Of course, use of steroids does not necessarily make you that bigger, you can get bigger by simply lifting weights and eating the right food, and going by pictures is a silly way of trying to determine who used steroids and who didn’t.
Mark McGwire’s size increase doesn’t look very suspicious to me. He was huge, but he was absolutely huge when he was a kid, too. His rookie pictures show a man with gigantic arms.
I’m also a little puzzled by Dumbguy’s observation that Bagwell had a power spike. Well, yeah. So do most power hitters throughout baseball history - very few start out as big time home run hitters (ironically, Mark McGwire is one who did start out that way.) Hank Aaron hit 13 homers his first season, then 27 and 26, then suddenly 44. Lou Gehrig went 20-16-47. Ken Griffey Jr., went 16-22-22-27-45.
Nor is size correlated all that clearly with power; Aaron, Mays, and Mel Ott were smaller than the average big leaguer. Most other power hitters were of ordinary size.
Really, most of the time you can’t go by someone’s appearance. PEDs do not generally turn someone into a superhero, and they don’t have to to help you hit home runs; one of their great benefits is allowing more rapid return from some types of injury. (I feel this is likely the biggest benefit they provided to McGwire, who was already ridiculously strong but faced nagging injuries that nearly ended his career.)
That’s why if players didn’t get caught, they should be evaluated strictly on their numbers.
I have no doubt that if Carl Yastrzemski had been born 30 years later, and had his Triple Crown Season in 1997, instead of 1967, the BBWAA would have him in the “holding cell” with Bonds and Clemens. Yaz went from being a very good hitter to a monster just by working out between the end of the 1966 season and the start of Spring Training.
As a Sox fan, as a kid, I witnessed it all and I had a hard time accepting it back then. It was like something out of Popeye, where he eats a can of spinach and then kicks the crap out of Bluto.
There’s an important misunderstanding here. When I first brought up drug use outside of steroids I was discussing amphetamine use by players in the 1950s and 1960s. This seems to have been misdirected into the concept of Red Bull and similar energy drinks. Leaving aside the potential health consequences of such drinks it’s a fallacy to believe there’s an equivalency between the two.
The amphetamines to which Mantle was referring - and other players openly discuss it such as Mike Schmidt in his book - were the real deal speed. Those drugs were the focus of the ‘Speed Kills’ campaign in the 1970s and early 1980s. These were not legal OTC substances but prescription pills that the players took to recover - or ignore - injury and pain, to enhance reflexes and to increase overall energy. If those are considered Performance Enhancing Drugs I don’t know what can be considered such.
Hell, players have implicated such highlights at Willie Mays, Willie Stargell and Bill Madlock as both taking and encouraging other players to take such drugs. If that’s the case, how does one use PED to discount McGwire without implicating Willie Freaking Mays?
Hell, in that Grantland article there’s a part where a writer is asking Bagwell about his PED use. He denies having ever used steroids or HGH. Greenies? “No comment.”
If you hold THAT against him but not the 60’s-70’s players, you’re a hypocrite. But I would expect there are many BBWAA writers who would do exactly that.
If you’re position against steroids - a prescription based set of drugs that can promote healing and increase performance - is that it’s a dealbreaker yet amphetamines - a prescription based set of drugs that can promote healing and increase performance - are fine then there’s some inconsistencies you should think about.
There are few players from that era that would surprise me if they used steroids (I’m sure all of them at least experimented with “Drugs” that Enhanced Performance). You can go back to Babe Ruth injecting himself with sheep testicle extract to find a player looking for a PED. And I’m sure he’s not the first.
If someone could come up with a steroid that helped keep you healthy without the muscle growth etc, would that be allowed? Or one that kept your body from aging? I know I wouldn’t hesitate to use the latter even without the MLB financial or competitive benefits.
Tiers? I think the subject is not quite so easy to categorize. At the very least, it’s a spectrum, not tiers. And with something like steroids, the benefits are more than just building muscle mass (bad!!!). It’s also something that helps healing (bad??? good???).
And what about surgery that gives you a competitive advantage (like Lasik). Is this OK? Which “tier” is this on?
If it’s body alteration that’s the criterion, then we should ban Tommy John surgery and other kinds of reconstruction. (Mind, this involves not merely fixing the torn tendon but replacing it with one from elsewhere in the body.) Tommy John went 65-48 in the five years before his surgery, and 90-45 in the five years after. That seems like a pretty artificial performance boost. (Yeah, I know W-L isn’t a good way to measure a pitcher’s performance but I’m just trying to make a point and was too lazy to figure out other stats over that period.)
His ERA in the five year period before the surgery was 3.14. In the five years after, it was 3.11.
Maybe Tommy John surgery isn’t a good example of performance enhancement, but rather as career lengthening. I thought Lasik might qualify as an enhancement, but if corrective lenses are doing the job, then no.
Really, for talented players like A-Rod and Bonds and Clemens, nothing does the trick like steroids. Which is why they turned to them over and over again.
