Stupidest Comment Thus Far on the Mitchell Report

Tom Scocca, taking Billy Beane hatred to the predictable next level:

Or, as Beane says elsewhere in the book [Moneyball]: “Power is something that can be acquired. … Good hitters develop power. Power hitters don’t become good hitters.” Oakland, with its limited funds, wouldn’t spend payroll to buy power hitters. Instead, it invested in cheaper, patient hitters. And those hitters, it seems, bought the power themselves.

Did Beane have steroids deliberately or explicitly in mind? He was talking about his hopes of drafting someone who could be the next Jason Giambi.

Uh… no. I’m pretty sure he was talking about long term and well established statistical trends that indicate (even in the pre-steroid era) that young players develop power over time, but that young power hitters with “old man skills” often don’t develop as they age. But I’ll concede that this narrative does nicely square the circle for self-appointed “traditionalists” in baseball; Beane is already a demon for destroying the notion that payroll is destiny and opening the door for the statisticians, so making him responsible for steroids (even as the Mitchell Report clearly excludes that hypothesis) is, so to speak, a predictable phenomenon.