With Barry Bonds’ pursuit of 714 career home runs still
going on, the talks about how steroids have tainted his
accomplishments and the game itself in recent years have only
accelerated.
If you listen to talk radio, read sports columns or even just
chat about it with friends on campus, the predominant opinion is
clear: Steroids have substantially changed the game of
baseball.
I’ve heard so many different things from people I respect
about how steroids have impacted the game. People claim steroids
have been responsible for Juan Gonzalez’s early breakdown,
Barry Bonds’ and Roger Clemens’ longevity and Jason
Giambi’s breakdown and comeback.
More important to the game as a whole, steroids are commonly
cited as the main reason why the home run rate has spiked in recent
years.
I can understand why the media has made this assertion popular
““ it will jump at any chance it gets to throw down or hype up
issues in sports it knows will draw a big response.
It’s just hard for me to believe that people are actually
falling for the hype.
I’m not denying that players have probably been using
steroids on a widespread scale, nor am I denying that home runs
have gone up over the past decade.
But there are so many other reasons why home runs should have
gone up that I am having a really hard time believing steroids are
the main culprit.
For one thing, there are a lot more pitchers around. It
wasn’t too long ago that teams used four-man rotations with
starters who were expected to go the distance every time out. That
made it less necessary to carry a lot of pitchers on the roster and
instead, teams would carry more hitters.
Now, with a five-man rotation firmly in place and pitch counts
being monitored closer than ever, teams give more roster spots to
pitchers. When you consider the fact that baseball has added four
teams since 1993, the number of pitchers in the major leagues today
is staggering in comparison to past eras.
The increase in the quantity of pitchers in theory would
decrease the overall quality of pitching. Pitchers who
weren’t good enough to make major league rosters in the 1970s
or 1980s can do so now. So when the same high-quality hitters are
going up against increasingly worse pitching, you would expect the
home run rate to increase.
Then there are the ballparks. It seems like new hitter-friendly
parks are being built every year while older parks are moving their
fences in. Parks in Colorado, Arizona, Texas, Philadelphia and
Cincinnati just weren’t around back in the days of Tiger
Stadium or Ebbets Field. Park factors have already been shown to
have a pretty strong statistical significance on home
runs.
There’s also the speculation that, in an attempt to draw
more fans and make the game more exciting after the 1994 baseball
strike, Major League Baseball juiced up the balls. I don’t
know how much credence there is to this theory, but it
wouldn’t surprise me at all if some bat or ball alterations
were made to help the home run rate go up in order to bring more
excitement (and revenue) to the game. It’s just something
else that makes you think.
I’m not totally sure how much of an impact any of the
points I’ve just mentioned are making in the increase of home
runs in baseball. But the fact they exist is enough to question the
validity of claims being made about steroids.
While there is no data on who was using steroids when, there is
plenty of data on the other changes in the modern era of baseball.
So before we start to buy in to the hype that steroids are
responsible for everything that’s been going on in the game,
let’s look at the evidence and find out what is really behind
the new trends.
E-mail Azar at bazar@media.ucla.edu.