Irish Boy wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
Here's the million dollar question- and I suspect it might be a little too early to tell for certain by examining the numbers. Did MLB change back to a less lively ball for purposes of convincing the fans that the "steroid era" had ended, with steroid usage being relatively incidental the entire time?
Here's where I stand on steroids:
The main claim of steroids opponents is that they make you unnaturally strong. But the guys who were juicing simply weren't *that* strong. Mark McGwire benched ~300 pounds. That's strong for a regular dude. But give me an ordinary person with decent frame, even with no weight training, and I can get them benching 300 pounds in two years. Granted, most of the strength comes from leg stuff, but from what I can tell baseball players don't squat all that heavy anyway.
These guys who were using steroids had an easier time of getting to OK results because of enhanced recovery. They also got big because of hypertrophy in training. Big does not equal strong. Bodybuilders are surprisingly weak, for example.
If not strength, what is it the steroids would have been doing? Is there some other, more baseball-specific skill that steroids impart? If so, what? I've never heard the claim that steroids were good for anything but raw strength. But if that's true, why aren't the players today
who are every bit as strong as the players ten years ago hitting 60+ homeruns? Robinson Cano claims he can bench 500 pounds, and while I really doubt that, he's a strong dude. And whether he's on steroids or not he's not breaking the home run record.
It's also not an answer just to say baseball players thought the steroids were working so they must work. Baseball players thinking corking a bat makes it go further, so much so that MLB had to make this illegal even though it has been shown repeatedly that it is just a placebo effect.
There's got to be something else to the story. Considering that very very minor variations in the ball have caused drastic changes in power and scoring in the past, it wouldn't surprise me whether that was true here also. I'm not a conspiracy theorist by nature but it wouldn't amaze me if MLB made the ball just oh-so-slightly springier after the lockout.
I disagree on the claim that steroids do not impart power. Steroids cayuse a massive influx of water into a muscle, which imparts hydraulic strength. Like any hydraulic system, an overload of solvent would eventually cause such an over-distension of the mechanical parts such that you would see a restriction of movement of the system - a plateau, if you will.
Having more water = having more weight. and we have already established that force = ma. Also, when your base is more sturdy, you can naturally infer that contact with a baseball would be more solid - think of the phrase "firing a rocket from a canoe" to visualize the reverse of the phenomenon that I am highlighting in this sentence. When you have the hydraulic pressure supplying added power, you can lift more (up to a plateau, again), such that you will signal the body to create new muscle fiber (actual fibrile mass).
Another simple observation would be that with your new hydraulic power, you could now employ a heavier weapon (bat), which would further add mass to your force equation.
Now, this all assumes that you are not sacrificing acceleration in this process, and I theorize that acceleration would increase to a plateau point as well, with too much bulk thereby restricting it.
Therefore, based only on the above, and having slogged through the beginning of JORR's article, I would conclude that both factors played a part in the power explosion we just witnessed, but that personal PED-induced enhancement caused certain individual players to compile statistics that set them apart from most of their peers during this period.
That's a whole lot of junk science. But even if it weren't, you kind of just said "but steroids DO make you stronger, and here's how." I'm sure they do. They assist in recovery. They also help in muscle water retention, which is the main reason bodybuilders use them. But what I'm saying is take two people that are equal strength. The steroids person might have an easier time getting there--in fact I'm sure that's true--but these 90s baseball players weren't working at the far right end of the bell curve of strength. A 300 pound bench press by a 225 (250?) pound man is entirely ordinary. An ordinary guy can easy aspire to be as strong as Mark McGuire in a couple of years.
As for HGH and eyesight, 1.) lasik helps eyesight even more, I'd imagine, and 2.) improved eyesight is not the motivation for banning HGH so far as I can tell.
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