Braves’ Prospect Jordan Schafer busted for HGH
This is a very strange and disappointing story, so stay with me.
Braves prospect and probable 2009 starting CF Jordan Schafer has been suspended 50 games for steroid usage. Many minor leaguers have received steroid suspensions, but Schafer is the first truly big name. I have him ranked 22nd, BA has him 25th, BP has him 17th.
He has always been considered to be one of the most toolsy prospects around. Last year, those tools translated into production as he combined for a .312/.374/.513 line between Low and High-A at the age of twenty. It’s not hard to see why Schafer is so highly touted.
This steroid suspension raises several questions. As a pure baseball guy, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, the first was: “How does this affect his prospect status?”
After a .240/.293/.376 line in 2006, Schafer improved to the excellent line mentioned above. It was assumed that this was just natural progression; after all, Schafer was highly touted before his breakout, and the improvement was just chalked up as a player’s production inevitably living up to his talent. Obviously, this will now be questioned by some. Steroids or talent?
In my opinion, Schafer is the same prospect today as he was yesterday. I really, really have to question the mental capacity of anybody who would attribute a .072/.081/.137 improvement entirely to steroids. After all, Jeremy Giambi, Mike Morse, Benito Santiago , Alex Sanchez and countless faceless minor leaguers have all turned into hitting machines as well, haven’t they? Steroids without natural talent are useless. While Schafer’s image has been tarnished, his prospect status shouldn’t be.
However, a perhaps even more pressing question, as raised by Kevin Goldstein, is how did he get caught? As you may be aware, the current tests do not account for HGH. It appears that Schafer’s HGH-usage was going to come out, and he chose to confess. This is a story I’ll watch with a lot of interest in the coming days. While everybody assumes that there are many unknown steroid users among major leaguers, not many people care that there are also many unknown steroid users among the top prospects we love to drool over. While this will likely shed no light on that, it will be very interesting to see the process that led to the alleged confession and how it is handled.
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