He's from Stanford

Chris Minaker (WI '06) gets an article today from Geoff Baker, but not for how he is playing this Spring Training. It's for something he wrote.

Minor-leaguer busts steroids myths

The one thing Mariners minor-leaguer Chris Minaker won't be doing as a professional ballplayer is touting his sport's party line on steroids.

That's the one where Major League Baseball officials publicly — but a lot more vigorously in private — campaign about how their sport isn't as steroid-ridden as, say, professional football and can't be held responsible if younger athletes imitate their players. Their nudge-nudge, wink-wink suggestion is that the sport is socially responsible and simply being victimized by a congressional and media witch-hunt on steroids and other performance boosters.

But these complainers, and there are many, ought to talk to Minaker. The well-spoken, 23-year-old infielder from Lynnwood graduated last June with a master's degree in sociology from Stanford University, achieving a perfect score on an 86-page thesis about the social pressures athletes face to take performance-enhancing drugs.

His paper was strictly about college athletes at Stanford, but some of its conclusions about steroids won't have baseball executives or union officials grinning with glee.

"If the need for steroids is broken down by sport, it becomes clear that baseball has the biggest problem with steroids," Minaker writes, citing results of a confidential, written survey he took of 91 male varsity athletes at Stanford. "It is also baseball that has had the most well-publicized steroid problem of all of the professional team sports. It seems that the problem of the professional ranks has trickled down into the collegiate ranks."

...

The last thing Major League Baseball wants is a minor-leaguer writing that college-level players are, at best, being influenced by their perceptions about big-leaguers or, at worst, copying them. After all, the argument that big-league steroids are morally corrupting youth is the biggest one cited by those crying for a government crackdown.

Minaker hit .315 with four homers and 17 runs batted in over 40 games with Class A Wisconsin last season. The 10th-round pick by Seattle hopes for a long baseball career, but has deferred a $10,000 scholarship just in case he wants more schooling down the road.

Regardless of what happens with his career, he said, he'd like to pursue his work on this topic.

"I think there is a need for that in our culture," he said. "So, definitely, I'd like to look at this further."