SWC75
Bored Historian
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 32,525
- Like
- 62,724
A RETURN TO NORMALCY?
The “post-steroids” era didn’t mean that balls stopped going over the fence. In 2005, Andruw Jones hit 51 homers. In 2006 Ryan Howard hit 58 and David Ortiz hit 54. In 2007, Alex Rodriguez hit 54 and Prince Fielder 50.
But there was a decline in home runs over the course of the decade:
In 2000, 5,693 home runs were hit by major league teams.
2001 5,458
2002 5,049
2003 5,207
2004 5,451
2005 5,017
2006 5,386
2007 4,957
2008 4,878
2009 5,042
That’s 26,858 home runs hit in the first half of the decade and 25,280 in the second half, a reduction of 5.9%. So the introduction of testing for banned substances may have had some impact on game. But 25,280 home runs for 30 teams over five seasons is 169 home runs per team. Let’s look at 1985-89 for a comparison: 18,136 home runs were hit in those years by 26 teams. That’s 140 home runs per team. So if the 70’s and 80’s were the “neutral period”, when the statistic of the game were properly balanced because the game was fully integrated, played largely in parks with regular dimensions but before steroids and the juiced ball, then baseball in the late 200o’s was not yet back to normal. If steroid use was under control, then something else was still driving the ball over the fence at an inflated rate.
THE POLITICS OF GLORY
That title was the original name of one of Bill James’ best books,(they alter changed it to “Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame” : I guess it wasn’t selling), in which he described the history of the Hall of Fame and the thinking, or the lack of it that has gone into the selections. Bill described at length the various arguments made for various players and then cited the standards he would use, (primarily: who is the most deserving guy not yet in the Hall of Fame, regardless of whether he’s the guy you most want in it.) The book came out in 1994, (which is ironic because that’s when the big numbers began), and doesn’t mention steroids or human growth hormone or any other body or performance enhancing drugs.
Six years later, in his New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill discusses the explosion of offense in the 1990’s. He rejects the notion that the ball was juiced because they are “tested regularly” and the idea that there was a lack of pitching because there’s always a lack of pitching. He prefers to stress “the acceptance of strength training, the abbreviating of pitcher’s motions, the use on aluminum bats in the amateur ranks, the policy of fining and suspending players automatically when there is a fight and the evolution of bat design”. His big emphasis is that batters are allowed to crowd the plate so they can drive an outside pitch. The aluminum bats convince –pitchers not to throw inside. He mentions the amour batters wear: “For all intents and purposes, the league policy is that the hitter can now stand on top of home plate.” The problem, of course, with these explanations is that they don’t explain the sudden sea change of 1994: all of them are long-term trends. Only the juiced ball theory does. But even in 2000, Bill never once mentions PEDs.
Since the Congressional hearings, the Mitchell report, the Balco Investigation and Jose Canseco’s writing career all of baseball has been trying to figure out what to with the players who were proven to, admitted to, alleged to or might have used steroids. Some people lump them all together. Several writers have announced that they would not vote for anyone of the generation of players that played from the late 1980’s to the mid 2000’s because that was the “steroid generation. This despite the fact that the Mitchell Report said that about 5-7% of major leaguers used steroids.
When Mike Piazza became eligible he was turned down the first three years because of suspicions that he had used steroids. One writer said that he had high standards for character and Mike didn’t meet that standard. He didn’t specify what he was talking about. I’ve heard two rumors about Mike: that may have been on his mind, (what there was of it). Supposedly somebody saw some pimples on his back and pimples on the back are said to be symptoms of steroids. Have you ever had pimples on your back? I have. I’ve never taken steroids. The other was something in a book by Roger Clemens that Mike supposedly admitted to some writer off the record that he was using. The writer’s name is also off the record. The idea that Mike Piazza should be denied an honor he should obviously receive because of rumors is offensive: even a murderer is innocent until proven guilty. The voters must have decided the same thing and Mike was elected to the Hall in his fourth year.
That brings up the first problem: What level of proof are you going to use to decide to exclude a candidate who’s on the field performance would otherwise qualify him for the Hall of Fame? Surely it’s got to be more than rumors and innuendo. It’s hard to prove that someone used PEDs beyond a positive test. They tried to get Barry Bonds for perjury and obstruction of justice, (for “evasive answers”), when he denied in the Balco case but they couldn’t make it stick. An initial conviction was over-turned on appeal.
Then there’s the result of baseball’s sloth in dealing with the problem. There was no policy on steroids until 1991 when Commissioner Fay Vincent sent a memo to all teams declaring their use illegal. No testing was done until 2002 and no suspensions were issued until 2005. When Jose Canseco started using them and pedaling them to others, including Mark McGwire, they weren’t even against the rules. And we don’t have any kind of complete records as to who took what and when so we can’t gage the specific impact of taking PEDs. We presume there is one but we can’t measure it. And there are many other factors that produce an increase in offensive number, including those cited by James and my me in this series of articles. How much of it was PEDs?
Does that matter? Many have suggested that players who took PEDs were cheating and that should be enough to keep them out of the Hall of Fame. They compare it to the Black Sox. Others compare it to Gaylord Perry using illegal spitballs. People found that “colorful”. White Ford, after his retirement, admitted to having a rasp imbedded in a ring with which he would doctor balls. Both are in the Hall of fame. Players of the previous generation have admitted they took “greenies” before games- amphetamines- to get energized. That hasn’t prevented them from going into the Hall of Fame. Wikipedia: The book The Baseball Hall of Shame's Warped Record Book, written by Bruce Nash, Bob Smith, Allan Zullo, and Lola Tipton, includes an account of Babe Ruth administering to himself an injection of an extract from sheep testicles. The experimental concoction allegedly proved ineffective, making Ruth ill and leading the Yankees to attribute his absence from the lineup to "a bellyache".
People have argued for years about Pete Rose, an obvious first ballot Hall of Famer on the field who has been excluded from even the vote on the Hall of Fame because he’s been banned from baseball for his association with gamblers and betting on games. He, too has been compared to Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Black Sox. There’s a dispute about whether he ever bet on his own team’s games. I’ve never heard an allegation that he ever created a conflict of interest by betting against his own team, agreeing to throw a game to pay off a debt or accepted money to throw a game, as Jackson did. That, to me, has always bene the tipping point. If your transgression does nothing to limit your desire to help your team win the game, it’s not on the level of Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox. I’ve always though the appropriate thing for Pete’s situation was what the NFL did with Alex Karras and Paul Hornung in 1963, when they’d done the same thing Pete did or was alleged to have done. They were suspended for a year with the caveat that they had to disassociate themselves from the gamblers and stay clean for that year. Both did that and were allowed to resume their careers. Hornung is in the Hall of Fame. Karras, surprisingly, is not but he was All-Pro in 1965, his second year back.
Say what you want about them, but PED users are not trying to make their teams lose. They are trying to help them win, which is what they are supposed to do. Baseball has had no historical objection to players getting bigger and stronger, winning games or breaking records. The reason why drugs are banned is not to protect the pennant race or the record book. It’s to protect the players from the medical side-effects of using the drugs –and the inevitable over-use when you get these drugs on the black market and have them administered by non-professionals. It is unfair if one player is using banned drugs and a competing player is not but the real issue is the health of the players.
And the Mitchell report makes it clear that you can’t get talent out of a needle- or a pill or a cream.
List of Major League Baseball players named in the Mitchell Report - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There are so many guys on that list that will never be considered for the Hall of Fame, even based just on their unremarkable baseball achievements, that it seems obvious that chemicals cannot make you into a star player when you never had it in you to begin with. The drugs probably do more to extend careers than enhance them. That’s really their purpose: to help, in small amounts, for them to get over injuries. It seems to me that that’s a good thing: why not permit our athletes to use what is available, in prescribed amounts to accelerate their return to action. It’s their excessive, uncontrolled use that is the problem. And that’s what can happen when you ban them altogether. Maybe if players where allowed to use steroids and HGH in amounts controlled by the league and supplied by licensed doctors, the black market would dry up. (It would also help if the owners would admit they juiced the ball in 1994 to keep the game popular during the strike so that players wouldn’t think that the big numbers came out of a needle.)
It’s been suggested that Hall of Fame voters should first try to determine how good a player was before they started taking PEDs and if that was at a Hall of Fame Level, vote them in anyway: they were Hall of Fame players who tried to become even more than that by taking PEDs. Let’s just acknowledge that they were already Hall of famers anyway. This Bonds and Clemens get in but Palmiero can forget it. The obvious problems with this are that we don’t know for sure when a player started taking PEDs, what he took, the amounts or what the impact really was. Alex Rodriguez says he started taking PEDs when he went to Texas as free agent because he felt pressure to perform. But his road, (field neutral), numbers suggest that he was the same player in Seattle that he was in Texas: was he taking stuff all along, even before he became a prospect? Who knows?
And do we really know who is clean and who isn’t? What if you refuse to vote for a guy because you heard he had pimples on his back but instead voted for another guy because there were no rumors about him and then, a few years after he’s been inducted, that guy writes his autobiography and brags about how he fooled baseball all those years and was taking the whole time? In 1983 Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays from baseball after they’d gotten jobs doing public relations for casinos. They were already in the Hall of Fame and remained in it during the ban, which was later lifted by Peter Ubberoth, Kuhn’s successor. It was a ban from employment in baseball, not from being honored by baseball. It set a precedent that you could be in the Hall of Fame even if you’d done something serious enough, (at least in the Commissioner’s mind), to be banned from employment.
It’s been suggested that you can put the PED users in the Hall if you want but they should be put in a separate room for PED Hall of Famers, which would produce more scorn than honor and might be the subject of law-suits. Beyond that the “character” issues are Pandora’s box: what do they include? Do we look at everything a player was as a man, everything they said and what they did? Do we limit it to obeying baseball’s rules? Cap Anson initiated the ban on black players. Ty Cobb beat up a guy with no hands in the stands. Tris Speaker was supposedly a member of the KKK at one time. Frankie Frisch, as a member of the Veteran’s Committee, tried to get all his old teammates in the Hall. Several of the members of the Hall were noted drunks, womanizers, racist or just arrogant jerks. Do those things matter? How do we measure them?
Of course, current players are subjects to suspensions and eventual banishment when they test positive so their numbers will be held down by such punishments and that plus the damage to their reputation could keep them out of the Hall unless they are still able to overcome that and put up Hall of Fame numbers anyway. And that brings up a big point: Baseball has not done anything in the record book to delete, separate or designate, (with an asterisk?), the numbers of PEDs users. Until they do so, shouldn’t Hall of Fame decisions be based on what is in the record books?
My solution would be this: Have everyone who meet the minimum requirements, (they played 5 years and have bene retired for 5 years), be considered by the Hall of Fame voters, (including Pete Rose and any players who have been banned or suspended). Who they vote for and why is up to them but strongly suggest to the voters that they should base their determinations on the player’s on-the-field accomplishments. If a player gets elected and he has tested positive for banned drugs, admitted that he used them or had it proven in court, (or borken any other baseball rules such as gambling), put that on their Hall of Fame plaque.
The “post-steroids” era didn’t mean that balls stopped going over the fence. In 2005, Andruw Jones hit 51 homers. In 2006 Ryan Howard hit 58 and David Ortiz hit 54. In 2007, Alex Rodriguez hit 54 and Prince Fielder 50.
But there was a decline in home runs over the course of the decade:
In 2000, 5,693 home runs were hit by major league teams.
2001 5,458
2002 5,049
2003 5,207
2004 5,451
2005 5,017
2006 5,386
2007 4,957
2008 4,878
2009 5,042
That’s 26,858 home runs hit in the first half of the decade and 25,280 in the second half, a reduction of 5.9%. So the introduction of testing for banned substances may have had some impact on game. But 25,280 home runs for 30 teams over five seasons is 169 home runs per team. Let’s look at 1985-89 for a comparison: 18,136 home runs were hit in those years by 26 teams. That’s 140 home runs per team. So if the 70’s and 80’s were the “neutral period”, when the statistic of the game were properly balanced because the game was fully integrated, played largely in parks with regular dimensions but before steroids and the juiced ball, then baseball in the late 200o’s was not yet back to normal. If steroid use was under control, then something else was still driving the ball over the fence at an inflated rate.
THE POLITICS OF GLORY
That title was the original name of one of Bill James’ best books,(they alter changed it to “Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame” : I guess it wasn’t selling), in which he described the history of the Hall of Fame and the thinking, or the lack of it that has gone into the selections. Bill described at length the various arguments made for various players and then cited the standards he would use, (primarily: who is the most deserving guy not yet in the Hall of Fame, regardless of whether he’s the guy you most want in it.) The book came out in 1994, (which is ironic because that’s when the big numbers began), and doesn’t mention steroids or human growth hormone or any other body or performance enhancing drugs.
Six years later, in his New Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill discusses the explosion of offense in the 1990’s. He rejects the notion that the ball was juiced because they are “tested regularly” and the idea that there was a lack of pitching because there’s always a lack of pitching. He prefers to stress “the acceptance of strength training, the abbreviating of pitcher’s motions, the use on aluminum bats in the amateur ranks, the policy of fining and suspending players automatically when there is a fight and the evolution of bat design”. His big emphasis is that batters are allowed to crowd the plate so they can drive an outside pitch. The aluminum bats convince –pitchers not to throw inside. He mentions the amour batters wear: “For all intents and purposes, the league policy is that the hitter can now stand on top of home plate.” The problem, of course, with these explanations is that they don’t explain the sudden sea change of 1994: all of them are long-term trends. Only the juiced ball theory does. But even in 2000, Bill never once mentions PEDs.
Since the Congressional hearings, the Mitchell report, the Balco Investigation and Jose Canseco’s writing career all of baseball has been trying to figure out what to with the players who were proven to, admitted to, alleged to or might have used steroids. Some people lump them all together. Several writers have announced that they would not vote for anyone of the generation of players that played from the late 1980’s to the mid 2000’s because that was the “steroid generation. This despite the fact that the Mitchell Report said that about 5-7% of major leaguers used steroids.
When Mike Piazza became eligible he was turned down the first three years because of suspicions that he had used steroids. One writer said that he had high standards for character and Mike didn’t meet that standard. He didn’t specify what he was talking about. I’ve heard two rumors about Mike: that may have been on his mind, (what there was of it). Supposedly somebody saw some pimples on his back and pimples on the back are said to be symptoms of steroids. Have you ever had pimples on your back? I have. I’ve never taken steroids. The other was something in a book by Roger Clemens that Mike supposedly admitted to some writer off the record that he was using. The writer’s name is also off the record. The idea that Mike Piazza should be denied an honor he should obviously receive because of rumors is offensive: even a murderer is innocent until proven guilty. The voters must have decided the same thing and Mike was elected to the Hall in his fourth year.
That brings up the first problem: What level of proof are you going to use to decide to exclude a candidate who’s on the field performance would otherwise qualify him for the Hall of Fame? Surely it’s got to be more than rumors and innuendo. It’s hard to prove that someone used PEDs beyond a positive test. They tried to get Barry Bonds for perjury and obstruction of justice, (for “evasive answers”), when he denied in the Balco case but they couldn’t make it stick. An initial conviction was over-turned on appeal.
Then there’s the result of baseball’s sloth in dealing with the problem. There was no policy on steroids until 1991 when Commissioner Fay Vincent sent a memo to all teams declaring their use illegal. No testing was done until 2002 and no suspensions were issued until 2005. When Jose Canseco started using them and pedaling them to others, including Mark McGwire, they weren’t even against the rules. And we don’t have any kind of complete records as to who took what and when so we can’t gage the specific impact of taking PEDs. We presume there is one but we can’t measure it. And there are many other factors that produce an increase in offensive number, including those cited by James and my me in this series of articles. How much of it was PEDs?
Does that matter? Many have suggested that players who took PEDs were cheating and that should be enough to keep them out of the Hall of Fame. They compare it to the Black Sox. Others compare it to Gaylord Perry using illegal spitballs. People found that “colorful”. White Ford, after his retirement, admitted to having a rasp imbedded in a ring with which he would doctor balls. Both are in the Hall of fame. Players of the previous generation have admitted they took “greenies” before games- amphetamines- to get energized. That hasn’t prevented them from going into the Hall of Fame. Wikipedia: The book The Baseball Hall of Shame's Warped Record Book, written by Bruce Nash, Bob Smith, Allan Zullo, and Lola Tipton, includes an account of Babe Ruth administering to himself an injection of an extract from sheep testicles. The experimental concoction allegedly proved ineffective, making Ruth ill and leading the Yankees to attribute his absence from the lineup to "a bellyache".
People have argued for years about Pete Rose, an obvious first ballot Hall of Famer on the field who has been excluded from even the vote on the Hall of Fame because he’s been banned from baseball for his association with gamblers and betting on games. He, too has been compared to Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Black Sox. There’s a dispute about whether he ever bet on his own team’s games. I’ve never heard an allegation that he ever created a conflict of interest by betting against his own team, agreeing to throw a game to pay off a debt or accepted money to throw a game, as Jackson did. That, to me, has always bene the tipping point. If your transgression does nothing to limit your desire to help your team win the game, it’s not on the level of Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox. I’ve always though the appropriate thing for Pete’s situation was what the NFL did with Alex Karras and Paul Hornung in 1963, when they’d done the same thing Pete did or was alleged to have done. They were suspended for a year with the caveat that they had to disassociate themselves from the gamblers and stay clean for that year. Both did that and were allowed to resume their careers. Hornung is in the Hall of Fame. Karras, surprisingly, is not but he was All-Pro in 1965, his second year back.
Say what you want about them, but PED users are not trying to make their teams lose. They are trying to help them win, which is what they are supposed to do. Baseball has had no historical objection to players getting bigger and stronger, winning games or breaking records. The reason why drugs are banned is not to protect the pennant race or the record book. It’s to protect the players from the medical side-effects of using the drugs –and the inevitable over-use when you get these drugs on the black market and have them administered by non-professionals. It is unfair if one player is using banned drugs and a competing player is not but the real issue is the health of the players.
And the Mitchell report makes it clear that you can’t get talent out of a needle- or a pill or a cream.
List of Major League Baseball players named in the Mitchell Report - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There are so many guys on that list that will never be considered for the Hall of Fame, even based just on their unremarkable baseball achievements, that it seems obvious that chemicals cannot make you into a star player when you never had it in you to begin with. The drugs probably do more to extend careers than enhance them. That’s really their purpose: to help, in small amounts, for them to get over injuries. It seems to me that that’s a good thing: why not permit our athletes to use what is available, in prescribed amounts to accelerate their return to action. It’s their excessive, uncontrolled use that is the problem. And that’s what can happen when you ban them altogether. Maybe if players where allowed to use steroids and HGH in amounts controlled by the league and supplied by licensed doctors, the black market would dry up. (It would also help if the owners would admit they juiced the ball in 1994 to keep the game popular during the strike so that players wouldn’t think that the big numbers came out of a needle.)
It’s been suggested that Hall of Fame voters should first try to determine how good a player was before they started taking PEDs and if that was at a Hall of Fame Level, vote them in anyway: they were Hall of Fame players who tried to become even more than that by taking PEDs. Let’s just acknowledge that they were already Hall of famers anyway. This Bonds and Clemens get in but Palmiero can forget it. The obvious problems with this are that we don’t know for sure when a player started taking PEDs, what he took, the amounts or what the impact really was. Alex Rodriguez says he started taking PEDs when he went to Texas as free agent because he felt pressure to perform. But his road, (field neutral), numbers suggest that he was the same player in Seattle that he was in Texas: was he taking stuff all along, even before he became a prospect? Who knows?
And do we really know who is clean and who isn’t? What if you refuse to vote for a guy because you heard he had pimples on his back but instead voted for another guy because there were no rumors about him and then, a few years after he’s been inducted, that guy writes his autobiography and brags about how he fooled baseball all those years and was taking the whole time? In 1983 Commissioner Bowie Kuhn banned Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays from baseball after they’d gotten jobs doing public relations for casinos. They were already in the Hall of Fame and remained in it during the ban, which was later lifted by Peter Ubberoth, Kuhn’s successor. It was a ban from employment in baseball, not from being honored by baseball. It set a precedent that you could be in the Hall of Fame even if you’d done something serious enough, (at least in the Commissioner’s mind), to be banned from employment.
It’s been suggested that you can put the PED users in the Hall if you want but they should be put in a separate room for PED Hall of Famers, which would produce more scorn than honor and might be the subject of law-suits. Beyond that the “character” issues are Pandora’s box: what do they include? Do we look at everything a player was as a man, everything they said and what they did? Do we limit it to obeying baseball’s rules? Cap Anson initiated the ban on black players. Ty Cobb beat up a guy with no hands in the stands. Tris Speaker was supposedly a member of the KKK at one time. Frankie Frisch, as a member of the Veteran’s Committee, tried to get all his old teammates in the Hall. Several of the members of the Hall were noted drunks, womanizers, racist or just arrogant jerks. Do those things matter? How do we measure them?
Of course, current players are subjects to suspensions and eventual banishment when they test positive so their numbers will be held down by such punishments and that plus the damage to their reputation could keep them out of the Hall unless they are still able to overcome that and put up Hall of Fame numbers anyway. And that brings up a big point: Baseball has not done anything in the record book to delete, separate or designate, (with an asterisk?), the numbers of PEDs users. Until they do so, shouldn’t Hall of Fame decisions be based on what is in the record books?
My solution would be this: Have everyone who meet the minimum requirements, (they played 5 years and have bene retired for 5 years), be considered by the Hall of Fame voters, (including Pete Rose and any players who have been banned or suspended). Who they vote for and why is up to them but strongly suggest to the voters that they should base their determinations on the player’s on-the-field accomplishments. If a player gets elected and he has tested positive for banned drugs, admitted that he used them or had it proven in court, (or borken any other baseball rules such as gambling), put that on their Hall of Fame plaque.
Last edited:
