Are Roids Really the Problem?

I hate to do it, but it's high time I weighed in on the steroids issue.
Hmm... still pushing two hundred pounds. Not a good sign.

Of course, I'm not a juiced professional athlete-- I'm a liquored up amateur one.
And, on the first day of my beer-league softball season, it's about time I put in my two cents worth on the steroids issue that has been so heavily "plaguing" major league baseball.

If you believe the media, or even some sources inside MLB, you'd think that the news of homerun production dropping was concrete proof that the huge hormone-driven gorilla was finally off baseball's back. Guess what, it isn't. In fact, from the numbers provided so far, it's even tough to say it ever was.
Take a look at the stats provided to us so far.
HRs per game through the season's first five weeks

Year HRs/Game
2005 1.97
2004 2.16
2003 2.07
2002 1.93
2001 2.31
2000 2.59
1999 2.22
1998 1.97
1997 1.86
1996 2.34
Avg 2.14

Any statisticians out there want to raise their hand and tell me what this graph signifies? Anybody? Right. It's the natural ebb and flow of any statistical category, and nothing more. If I had told any of my stats teachers through college (5 of 'em) that the reason HR production dropped this year was because of tougher steroid regulations, I'd be punched. No, I'd be beaten with an axe. Publicly hung. Drawn and quartered. You get the picture.

Truth is, we're on exactly the same pace we were on in the revered "Summer That Saved Baseball," where Big Mac, Slammin Sammy and Crippled Ken Griffey combined for 193 round trippers. That's three guys hitting more moon shots than most teams combined (I included Griffey in there because he had the quietest 57 HRs in the history of baseball that year. To put that into perspective, Adrian Beltre led the majors with 48 last season). We look at 1998 now as the pinnacle of 'roid abuse just as '86 was to cocaine (thanks, Straw!).

To put this another way, the media is throwing around the figure of an 8.8% decline in HRs through the first 5 weeks of the season. Now, let's look at the percentage difference of the last 10 years, just for consistency:

Year Pct Difference from previous year
2005 -8.8%
2004 4.3%
2003 7.3%
2002 -16.5%
2001 -10.8%
2000 16.7%
1999 12.7%
1998 5.9%
1997 -20.5%

Still think the decline is steroid-related? I didn't think so. Pitchers and batters battle every year for supremacy. Some years, due to better conditioning, weather, whatever, one group will get the better of the other (relatively speaking of course).

Perhaps more telling of the issue at hand is to look at slugging percentage, not actual homeruns. If batters aren't making as much contact (and remember, even sluggers have established that steroids don't help contact), we can more safely attribute this decline to a rise in pitching performance. And what do you know, batting average has dropped from last year-- 4 points to be exact (4 points per 1000 doesn't seem to be very much to the casual fan, but remember that a difference of 10 points can cost literally millions of dollars in a player's contract).

I might be going out on a limb here, but it's hard for me to believe that steroids were ever really affecting the game. From all the evidence that exists, it all boils down to just a few players and a general trend towards increased power. It's extremely naive at this point to even suggest that it was illegal narcotics affecting and "tarnishing" the game.

This isn't radical thinking, folks, it's logical.

I find it actually disgusting when members of the media cherry-pick statistics to back up their predictions. I write this only to implore the rah-rah writers out there to please, please perform some sort of unbiased statistical analysis on this. You're leading people in the wrong direction, and it's wrong. Just wrong.

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