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Steroid Testing /
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Steroids testing hasn’t affected HR totals
Steroids testing hasn’t affected HR totals, By: Michael Salfino
June 17, 2007
Last week while proposing amnesty for players who used steroids, Fox Sports columnist Mark Kriegel said “there is no mathematical formula to factor out the influence of (steroids)” on home run totals between 1995 and 2003.
“When meaningful testing began in 2003, [home runs] returned to normal levels,” he writes.
This is a common misconception among many baseball fans, one fostered by a media either lazy with research or in need of remedial math.
Between 1995 and 2003, the era where, according to Kriegel and many others, home run totals were inflated by alleged steroid use, each team hit, on average, 173 homers. (Expansion occurred in 1998, so we’re not using league-wide homer totals for each season.)
Unfortunately for Kriegel’s argument, home run totals per team post-steroid testing are actually up, not down: 176 homers per team on average from 2004-to-2006. Perhaps Kriegel’s argument could be helped if we focused on only the last three years pre-testing and the three years already in the books post-testing. Nope. Now, we don’t need to use perteam totals because the number of teams is steady each year. There were 5,250 homers hit on average between 2001 and 2003; 5,290 homers on average between 2004 and 2006.
Maybe Kriegel and those who think like him don’t necessarily mean that annual totals were impacted by steroids, just the totals of the top home-run hitters. The argument here is that between 2000 and 2002, seven batters slugged 50 or more homers. Between 2003 and 2005, just one did. But two batters, Ryan Howard and David Ortiz, hit over 50 homers last year and another, Albert Pujols, just missed with 49.
We again share the great insight by Art De Vany, professor emeritus of economics at the University of California (Irvine), that hitting home runs is an act of genius. So, De Vany concludes, we must expect wide variance in the best years of athletes just like we accept wide variance in the best films of directors, albums of musicians or books by authors relative not just to the work of others but even to their own body of work.
This year, teams are hitting homers at about a 4,700-pace. That seems much lower than the low end in recent years, about 5,000 (in 2002 and 2005). But this homer pace could correct itself in this still-young season. Even if it doesn’t, swings of 10 percent are common in every era of baseball. In the modern context, that means a range of anywhere between 4,800 and 5,800 homers should be considered normal.
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