It just seemed like steroids worked too well. These guys looked like cartoons and homerun records weren’t just shattered, they were obliterated. Greenies, spitballs, corked bats etc. seems small time in comparison.
It seems to me Perry cuts a bigger historical figure because he cheated. I think some people look at him as one of baseball’s lovable rascals.
Maybe because all the home runs were distorting the history of the game.
Munch:
So could caffeine. Or aspirin. Or yoga. There’s no rule specifically in baseball against using any number of techniques to improve your mental outlook. Amphetamines are against the law to use (unprescribed, at least), but not against the rules of baseball to use. Perhaps baseball never felt a need to ban it because it is illegal anyway, but the bottom line is it was never defined in the rules of baseball as something that warps the inegrity of the competition.
Steroids, on the other hand, have been.
And destroying the comparisons. Baseball loves its history and loves to compare players from the past with todays players. It just feels rotten to the core when you try it nowadays. How can our heroes from our youth be so weak now. But now we know they weren’t.
The first time I saw Canseco and McGwire together ,immediately steroids came to my mind. We still have a whole generation of ballplayers and the HOF to deal with. The ugliness is not done.
Is there actually any empirical evidence that amphetamines enhance athletic performance? I don’t see how they could. They don’t make you any stronger or faster.
They make you better able to see the ball, and more importantly increase your reaction time such that you can take extra time to wait on the pitch, thereby getting more information as to the pitcher’s arm angle and release point, thus making you more likely to get a hit or not swing at a bad pitch.
I got my anecdotal evidence from player testimony, and there’s this, among other articles:
Empirically? Not that I’m aware of. But there is plenty of anecdotal examples. Amphetamine use was estimated at over 75% of MLB as recently as 2005 (cite). As to their effectiveness on the field:
I’m not sure how “empirical” that is - but I don’t know if there’s anything empirical out there about anabolic steroids either (at least in the vein of “X amount/months/etc. of steroids produces Y HRs”).
False. Players need a specific exemption to use amphetamines in the game now, a rule dating back to 2006. Here’s the MLB drug policy, complete with list of banned substances, which includes amphetamines.
IIRC, when that list of steroid users got released a few years ago, one of the things that some commentators noted was that there were some pretty mediocre players on the list. It’s pretty clear that steroids will help with strength, but there’s a good chance they’ll only do you any good if you’re already an excellent ballplayer.
I could take all the steroids in the world, and if someone put an 85mph fastball right down the middle of the plate i probably still couldn’t hit it out of a Major League ballpark.
The majority of the list was middle relief pitchers - guys who have less than 24 hours to recover from very damaging physical activity. There were also a handful of scrubby jackrabbit guys like Alex Sanchez. Mostly it’s people trying to recover quickly from an injury. There’s also a very large disappointing chunk coming out of Latin America who are just not being educated about MLB’s drug policy and how extensive and efficient their drug testing is.
Why? Is there some reason to believe he never used steroids or hgh? He was pretty huge for awhile, now he looks smaller.
Were they? Were they a greater distortion than the color line? Do we have any idea just how much of an impact they had?
There’s no reason to believe he did. He’s been unable to work out the way he used to for a couple of seasons due to nagging injuries, which might explain the loss of mass.
Anyway, if he was juicing, it clearly wasn’t doing him much good; he hit 47 home runs last season, his second highest total ever.
I’m not saying it’s objectively true, and it certainly had a much smaller effect than did the ban on black players. But I think there was a large blacklash against steroids in part because the history of the game and records and players people had cherished for a long time were suddenly being eclipsed by these guys who were juicing. Not that everybody who hit 50 home runs was an immortal, but when Brady Anderson did it and doubled his career high for home runs in the process, when the season record went from 61 to 70 to 73, I think people started feeling that something was very much out of alignment. I still remember the top of the home run chart used to look like this:
Aaron – 755
Ruth – 714
Mays – 660
Robinson – 586
Killebrew – 573
That’s three guys with 600 home runs ever, and in about 10 years four more guys have done it. Six guys have passed Killebrew. It’s not that this means anything objectively, but I do think people started feeling that these were video game numbers and it was going too far. That and a lot of lying, and sensationalist press coverage.
My guess would be Pujols wasn’t a juicer, but of course I was foolish enough to Google and saw a bunch of supposed before and after pics.
It was supposed to fun watching A-Rod chase Aaron, the new home run king, done the right way. So now that sucks, so bring on Pujols (without any revelations please.)
At least it will be cool to see Jeter reach 3000 hits next year.
I’ve never seen any reason to think Pujols is cheating. But I’ve always said it’s a bad idea to state definitively that anybody isn’t using. The most you can really do is say that there is or is not evidence against a particular player.
Munch:
Fine, so let’s exclude any home runs hit by Hank Aaron after 2006, OK?
They don’t help you if you chronically abuse them, though. Paranoia, hallucinations, etc. Is LSD a PED now too because Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while tripping balls (allegedly)?
Right. It’s not that I believe Pujols is not a juicer - although those before and after pictures notwithstanding, he’s been huge as long as I can remember - but that I don’t believe he is. There were 10 Cardinals mentioned in the Mitchell Report, but his name never came up in any context.
I gave A-Rod the benefit of the same doubt, for what it’s worth, although I like Pujols and dislike A-Rod.
Yet the same can be said for A-Rod - we don’t know when he started (he says he only juiced from 2001-2003) - but his post 2003 numbers are still as impressive as hell. His best year ever was 2007, well after drug testing had reached its stride.
His numbers clearly dipped from 2004 on, 2007 notwithstanding - and it wasn’t his best year for home runs. He hit 57 in 2002.