I’m deep in the “who cares?” ocean. I think its a crap sport and couldn’t care less about any of it.
But I do have a real nice Giants hat that I’m gonna “Sharpie-up” and put on ebay…
Really? Cite?
Is there any evidence that steroid use has helped pitchers in any way? Do they throw faster these days? Do they throw longer? Do they pitch more often? Aside from Nolan Ryan do they have longer careers? With hitters the ball is going to travel farther if hit with more power, is there a correlation for pitchers? I haven’t seen any evidence of pitchers gaining any advantage over hitters since the advent of steroids but maybe I am missing something. Anyone?
Bonds isn’t the only player on the juice. There’s no possible way his people invented a new synthetic steroid just for his use only. There must be other players doing the same thing. But only Bonds has got the 755 home runs to show for it. Such a record can’t be the steroids alone.
And frankly, Selig is in a really crappy position. Whether he likes it or not, Barry Bonds and the Home Run Chase puts butts in seats. The Giants are in the cellar in the National League West, lest anyone forget, and still playing before packed houses. The owners would skin him alive if he made any announcement that jeopardized ticket sales.
The next few weeks will show us how long this mania can be sustained; after it has crested, I expect Selig to make a statement one way or the other, after any negative announcement can no longer affect ticket sales. (If I had to put a date on Selig’s solemn announcement, it’d be November, somewhere around the time of the owners’ meeting.)
It’s like when Joe DiMaggio lost his 56-game hitting streak against Cleveland on July 17. The Cleveland owner was initially delighted that his team had stopped Joltin’ Joe — delighted until he saw the low attendance the following day.
I was surprised that no one mentioned these
two
articles
about a factor which may have contributed as much to his HR record as his possible steroid/HGH use …
w.
Holy crap! Clearly Googling media trumps decades of baseball knowledge. I bet those stupid team owners have never even heard of the internet.
I find it shocking, SHOCKING, that Bonds was able to use such secret equipment in public without people noticing.
Now people that don’t juice can be heroes too!
I’d actually say the opposite. Bonds used steroids, legally, and never actually broke any of the rules. In that sense, I think he’s legit. On the other hand, the record should have been protected by rules: because they weren’t (until recently, perhaps), Hank’s record seems to be the more legit HR record.
And to everyone who likes to cry about how we must look at Bond’s batting average or OPS, in order to realize that he would have been an amazing player without the 'roids, I invite them to go to a batting cage and try hitting a few balls. It ain’t difficult to make contact. To do so with enough power to drive them beyond the fences is another thing entirely. There are plenty of major league players who have hit an awful lot of balls fairly deep, only to have them caught by an outfielder. Pumping up your body to the point where you hit the balls twenty feet further turns a lot of sac flies or regular outs into homers.
I don’t see how pitchers being juiced is relevant. They didn’t move the bleachers back. Sure, it might be harder to hit a pitch from a juiced pitcher but if you do (and you are juicing) your chances of hitting a HR are greatly increased.
-This is my stance as well. I mean, come on, cigarettes are legal.
It’s late where I am, and now, I can’t sleep b/c I knew I posted something incorrectly. I should say, I want factual evidence that he knowingly broke the rules. I concur that he did take steroids. I know, I’m naive.
Right … that’s why using the equipment in question is now outlawed in baseball unless the player is injured, because the team owners are so stupid … right … did you bother to read the citation?
w.
So, did Barry Bonds break a rule?
Nope, he’s grandfathered in because he was using it when the rule came into force … again, didn’t you read the cite?
To me that seems incredibly foolish, to have rules that apply to some players and not to others, but what do I know?
w.
Baseball records have as much meaning as is assigned to them by the fans. Ask a man on the street who was the first ballplayer to hit 60 home runs in a season and it is my (totally unscientific) guess that a good chunk of people will say “Babe Ruth.” Ask them who the first to hit over 60 in a season is, and I think a far smaller percentage will be able to correctly answer “Roger Maris.” I wouldn’t be surprised if some answer Mark McGwire to that question.
Why is this the case? Is it because Maris was a bad guy? No, not at all. By most accounts Roger Maris was a good guy, not a huge name and not even a Hall of Famer, but a very nice guy who set a very impressive record. There was some sizable portion of the country who wanted Mickey Mantle to break Ruth’s record, and they were disappointed when Maris broke it instead–but overall, Maris didn’t do anything to deserve his record being slighted. However, slighted it was, even “asterisked.” It wasn’t of course actually asterisked, but that is the popular term for what Ford Frick planned to do with the record–to display the previous record for most home runs in a 154 game season alongside whatever record was listed for the 162 game season. This was basically a ploy by Ford Frick to discredit Maris’ record, because Major League Baseball doesn’t even keep an official record book, but Frick set the tone that Maris record wouldn’t be “legitimate” unless it was hit in the same number of games as Ruth’s.
Maris is probably a victim of things out of his control. He couldn’t control the fact that he set his record in 1961, the year that two new teams were added (thus creating the perception–probably correctly, that pitching was somewhat diluted over the previous year), nor could he control the fact that they added 8 games to the season. But obviously the 162 game season, and the addition of two other teams wasn’t enough to make 60 in one season “trivial.” In fact, Maris’ record stood for more years than Ruth’s did, not being broken until 1996 by Mark McGwire. In all the years since Maris hit 61 in '61, only a handful of men (Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds) have surpassed his feat, period. This is despite the total number of teams in the AL going up from 10 to 14, and the addition of interleague play.
There’s some impressive records in baseball that will most certainly never be broken. Ty Cobb holds the career batting average record at .366, this is a record which will almost certainly never be broken–the closest an active player is to this record is more than 30 points shy of it.
Sam Crawford holds the career record for triples, with 309–another record that will never be broken. The closest an active player is to this record is Steve Finley at 124, that is less than half of Crawford’s total. I don’t think any player has gotten close to this record in decades. In fact, I don’t believe an active player since 1928 has even had over 200 triples in their career (in 1928 that was Ty Cobb, who is number two on the all-time triples list.)
Some might argue these two records aren’t considered significant because they were set by ballplayers in an earlier era of baseball, when the game was played differently. This is certainly true, although in defense of both Cobb and Sam Crawford, even within their own eras their career numbers are only approached by a small handful of people (only 4-5 get close to Crawford, for example.) So they were not exactly easy records to get on the books.
If that’s the case, then what about the record for most RBIs in a career? Or most runs? These are records that still get approached from time to time. Barry Bonds is 82 runs shy of Ricky Henderson’s all time runs record, yet this hasn’t been hyped whatsoever. This is a record that is very hard to set, if you look at the top ten list, the only active player in it is Barry Bonds. After him Craig Biggio is down at 1830 runs and comes in at number 13 all time (very impressive, nonetheless.)
How about the career saves record? Saves are even fairly glamorous these days, as many fans have a lot of respect for the good closers. Who holds that record? Well, it’s an active player–Trevor Hoffman with 511 of them. There’s some pretty decent hurlers out there who have been closers for almost their entire careers who don’t approach that number.
Anyone who has ever seen someone hit a home run knows why none of the records I’ve mentioned are as prominent as the home run record. It isn’t because someone who can hit a lot of home runs is guaranteed to be a better contribution to a team than someone who can score a lot of runs by being a fast base runner (although that can and is often the case.) It’s just the simple fact that a home run is a raw display of power and skill, that is really awesome to see. The poster who talked about how easy it is to hit a baseball and suggested you just go to a batting cage to see…kind of misses the point. Pitching machines at your local batting cage aren’t going to know where the weakness in your swing are. They don’t throw you a 95 mph fast ball one pitch followed by a 85 mph changeup the next. They don’t throw a curveball that falls off the table, nor a slider that makes you look foolish for even swinging at it. They also don’t whizz the ball past your skull at 95 mph to brush you back and intimidate you. Hitting a baseball into play off of a major league pitcher is a serious accomplishment that most people in the world wouldn’t be capable of doing more than maybe 10-15% of the time even with substantial training and practice.
Hitting a baseball 380-450+ feet is simply unthinkable for most people. I played baseball extensively when I was growing up, and I never got anywhere close to hitting a ball that far, not off a tee, not a slow pitch from a friend et cetera. I never saw anyone hit a ball that hard, either. Not when I was watching the State High School baseball championships (that my school didn’t make.) So seeing someone able to consistently hit the ball and that far is a spectacle, and that is why the home run records are considered so sacred within baseball. However, Barry Bonds record is probably never going to be respected in the same way as the records of Ruth or Aaron. Hell, how many second-place records in professional sports get remembered for more than fifty years after the person’s death? 714 hasn’t been the record for a long, long time now, but that’s a number that is still prominent in the minds of the nation. Just as 755 will be prominent long after Aaron dies. Bonds record is going to be like Maris’ 61, it’ll be known, it’ll be accepted as the correct statistical answer. But in the hearts of the fanbase people are still going to treasure 755 more, and that’s just the “burden” that Bonds has to bear. Some of it brought on to himself, and some of it unfair (as it was with Maris.)
They did this when they outlawed the spit-ball, too. Pitchers that had gotten by extensively using the spit ball were allowed to continue using it, legally, for the rest of their careers.
I read a story once about some baseball movie. An actor - I think is was Kevin Costner - was playing a baseball player. They were using professional players in some of the parts. A professional pitcher was practicing throwing realistic looking pitches with Costner practicing hitting in a realistic looking manner. Apparently, Costner started talking about his high school and college ball-playing career and said that he figured he was good enough he could have turned pro if he had wanted to. So the pitcher decided to stop throwing realistic looking pitches and started pitching for real. Costner was apparently unable to hit a single pitch after that.
Martin, thanks for a fascinating and insightful answer. As someone who obviously knows a lot about the game, what is your opinion of the thesis that Bond’s elbow protector is a significant advantage? Seems to me that the fact that the League outlawed it means it must make a substantial difference, or they would have let all the players use it … is that your take as well?
And do you have any idea of the rationale behind having different rules for different players? I mean, why let some guys use elbow protectors and not others? Is this selected enforcement the result of actions by the Player’s Association, or decided by the Baseball Commissioner, or the team owners, or how?
All the best,
w.
Many websites are happy to promote Human Growth Hormone. This is all that I found about side effects after a brief effort to find anything negative:
If they “grandfathered” him in after knowing that he had used the steroid creams, then that’s where the biggest mistake was made. It’s a lousy situation, but he holds the record. Changing the ruling now would just make things worse. The exception would be if they could prove that there was further use that was actually against the rules.
Martin Hyde makes a good point about how the game keeps changing. The playing field has never been level, so to speak. But they sure do need to clean up this steroid mess before it takes the game down once and for all.
And there is nothing legit about a Baseball Hall of Fame that leaves out Roger Maris.
Zoe, they grandfathered him in regarding the elbow armor, not the steroids …
All the best,
w.
Games played but not at-bats
Games:
Jimmie Fox is fourth, sorry.
Here is an article that implies the elbow protector gave him quite the advantage:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003621797