Steriods

I thought I’d try to weigh in on Barry Bonds and the home run and the steroid controversy. Here’s where I started, a year or so ago, with a look at the career records of Bonds and Hank Aaron.:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/b/bondsba01.shtml (Bonds)
http://www.baseball-reference.com/a/aaronha01.shtml (Aaron)
If you look closely, other than Bonds 72 home run season, their totals aren’t completely out of whack with each other, mainly because Aaron was so consistent for so long. That surprised me. Bonds is better, granted, but not wildly out of line better.
How much, then, do steroids help?
There are a lot of baseball players who have gotten caught with steroids in the last couple of years, and most of them were marginal major leaguers. Steriods didn’t seem to be helping them all that much. So, the questions then are, how would one show that Bonds was, in fact, taking steroids? And, if so, what was the effect? Here are my three methods:
Figure out an average number from somewhere, either the average number of homers Bonds in his first five seasons, and use it to measure how he might have done in his last five. (I used five as a guess. I suppose it could be seven or even 10 if need be.) Other averages to use could include Aaron’s averages for his last five years; an average of the averages of a group of top home run hitters’ last few seasons, prorated by era and ballpark. I doubt this really gets to the bottom of it, though, because it’s really comparing Bonds either to someone other than himself, or to himself as a younger player playing under different conditions. But, it’s a start. My guess on this method id that it would show Bonds with some 600-plus home runs, but probably not enough to beat Aaron. But, if Bonds has beaten Ruth, even if he was 44 or 45, who’s to say he wouldn’t have hung around two or three or even four extra years to take a shot at Aaron? Who’s to say he wouldn’t have passed him eventually?
One would have to be a physicist or kinesiologist to figure this one out, but determine how much steroids increase a person’s strength. Then, apply that increase in force to the torque created by swinging a baseball bat of a certain weight to determine how much farther a ball, hit squarely, might travel. I assume you would have to work from a squarely hit ball, because trying to figure out how it affects a ball that’s not well hit adds other variables. Because a home run has to be hit fairly solidly, we could probably come up with a good measure. My guess is what this would show is that a well-hit ball would travel, at best, 10 or maybe 15 feet more. That’s a complete and utter guess, and maybe the number is measured more in inches. To hit a ball well is a function of not only the strength, but also the swing, the bat, the wind, the humidity and so on. Maybe the effect is really marginal. At any rate, you’d have to check all of his homers against all of the ballparks in which they were hit since the steroid rumors started, and determine by this factor how many home runs he gained.
How about using stop-motion photography to compare bonds in the late-80s and early 90s with Bonds now? The idea would be to see if his swing actually got faster or stayed the same. Using film, one could use certain cues in his wing to determine how it changed over the years. Especially by comparing his swing to other of similar age and accomplishments, where film is available, we might get a measurable idea of how his swing at an advanced age differs from other similar players.

None of these methods strikes me as likely to show Bonds had a huge advantage. The third probably would be the most telling, but even that couldn’t really show how many extra home runs he may have hit. There are too many factors cluttering up the analysis.
As many people point out, Bonds was a Hall of Famer long before the steroid controversy erupted. There’s no question he’s one of the best to ever play the game. The question is how can baseball fans understand his career in the context of the typical career we are used to seeing?
I doubt there will be any other players, juiced or otherwise, who will hit 72 home runs in his late 30s. There are a lot of people saying Alex Rodriguez may pass Bonds eventually. It’s possible, but he’d have to build up a huge pad of home runs because of Bonds’ late surge.