions for Gordon, Blue Jays first baseman Chris Colabello, and Phillies reliever Daniel Stumpf, and the lifetime ban for Mets reliever Jenrry Mejia after his third positive test.
Conversations with numerous members of the professional scouting world — all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity owing to the sensitive nature of the topic and, in some cases, organizational policy prohibiting public discussion of PED use — revealed a wide array of views regarding the prevalence of performance-enhancing drugs in the game.
Multiple evaluators described the problem as “rampant,’’ though without a precise sense of what “rampant’’ means, or how long, if at all, there has been a widespread problem. Some believe that the game never made significant inroads into drug use even during the onset of the testing era; others considered the Biogenesis scandal — in which a number of players were punished even though they’d never tested positive — to be a wake-up call.
“It’s definitely still happening,’’ said one NL evaluator.
Others suggested that the limited number of positive tests, in the wake of more frequent testing, appears to have closed the gap between detection and cheaters, and represents enough progress that suspicion need not be omnipresent — particularly at a time when players are willing to speak out against those who get busted.
“Maybe I’m a sucker; if so, then I’m a sucker,’’ said a second AL evaluator. “There are people out there doing illegal drugs, doing performance enhancers on the banned list. I just don’t think it’s a giant number. I’m not sitting around watching two teams take the field in a professional setting thinking, ‘There are 50 guys on the roster and I think 10-15 are using.’
“I don’t think the number’s that big. I really don’t. I think there are some games where it’s zero, and plenty of games where it’s a one or a two or a three.’’
That opinion, however, was not shared by all. Some evaluators believe that the incentives to cheat — as evidenced, for instance, by Gordon’s five-year, $50 million deal signed shortly before he was suspended for half of this season — are so enormous that the problem of PEDs never truly dwindled even over the decade-plus of increasingly frequent tests and increasingly severe punishments.
“It’s rampant throughout our sport, unfortunately,’’ said an NL evaluator. “But I can’t identify physically who’s using. It is a beast.
“When I heard Dee, I was thinking, ‘Dang, is anything sacred in this world?’ I was frustrated.
“I’m perplexed and I’m confused . . . I don’t want to get to the point where everyone is guilty until proven innocent. I refuse to take that attitude.
“But it’s kind of trial and error. Hopefully by some of these guys getting caught, then maybe we’ll change the mind-set. But I don’t think you’ll ever weed them all out.’’
Skepticism part of the job
Behind the scenes in the scouting world, there’s plenty of chatter and speculation about whether there’s an All-Star with a therapeutic-use exemption for a banned PED; about the journeyman in Triple A who suddenly finds the ability to hit for power; about the once highly touted prospect who finally finds his way to stardom under the description of a “late bloomer’’; about the player who defies normal decline patterns.
Some of these players can represent the best stories the game has to offer — the players whose success came without the arrogance of inevitability. Yet while that narrative may hold in many instances, the players who defy typical career arcs almost invariably invite some level of suspicion from the scouting world.
“I think that’s the world we live in,’’ acknowledged one AL evaluator.
Commissioner Rob Manfred recently said that he found such speculation without a positive test to be “distasteful.’’ Yet the evaluators’ responsibility is to mine for precisely such details.
Because they recommend for or against the acquisition of players, it’s the job of scouts to be skeptics, to ask whether the skills underlying the numbers are sustainable. It’s a bit extreme to suggest that a misevaluation on a player who either starts or stops using PEDs by itself could lead to a firing; multiple player personnel officials suggested that they wouldn’t fire a scout based on one bad recommendation.
That said, a bad miss can erode an evaluator’s credibility within an organization in a way that ultimately affects job responsibilities, and in conjunction with other misses, could hurt promotions or ultimately job security.
Yet there’s little that can be done to figure out who is and isn’t using. Moreover, there’s a question of the degree to which evaluators should factor in suspicions in their view of players. After all, a number of players who were caught in the dragnet of Biogenesis — Nelson Cruz, Ryan Braun, Melky Cabrera, Alex Rodriguez, to name a few — returned to perform at something approximating (or even exceeding) pre-suspension norms.
“What are we supposed to do?’’ wondered one AL scout. “I don’t know what to make of any of it. As a scout, all we can do is report what we see. I think I’ve written in reports that it might look like a guy is getting help, but what does that even mean? I’m not telling the front office to walk away.’’
An unsettling feeling
The mere mention of suspected use in a report is itself less than universal. Some evaluators said they’d been given orders not to include written mention of suspected PED use in reports, texts, or e-mails, and instead were to convey such sentiments solely through conversation in order to avoid the sort of paper trails and server searches that occurred during the Mitchell Report.
Members of other organizations, however, said that their pro scouts had no restrictions when it came to their reports.
Evaluators, then, face some uncertainty about what to do with that “feeling,’’ the suspicion that a player might be juicing based on changes in physical appearance (once common, now far less prevalent) or performance spikes or plummets. Will changes in pitch velocity or exit velocity or injury recovery rates become markers of potential use?
For some, maybe. For others, there will be caution.
“I think it’s so dangerous to run a spreadsheet, find everyone who’s up or down 20 percent in some category that could show PED use, and say, ‘That’s our start list,’ ’’ said an AL evaluator. “I don’t want to have any part of that.
“I think the worst thing you can do is go out and hunt for it. At a certain point, it’s just baseball, but it does become a bit of a witch hunt.’’
Even so, for many scouts, there is an unsettling sense about who is and isn’t using, or who is using but might stop, or who isn’t using but might start. A profession already defined by its inexact nature is only made more complicated by the sense that a number of players have the money and means, along with the incentive, to cheat.
“None of us want to be wrong,’’ said one of the evaluators. “It makes a difficult occupation almost impossible at times. You just don’t know.’’
Alex Speier can be reached at alex.speier@globe.com. Follow him on twitter at @alexspeier.
