OK, so Barry Bonds used steroids.
Get over it.
Who didn’t use them in the great “Bud Selig Ostrich Farm era of baseball” (1995-2004)? George Mitchell’s “investigation”—the quintessence of the “close the barn door after the animals have hit the road” approach—would be more revealing (and a whole lot easier) if it simply focused on identifying the players who were actually “clean” throughout the period in question.
There are so many logical blackouts in the endless harangue of moralizing nitwits cashing in on controversy that it really seems pointless to attempt to inject rationality into the mix at this point, but what the heck—we have to put something on this blog, after all.
Singling out Barry Bonds for the collective sins of the ongoing American malaise is, of course, a mighty convenient tactic for ignoring the slippery slope that is this fractured land’s obsession with “morality” (and its many illusory shapes).
And it’s amusing that this virulent streak of superannuated schadenfreude has, in fact, dissipated now that Bonds has actually passed Hank Aaron.
But the lingering effect of this relentless media blitz is part of a larger strategy to twist facts and sustain opinions based on rumor and innuendo—to create myths that serve more invidious aims. Appealing to the masses’ basest instincts is a sure way to deflect reasoned discourse, and—well, welcome to America, friends.
5-Year HR Totals: Some Historical Context on the “Steroid Era”
What we need, of course, is context—something that the garden-variety baseball opinionator, whether a member of the media or the armchair nation, is loath to seek, much less embrace. What follows below is a sort of “intellectual bear hug” for those otherwise averse to reasoned discourse.
And so let’s look at the notion of “five-year home run totals.” Instead of focusing on single-season peaks, we examine the longer arc of HR hitting, and get a sense of how that landscape has evolved since the beginning of the live ball era (1920).
The data (extracted from Baseball Reference’s peerless Play Index) has been molded to depict the number of players whose five-year HR totals were 100 or more. The chart below has been adjusted to reflect a constant number of teams in MLB—and that number of teams is 30 (the current total). In this way, we can get a truer comparison of “elite HR hitting patterns.”
Get over it.
Who didn’t use them in the great “Bud Selig Ostrich Farm era of baseball” (1995-2004)? George Mitchell’s “investigation”—the quintessence of the “close the barn door after the animals have hit the road” approach—would be more revealing (and a whole lot easier) if it simply focused on identifying the players who were actually “clean” throughout the period in question.
There are so many logical blackouts in the endless harangue of moralizing nitwits cashing in on controversy that it really seems pointless to attempt to inject rationality into the mix at this point, but what the heck—we have to put something on this blog, after all.
Singling out Barry Bonds for the collective sins of the ongoing American malaise is, of course, a mighty convenient tactic for ignoring the slippery slope that is this fractured land’s obsession with “morality” (and its many illusory shapes).
And it’s amusing that this virulent streak of superannuated schadenfreude has, in fact, dissipated now that Bonds has actually passed Hank Aaron.
But the lingering effect of this relentless media blitz is part of a larger strategy to twist facts and sustain opinions based on rumor and innuendo—to create myths that serve more invidious aims. Appealing to the masses’ basest instincts is a sure way to deflect reasoned discourse, and—well, welcome to America, friends.
5-Year HR Totals: Some Historical Context on the “Steroid Era”
What we need, of course, is context—something that the garden-variety baseball opinionator, whether a member of the media or the armchair nation, is loath to seek, much less embrace. What follows below is a sort of “intellectual bear hug” for those otherwise averse to reasoned discourse.
And so let’s look at the notion of “five-year home run totals.” Instead of focusing on single-season peaks, we examine the longer arc of HR hitting, and get a sense of how that landscape has evolved since the beginning of the live ball era (1920).
The data (extracted from Baseball Reference’s peerless Play Index) has been molded to depict the number of players whose five-year HR totals were 100 or more. The chart below has been adjusted to reflect a constant number of teams in MLB—and that number of teams is 30 (the current total). In this way, we can get a truer comparison of “elite HR hitting patterns.”
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