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'98 HR chase never happened.
I refuted this already.
When it comes to the steroid argument, all of you are just regurgitating common knowledge, I've looked into this, extensively, and it's extremely difficult to arrive at any other conclusion besides.
1. The effects of steroids are vastly overstated by the general public.
2. The practically effect of steroid use on your ability to hit a baseball is mostly mysterious and incredibly difficult to discern.
There are various arguments that always repeated when it comes to steroid use and most of them are just flat out wrong, I'll go through most of them in the simplest and most concise way possible.
a) If steroids aren't effective how come we saw a massive spike in offense in the late 90's early to mid 2000's???
Baseball power numbers have been trending upwards at a steady pace since Babe Ruth entered the game, for this claim to be true baseball power numbers would have to increase at rate discontinuous with past seasons.
and while power numbers have increased, another thing people seem to have completely ignored is MLB started juicing the ball in about '94 . if you look at the numbers
there is a massive spike in power that occurs basically in the span of one year and unless every decided to do PED's at the exact same time the suddenness of this jump can't be explained by steroid use.
The juiced ball theory is pretty well research by a number of people,
So how do we apply the juiced ball theory to the power increases in the "steroid era"
If you adjust for the ball juicing power in baseball hasn;t actually increased but decreased in relation to other eras.
If you look at just the "steroid era", you don't even have to adjust for the ball juicing, just remove the one year where power jumped because of the introduction of the rawlings ball, power in the modern era has mostly remained flat.
If players are using steroids and they are so effective, shouldn't we see a gradual increase as more and more players use it?
b) Look at how Big Barry bond was, look at Brady Anderson, Luis Gonzalez??! That HAD to HELP.
I'm not going to pretend that Barry, Brady and maybe Luis didn't do steroids, ultimately this argument doesn't hold up when you actually think about the kinetic chain of a baseball swing, and the piratical application of more muscle mass.
This chart http://webusers.npl.uiuc.edu/~a-nathan/pob/batspeed.pdf basically figures out that by increasing you muscle mass by 10%, it could theoretically result in an increase in power of 10 ft.
Here is the problem: This chart assumes that all muscle mass gained are practically applicable to a baseball swing, ANY scouts will tell you, that power is generated mostly from the lower half and if you look at pretty much ANY study on the effects of steroid use, you will find that they are particularly most useful for increasing Upper body mass.
So lets say a 200 pound ball player uses steroids, gains 20 pounds of raw muscle How much of that will actually how up on the field? How much of that will be lower body mass, vs. upper body mass? 5 pounds maybe? Who knows? point is 20 pounds of pure muscle is A LOT, and its not likely that somebody is going to go from singles hitter to doubles and hr's with that. 2.5% growth in mass, will only get you theoretically about 2 to 4 ft, that is not incredibly effective or significant.