chilling the 'roid-rage

[homedawg]

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.”

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Before we get to the dramatic aspects in the graph, let’s first note that the general argument that the great HR historian David Vincent makes about the ongoing evolutionary prominence of the four-bagger is supported here. If one draws a line from the 1920-24 period over to the 2002-06 period, the angle of that line will look very similar to the HR/PA trend line that Vincent has traced.

What Vincent’s data doesn’t show, however, is the amazing (and, yes, downright suspicious) vertical leap that occurs in the 1990s. The number of players hitting 100+ HRs over five seasons literally doubles from 1990-94 (31) to 1994-98 (60). This phenomenal spurt peaked in 1998-2002 (77) and is now subsiding. (The fact that the “Bud Selig Ostrich Farm era” has ended and drug testing is now in place is probably not coincidental.)

The chart makes it clear that this is a wholly different phenomenon from the “elite HR hitter spikes” that occurred in the 50s and 60s (and briefly resurfaced in the 80s around the homer surge of 1986-87).

The readily identifiable forces at work that created such a spike are three in number. In no particular order of prominence, they are:

—Smaller ballparks and concomitant hitting techniques;
—Some type of alteration to the resiliency of the baseball;
—Steroids.

Given that there is no research existent that quantifies how much effect on HR hitting ensues from steroids, we must first attempt to measure the effects of the first two forces.

But doing that is problematic and nebulous as well.

Given that none of this is explicitly measurable, the result has been a crusade of noisy, roiling moral hypocrisy based solely on the fact that steroids are being used, with virtually no effort to make even an educated guess as to the true effect of steroids on the specific task of hitting home runs.

And since Bonds broke baseball’s most hallowed record in this time frame—tinged as it is with a pseudo-apocalyptic moral rigidity virtually without parallel in American history—it stands to reason that he would be singled out as a concatenation of all of America’s fears and hatreds.

[homedawg]

The Changing Face of the 5-Year HR Leader Board

One way to measure the effect of the 5-year HR performance spike is to examine the current leader board (top 30) and compare it with the list as it existed in 1994. When we do this, it immediately becomes clear that the current spike has almost completely rewritten the record book.



On the current list (through the 2002-06 span), there are 21 incidences (by seven players) from the post-1994 time frame who have cracked the top 30.

Only one player from the pre-1994 era—Babe Ruth—remains in the top ten (7th and 9th).

Only two players—Ruth and Ralph Kiner—remain in the top twenty.

And only two more players—Jimmie Foxx and Willie Mays—remain in the top thirty.

For whatever reason or reasons, it has suddenly become a lot easier for people to hit 200+ HRs over a five-year period.

The entire list of people who had done that prior to 1994 amounts to only 36 incidences (by twelve players). That’s over seventy separate 5-year periods.

From 1994 to the present, there have been 46 incidences of 200+ HRs over five years (by twelve players). That’s over just thirteen separate 5-year periods.



The 200+ HRs-in-five-years achievement has become so commonplace as a result of the “Bud Selig Ostrich Farm era” that the player list now includes several hitters who have never led the majors in five-year HR totals. Whereas the pre-1994 list contains only one hitter in the Top 20 who wasn’t the leader in HRs for the five-year period in question (Harmon Killebrew, in 1961-65), the current Top 30 list has nine also-rans in the Top 20.

Thanks to this amazing, curious, and possibly sinister spike in elite HR hitting, sluggers such as Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire could finish in second place despite hitting 250+ homers over five years (more than 50 a year).

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And this is reflected in the table of five-year HR leaders. Of the 23 players who’ve hit 200+ homers over five years, there are seven who never led the majors in the time frame in question. One of these was Lou Gehrig, who finished second seven times back in the day when Ruth and Foxx were aiming for the stratosphere.



The other six are all players from the current era (Palmeiro, Thome, Pujols, Gonzalez, Ramirez, Bagwell). While Gehrig was in the top five on these lists about 70% of the time when he hit 100+ HRs over five years (as reflected in the “No” column), these “Ostrich Farm era” sluggers could manage it less than 25% of the time (15 Top 5 appearances out of 62 100+ 5-year incidences).

The Legitimacy of Bonds’ Record

And this is one way for us to measure the legitimacy of Bonds’ achievement. How often did these hitters make it into the Top Five list for 5-year HR totals?

As you’d suspect, the leader in this category is Ruth, whose Top Five percentage is 92% (12 Top Five appearances out of 13 100+ HR incidences). Kiner and Aaron are tied for second on this list, with 80% (Aaron 16 of 20, Kiner 8 of 10). Foxx is next at 79% (11 of 14), followed by Gehrig at 71% (10 of 14). Sosa is sixth at 67% (8 of 12).

Barry Bonds is currently seventh on the list, at 65% (11 of 17).

The average Top 5 percentage for all hitters with a 200+ 5-year achievement is 54%.

There are only six players who’ve appeared in the Top 5 ten or more times. Bonds is the only present-day player on that list (in order: Aaron, Ruth, Bonds, Foxx, Mays, Gehrig).

Steroids or not, this is the first of several powerful discoveries that strongly indicate that Bonds’ record is legitimate. The commonly-held features of steroid use—sudden, short-term gain, followed by injury and an equally sudden, steep decline—are nowhere to be found in Bonds’ record.

Except for that 73-HR season, of course.

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And it is that lone data point that sustains the scurrilous moral hypocrisy that has blighted every sports page in America for the past five years.

Missing in this hysterical outpouring of shamefully childish outrage is the fact that Barry Bonds, in the years immediately preceding the “Ostrich Farm era,” was at or near the top of the 5-year HR charts.



That’s right. Look at the chart. In the years before offense ballooned into the homer-haven environment of the “Ostrich Farm era,” Bonds is the #2 homer man (1990-1994 and two five-year increments following).

The level of Bonds’ early HR achievement is a fact that has all-too-conveniently disappeared from the “official record,” in the relentless zeal to turn him into the Single Greatest Pariah in American History (or SGPIAH, for short).

What all these quacking ducks overlook, of course, is the fact that Hank Aaron, while unquestionably one of the most consistent hitters in baseball history, rarely was at the top of the 5-year HR list, either. He only began to do that late in his career (as was the case with Bonds as well), and it happened for two reasons:

—The higher-flying sluggers (Mathews, Mantle, Mays, Killebrew)
all aged more quickly;

—Aaron’s team moved to a ballpark that was much more favorably
inclined to the long ball.

The most interesting aspect of Aaron’s successful pursuit of Ruth is not located in the fact that he broke the record, but in how he did it.

He did it by grinding it out, with no 50+ HR seasons whatsoever.



And in the post-Maris era, where the Lords of Baseball discouraged offense in the 60s and—as Brock Hanke persuasively argues—made a series of efforts to dampen home run hitting for the following two decades, this particular aspect of Aaron’s achievement has granted it far greater legitimacy than anything else.

Once the single-season HR leader was no longer the lifetime HR leader, a different psychology about the matter evolved.

As McGwire, Sosa, and then Bonds suddenly made mincemeat of Roger Maris’ fluky record, a crisis in this mass psychology began to loom. And it had a convenient demonizing agent in steroids.

What’s ironic, of course, is that if you look at Bonds’ record, and you take away the one aberrant 73-HR season, you see that, just like Aaron, here is a slugger who has been grinding it out.

There’s not a 50-HR season to be found anywhere else in his record.

So, naturally, that one season is taken as “evidence” that Bonds’ entire achievement is bogus.

Which, of course, is the type of reasoning, when applied to things like terrorism, ensures that America will find itself in an ever-increasing quagmire—all in the name of “righteous indignation” and “moral outrage.”

All of this hysteria can be reduced to the fact that one outrageous event—9/11 in the case of political pandering, and 73 HRs (in the same YEAR, no less!) in the case of toy-store “sacrilege”—has overtaken reason and cast a lingering, ominous shadow over the nature of discourse ever since.

To me, the key number in the case of Barry Bonds is 780. If he reaches that number of lifetime HRs, it would mean that he’d hold the lifetime record even if we reduced his 73-HR season back down to his previous career high (49, in 2000).

After all, if Bonds had “ground it out” with nary a 50+ HR season in the midst of all this (purportedly) steroid-induced desecration of the American flag, motherhood, and the truly astonishing advances in brassiere technology, we wouldn’t be trying to tar and feather the arrogant putz, now, would we?

Perhaps we would merely have sent him death threats, as was the case with Hank Aaron