there were no restrictions on drug use in MLB before then

Barry Bonds might be the only ballplayer who can be clearly shown to have gained a substantial boost from the use of PEDs

Here's what former New York Times columnist and current blogger Murray Chass wrote today:

"Thus, on the Hall of Fame plaque he is virtually certain never to have in Cooperstown, it could list his .312 career batting average, his .411 on-base percentage, his .585 slugging percentage, his 1,831 runs batted in, his 555 home runs and his status as the first two-time drug loser at the cost of 150 games."

Does this jibe with BBTF groupthink? That Bonds actually did get a boost from PEDs, the merits of the perjury case aside?

there were no restrictions on drug use in MLB before then

Except for...the law..but #### that, man.

Barry Bonds might be the only ballplayer who can be clearly shown to have gained a substantial boost from the use of PEDs

Does this jibe with BBTF groupthink? That Bonds actually did get a boost from PEDs, the merits of the perjury case aside?

You mean U.S. law, for some substances, since 1990. Other countries have different laws.

And what's the significance of having MLB ban substances, if "the law" was already speaking to this? Isn't the MLB policy redundant, under your argument?

You'd think it would be intuitively obvious to players that they aren't supposed to commit federal crimes in order to get an edge on their competition. But the evidence suggests that in the case of this particular crime, that wasn't enough. It's perfectly logical under the circumstances for MLB to put in its own policy to reinforce "the law" if the law by itself is not acting as enough of a deterrent.

Barry Bonds might be the only ballplayer who can be clearly shown to have gained a substantial boost from the use of PEDs

For the hof vote, comitting a federal crime has never stopped anyone from getting in, why should this crime be any different?

Bonds used PEDs, got bigger and stronger, and started hitting more home runs. I've never thought it a coincidence that the only two guys to hit 70 HR in a season were both juicers.

The point wasn't that breaking the law should keep one out of the HoF. It's that the law itself should have been seen as a restriction on their usage. And I've never seen a good argument why that isn't the case.

(And Sosa approached 70 HR three times. What is the evidence that Sosa was on steroids, other than the home runs?)

The point wasn't that breaking the law should keep one out of the HoF. It's that the law itself should have been seen as a restriction on their usage. And I've never seen a good argument why that isn't the case.

(And Sosa approached 70 HR three times. What is the evidence that Sosa was on steroids, other than the home runs?)

The law said people shouldn't use illegal drug X and if they do and get caught they face punishment Y. What does that have to do with MLB?

you would keep him out of the HOF on the grounds that he... what, didn't break the law?

There was a leaked report two years ago that Sosa tested positive in 2003, in the "anonymous" first round of testing.

...according to lawyers with knowledge of the drug-testing results from that year.

...The lawyers who had knowledge of Sosa’s inclusion on the 2003 list did not know the substance for which Sosa tested positive. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified as discussing material that is sealed by a court order.

Many pro-PED types have argued that there's nothing wrong with PED usage, that it wasn't cheating, that it was available to all.

Bonds hit 73 HR in a league in which the league HR rate was 1.14 per game.

Maris hit 61 HR in a league in which the league HR rate was 0.95 per game. Put Maris into a 1.14 league and he comes closer to 70.

Fielder hit 51 in the 1990 AL, where the league HR rate was 0.79.

Mays hit 52 in the 1965 NL, where the league HR rate was 0.81.

Even McGwire's 70 HR came in a league in which the HR rate was 0.99.

Matt, I resubmit my question asking for evidence

Yet baseball felt the need to exclude steroids from their drug and alcohol policy.

We've plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence.

The old CBA that I saw listed very specifically the substances that were banned from baseball and steroids were not on that list. I believe even Fay Vincent in his interview with Maury Brown was saying that steroids were not even on the radar that baseball was more concerned with cocaine than any steroid out there.

Since 1971, baseball has prohibited the illegal use, possession, or distribution of drugs, including the unauthorized use of prescription drugs. Anabolic steroids have been expressly listed among baseball’s prohibited substances since 1991.
Until it was included in the 2002 Basic Agreement, however, this policy was not agreed to by the Players Association, which therefore retained the ability to challenge discipline decisions by the Commissioner for violations of the policy.

This should be done by HR/AB, not HR/G. While context matters, it does not bring any of Mays/Fielder/Maris up to the level of Bonds or McGwire.

These are (non-park adjusted) HR+ numbers. It's (HR/AB) / (lg HR/AB) * 100

451 - McGwire 1998
436 - Bonds 2001
381 - Fielder 1990
370 - Mays 1965
349 - Maris 1961

The old CBA that I saw listed very specifically the substances that were banned from baseball and steroids were not on that list. I believe even Fay Vincent in his interview with Maury Brown was saying that steroids were not even on the radar that baseball was more concerned with cocaine than any steroid out there.

I've never seen that position put out there, I've seen it said that it wasn't cheating because you were improving yourself physically, but never hear anyone reference the second part of your comment "available to all".

As a pro-ped guy, I say it wasn't cheating because MLB didn't care about it happening, and that there are plenty of whispers that teams encouraged it.

Now that MLB has banned it and set up a penalty portion of it, I argue that MLB has determined the penalty for the crime and that is the end of the story.

Which is just a fancy way of saying there was no rule against it.

Of course it's evidence.

A leaked report is a kind of evidence that Sosa had a positive test. We don't know for sure.

At the start of spring training, major league baseball manager and owner Pop Clark brings Larry Kelly, a highly promising young pitcher from the Texas league, to his struggling St. Louis Cardinal team. After chasing off two former players who were kicked off the team for gambling, Pop confides in his daughter Frances, the team's secretary, that if the Cardinals fail to win the pennant, he will lose the franchise to greedy business rival Henry Ainsley. That night, Larry is befriended by the wealthy Joseph Karnes, but is advised by veteran sports reporter Jimmie Downey that Karnes is a notorious gambler. After Mickey, the ballboy, discovers two men tampering with the pitchers' mitts, the team physician announces that the mitts had been covered with a serious skin-damaging substance. Slugger Dunk Spencer, who, like Jimmie, is infatuated with Frances, accuses Jimmie of sabotaging the mitts as a means of reducing his competition. Frances, however, dismisses Spencer's claims and forces the two men to bury their hostilities for the sake of the team. Although the Cardinals are given only twenty-to-one odds to win the pennant, they quickly climb to second place behind Larry's pitching and Spencer's hitting. Worried that he will lose one million dollars, Karnes, who bet against the Cardinals, tries to bribe Larry by leaving $10,000 on his hotel pillow. Larry, however, shows Pop and Jimmie the money, and the bribe attempt is made public. Later, a taxi carrying Larry and his hotdog-loving teammate, Truck Hogan, is shot at and crashes. In the accident, Larry suffers a foot injury that forces him out of the game for two weeks. While Larry is recuperating, the Cardinals move into first place and need to win only two out of three games to clinch the pennant. During the first crucial game in Chicago, Spencer is shot and killed by a gunman in the stadium as he is about to score the winning run. Because of his rivalry with Spencer, Jimmie is questioned by the police but is not charged. Just before the second game, pitcher Frank Higgins is called to the telephone and, in spite of tight security overseen by groundskeeper and former Cardinal player Patterson, is strangled in the locker room. After Truck leads the Cardinals to victory, one of his hotdogs is laced with poison, and he dies before identifying the killer to police. Although the police want to cancel the last game with the Cincinnati Reds, Pop insists on playing and slates Larry to pitch. When Frances confesses to Pop that she loves Larry, Pop starts to pull him from the lineup but is persuaded by Jimmie, who wants to trap the murderer, to keep his star in the game. During the game, Larry sees someone in the dugout placing an explosive in his warm-up jacket and hurls his baseball at the saboteur's head. After the explosive is safely detonated, the killer is revealed to be Patterson, whose anger at being hired by Pop as a groundskeeper instead of a coach, drove him to conspire with Ainsley to ruin the Cardinals. The mystery solved, Larry slugs the game-winning hit and embraces Frances, his bride-to-be.

As SoSH U mentioned, you had players being placed in the position of having to choose to either break the law or potentially fall behind their peers.

Does baseball have an explicit rule against committing murder during a game? (I now am picturing the scene from the movie Hook in which the catcher shoots the runner trying to steal second base).

Whether or not the sanctimony about "cheating" is excessive, I don't understand the notion that Ramirez and Bonds are outliers in the sense of being the only players whom PEDs actually benefited. I'd like to see a distribution of probabilities as of 12/31/95 for Brady Anderson hitting 50 HR the following year at age 32.

It didn't seem to be a tough choice for the players, any more than college students have the "tough choice" of deciding whether to take a hit from a joint at a party, or submit to underage drinking. Just because these things are ILLEGAL OMIGOD does not mean people are the slightest bit apprehensive about doing them.

There are good reasons why hearsay is not admissible evidence in court under most circumstances

It didn't seem to be a tough choice for the players, any more than college students have the "tough choice" of deciding whether to take a hit from a joint at a party, or submit to underage drinking.

But you don't seem to care about any of them.

You don't just do a "hit" of steroids. You take a regimen which you maintain throughout the year. Studies have drawn strong links between steroid use and heart disease, as well as to various psychological ailments. There's a real trade-off there that shouldn't be compared to taking a hit from a joint.

Of course I care about them. There are standards to which a governmental body given the authority to take life and liberty absolutely must be held, to which it isn't necessary to hold some guy on the internet who has no control over anything. You're being ridiculous.

The point is that there's a _reason_ for the rule against hearsay. It's not just something they decided would be fun to have at trials.

And yet, scores of players didn't seem to have much trouble making the "trade-off."

Like with anything else, we need to adjust for context. The HR rate in the league where Bonds hit 73 home runs (1.14) was the second highest of all time in the NL. (The year before, the NL had a 1.16 HR rate. I count four AL home run rates that were higher.) What you had was an all time great player who had already had 3 SLG titles and 1 HR title as a "Clean Player," now playing in one of the most favorable leagues ever for hitting home runs, and (even if one attributes some of it to steroids) had clearly changed his approach at the plate. I don't think the answers are so simple.

So it would be like a stranger coming up to you and saying he heard from some other stranger that some guy you know did something the other day. Does that make it probably true that the guy was drunk?

You know what players felt and thought about steroid use? What's your evidence?

I think there's a good chance the report is true.

That someone did something is not good evidence they weren't troubled by doing it.

But it is good evidence that they weren't troubled enough not to do it.

I think we have some idea what your logic skills are.

The fact that players used steroids.

I've been ignoring these insults for about an hour. I'm done here. I have better things to do.

The hysteria sets in when the general public imagines PEDs as a kind of Popeye's spinach. And/or when a stray poster here points to a given spike or arc in a career and says, "look, steroids" without considering ten other relevant factors, or sheer variation.

This should be done by HR/AB, not HR/G. While context matters, it does not bring any of Mays/Fielder/Maris up to the level of Bonds or McGwire.

This should be done by HR/AB, not HR/G. While context matters, it does not bring any of Mays/Fielder/Maris up to the level of Bonds or McGwire.

These are (non-park adjusted) HR+ numbers. It's (HR/AB) / (lg HR/AB) * 100

451 - McGwire 1998
436 - Bonds 2001
381 - Fielder 1990
370 - Mays 1965
349 - Maris 1961

If his steroids were so powerful they jumped him from 16 to 50 homers, why on earth would he then stop taking them and drop back to 18 homers?

Roger Clemens, one of professional baseball's most durable and successful pitchers, is among six players allegedly linked to performance-enhancing drugs by a former teammate, The Times has learned. The names had been blacked out in an affidavit filed in federal court.

Others whose identities had been concealed include Clemens' fellow Houston Astros pitcher Andy Pettitte and former American League most valuable player Miguel Tejada of the Baltimore Orioles...

A source with authorized access to an unredacted affidavit allowed The Times to see it briefly and read aloud some of what had been blacked out of the public copies. A second source and confidant of Grimsley had previously disclosed player identities and provided additional details about the affidavit. The sources cooperated only on condition of anonymity.

According to the affidavit, Grimsley told investigators that Clemens "used athletic performance-enhancing drugs." He also allegedly said Tejada used anabolic steroids.
The affidavit also alleges that Grimsley told federal agents that former Orioles teammates Tejada, Brian Roberts and Jay Gibbons "took anabolic steroids." Roberts was the American League's all-star second baseman in 2005 when Grimsley was an Oriole.

For The Record

Los Angeles Times Friday, December 21, 2007 Correction

Baseball: A front-page article on Oct. 1, 2006 incorrectly reported that in a search warrant affidavit filed in May 2006 in federal court in Phoenix, an investigator alleged that pitcher Jason Grimsley named former teammates Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Brian Roberts and Jay Gibbons as players linked to performance-enhancing drugs. In the affidavit, which was unsealed Thursday, Grimsley did not name those players. The article also said Grimsley alleged that Miguel Tejada had used steroids. The only mention of Tejada in the affidavit was as part of a conversation with teammates about baseball's ban of amphetamines. The Times regrets the error, and a clarifying story appears on the front page today.

In a separate two-page order, U.S. Magistrate Judge Edward C. Voss in Phoenix cited the newspaper for "abusive reporting" in its article that linked Clemens to the affidavit.

"At best, the article is an example of irresponsible reporting," Voss wrote. "At worst, the 'facts' reported were simply manufactured. ... Hopefully, any reference to the Times article as authoritative will now cease."

-denying steroid use when asked

So if a player used steroids without breaking any laws (e.g., by going to another country, or getting a prescription, or using something that wasn't scheduled), you would keep him out of the HOF on the grounds that he... what, didn't break the law?

"They cheated by using illegal steriods"

"they would have been cheating if the commissioner had the authority to regulate what they put in their body, but he only did not because of a meany union that fought for players personal privacy and rights, but still they might have broken the law because some steroids were illegal to take in this country without a prescription, and hearsay clearly gives us reason, though not evidence, that some players did not take them in other countries or with prescriptions".

I guess it's just easier to make wild assertions if you can say them as compactly as possible.
"They cheated by using illegal steriods"
, while not factually true, is a much more powerful statement than

the second stranger is identified by the reporter as having knowledge of the situation.

That link/quotes by Ray in post 82 is pretty damning in my eyes for any time in the future I see "unnamed sources" in an article in which the writer has a clear preconceived bias.

Not only is there no way of knowing whether the writer is just making sh!t up, even if he/she isn't, the motives/credibility of any source unwilling to be named have to be held in question.

Doesn't pretty much every single company out there have a drug and alcohol policy? Didn't baseball? Yet baseball felt the need to exclude steroids from their drug and alcohol policy. I think that says something.

Yeah, so how do the quasi-natural law folks feel about Randy Velarde's testimony in the Bonds' trial? Didn't sound like too many players were trying to hide too much of anything. Almost sort of like greenies in the '60s.

* Larry Bigbie claimed that Cust told him he tried steroids and had a source that could procure anything he wanted. Cust declined interview

* Radomski claimed that Franklin purchased Anavar and Deca-Durabolin from him through another Radomski client and then-Mariners teammate, Ron Villone.

* Radomski claimed he sold Deca-Durabolin and testosterone to Hundley on three or four occasions, and the player's contact information was found in his address book. Chris Donnels confirmed that Hundley discussed his use of performance-enhancing drugs with him. Hundley declined interview

* Brian McNamee claimed he obtained human growth hormone from Radomski, which he provided and injected Knoblauch with seven to nine times. Knoblauch paid Radomski through Jason Grimsley and McNamee. Knoblauch declined interview

* Radomski claimed he sold two or three kits of human growth hormone to Justice. Brian McNamee confirmed that Justice admitted to him that he obtained human growth hormone from Radomski.

* Radomski claimed he sold one kit of human growth hormone to Nook Logan in 2005, after a referral from Rondell White.

* Radomski claimed he frequently sold small quantities of testosterone and Winstrol to Miadich from 2002 through 2005, after a referral from Adam Riggs

* Adam Piatt also stated that Santangelo provided Piatt with Radomski's contact information when Piatt asked where he could get performance-enhancing substances.

* During his interview with Mitchell, Adam Piatt claimed that he obtained Deca-Durabolin or testosterone, as well as human growth hormone from Radomski for Tejada. Piatt produced checks from Tejada totalling $6,300. Radomski confirmed the sale to Piatt and claimed that Piatt said the purchases were for Tejada

Anabolic steroids have been expressly listed among baseball’s prohibited substances since 1991.

Whether or not the sanctimony about "cheating" is excessive, I don't understand the notion that Ramirez and Bonds are outliers in the sense of being the only players whom PEDs actually benefited. I'd like to see a distribution of probabilities as of 12/31/95 for Brady Anderson hitting 50 HR the following year at age 32.

Of course hearsay is evidence. It's something that leads you to think somewhat differently about whether events happened and in what way those events happened.

That can't be the test. Horoscopes cause some people to think differently about whether events happened and in what way those events happened, too. That doesn't make them evidence.