Steroids, blogging, and baseball

For those of you who haven't heard, there's been a buzz around baseball media circles over the past week after Jerod Morris of Midwestsportsfans.com wrote the following article regarding the hot start of Raul Ibanez in Philadelphia. "In fact, the 37-year old Ibanez has been so good that it has led to the inevitable speculation that his improvement may be attributable to factors other than his new lineup, playing in a better ballpark for hitters, or additional maturation as a hitter. In this day and age of suspicion at any significant jump in numbers, even over small sample sizes, it is what it is - and such speculation is to be expected." And when such speculation was posed to Morris via his fantasy baseball league's message board, he set out to disprove with whatever statistical evidence he could muster that Raul Ibanez' hot start was artificial by nature. After a fairly well articulated statistical overview of everything from park effects to opponents fac...