Will Carroll Chat 6-15-09

P Bu (St. Louis): What's the Athlete's Passport?

Will Carroll: Oh -- good question. The AP is a document that shows the date of each test and the result. WADA uses it with most Olympic athletes and it has to be presented at some tournaments to show "good standing." Baseball could do the same thing with a document or even a website. Wouldn't it have been better to have the Inquirer ask "hey, some blogger says you might have done steroids" and have Ibanez pull out a document that said "Ibanez, tested 3/23 clean, 5/10 clean" etc. Heck, just put up the negative results on MLB.com. I don't see a valid argument that a negative(clean) test would be an invasion of privacy. How about this -- instead of the crappy PSA's baseball has now, why not have Albert Pujols stand up on camera and show the fifteen or so negative tests he's taken. (Yes, you could say that Manny Ramirez also has a lot of negatives and that one positive ...)

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dianagramr (Cubehenge): "How about this -- instead of the crappy PSA's baseball has now, why not have Albert Pujols stand up on camera and show the fifteen or so negative tests he's taken." ================= I can see it now, the newest roto category, "percentage of clean tests" ...

Will Carroll: Well ... that's kind of like saying a NASCAR driver needs a high percentage of left turns. It's that one right one that can screw things up.

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Kingpin (Grinnell, IA): I know you have to be considerate of your sources and I know you've mentioned that the club was trying new ideas, but why do the Cardinals continue to have set backs in recovery times (Glaus, Rolen, Carpenter, Kinney, and etc) and what seems like a higher incident of re-injury (Lohse, Carpnter, etc)?

Will Carroll: If I knew I could publish Injury Database stuff without getting HIPAA-hammered, there's some interesting stuff on team patterns in there. I often say teams are conservative or aggressive, that they have strengths or weaknesses, but I'd love to put the data out there. That said, the Cardinals are pretty aggressive with rehabs and have more setbacks that average, but they also get some extra time out of that strategy.

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