Welcome to the new steroids era, By: Larry Stone
April 17, 2006, Seattle Times
Some things never change.
A new season is upon us, batters are ripping the ball at unprecedented rates, and we are left to grapple for explanations. Just like in, well, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 ...
First, the slap-happy totals, courtesy of the fine folks at Elias Sports Bureau:
• In the first week of the season, home runs were up 10.1 percent from last year and scoring increased 5.3 percent.
• Through Thursday, 137 games had been played, and teams had a .273 batting average in those games. The major-league average for a full season hasn't been as high as .273 since 1939.
• In those 137 games, teams averaged a combined 10.8 runs and 2.62 home runs, with a home run every 26.3 at-bats. The home-run rate, if maintained, would be the highest in major-league history.
What in the name of Henry Aaron is going on here? The advent of drug testing with penalties last season — significantly toughened this year — was supposed to eradicate this sort of wild and wooly offense. But all one has to do is take a daily gander at the box scores to realize that runs are again running amok.
According to Elias, the last time the major leagues averaged 10.8 runs per game was 1930, when the major-league batting average was .296, highest in history.
While a number of theories have been advanced for the torrid start at the plate — many of the same ones that were dragged out over the past decade, including the all-time favorite, a juiced ball — it would be the height of naiveté to surmise, as one observer did this past week, that baseball has "solved" its steroids problem.
The fact that the observer was Bud Selig His Own Self, quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch while attending a Cardinals game at the new Busch Stadium, makes one cringe. That is the height of, if not naiveté, then wishful thinking, especially in light of the fact that so many performance enhancers remain beyond the scope of baseball's drug-testing plan.
All one has to do is read the current best-seller "Game of Shadows," which alleges that Barry Bonds used, among other things, insulin, Clomid and human growth hormone. As Dr. Gary Wadler of the World Anti-Doping Agency board pointed out to the San Francisco Chronicle, the first two drugs — substances used in conjunction with steroids — aren't on baseball's banned list, and HGH can only be detected by blood samples, which baseball doesn't require.
Dr. Charles Yesalis, a Penn State professor who is a leading expert on steroids and a leading critic of baseball's drug policy, railed against those in the media who are calling this the "post-steroids era."
"That is naiveté that borders on moronic," he said in a phone interview. "We're really still at the front part of the drug era in baseball. It's evolving. When you see silliness about juicing the ball, and every other excuse, my mouth is agape."
Yesalis believes that last year's modest drop in production — 13.5 home runs per 500 at-bats, down from 14.5 home runs per 500 at-bats in 2004, according to researcher David Vincent — is tied to the fact that players didn't know how to beat the system. Now they do.
"What we saw last year and the year before is a learning curve," he said. "Guys had to learn how to get around drug tests."
Of course, it's no guarantee that home-run rates will continue at the same feverish pace. Some of the theories for the early bashing numbers may well have validity, such as the unseasonably warm weather in the Midwest and East aiding the hitters; others, such as the suddenly trendy speculation about the liveliness of the baseball, reek of the same head-in-the-sand thinking that helped gloss over the impact of steroids throughout the 1990s.
That's not saying that every rampaging hitter is a monument to better slugging through chemicals. Such an implication is unfair to the players doing it cleanly. One factor that could be at work, some believe, is that pitchers are off the juice and thus not throwing as hard as they used to.
Then again, that's one of the saddest legacies of this steroids era: constant suspicion of the validity of any achievement. It isn't just the steroids era in baseball. It's the new age of cynicism and skepticism.
Baseball has done some good things in response to its steroids crisis, and I truly believe that use is on the decline. Just look at the smaller bodies around baseball. But if anyone thinks the problem is solved, that really is naiveté that borders on moronic.
