Making steroids a scapegoat is baseless, By: Ben Azar

While it’s easy to blame beefed-up stats on drugs, baseball fans need to look beyond hype for answers

May 16, 2006, DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF
 
With Barry Bonds' pursuit of 714 career home runs still going on, the talks about how steroids have tainted his accomplishments and the game itself in recent years have only accelerated.

If you listen to talk radio, read sports columns or even just chat about it with friends on campus, the predominant opinion is clear: Steroids have substantially changed the game of baseball.

I've heard so many different things from people I respect about how steroids have impacted the game. People claim steroids have been responsible for Juan Gonzalez's early breakdown, Barry Bonds' and Roger Clemens' longevity and Jason Giambi's breakdown and comeback.

More important to the game as a whole, steroids are commonly cited as the main reason why the home run rate has spiked in recent years.

I can understand why the media has made this assertion popular – it will jump at any chance it gets to throw down or hype up issues in sports it knows will draw a big response.

It's just hard for me to believe that people are actually falling for the hype.

I'm not denying that players have probably been using steroids on a widespread scale, nor am I denying that home runs have gone up over the past decade.

But there are so many other reasons why home runs should have gone up that I am having a really hard time believing steroids are the main culprit.

For one thing, there are a lot more pitchers around. It wasn't too long ago that teams used four-man rotations with starters who were expected to go the distance every time out. That made it less necessary to carry a lot of pitchers on the roster and instead, teams would carry more hitters.

Now, with a five-man rotation firmly in place and pitch counts being monitored closer than ever, teams give more roster spots to pitchers. When you consider the fact that baseball has added four teams since 1993, the number of pitchers in the major leagues today is staggering in comparison to past eras.

The increase in the quantity of pitchers in theory would decrease the overall quality of pitching. Pitchers who weren't good enough to make major league rosters in the 1970s or 1980s can do so now. So when the same high-quality hitters are going up against increasingly worse pitching, you would expect the home run rate to increase.

Then there are the ballparks. It seems like new hitter-friendly parks are being built every year while older parks are moving their fences in. Parks in Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Philadelphia and Cincinnati just weren't around back in the days of Tiger Stadium or Ebbets Field. Park factors have already been shown to have a pretty strong statistical significance on home

runs.

There's also the speculation that, in an attempt to draw more fans and make the game more exciting after the 1994 baseball strike, Major League Baseball juiced up the balls. I don't know how much credence there is to this theory, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if some bat or ball alterations were made to help the home run rate go up in order to bring more excitement (and revenue) to the game. It's just something else that makes you think.

I'm not totally sure how much of an impact any of the points I've just mentioned are making in the increase of home runs in baseball. But the fact they exist is enough to question the validity of claims being made about steroids.

While there is no data on who was using steroids when, there is plenty of data on the other changes in the modern era of baseball. So before we start to buy in to the hype that steroids are responsible for everything that's been going on in the game, let's look at the evidence and find out what is really behind the new trends.