I do believe you’re correct.
You want to know how long the performance-enhancing properties of amphetamines have been known for? The British Army, Royal Navy and RAF issued amphetamines (methedrine, specifically) to combat personnel throughout World War II due to the measurable resulting improvement in their reflexes, stamina and overall performance, especially under conditions such as sleep deprivation.
Personally, I think we should throw out all the records of players who competed in a segregated league; far more morally culpable as a policy, and it definitely had an effect on the level of competition. Sorry about that, Cy Young and Babe Ruth.
I can be perfectly civil to you…as long as we’re not talking about football. You are a fan of a hated division rival, so by extension during football season I hate you. Don’t take it personally, it’s just business. My wife is a Cowboys fan and she gets it far worse than you, yet we’re still married, because she understands what I just said to you. On football Sundays she doesn’t even attempt to talk to me, she knows it’s time for Steelers football and that’s that.
Same to you.
Heh. I remember several years ago some yahoo on the radio trying to defend Bonds against charges of steroid use (“it’s all exercise and hard work!”), and someone calling in and wagering a year’s salary if he could be shown the exercise that increases your hat size.
Wouldn’t surprise me if P90X includes some sort of reverse trepanning procedure. I hear that shit is really unpleasant.
McGwire says that steroids had nothing to do with him hitting homers. I am glad that is finally settled. He says" the man upstairs" gave him the ability. I guess he lived in an apartment complex.
I saw that. It just makes me shake my head. McGwire apparently also called Joe Posnanski up out of the blue to talk about the past. Joe described that conversation (which focuses a lot on this “bulking up to Popeye level did nothing for my numbers” angle) here:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/joe_posnanski/01/12/mcgwire.cardinals/index.html
I don’t know if this gives McGwire any more credibility on this topic (that he really did work a lot harder at making contact, and thus had more balls in the air, which led to more dingers) or takes credibility away from the “steroids make you hit it farther - they don’t help you make contact” argument. I think there will be plenty of conversation around that, and I’m eager to hear about it from the experts.
Increased strength means you can generate more power with a more compact swing, meaning it’s easier to make useful contact, as opposed to just making contact.
Apparently the “man upstairs’, helped a lot of baseball players at the same time. Player after player were stretching personal records and league records. The " man” helped Sosa and Bonds a lot too. I guess I have to accept that the “man” has a great interest in sports and has chooses his favorites.
As RNATB points out, there’s no way to separate the skill of making contact from power hitting ability. One feeds the other. There’s no doubt in my mind McGwire was a more technically proficient hitter later in his career, but we don’t know to what extent extra strength helped him.
I don’t expect Mark McGwire to be a genius and he’s being heavily managed by Ari Fleischer’s firm in all this, so we needn’t be surprised if the apologies aren’t all that honest. But this illustrates the fundamental problem of a loss of trust; it puts everything to question.
Some sabermetricians have made an effort to try to quantify how much steroids have increased home runs, with answers ranging from “some” to “none.” They all miss the point; it’s impossible to replay history, so it’s impossible to tell just what steroids meant for Mark McGwire. Perhaps he would have hit 70 homers without steroids. Perhaps he would have hit just 44. Perhaps he would have hit 53 but also batted .340. Perhaps his injuries would have knocked him out of baseball by then. Perhaps he would have remained in baseball longer and hit more homers than he did. There’s no way to know.
There’s also no way to know his intent. Nor, to be honest, is there any point. He cheated, full stop. It’s irrelevant whether he did so to prevent injury (which, at least initially, is quite plausible) or to hit more homers, or both. **Once you have violated a state of trust, you can’t be trusted anymore. **
The comparison I always like to draw is with corporate conflict of interest guidelines. If I secretly make corporate purchasing decisions that benefit my wife’s company, and am found out, I’ll be fired. No muss, no fuss, no question about whether I was harming the company or not; I’ll be walked out the door. Once I place myself on a position of conflict of interest, I have acted unethically just by putting myself in that position. The details aren’t relevant. My responsibility is to ensue that the question “but why did he do it?” doesn’t need to be asked.
McGwire’s error, in my humble opinion, is that he is trying to prevaricate, to avoid the simple truth; he cheated, and once you cheat you’ve blown it. WHY he cheated doesn’t matter. “But” is not a word that belongs in an honest apology.
Fair enough. Interesting marriage! To be a fly on the wall when the Cowboys and Steelers play one another!
Head out into the woods. You’ll be right next to the bear. Or the pope.
He set the rookie record for home runs. He was one shy of cracking 50 when 50 homers in a season meant something, and he was a rookie! Was he juicing from day one?
Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. We don’t know.
McGwire was certainly an awesome power hitter, but his 49-homer rookie season was, remember, his career high for nine years. There would certainly be nothing especially remarkable about someone peaking at age 23. Then, after his two injury-plagued seasons, he suddenly became the best home run hitter of all time for about five years. He was a very different hitter from 1995 on than he had been before.
I still say it was a lot of fun as a casual fan when they first broke the record, and the competition afterward. It’s the only reason I ever learned anything about baseball. I actually enjoyed watching.
The point is, he clearly had the ability. I expect that his ability to play the game of baseball is not in dispute, otherwise there’s no reason to continue this thread at all.
Actually, it would be quite unusual, especially for a position player at McGwire’s level; the only players I can think of off-hand who peaked at an all-star level by age 23 are Cesar Cedeno and Ruben Sierra.
Sure. He could play baseball. That’s why nobody is asking him to return his paychecks to the Cardinals; we’re just saying his name should be stricken from the record books, and he shouldn’t get into the Hall.
People always talk about “putting an asterisk by the record” as though it’s some sort of unprecedented deal, or silly. It’s not, though - do you think anyone cared about Ben Johnson’s dirty record when Carl Lewis set a new clean one?
Johnson’s record being “stricken” doesn’t mean leaving a yawning hole in the record of the major leagues from 1986 to 2001. You can’t excise a baseball player from the facts the way you can just disregard one sprinter. McGwire helped a team win a World Series; are you going to strike that from the record books? How could you?
Eddie Mathews peaked at 21. Al Kaline had his best season, arguably, at 20. Vada Pinson peaked between 20 and 23. It does happen.