Scott wrote about his favorite writers -- and I concur. Ken Rosenthal is kicking butt with his scoops this winter, making FOXSports very happy at that signing, perhaps the best free agent move of the season.

One of my favorite writers, Michael Lewis, just made a phenomenal error, one so basic and wrong that I've stared at it for a couple days. I got the quote off of MCScoresheet, a list-serv for Scoresheet players with lively, smart discussion. (Yes, I know some have problems with the proprietor ... I don't.) Here's the quote, from the NY Times by way of Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster '06:

"Ron Shandler expresses his suspicions another way: he flags playerswho acquire power the same season that they've come back from vacation 20 pounds or more heavier. For instance, Shandler has noted that last season (2004) Adrian Beltre, in the final year with the Dodgers before becoming a free agent, reportedly showed up 50 pounds heavier than the year before. Beltre whose career up to that point had been a story of unfulfilled promise, blasted 48 home runs, 25 more than he ever hit in a single season - for which he was rewarded, by the Seattle Mariners, with a new five-year $64 million contract. When a Tacoma, Wash reporter asked if he had used steroids, Beltre laughed in denial.

Beltre was a well-hyped prospect in the late 1990s. He fell short of expectations in is first six years in the majors, some through no fault of his own. He was coming into a contract year, one that would likely determine his long-term financial future. It's not like there was no motivation here. But we can only speculate."

Holy crap. It's one thing to see this error in a blogger, but Lewis is among the finest working writers. There are two problems here:

1. The "proving a negative" is in full effect. Beltre laughed in denial and Lewis makes it seem as if he's laughing at us, all the way to the bank with his steroid-tainted money. I don't know if Beltre used steroids, Michael doesn't know, and you don't know. Only Beltre knows. (Ok, there is that 2003 list floating around, but we may or may not ever see that.) What we DO know is ..

2. Beltre had one of the most devastating medical situations in recent baseball memory. Beltre had an off-season appendectomy that was not closed correctly. When he came to spring training, he had to have a second major surgery to close the seeping wound, yet he STILL came back that year. That's pretty amazing. There's open speculation that Beltre took not only that year, but 2002 to recover. Now, the theory doesn't hold as much water since it surely doesn't take into 2003 to recover and the statistics for games played look similar. This still bears mention because the idea that he gained weight as the result of recovery and age is at least as plausible, if not more so, than the steroid accusation.

Add in the normal aging patterns, the "walk year" effect, and park factors and this accusation is as baseless as saying that Billy Beane wrote Moneyball. I won't lump Lewis in with the chemical McCarthyists yet, but in his recent NY Times Magazine pieces, he's treading a very fine line between objectivity and accusation. He's a better writer and thinker than that.

I hope.

(BTW, I'm not dismissing Shandler's technique. It's actually one of the more interesting ones and has some basis in fact. I think the bigger problem -- and one seen in PECOTA as well -- is the accuracy of height/weight measurements. A beat writer with a scale could help here or a requirement of giving the physical weight rather than some random roster weight. I'd love to have beat writers tell me things like this, that a player's significantly bigger. In fact, I just tried to see if the LA beat writers mentioned if Beltre looked bigger and couldn't access stories that far back. Be a nice project for someone - go back to the power spike seasons and see if there were beat notes in that spring that gave any hints like "he looks bigger.")

Final note: Nate Silver has an amazing chapter in this spring's "Baseball Between The Numbers", the next non-annual book from BP, that covers this topic and looks at it in a way no one else has. Combined with Jay Jaffe's statistical work in The Juice, I think this should be the statistical nail in the coffin of steroid speculation, but am smart enough to know it won't be.