Consider the fact that over 100 players tested positive for steroids in a year when they knew they would be tested. How many more would have tested positive in 1999 or 2000? Having 1/4 of the league on steroids indicates a systemic problem, not 150 bad individuals.

As you have touched on previously, it isn’t that coaches or managers were literally telling players to use steroids, but they were telling players who had obviously reached the natural ceilings of their abilities that they had to get stronger or faster in order to stay employed (wink, wink).

I’m a lawyer, and it would be similar to the big-wigs at my firm telling me that I have to bill more hours on x deal or I will lose my job (wink, wink). I’m pretty sure I would do the right thing if that happened, but I consider myself lucky to have never been faced with that choice. Ask yourself, how much harder would the decision be if I knew all of the successful lawyers in my firm were overbilling without consequence? Also consider that even if that happened to the common person, most of us could switch jobs, or even careers, without taking a giant pay cut. For baseball players, the choice is between making tens (or even hundreds) of millions to play a game or getting a 50-150K job somewhere.

I would like to think a majority of people have a strong enough moral compass to avoid making poor ethical decisions, even in the face of such pressure. Having said that, if a person does choose to make the wrong choice in order to save his or her job, I think the blame falls at least as much (if not more) on the management applying the pressure as it does on the individual. That is what makes me so mad at Bud Selig and MLB in general. It couldn’t be more hypocritical for him to chastise a player for taking steroids in an effort to make more money, when his organization made billions by creating an environment that encouraged the player to do it in the first place.

Bud Selig and MLB should be held responsible for their role in this mess. It wouldn’t even be that painful for him. All he would have to do is acknowledge that it happened on his watch and apologize for his failure to do more to stop it from happening. Inexcusable.

But what we DON’T see is that baseball players are anything but normal in terms of their reflexes. Most of us couldn’t hit a fair ball against a journeyman major league pitcher throwing 80, let alone 90. These guys eat 80 for lunch and hold their own against 90. They are, in those terms, the equivalent of a 6-6, 240 pound linebacker coming at you. We can see that the linebacker is a freak of nature, but Pedroia looks like the kid next door.

He ain’t, but because that’s not easy to see, baseball PED users get grief that football users don’t.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Nobody has ever tried anything close to a controlled study of these substances, for obvious reasons. So to stand up and say “there is no evidence that PEDs work, therefore PEDs don’t work” at this stage is NOT the rigorous, scientific-minded claim that people seem to want to claim it is. It’s more head-in-the-sand than level-headed.

Heck, look at pictures of bodybuilders from the 50s and from today, or compare bodybuilders in “clean” comps vs “anything goes” comps and it is pretty difficult to hold a rational opinion that steroids/HGH/whatever-they-put-in-their-bodies do not help build muscle mass. So the “absence of evidence” crowd then has to try to make the claim that building muscle mass will NOT help transform one of the best hitters that ever lived into an even better hitter. Is it possible that muscle mass makes no difference to a hitter, given the available data? Sure. Is it likely? I don’t think so, and I think that’s a rational stance, even if it’s not yet firmly rooted in evidence.

I certainly wouldn’t call someone who believes steroids or HGH might give a player a competitive advantage a “moron”.

My uneducated guess is that sometime within the next five or ten years somebody who’s now got brain damage will win a judgment against the NFL on the grounds that they knew there was a risk of, say, smashing up their knees or breaking their collarbones five times, but not that they’d end up quivering like gelatin sitting in a wheelchair.

I’d suggest some rule changes: No leading with your head ever, no blows to the opponent’s head ever, no blocking below the waist ever, pad helmets on the outside as well, eliminate kickoffs and give them the ball at the 20, and permit the ref to penalize legal but unnecessarily dangerous hits as a judgement call. (That means Hines Ward.)

Also, of course, they need to test for roids and do so very strictly, since one reason these guys are all getting hurt is they should weigh 240 based on their frames, but they’re pumped up to 310.

This conversation means more to the history of baseball than all of the A-Rod press conferences and Bud Selig…whatever the hell he does.

Nice job everyone. This is one of the most thoughtful blog conversations I’ve read – ever. Maybe I should tune in more often, and forget the local newspaper stuff.

As for Tony Posnanski’s opinion of Barry Bonds, he’s wrong. Bonds would definitely have hit 500 homers without steroids and probably hit 600, but no would he have reached 700. In 1999, at the age of 35, he had had four straight seasons with declining home run totals. If he averaged 34 homers per season for the next five years (matching what he hit in 1999) he would have hit 84 fewer home runs, or well under 700, and almost certainly would not have lasted long enough to hit the 54 he got his last two seasons. Instead he twice set new career highs in single season homers, and his other three seasons (at ages 37-39) tied or were within one of his previous career high in home runs, despite having moved into a ballpark that for everybody else in baseball acted like a pitcher’s park.

Bonds deserves to go into the HOF; his pre-steroid records convince me. Until all the ARod news comes out, I suspect he too deserves his day in the HOF. But the downside of steroids will be if a guy who juices from the start hits like Bonds without establishing a HOF career level first.

As I’ve said before, I think steroids should be handled like prostitutes in Nevada. At the brothels they are legal, they get medical tests, and they are stopped from practicing their trade if they have a contagious disease. I think steroid use should be the same way. After all, every drug store in America has weak steroids on their over the counter shelves and stronger ones behind the pharmacist’s counter for prescription use only. Let the players juice, let them be monitored with monthly blood tests for organ damage and if they start acting strangely on the field, no more steroids. Since pitchers and batters both will use, no competitive advantage accrues (overall). Steroids are just as legal (with a doctor’s supervision) as is the Tommy John surgery. How many games have been won thanks to that doctor’s intervention? Hundreds if not thousands by now. So why is Tommy John performance enhancing medical intervention legal but corticosteroid performance enhancing medical intervention illegal? I see no good reason. So lets make it legal, same as the super skintight swim suits and track suits, and lets monitor the usage to make sure that nobody who chooses to use gets sick from it: first, do no harm. And then lets vote in Bonds and Sosa and Clemens and Palmeiro and ARod like they deserve. And give Bonds a shot at a DH job. If he can still hit at his age while passing drug tests, then it’s a travesty to baseball that he’s not being given that chance. His last season had an OPS over 1.000 and an OPS+ of 170. How many teams in baseball have a DH that good?

Those two guys were doing a lot worse chemicals than steroids, and it’s not been proven that steroids caused either death. The fact of the matter is that very heavy steroid use may actually make you an action-movie star, get you married into an American political dynasty, leading to millions of dollars of personal wealth and governorship of the largest state in the union.

As far as the football/baseball comparison, nobody cares about football players, even though they love the game. For instance, if Stan Musial had walked around St. Louis the last few decades crippled, drooling, and broke, the folks in that city would be in an uproar. Conrad Dobler, Earl Campbell, Mike Webster? Not so much.

A. Maybe of the substances used were illegally obtained/used according to US Law, regardless of how the baseball rulebooks happened to treat said substances.

B. These athletes obviously thought they were getting a performance enhancement, or else they wouldn’t have used said substances. They also thought that what they were doing was, if not downright illegal, shady enough that they went to fairly great lengths to hide these occurrences.

I understand that sometimes the acrimony and grandstanding from the MSM and some particular former players (I’m looking at you, Dale Murphy) gets ridiculous, especially given the double-standard when it comes to the use of amphetamines. But to say that steroids, HGH and the like don’t matter, that their use simply be glosses over, that we should rubber stamp it just because it may not have actually enhanced the players who used them…well, that’s as dumb a statement as any made by the stone-agers like Murray Chass and his ham-handed compatriots.

I’d love to see someone tell the SEC that it was perfectly fine that they traded using insider information because they still ended up losing money.

If you point a loaded gun in someone’s face, pull the trigger and the gun just happens to jam, that doesn’t mean your hands are clean. It changes the circumstances of the crime, certainly, but it doesn’t absolve you of wrongdoing. The players who uses PEDs are, were and always will be cheaters. How one adapts that to his worldview is entirely a personal decision. For example, I would still vote for Clemens, Bonds, A-Rod and etc. to be 1st ballot HoFers, and though I look at 73 with a bit of acquired cynicism, I still consider it a “legit” record, as long as you consider the context.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t cheat, it just means I’m not quite as hard-line as many of the folks in the MSM.