Tag Archives: Baseball

The Dynasty

It’s behind the pay firewall but today Bill James compiled his list of the greatest baseball teams of all time. It’s an impressive effort as he is considered single season performance, multi-year performance, post-season performance and the quality of the team (i.e., was this time comprised of great players or guys just having good years).

My 1995 Atlanta Braves ranked 3rd, slightly ahead of the Big Red Machine.

This will, of course, sound ridiculous to anyone who’s not me or Bill James. After all, the Braves of the 90’s only won one world series. But consider the totality of what they did between 1991 and 2005.

  • Won 1431 regular season games and lost 931, a winning percentage of .606 — a 98 win pace. They won 100 games six times.
  • Won 14 division titles and were a wild card when the ’94 strike hit.
  • Won 12 post-season series and lost 13. Between 1991 and 1999, they went 11-7, taking five pennants and one title.
  • Had future Hall of Famers Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz and Chipper as well as a near-HOFer in Fred McGriff and bona-fide stars in Lemke, Lopez, Galarraga, Justice, Gant and Andruw Jones.
  • Had a future HOF manager.
  • I was there for most of it. I watched every night, I frequently went to Atlanta, I attended World Series games. It was like nothing I had ever seen before or ever will again. We just knew they were going to win. There was an aura about the team that was remarkable. Even if they fell behind in the standings — 10.5 games in 1993 — we knew they would close the gap.

    The reason the Braves are not generally considered one of the greatest teams of all time is because of who is #1 on Bill James’ list — the 1998 Yankees. The Braves, like the great Brooklyn Dodgers before them, had the misfortune to be contemporaries with one of the greatest teams of all time. And they lost twice to them in the World Series including in 1996 when the Braves were clearly the better team.

    People wonder why I hate the Yankees so much as I’m not a big Red Sox guy. 1996 is why. The Braves had blown out the Yankees in two games. And then, with some bad luck and bad ump calls, it fell apart. And it became even worse after since the media swooned over the Yankees, portraying it as a wonderful story that they had won their first title since all the way back in … 1978.

    I’m still bitter about it. It still hurts. And one of the reasons it hurts is because it blinds people to the greatness of those Braves teams. Had they won the ’96 World Series, no one would question their greatness. But because they lost, they don’t get mentioned.

    If only Tim Welke had gotten out of Jermaine Dye’s way…

    The Steroid Thing

    Mike’s Rule #3: Human beings aren’t very good at reasoning; but we are dead awesome when it comes to rationalizing.

    It’s Hall of Fame ballot time again and if any group illustrates Mike’s Rule 3 perfectly, it’s the Baseball Writers of America. You will rarely find such a pure distillation of the frailty of the human thought process. For every Joe Posnanski or Joe Sheehan, who use facts and data to inform their positions, there are five others who:

    1) decide in advance what they think

    2) twist the facts to suit their pre-conceived opinion.

    You can see it perfectly in the debate over Jack Morris vs. Bert Blyleven. It’s possible to vote for both, for neither or for just Blyleven.

    But it’s really difficult to vote for just Jack Morris. Blyleven had both better career numbers and better peak numbers and his post-season performance was a good (if not as notable). But there are a slew of writers who will, on the one hand, tell you that Blyleven was never the best pitcher in baseball, that he never won a Cy Young Award, that he was just a “compiler” of stats (as if there’s something wrong with that) — and then, on the other hand, will conveniently forget that those arguments apply doubly-so to Morris.

    That’s difficult to wrap your mind around until you understand that they are not reasoning, they are rationalizing. As Bill James observed long ago, many HOF voters and agitators care more about individuals than arguments. The Blyleven-no, Morris-yes writers don’t care about arguments … they care about Jack Morris. And whatever argument they have to use to make their case, they’ll use it, consistency and reason be damned.

    But nowhere does rationalizing become more painful and more odious than the debate over steroids and whether to put players from the steroid era into the HOF. Over the years I’ve laid out my thought on this (here, here, here). There are basically three options when it comes to voting on players from the Steroid Era:

    Option 1 – Vote for No One. This has the advantage of being clear and consistent. It also has the advantage of creating a very high horse from which the media can make up for their massive failure to uncover the scandal as it was going on (Wilstein exempted). The disadvantage is that it throws the innocent in with the guilty and means a very empty hall.

    While this option is reasonable, I don’t think its viable for one big reason — it rewards cheaters from earlier eras. Even leaving out sign stealing, corked bats and segregation, we know that PEDS long pre-date Mark McGwire. Baseball players chomped amphetamines for decades. HOF pitcher Pud Galvin drank a concoction with monkey testosterone. And steroids specifically have been around for several decades. I think it’s highly likely we will find out, in the near future, that someone already in the HOF used steroids. And when that happens, option 1 collapses.

    Option 2 – Innocent Until Proven Guilty In this option, the writers admit anyone who has not been implicated in or confessed to PED use. So guys like Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, etc. would be out while guys like Maddux, Johnson and Thome would be in. This has the advantage of requiring evidence of cheating before punishment is meted out.

    But I don’t think this option is viable either. First, it rewards players for not getting caught and makes it nearly impossible for players to be honest about what they did and didn’t do. Indeed, Mark McGwire has gotten caught in a catch-22 where the writers clamored for him to talk, then turned on him when he did. Both his silence and his admission were seen as incriminating. Innocent until proven guilty encourages players to lie and cover up.

    Even worse, it opens the door to smear, innuendo and statistical malpractice. Nowhere is that seen more clearly than in this year’s debate over the candidacy of Jeff Bagwell. You can read Peter Gammons and Joe Posnanski on why Bagwell should be an absolute lock Hall of Famer. And then, you can read Jeff Pearlman‘s ridiculous smear job. Pearlman asserts that Bagwell should be thrown in with the guilty since (a) he got bigger as he got older (see here on how little this means — check out Puckett specifically); and (b) he had “guilty knowledge” — i.e., he didn’t speak out about it.

    The latter point was the impetus behind Christina Kahrl’s diatribe on media arrogance and I agree with much of what she says. The guilty knowledge argument not only ignores that baseball culture is extremely hard on those who rat on team-mates (see Bouton, Jim), it makes the media the focus of the debate. That may be gratifying to their tiny media egos, but it’s terrible for the debate.

    And ultimately the innocent-until-proven-guilty argument founders on the same rocks as strategy (1): eventually we will find out that a steroid user is in the Hall. And since the door into the Hall only goes one way, he’ll stay there, a constant reminder to the players to keep their mouths shut.

    (As self-indulgent as Pearlman’s article is, Perrotto’s article is equally self-effacing. He admits to not asking the hard questions and acknowledges that this makes him uncomfortable being judge and jury for the players. It’s one of the most refreshing things I’ve read this week.)

    Option 3 – Curve the Era In this option, we simply set a higher bar for players from the Steroid Era, especially when it comes to hitting for power. 500 home runs ceases to be an automatic admission, high slugging percentages weigh less. We only take the best players from the era. In this scenario, known steroid can use can be used as a factor in judging borderline candidates (the HOF voting instructions include a character clause). But it’s not a determining factor.

    In the end, this is the option I favor. For one thing, it acknowledges that the Steroid Era was about more than steroids. The power explosion of the late 90’s was a result of many factors, including smaller ballparks, smaller strike zones, more elastic balls and players standing on the plate to drive outside pitches. In fact, it’s not clear at all that steroids had that big an impact. As Joe Sheehan has pointed out relentlessly, many of those who tested positive for PEDs were not power hitters at all, but fringe players and pitchers. The biggest impact of steroids may have been keeping players on the field (for a while, at least).

    Another advantage is the acknowledgment that we will never know, with absolute certainty, who used and who didn’t and what impact it had on their performance. The best way to deal with that uncertainty is to let it be, not try to slice and dice it based on rumors, gut feelings and rookie baseball card pictures.

    Finally, one of the defining elements of the Steroid Era, as I noted before, was the complicity of the league, the teams, the media and the fans. As homers soared out of ballparks, no one asked the tough questions, no one cried “foul!”, no one wanted to hear the whispers. We created an environment in which PED use was, if technically illegal, still tolerated and even tacitly encouraged. To block players from the Hall because of steroid use — real or imagined — is to put the onus entirely on them.

    Granted, they are the ones who stuck needles in their bodies. But they did it because everyone else looked the other way. They did it because, as Buck O’Neil said, they could.

    The only real disadvantage of option (3) is it throws in the innocent with the guilty. If a clean player hit 400 homers, he sits out of the Hall while a dirty player who hit 500 gets in. Furthermore, it encourages future cheating for just that reason — that a small extra advantage could be the difference between stardom and immortality.

    I’m not entirely comfortable with that. But in the end, there is no perfect solution and the “curve the era” option, for me, has the best combination of trade-offs (especially since I think the impact of PEDs on the game was and is overstated). As with most human endeavors, we simply need to do the best we can. And curving the era seems the best we can hope do with the information we have.

    —-

    As for tomorrow’s ballot … I expect Alomar and Blyleven to get in. I expect Morris and Larkin and possibly Lee Smith to surge ahead, possibly getting elected in 2012. I expect Edgar Martinez and Jeff Bagwell to both poll in the 30’s or 40’s. Everyone else will poll in the 20’s or lower, including Raines, Trammell and McGwire, who deserve better. Walker, Palmeiro, John Franco and Kevin Brown will stay on the ballot, but many of the other first-timers will go quietly.

    But the real story is coming two years from now. For many of the players on the ballot, they need to get elected by 2012 or they won’t get elected at all. Starting in 2013, there will be a slew of massively-qualified guys hitting the ballot. For my money, we will see six definite HOFers in 2013 (Bonds, Clemens, Biggio, Schilling, Sosa and Piazza), five more in 2014 (Glavine, Kent, Maddux, Mussina and Thomas), three more in 2015 (Johnson, Martinez and Smoltz) and at least one already in 2016 (Griffey).

    It’s going to be very interesting to watch what happens with such a crowded ballots, especially as a number of those guys are going to struggle to make it due to steroid allegations (Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, Piazza) or writer ignorance (Biggio, Kent). The BBWAA has not elected more than two players in a year since 1999. The last time they elected four players was 1955. They not elected five since the first election in 1936.

    We may be in for a calamity like we did in the 1940’s and 1950’s, when there simply too many qualified candidates for anyone to command enough votes to get in. The Hall had to respond with run-off elections and I suspect they will end up having to do the same about 2016.

    Expect a long backlog that drag outs until at least 2020, followed by the Veteran’s Committee picking up the stragglers like McGwire, Martinez and Raines, who simply got crowded off of the platform.

    Update: Tom Verducci disappoints me by throwing in with the “I know a steroid user when I see one” crowd. He even quotes Andre Dawson … since no one in Dawson’s era used PEDs … as the players having “chosen their legacy”.

    What sanctimonious claptrap. The players did not choose their legacy — baseball did by not taking the issue seriously until an unpopular player started breaking records. The players were the largest part of that, obviously. But they played in an environment in which the only negative impact of steroid use was long term health risk — something many would trade for success. What Verducci and others are trying to apply is an ex post facto judgement. They looked the other way when steroid use was happening. Now that it blew up in their faces, they suddenly want to start issuing retroactive penalties.

    Verducci even dusts off the criticism of McGwire and Bagwell for claiming that steroids did not make their careers. While I think the players are wrong to claim this, it puts the players into yet another BBWAA Catch-22: we will not forgive you until you admit that your entire career was a fraud. After which confession, of course — as they did with McGwire, as they did with Pete Rose — they will turn their backs again and say, “Well, I definitely can’t vote for him now.”

    In the end, what the BBWAA wants is not consistency, justice or logic. What they want is for the players to grovel to them, to suck up to them, to kiss their feet, to show what they think is requisite amount of contrition. This was the chief reason the narrative on steroids changed when Barry Bonds started using them — because he was famously hostile to certain members of the press (although that too involved revisionist history — they elide the part of the infamous “back off or I’ll snap” incident where they were trampling his kid).

    I see every reason to hold players accountable for what they did. But I see no reason to let everyone else off the hook. And I see no reason why players should have to crawl and grovel to a bunch of people who continually forget that voting for the HOF is a privilege, not a right.

    In the end, they are going to end up with egg on their faces when it turns out that an existing HOFer was a steroid user. And their self-righteousness and preening will be revealed for exactly what it is.

    Update: Jayson Stark comes through, as he usually does. Stark is one of those writers, like Gammons and Verducci, who I’ve watched evolve and change over the last 15 years. The man thinks, which is rare.

    Mac

    The news that Mark McGwire used steroids is not surprising.

    What is also not surprising, but incredibly disappointing, is the titanic and hypocritical self-righteousness which still accompanies the issue. McGwire is a Hall-of-Famer who is being denied because he used steroids. This represents the apex of blaming the player — and only the players — for the rampant use of performance enhancing drugs throughout the game. The completely ignores that:

  • The owners certainly knew who was using and who wasn’t. As the Mitchell Report made clear, teams do not make $100 million investments without knowing what players are putting into their bodies.
  • Either the media knew or their much-ballyhooed “inside access” is a load of crap. The Sports Media Twerps are constantly telling us how their access to players and their inside knowledge makes them so much smarter than the rest of us. How could the SMTs have such insider information and not know what was going on? How could they turn on the reporter who found that McGwire was using Andro? I think that’s why the press is so vicious and judgmental on the steroid issue. They are compensating for their own complicity. Shame on them.
  • The fans knew or suspected what was going on. I mean, we knew Mac was taking Andro. We at least suspected that Canseco was using. But we didn’t care as long as homers flew out of parks. We looked the other way and cheered the juicers, which just encouraged more use. Then, suddenly, we got religion when someone we didn’t like — Barry Bonds — broke the home run record. We’re content, of course, to ignore the obvious drug abuse in football.
  • The players did steroids, in part, because they were allowed to. They did them because the owners, the press and the fans knew what was going on and were happy to ignore it. When we suddenly decided PEDs were bad, we refused to take any responsibility. Instead, we have heaped scorn only on the players. They are, after all, rich and popular, so we have to tear them down, right?

    Screw that. I’m all in favor of a clean game. But I’m not in favor of white-washing the past and blaming the most convenient party. It’s time to admit what we allowed to happen.

    Update: Incidentally, the commish knew about steroids in 1993.

    SciAm on Steroids

    Scientific American continues to go down the tubes. Today, they ran an insipid interview on the Alex Rodriguez steroid issue that contain little fact, no analysis and a whole steaming load of bullshit. But it comes from a steroid user!

    During Rodriguez’s confessed era of doping, his homerun average jumped to a super-slugging 52 per season, compared with 36 during his first four seasons in the league and about 42 since. His runs-batted-in (RBI) statistics and total games played also peaked. Even so, his batting average has dipped over his career, from .315 to .305 during his steroid days to .303 over the past five seasons.

    Those were also his age 25, 26 and 27 seasons — typically the peak of any player’s performance. Those were also the years he was in one of the best hitter’s park in baseball.

    His slugging percentage in those years was .615. Since then, his performance has dropped a bit but he did hit 54 homers with a career-high .645 SLG in 2005. There is little statistical evidence that 2001-2003 was anomalous.

    The key benefit with anabolic steroids is that they can help you be consistent over an entire baseball season. That’s the reason you’re seeing those higher statistics for Rodriguez from 2001 to 2003. If you take a look at good power hitters in April and May (early in the baseball season that runs from April to September, excluding the playoffs), their numbers are going to be pretty good. But these guys aren’t able to maintain that in August and September. Take the New York Mets: If that team was on anabolic steroids the way they were in 2000, they probably would have made the playoffs the past two years instead of running out of gas late in the season. It makes a big difference when having that little extra.

    None of this is true. A-Rod’s stats in 2001-3 were marginally, but not dramatically higher. Power hitters sometimes catch fire late in the season. There’s a selection effect for us to notice guys who start hot and cool off rather than guys who start cold and get hot in the end of the season. Carl Yastrzemski, in 1967, had one of the greatest Septembers of all time. Guess he must have been taking steroids because we all know power hitters fade in September. There is no objective evidence that power hitters, as a group, fade over the season.

    And how do we know that last year’s Mets weren’t on steroids? Is he implying that the Phillies were? Would the Phillies of 1964 have won the pennant with steroids? Were the Giants of 1951 juicing? Teams collapse. Teams surge. It happens. It has always happened. It always will happen — steroids or no steroids.

    So the big question people may be asking is if Alex is taking something else. His homerun numbers have declined, but they’re still pretty damn good.

    So he must still be juicing. ‘Cuz without the juice, this #1 draft pick who tore up the minors and slugged from the very first day he stepped on a diamond would be hitting .220 with 3 HR.

    For example, maybe his [lucrative] contract could allow him to buy a designer steroid that’s undetectable

    As opposed to his former contract, which had him on a starvation wage.

    Scientific American should be ashamed of themselves. This is nothing but someone talking out of their ass. I know he’s a physiologist who took steroids. He’s still talking out of his ass, making wild speculations mixed with post hoc propter hoc logic about who’s using and who isn’t.

    What a disgrace.

    PS – For a real analysis of whether the stats show A-Rod juiced, try this. At least he’s aware of the limits of the data.

    Mad Dog

    One of the greatest pitchers in baseball history is retiring. Joe Posnanski breaks down one of his greatest games. I can’t believe it’s been eleven years.

    Watching Maddux pitch in his prime was something else. He would get batters so mixed up and frustrated they’d be yelling at him from the dugout. At least once a game he’d throw a pitch that had the better saying, “What the hell was that?” It was a privilege to be a Braves’ fan back then. Three out of five nights, you were seeing a future Hall of Famer work his craft. And at least one night a week, you saw the baseball equivalent of Picasso.

    Let’s also not forget: Maddux could be really funny.

    More on Maddux from Neyer and Verducci (also 1995 Verducci). I really hope Mad Dog has a career as a broadcast or analyst. I don’t want to have seen the last of him.

    Why Fans Don’t Vote

    Here’s why, as bad as the sportswriters are, the fans should never control the doors to the HOF. Less than 75% think Ricky Henderson is a HOF player. 10-time all-star, MVP, most runs in history, most steals in history, 2nd most walks in history, 297 HR, 3055 hits. Only 74% think that describes a Hall of Fame player.

    I’ll put off my diatribes about Tim Raines and Bert Blyleven until the writers show that they’re only slightly less dumb.

    Continue reading Why Fans Don’t Vote

    No HOF For Me

    I was a little annoyed when I heard a writer had refused to vote in baseball’s hall of fame balloting. But reading his statement he makes a great point:

    Anybody who has a HOF vote now was writing then. Also I recall that when I wrote about McGwire and andro, wondering why we celebrated him while crucifying Ben Johnson, the fan/public response I received was almost one hundred per cent negative. Leave McGwire alone, they said. Totally different thing. Don’t wreck a great story.

    So the same writers who were celebrating Big Mac back then, and pissing on the reporter who wrote the andro story, suddenly got religion last year. I got sick reading all of those ‘what will I tell my children if I vote for him’ columns.

    To my mind, baseball created the working conditions under which players felt comfortable using steroids, amphetamines, and god knows what else. There were ‘rules’ and there was a law — but with no testing and no enforcement, that was like posting speed limits with no radar.

    After the fact, I am not willing to stand in moral judgment, deciding who gets in to Cooperstown and who doesn’t. I didn’t sign up for that. And I think it’s wildly hypocritical for anyone else to do it, given how willfully blind they were, but that’s up to them. (The whole idea of sports writers standing in moral judgment of anyone is a bit hard to take.)

    So I opted out. Wrote a little note on my ballot saying I declined to participate, and sent it in. Don’t know if they’ll send me another one next year, but I can’t see getting back into the voting unless baseball somehow rules that alleged drug use should not be taken into account.

    The great irony is that had McGwire lied to that congressional kangaroo court rather than awkwardly taking the Fifth, he’d be in Cooperstown now. There’s a great moral lesson for the kids.

    Degrees of Scum

    Will Carroll, whose analysis of the baseball steroid issue is second to none, makes a great point.

    One final note: While I agree with Sen. Mitchell’s call for a blanket amnesty for all users, named and not named, prior to the testing agreement in 2004, I have a problem with several of the players in the report acting as salesmen and distributors for Radomski. Drug use is wrong, but drug trafficking is a far larger issue and one that I feel calls for not only suspensions, but the consideration of larger penalties.

    To me, this should be where our thinking is. The thinking of our self-important self-righteous SMTs when it comes to future HOF voting seems to fall into three camps:

    1) Ban any players who might have done steroids, possibly even refusing to vote for anyone from the steroid era. This is ridiculously puritanical. The HOF is filled with segregationists, spit-ballers, sign stealers, mugs, thugs and pugs. We have never held baseball players to a terribly ethical standard. So why start now?

    Well, the reason to start now is because a lot of the SMTs are feeling guilty because the knew what was going on and said nothing. And the reason to start now is because the SMTs feel stupid because they lavished praise on Bonds and Clemens and McGwire only to look dumb later on. And so, in their anger and arrogance, they throw the blame squarely on the players. Jason Stark is the only writer I’ve heard even start to take some of the blame for the steroid era.

    It reminds me of the Pete Rose business. The press spent decades telling us how wonderful he was. And then when it turned out he was a corrupt asshole, they turned on him like a pack of wolves.

    Never forget the first rule of the SMT: we were always right.

    Moreover, as Carroll points out, banning players from the HOF is ex post facto punishment. Steroids were illegal before testing, but they were not banned by the league (similar to the way sunday games used to be illegal but not banned). The most fascinating part of the Mitchell report is the internal e-mails of the Red Sox, who clearly knew who was using. Everyone in baseball management knew this was going on but no one did anything until the outcry. And to turn around and punish only the players because they took advantage of the league’s tacit tolerance of the juice is unfair.

    Finally, there is not enough evidence that steroids really make a ballplayer better to exclude everyone. I have no problem with a slightly tougher standard, but this extremism is silly.

    2) Only exclude players on whom we have good evidence. This is fairer but puts in a “don’t get caught” morality into the league. And again, show me the proof that steroids make ballplayers better.

    The only scientific study to date — that of Baseball Prospectus — showed little effect. Yes, two of the best players of all time did them. So did many guys who flopped right out of the league. And the latter outnumber the former.

    3) Only exclude guys we don’t like. I suspect this is the way it will go down. Because that’s the way it’s going now. Guys who suck up to the media and appear contrite (Betancourt, Giambi) are forgiven; those who obfuscate (Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Palmiero) are pilloried. In that sense, Andy Pettite is the smartest guy in the room. He immediately confessed. By opening day, he’ll be getting cheered again.

    I don’t think we should play these games. We can apply a tougher standard on HOF considerations, we can drop guys from the era a little bit in compilations of “best ever”. But we don’t get up on a high horse (option 1), we don’t play witch hunt (option 2) and we certainly don’t play favorites (option 3).

    But Carroll makes another good point. The only players I would seriously punish are those who were spreading the gospel. It is clear that several players were spreading steroids like a virus, aiding and encouraging their use.

    The worst was that scumbag Canseco, who is currently being lauded by the media because, of the hundreds of names he threw out, one or two stuck. Has anyone read Canseco’s book? Because my understanding is that he talks about how great steroids are.

    Oh, he’s a whistleblower. Bullshit. He’s a media whore. Ken Caminiti was the first player to go public on steroids. Canseco took advantage of the scandal to cash in on his own scumbaggery. That ain’t a hero.

    Chemical McCarthyism Watch

    From the usually brilliant Fire Joe Morgan, I find this turd:

    I often have to remind myself that good Christian soldier Paul Byrd took HGH and guys like Matt Lawton and Alex Sanchez took steroids. Basically, literally everyone in the game is a possible user, no matter what their body shape, position, or ostensible character. No one likes this. But the people who have been found guilty so far represent such a random assortment of guys, it’s hard to exonerate anyone before we’ve seen the proof.

    So, every baseball player is guilty until proven innocent? Since they can never prove that they’ve never used steroids — or any drugs that evade testing, that means everyone is a perpetual suspect. Whatever player we decide is suspicious or don’t like can be branded a steroid user. No burden of proof is required and no testing can exonerate him. Just ruin a man’s reputation.

    My favorite in this realm is Sammy Sosa. Sosa was always a power hitter and still is. In 1998, he stopped swinging at everything and became a great player. But now everyone “knows” he used steroids even though there is precisely zero evidence of this. None. Nichts. Nada. Niente. Nothing except a bunch of igornant asshole fucks sitting around saying, “Hey! I think that Sosa used steroids. I mean, he never hit no 60 homeruns before!”

    Yes, my friends, that’s why it’s called a *peak*. He’d hit 40 in 120 games before. He’d shown 50-, 60-homer potential. But that’s not relevant. Because we need to slime somebody.

    More BS Research

    In a study that brings back memories of the one that “proved” that a four-minute mile was impossible, a professor is claiming that steroids can increase homerun production 50-100%.

    The such a study could be taken seriously beggers belief. Among other things, if such a benefit from steroids were real, home run rate would have exploded across the league and this is clearly not the case. The people who have tested positive for steroid use, including many pitchers, have not had anywhere near the power explosion this guy is guessing at.

    (Although it clearly would depend on the type of hitter. You could add 4% to the speed of the balls I hit and they might just reach the outfield. Adding 4% to Barry Bonds is a different story, clearly.)