Hank Aaron On Steroids?

[TooLiveBrew]

Careful - I think that's when they were classified as a Schedule III drug (with heroin, cocaine, etc.) - one with 'no medical purpose, & high potential for abuse' to paraphrase the legal-ese. They were still illegal, iirc, prior to that, but the penalties weren't as stiff. Am I remembering that incorrectly? Seem to recall encountering that in the Mitchell Report.

[AdvantageSchneider]

This is from The Bill James historical abstract p. 485 and it explains why Aaron's HR season totals look weird.

 

"What Collins has in common with AAron is that both players' records have the illusion of unnatural consistency. Their true consistency is emphasized by the fact that, as they aged the circumstances in which they played swung gradually in their favor. Aaron at age 32 moved from a poor home run park, boosting his home run totals just as they were beginning to decline, and then received a second boost 3 years later, when the mound was lowered and other actions were taken to prevent Bob Gibson from pitching 32 shutouts a year."

 

I'll take Bill James take on history over the moron who wrote that post.

 

James also has a similar entry to explain Darrell Evan's spike. It's park effects.

[Big Reed]

I brought up the comment about Advil because Nolan Ryan swore b y them. his commercials pointed out how he was always sore after throwing his 150 pitches. and then he'd take a couple of advil to relieve the pain. HGH is supposed to work in much the same way. A lot of players such as bonds have been speculated to use HGH not to encourage growth, but rather as a quick healing agent. In this manner, he was able to stay off the Dl and play in more games.

 

if a doctor prescribes that you take 4 advil a day for your back aches, and you take 16 a day, wouldn't tha t have the same effect as taking HGH or other drugs?

[TooLiveBrew]

I doubt it. Advil's a painkiller, whereas HGH helps muscle actually grow (heal). I'm no doctor though, so maybe I'm way off.

[DuWayne Steurer]

if a doctor prescribes that you take 4 advil a day for your back aches, and you take 16 a day, wouldn't tha t have the same effect as taking HGH or other drugs?

 

Absolutely not. Advil (or any other over the counter pain killer) is simply a pain blocker. HGH actually promotes cell growth.

[Phenomenal Smith]

Advil is an over the counter anti-inflammatory as is aspirin. It might relieve some pain, but it doesn't enhance performance.

If it takes away pain and allows you to perform at your abilities rather than being forced to the bench, isn't that performance enhancing? One of the things we about PED is that decrease recovery time. Is this example the same thing?

 

[DuWayne Steurer]

Advil is an over the counter anti-inflammatory as is aspirin. It might relieve some pain, but it doesn't enhance performance.

If it takes away pain and allows you to perform at your abilities, isn't that performance enhancing? One of the things we about PED is that decrease recovery time. Is this example the same thing?

 

Technically? Yeah. Are we going to start blood testing for tylenol and Nuprin? A line certainly needs to be drawn somewhere.

 

[Phenomenal Smith]

I agree RoCo. Unfortunately baseball (and other sports) have a history of better play through chemistry. Where baseball has gone wrong is that until recently that didn't do a very good job of letting players know what is acceptable and what isn't.

[DuWayne Steurer]

I agree RoCo. Unfortunately baseball (and other sports) have a history of better play through chemistry. Where baseball has gone wrong is that until recently that didn't do a very good job of letting players know what is acceptable and what isn't.

I certainly agree with that. I think where baseball has gone wrong is in how public it's making this debacle. Football took care of their steroid problem quickly and quietly, or so we're lead to beleive. I honestly can't say that any human being who's 6'3" and 250+ pounds should be able to run a 4.5 40 without the aid of chemical enhancements........but what do I know?

 

[Diskono]

BritInWI wrote:

 

Given that there was no testing implemented, why would Evans and Johnson have taken for just one year and then stopped?

 

I'm not saying that steroids might not have been a factor back then, but this particular argument is weak at best because it conveniently ignores this obvious question, which calls the argument into doubt.

That was my thought. Did other teams have similar increases in home runs? If so, perhaps it was a juiced ball season.

[igor67]

I think the accusation is suspect because the timing of alledging Steroid abuse is so far off the timeline. Steroid abuse first cropped up in body building and strong man competitions in the 70's. I'm pretty sure HGH was not available until the 90's and prior to that the alternative treatment was a similar hormone harvest from pigs and obscenely expensive. This strikes me as a scientifically illiterate reporter desperate for a story absolutely incapable of distinguishing between PED's and steroids. Heck Ueck will go one about salt pills in the 50's, which of course had the opposite effect...

[sbrylski]

I don't think the players should wear cleats - it makes them run faster. You know what, no hats or gloves either.

[DuWayne Steurer]

In 1968, the NL (10 teams) hit 891 homers, (89 per team, of course) and had a league ERA of 2.99.

 

They lowered the mound, added 2 teams, and in 1969 the NL hit 1470 (about 125 per team) and had a league ERA of 3.60.

 

Those are significant jumps in homers and runs. I'd guess that it's a factor of both the lowered mound and watered down pitching with 2 expansion teams being in the fray. Not really rocket science there.

[rluzinski]

I wrote an article for Brewerfan.net that is related to this topic:

 

Barry Bonds, Steroids and Home Run Power

 

None of those numbers are park or era adjusted but the point I was trying to make was that increases in HR production late in a player's career isn't particularly uncommon. Hard to use it as strong evidence, either way, IMO.

[sweepscc]

Just wanted to point out that amphetamines and anabolic steroids are in a completely different league. Taking an amphetamine is just going to give you a boost of energy, like drinking a crap load of caffeine or taking a lot of sugar. Anabolic steroids on the other hand "increase protein synthesis within cells, which results in the buildup of cellular tissue, especially in muscles." They have the power to potentially completely adjust an athlete's range of ability. Amphetamines can also negatively effect eye sight with long term use. It's comparing apples and oranges.

[Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat]

You know what I like about that saying? Apples and oranges have a lot in common. They're both foods, specifically they're both fruits. They're in a similar price range when I go to the grocery store. Delicious juices can be made from both of them.

 

Same is true in the case of amphetamines and steroids/HGH. No, they aren't the same. But they're both illegal drugs that have been taken by athletes competing in a variety of sports in an attempt to gain a performance advantage. Usually the anti-"PEDs" crowd falls back on something like "but greenies are just a strong cup of coffee" in order to preserve the quasi-rational ability to give steroid-users exclusively the Scarlet Letter treatment, but personally I've never found that argument terribly compelling. This probably has to do with whether you're a consequentialist or not in your ethical thinking. I'm not, so the intention matters a heckuva lot more than the result to me. The steroid user and the greenie user have exactly the same intention, i.e. "I'm going to use this illegal, dangerous drug in order to perform better at my job," thus, for all I can see, their actions are the ethically identical.

 

If using steroids is cheating, using greenies is cheating. Whether it "worked" and to what extent doesn't matter much for the morality of the thing. Let's say, for instance, that Bonds had just gotten his story backwards when he said that he did take the cream and the clear but didn't know they were steroids. Let's say, instead, that he'd asked Greg Anderson for the most potent steroids he could possibly obtain and Anderson had given him crisco and flaxeed oil for a larf. For those that want to put asterisks on balls and keep him out of the HOF, where would this bizarro-version of Bonds stand? He didn't cheat (successfully) but he wanted to and he sure tried, and had every reason to believe he was cheating.

 

Personally, I'm unwilling to go back and slap asterisks on every noteworthy baseball accomplishment of the last 50 years. All that would be left would be pre-integration records held by racists or non-racists complicit in institutional racism. Everyone's a jerk, and every era's a jerkfest. I'm not sorry to see baseball adopt a firmer drug policy, but I've made my peace with the fact that it didn't have one in the past and, with apologies to those that didn't use and thus were at something of a disadvantage (how large is difficult if not impossible to say), I've moved on.

[mothershipconnection]

Careful - I think that's when they were classified as a Schedule III drug (with heroin, cocaine, etc.) - one with 'no medical purpose, & high potential for abuse' to paraphrase the legal-ese.

 

That's schedule 1(incl heroin), cocaine is schedule 2 (high risk of abuse/dependence but an accepted medical use). Schedule 3 (incl steroids) means

 

1. The drug or other substance has a potential for abuse less than the drugs or other substances in schedules I and II.

2. The drug or other substance has a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.

3. Abuse of the drug or other substance may lead to moderate or low physical dependence or high psychological dependence.

[RockCoCougars]

Personally, I don't believe a word of it. Tom House is a flake drama queen who wants to get his name in the papers. I think I've heard him spout off on this before. The reason that I don't believe it is that I've never once read about steroid usage in Ball Four or any one of the hundreds of other "tell all" biographies players from that era have penned. If steroid abuse was rampant back then don't you think someone would narc on people so they could sell a ton of books? I've read a ton about Greenies, coke, weed and everything else, but not roids.

[TooLiveBrew]

That's schedule 1(incl heroin), cocaine is schedule 2 (high risk of abuse/dependence but an accepted medical use). Schedule 3 (incl steroids) means

 

Sorry - thanks Mother.

 

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