Scott Lemieux and David Brockington debate the question of whether managers “matter” in baseball. I don’t know much about baseball, but Brockington’s contention is very illogical:

These are superficial, anecdotal pieces of evidence; the sabermetric literature (that I am familiar with, I am now a couple years behind I’m afraid, although there is some interesting stuff here) has had a difficult time establishing that the field manager of a ball club has much measurable effect at all, and is negligible at best.

The link is to a research that indicates managers don’t have an impact on player performance. But insofar as some players perform better than others, and insofar as managers decide who plays and how much, I don’t see how sabermetrics could possible show that the field manager of a team has no impact on how many games the team wins. Say your team’s 8th-best offensive player is a slightly below-average defensive shortstop whereas your 12th-best offensive player is an above-average defensive shortstop. Who do you play? In what situation? Answering these kind of questions correctly seems incredibly important, and the importance of these issues is precisely why sabermetric research has been of so much interest. Or am I missing something?

It’s obviously well-within the rights of Major League Baseball to articulate and begin enforcing a workable ban on consumption of certain kinds of substances. And my understanding of the evidence is that it’s good for the health of the players, and also for the health of aspiring players in high school and college and the minor leagues, for such a ban to be in place.

But the impulse of this sort of asterixing displayed in ESPN’s article on Mark McGwire, really makes very little sense to me. The players being marked out on this list played during a time when there was no real effort to curb the use of currently-banned substances and the use of such substances was widespread. In particular, they were used by pitchers as well as hitters, and any position players whose physical attributes were enhanced by PED was also playing defense. There’s just no clear reason to believe that widespread use of steroids and HGH represented some structural advantage for hitters.

In general, all sports are always changing all the time in terms of standards of training, nutrition, and conditioning as well as sundry tweaks of the rules. That’s why it’s inherently problematic to compare statistics from far-removed time periods. But the issue raised by PEDs is no different from the normal difficulties of historical comparison. Awareness of these ins-and-outs is part of what differentiates informed fans from less knowledgeable ones. But there’s no good reason to single out one aspect of one period in the game for some kind of special shaming.

I don’t really follow baseball in enough detail to know for sure if he’s wrong, but this Buzz Bissinger argument is wildly unconvincing:

Whatever happens in the National League and American League Championship series unfolding over the next week or so, one outcome has already been decided–the effective end of the theories of Moneyball as a viable way to build a playoff-caliber baseball team when you don’t have the money. That no doubt sounds like heresy to the millions who embraced Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, but all you need to do is keep in mind one number this postseason: 528,620,438. That’s the amount of money in payroll spent this season by the teams still in it–the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Moneyball? You bet it’s Moneyball, true Moneyball, like it always has been in baseball and always will be.

Bissinger goes on to diss Billy Beane across various modalities. But my impression watching from afar is that recent developments in baseball largely vindicate Beane’s work. Obviously, having a bigger payroll to work with is helpful to a general manager. But for a while, detailed attention to statistical work allowed Beane to exploit massive market inefficiencies and put together high-quality, low-payroll teams. But then other people noticed. Michael Lewis wrote a bestselling book about it! So the insights spread, and there are fewer inefficiencies to take care of. If it had somehow been possible to copyright on base percentage and force everyone else to keep relying on batting average, that would have been nice for the early adopters. But it’s not, and the broad outlines of statistical analysis of baseball performance are now pretty widely understood.

Ross Douthat says past steroid use shouldn’t keep you out of the Hall of Fame forever, but it should carry a penalty:

This isn’t to say that the steroid effect shouldn’t be considered in evaluating a player’s fitness for the Hall. I wouldn’t give A-Rod or Bonds the honor of a first-ballot induction, and I think that evidence of steroid use is a good reason for keeping borderline HoF candidates out. If you think a player wouldn’t have reached Hall-worthy numbers without cheating – as I suspect McGwire wouldn’t, for all his gifts – then don’t vote him in. But there’s no question that Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens would have made the Hall without the edge that steroids provided. And if you grant that premise, I think that they belong there, unless the sport is willing to take the plunge of banning them from the diamond permanently.

I think I’d go softer on McGwire than this. Maybe it’s true that absent the juice McGwire wouldn’t have been a good enough hitter to rack up HoF stats. But one of the problems a juiceless McGwire would have faced was the need to hit the pitches thrown by Roger Clemens. Suppose McGwire hadn’t had assistance and the pitchers against whom he played didn’t have it either—is there any reason to think it wouldn’t have all just evened-out in the end?