And it's in, Ortiz has been elected to the Hall

[Jim65]

Originally Posted by icurnmedic

By this logic though you are essentially saying a player cannot improve based on hard work,practice and technical changes.
So the 750 ops hitter will always be a 750 ops hitter , period?

I'm not saying that all. But when a player spikes the exact same year that he fails a drug test, do we think it was due to technical changes? I don't.

My original response was to a poster that claimed Ortiz never went through any transformation at all. Then claimed it was because of a hitting coach.

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Jim65

I'm not saying that all. But when a player spikes the exact same year that he fails a drug test, do we think it was due to technical changes? I don't.

My original response was to a poster that claimed Ortiz never went through any transformation at all. Then claimed it was because of a hitting coach.

The hitting coach claim was not mine, it's from Ortiz book. And it wasn't a hitting coach, it was supposedly Francona. (Which yes, makes it shaky, because the timeline is a year off. )

The AB/HR stats are what they are. I didn't bother with going to thousandths or beyond.

An OPS difference somewhat early in a career is probably not at all unusual for a star player. I believe because OPS is affected by many things besides what the player can do naturally.
Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Reggie Jackson, Willie Mays, and to a lesser degree Mantle, All had 100-200 point jumps right about between their second and third full seasons. A couple others I checked didn't, Ott and Musial.

[Jim65]

Manfred never said Ortiz was a false positive. He said at least 10 of the 104 positives MAY have been false positives and Ortiz POSSIBLY could have been in the 10, as could have any player. No one knows who the 10 were since the records were destroyed. Those 10 were not re-tested because they easily reached the 5% failure threshold which triggered future testing according to the agreement with the Union.