Thread: Did Roger Maris Use Steroids?

Originally Posted by cdude

Oh, you are talking about baseball exclusively.

David Ortiz, Brett Boone are two obvious ones, with huge HR/AB gains after doping.

David Ortiz never tested positive again post 2003, and yet more home runs in four seasons since. Not a strong case for steroids providing a large unnatural boost.

Bret Boone's never tested positive, been seen taking steroids, etc. What we have here is heresay. So the proof is the spike in his numbers, which puts the cart in front of the horse. The effect now proves the cause? Bret Boone's power surge is not inconsistent with past players, especially given how close it came to the peak home run age for career players. In fact, you could look at what Carlton Fisk did at age 37 when he decided to lift weights in the off season.

Did Roger Maris Use Steroids?

Originally Posted by cdude

And to explain the decrease, most dopers started doping at the late stage of their careers. Jose Conseco started doping at a very early age of his career, so we would never know what his natural production level would have been had he not taken PEDs.

Care to provide evidence that most folks start using PED late in their career? Your source of evidence is someone who used it his entire career. He claims that Big Mac used it basically his entire career. Jason Giambi is a prominent example of an early juicer.

Originally Posted by cdude

But he has had a pretty good track record on the PED issue in the MLB. So I took his words that PED helps hitting home runs.

Just two sentences ago you state that we never know what the counterfactual would be, and yet now, he's authoritative in stating the counterfactual? That's pretty inconsistent.

Originally Posted by cdude

And also the BALCO guy who's a scientist, now that's the scientific evidence you are looking for.

BALCO didn't employ a scientist. Conte was self-proclaimed nutritionist. He had a doctor that marginally worked for him. They did buy many of their steroids from a rogue chemist out of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. He was able to work with the chemical compounds and did use himself. However, that's not scientific evidence.

Once again, we're at back at where we started.

1. No controlled experiments that demonstrate a causal link between steroids and home run hitting.

2. Studies that often find a link between muscle mass gain and strength, but nothing that then translates this into a precise power gain based on the mechanics of a baseball swing. However, the evidence often finds the gains from steroids are predominantly weighted towards the upper body, which is the least important part of generating power in the baseball swing. Once you account for this, using several models of the baseball swing by physicists and back of the envelope calculations, you can measure the impact of steroids in inches.

3. Statistics that show that the rate of home runs increased suddenly and dramatically in 1993-4 and then have maintained that level. For steroids to explain this sudden increase, they would have had to have been adopted over the course of those exact two seasons, and then that same rate of use would have to be continued through today, despite several years of now extensive testing with real penalties for getting caught.

4. Since we know that steroids didn't show up all of a sudden in 1993-4 with a huge cult of juicers (Canseco's story tells of a more gentle increase starting before 1993-4), we can turn to several other plausible hypotheses: expansion, the ball, equipment, stadiums.

5. Home run output is a random process, and so we should expect variation in output. Temporary spikes are not exclusively a "Steroids Era" phenomenon, but can be found across the entire history of baseball. Sometimes you can find reasons (getting traded to the Cubs and Wrigley Field), but other times it's simply a random outcome. You get more than your fair share of "juiced" balls (on the extreme ends, two balls that fall within MLB specs/tolerances will have a carry distance difference of 50 feet). You happen to hit the ball for power more than your fair share on days when the wind's blowing out. Etc., etc., etc. Thus, spikes in output need not have an explanation (although maybe there will be one that you can pin down that is systemic, like playing at Wrigley or Coors).

6. We have a study that finds that the average output of users declines. While not sophisticated in its approach, rather than producing smoke in favor of the "Steroids Era" hypothesis, it produces smoke as to why so many people want to assign most if not all power gains in the "Steroids Era" to steroids and other PEDs. Furthermore, the evidence is stacked in favor of finding a steroids effect exactly because of the way that people put the cart in front of the horse. If someone has a spike in power, then they will immediately be under suspicion of juicing and be cited as evidence of juicing. However, given that the physics of it measures the impact in inches and that the statistics of it finds a negative impact, we should expect that there are plenty of folks who experience now power surge. Since no surge is evidenced, no suspicion is cast, and so it's the surviorship bias that Sir Francis Bacon wrote about approximately 400 years.