Finding Reasonable Doubt in Baseball's Steroid Era

The baseball news cycle ebbs and flows when it comes to discussion of steroid use, and the Hall of Fame inductions last month, followed by Alex Rodriguez's 600th homer this month, have put us at a high-tide, of sorts, when it comes to hand-wringing about PEDs.

I'd like to interrupt the moralizing and indignation with a thought:

What if everything we think we know about steroids in baseball is wrong?

What if steroids actually don't make much difference at all, when it comes to performance on the baseball field, specifically to home runs? What if steroids actually aren't any more harmful to athletes' bodies than the dozens of other acceptable means of performance enhancement?

You can't help but wonder about those things after you read the extensive documentation that longtime baseball analyst Eric Walker has collected on his web site, unimaginatively titled, Steroids, Other "Drugs," and Baseball. The site looks pedestrian. It is sprinkled with highlighted quote boxes, charts and cheesy little clip art images. If you read it, though, you can't help but marvel at the lengths he has gone to search for scientific answers to the Big Four steroids issues, which were identified back in the Mitchell Report.

1. Steroid use presents a grave health risk.
2. Steroid use by prominent athletes encourages use by young people.
3. Steroid use corrupts achievement levels by substantially enhancing performance.
4. Steroid use creates an atmosphere in which other athletes feel pressure to use to compete.

Walker's conclusions? False. False. False. Maybe, but that's a risk they accept by competing, and it's not a big deal because the first three are false anyway.

You are skeptical, and you should be. I encourage you to read the whole thing, including all of the sub-pages with detail on the studies that he is quoting. There are some holes, some things unexplained, but very few.

Walker is a former aerospace engineer who won't give his age, other than saying he is "no stranger to Social Security." He became engrossed with baseball statistics in the early '80s, worked briefly as a consultant for the Giants and then continued to work for the A's. Former A's GM Sandy Alderson commissioned Walker to write a pamphlet on the valuation of baseball players in the 1990s. That pamphlet, wrote Michael Lewis in the best-seller Moneyball, was one of the seeds of the modern analytical approach to baseball. Walker described his role here, at the request of Deadspin.

Walker's treatise on steroids in baseball has been hovering around the web, quietly waiting to be read, since December 2007. It first got attention from Alan Schwartz of the New York Times in January 2008. It recently got a kick around the Twitterverse, where it came to me and, among others, Sports Illustrated's Joe Posnanski, who also found it thought-provoking.

Maybe, all we know about steroids and baseball is wrong. At a minimum, Walker has provided reasonable doubt.

Walker makes no effort to answer the question of who used steroids and who didn't, only how much impact it may have had, and how much we should care.



All of this resonated with me because I've long been on the minority side of this whole steroids-in-baseball argument. Last year when Manny Ramirez was suspended for a violation of baseball's drug policy, I wrote that it isn't a big deal that Ramirez may have used steroids. I am one of the 25 percent of Hall of Fame voters who votes for Mark McGwire. I will vote for Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez and any other player whose on-field performance I feel meets the standard of the Hall of Fame.

I have gone easy on the morality judgment because it was an era in which steroid use was commonly accepted, and implicitly encouraged. Players were going with the flow, like cars cruising alongside each other at 80 mph on a freeway where the speed limit is 65.

I don't begrudge anyone his opinion that the players who used steroids should not get into the Hall of Fame because they lacked integrity. After all, the players were cheating, even if it was cheating that had a negligible impact.

Before I get into that negligible impact, there is the health issue. Walker delves into many of the possible side affects, describing the real risks, according to his research. I'll let you read the details for yourself, but his conclusion is this:

"There are no significant long-term health risks associated with known PEDs that are not avoidable or reversible by cessation of use if symptoms present, and not many of any sort. Were the substances not illegal, which precludes reputable medical authorities from giving advice and supervision concerning their use, they would be considered altogether harmless."

Walker does write that steroid use is very dangerous for adolescents, but he cites numerous studies to show that teens who use steroids don't use them because they see pro athletes using them. Again, I'll let you read the research and decide for yourself.

What we, as baseball fans and the baseball media, really care about, is what steroids have done to our game on the field, to the records and achievements we cherished.

We all know that performances have changed. There are more home runs hit now than than there were in the 1960s and '70s and '80s. We've now seen four players reach 600 homers in the past six years, after three players did it in the previous century. So, to stick to the legal analogy, we've got a body.

Steroids are on trial.

Walker, like a good defense attorney, makes a compelling two-pronged case. He creates reasonable doubt that steroids have had a significant impact on power numbers, and he also points the finger at another suspect that has largely been ignored: the baseball.

A look at offensive statistics throughout baseball history shows a few significant, season-to-season jumps. Two of them came when there were known changes in the baseball. It is generally accepted that Major League Baseball's leaders intentionally juiced the baseballs in 1921 to capitalize on the popularity of the home run, which came in vogue because of Babe Ruth. In 1977, MLB switched ball manufacturers, from Spalding to Rawlings.

There was another quick increase of offense in 1993. Although there was no official change in the ball at the time, Walker believes a change in the ball is the only reasonable explanation for that year's burst of homers, hits and runs. (Expansion? Past expansion years did not show a sudden, sharp rise in offense, Walker writes. The introduction of high-altitude baseball in Denver? Subtracting Mile High Stadium totals in '93, runs still jumped from 4.12 per game in '92 to 4.53 in '93, homers from 0.72 to 0.87.)

Walker also cites a University of Rhode Island study conducted in in 2000. The URI study used baseballs from 1963, 1970, 1989, 1995 and 2000. They performed a battery of tests on the balls, cut them up and studied their materials, and concluded that the more recent balls were more lively. The obvious question is whether the older balls were less lively because they were, well, old. To counter that, they examined the cores of balls, which were protected from the elements by being inside the ball. The 1995 and 2000 balls bounced about 30 percent higher than the older ones. There was little difference between the '95 and '00 balls, but a big difference between those and the '89 ball, which would counter the argument that the balls had changed with age.

The answer to all this, from an MLB-funded project at UMass-Lowell in 2000, was to study the differences between balls in 1999 and 2000. Their conclusion was there was no difference. They added that studying older balls is not practical because you can't go back in time to their measure their condition when they were in use.

Walker cites further evidence from a 2007 study, results of which were described fully in this article, but those results seem to be more in dispute.

As for the reasonable doubt about steroids improving performance, Walker writes that steroid use mostly causes increased muscle mass in the arms and shoulders, but most power in a baseball swing is generated from lower body and torso. In The Physics of Baseball, Dr. Robert Adair wrote: "The considerable energy ... transferred to the bat ... is generated largely by the large muscles of the thighs and torso. The arms and hands serve mainly to transfer the energy of the body's rotational and transverse motions to the bat and add little extra energy to the bat. [Footnoted with:] In particular, the contribution of the hands and wrists to the energy of the bat is almost negligible."

Walker then suggests that a hypothetical player who gains 20 pounds of overall muscle mass will actually gain only about one-third of that in the power-generating torso and lower body. The net result of that on bat speed, which he determines using a formula from Adair's book, is another two to four feet on the average fly ball.

Adair seems to go along with Walker's general conclusion. In an interview published in, of all places, Popular Mechanics last October, Adair said: "While I think there's no question that drug use helps a bit -- they bulk a guy up a bit, they're a little more probable to hit home runs -- I don't think it's dramatic. It's fun to make estimates, and I made some pretty logical estimates, so forth and so on. Probably you're talking about, in home runs for example, two or three more home runs a season."

Walker is not the first to make this argument. He cites numerous other books and studies in which authors concluded that steroid use had little effect on performance.

With that, I send you back to the jury room to deliberate. Certainly, you should read all of Walker's work, as well as the full details of all of the work that he cites, to draw your own conclusions. None of the work is airtight. I don't accept it all as the gospel, and neither should you. But the sheer volume of it and completeness of it is certainly enough to create what I've been calling reasonable doubt.

That's not to say the players of the Steroid Era were innocent. They secretly injected themselves with who-knows-what in an effort to skirt the rules. They aren't heroes, by any stretch. They certainly aren't role models. But I think we can put away the torches and pitchforks. We ought to be more worried about our teenagers drinking and driving than using steroids. Frankly, if we were that worried about the example baseball players set with regard to our kids' health, we wouldn't stand for them stuffing known carcinogens between their cheek and gum on national TV.

But no one ever believed that a can of dip could help someone break a home run record, or help someone get into the Hall of Fame, so chewing tobacco never provided the handy news peg that steroids do, allowing columnists to get on their high horses and lecture us on morality.

All of this steroids hysteria may be no more than the mass media overcompensating for the previous decade, when the issue was virtually ignored. Now, the safe way to go is to point fingers and moralize and rally indignation, the same way politicians do when they stir up voters with issues that have no impact on 98 percent of the population.

It's easy demonize people that we didn't particularly like anyway, like Barry Bonds and A-Rod. It's easy to protect the heroes we've read about, like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. It's easy to point at the steroid users and say they have tarnished the game.

What's hard is to admit that it might not be true.