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So whats an asterisk worth anyway? (great article about Afraud and roids in general)
IchiroDeported
Posts: 1,610 ✭
in Sports Talk
You're probably still reeling from the news that a shortstop who hit 57 home runs in one season at the peak of the Steroid Era was -- say it ain't so -- on the juice.
What a shocking revelation.
Having had the benefit of watching Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens suffer the denial twist, Mark McGwire go the "on advice of counsel" route and Andy Pettitte take the "I'm sorry" high road, Alex Rodriguez made the snap decision to come clean.
He admitted using performance-enhancing drugs, though he couldn't remember which ones (Sports Illustrated reported it was Primobolan and testosterone), from 2001 to 2003 with the Texas Rangers. The positive test occurred at a time when Major League Baseball was merely trying to determine if it needed further testing -- as if the 73 home runs that behemoth in San Francisco hit in 2001 wasn't evidence enough -- and there can be no sanctions because steroid use was not proscribed by MLB until 2004.
So nothing will happen to Rodriguez, save the judgment we render on him. He was supposed to be The One, the clean freak of nature who could replace the freak of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. Now that's gone.
He's just another slugger with juked stats in the Asterisk Era.
In 1961 Roger Maris got the scarlet asterisk from Commissioner Ford Frick, but everyone knew why. The '61 season was eight games longer than the 1927 season in which Babe Ruth set the record of 60. So even if the asterisk was somewhat unfair to Maris, it came with a simple explanation.
But what to do with 73*? Or 762*? Or 805*, should A-Rod end up there? Is there a way we can define these asterisks beyond the snarky, "we're onto you" self-righteousness they signal?
Hall of Fame voters have spoken pretty emphatically on this issue. If you're dirty, there's no place for you in Cooperstown. But that doesn't help us with this pile of dizzying numbers.
Beyond booing A-Rod lustily -- an already regular occurrence in Seattle, Arlington and Boston (and New York in October) -- baseball fans need further recourse. We need perspective. The way economists can adjust for inflation to tell you just how little your 2009 dollar is worth, we need to figure out the value of the home run in the Steroid Era.
By crunching the numbers of the top 10 home run leaders in each league for the 43 seasons preceding the Steroid Era (1993-2003) and the numbers for the top sluggers during the Chicks Dig the Long Ball Boom, I've determined that a Steroid Era homer, assuming it was hit by a juicer, is worth .75 of a legit dinger.
While pinpointing the moment a player starting sticking himself with a needle can be tricky, it's pretty easy to figure out when steroid use ramped up across baseball.
In the 1950s, averaging the top 10 home run hitters for each season in both leagues produced an average of 30.9 home runs per year.
In the '60s, even with expansion, that number nosed up only slightly, to 32.6.
In the '70s. the top 10 home run hitters for each season in each league averaged 30.7 home runs a year.
In the '80s (extrapolating the strike season of 1981 to a 162-game schedule) that number held remarkably steady at 31.1.
So for 40 years in Major League Baseball the home run leaderboard deviated very little. In each decade the 200 players that made up the two leagues' top 10 for each of the 10 seasons in the period averaged between 30.9 home runs and 32.6 home runs.
That form held for the first three years of the 1990s as the top 10 homer hitters in each league averaged 31.5 home runs a season.
So taking the 860 individual seasons that produced 43 top 10s in each league, the average slugger in the top 10 in his league between 1950 and 1992 hit 31.3 home runs.
But something began happening in 1993. The top 10 home run hitters in the American League hit 367 home runs and the top 10 in the NL smacked 363 for an average among those 20 sluggers of 36.5.
The jump in 1994 was even more obvious, but that season's strike obscured a historic home run season as both leagues' top 10 leaders were on pace to hit well over 400 home runs.
From 1993 through 2003 -- a period that encompasses A-Rod's admission of use -- the yearly top 10 home run hitters from both leagues (accounting for the shortened '94 and '95 seasons) averaged 41.7 homers a season.
During this period we fell all over ourselves to provide alibis for the players that would make the stats legit. It was expansion, particularly Coors Field. It was lousy pitching stretched too thin. The new parks were bandboxes. The ball was juiced. We had reporters flying to Central American factories where the baseballs were made to find an answer other than steroids.
But it's all clear now.
With the advent of testing and penalties in 2004, those ridiculous numbers have begun going down. In the last two seasons, the average has dipped to 35.7 (apparently HGH can only do so much). And last year not a single player in the American League hit 40 home runs.
Using 1993-2003 as the Steroid Era gives us a fairly simple calculation with which to weigh the cheats. The best sluggers in the majors for 43 seasons averaged 75 percent as many home runs as the best sluggers in the Steroid Era.
So there we have a definition for our asterisks.
If a player used steroids -- as Alex Rodriguez admits he did -- you can multiply his Steroid Era totals by .75 (or just lop off a quarter) to yield an honest result.
For A-Rod, that would mean subtracting 95 of the 381 home runs he hit during the Steroid Era, a penalty that would still leave him with the impressive career total of 458 home runs, but would make his assault on 755 and 762 less inevitable. (Juicers will not get the benefit under this system of prorating their stats based merely on the years they admit doing roids. The adjustment will be applied to every season they played in the era.)
Bonds hit 482 home runs in the Steroid Era so he'll lose 121 home runs, leaving him with a career total of 641, good for fourth place all time, behind Willie Mays (660), Babe Ruth (714) and rightful home run king Hank Aaron (755). Now if we can only purge the images of that nauseating pursuit and passing of The Hammer in 2007.
With all the cheats on the all-time home run leaderboard, it might be easier to just put an asterisk next to Hank Aaron's 755* with this notation:
* Aaron was not on steroids.
Before steroids were outlawed in baseball the only reasons a player might choose not to do them -- while his peers blasted off into the stratosphere -- would be a strong personal morality or the fear of unhealthy side effects.
If his assignations with strippers and pop superstars are any indication, A-Roid probably didn't have a huge problem with the morality part. As to the health concerns, there's just no way to convince an immortal-feeling 20-something that this drug that will make him feel even more immortal might be hurting him.
Shrinking genitalia and bacne apparently aren't much of a deterrent when your stats are fully engorged.
So another hero has fallen. A-Roid. A-Fraud. He was 75 percent of the man we thought he was.
------------------
my favorite part:
With all the cheats on the all-time home run leaderboard, it might be easier to just put an asterisk next to Hank Aaron's 755* with this notation:
* Aaron was not on steroids.
What a shocking revelation.
Having had the benefit of watching Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens suffer the denial twist, Mark McGwire go the "on advice of counsel" route and Andy Pettitte take the "I'm sorry" high road, Alex Rodriguez made the snap decision to come clean.
He admitted using performance-enhancing drugs, though he couldn't remember which ones (Sports Illustrated reported it was Primobolan and testosterone), from 2001 to 2003 with the Texas Rangers. The positive test occurred at a time when Major League Baseball was merely trying to determine if it needed further testing -- as if the 73 home runs that behemoth in San Francisco hit in 2001 wasn't evidence enough -- and there can be no sanctions because steroid use was not proscribed by MLB until 2004.
So nothing will happen to Rodriguez, save the judgment we render on him. He was supposed to be The One, the clean freak of nature who could replace the freak of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. Now that's gone.
He's just another slugger with juked stats in the Asterisk Era.
In 1961 Roger Maris got the scarlet asterisk from Commissioner Ford Frick, but everyone knew why. The '61 season was eight games longer than the 1927 season in which Babe Ruth set the record of 60. So even if the asterisk was somewhat unfair to Maris, it came with a simple explanation.
But what to do with 73*? Or 762*? Or 805*, should A-Rod end up there? Is there a way we can define these asterisks beyond the snarky, "we're onto you" self-righteousness they signal?
Hall of Fame voters have spoken pretty emphatically on this issue. If you're dirty, there's no place for you in Cooperstown. But that doesn't help us with this pile of dizzying numbers.
Beyond booing A-Rod lustily -- an already regular occurrence in Seattle, Arlington and Boston (and New York in October) -- baseball fans need further recourse. We need perspective. The way economists can adjust for inflation to tell you just how little your 2009 dollar is worth, we need to figure out the value of the home run in the Steroid Era.
By crunching the numbers of the top 10 home run leaders in each league for the 43 seasons preceding the Steroid Era (1993-2003) and the numbers for the top sluggers during the Chicks Dig the Long Ball Boom, I've determined that a Steroid Era homer, assuming it was hit by a juicer, is worth .75 of a legit dinger.
While pinpointing the moment a player starting sticking himself with a needle can be tricky, it's pretty easy to figure out when steroid use ramped up across baseball.
In the 1950s, averaging the top 10 home run hitters for each season in both leagues produced an average of 30.9 home runs per year.
In the '60s, even with expansion, that number nosed up only slightly, to 32.6.
In the '70s. the top 10 home run hitters for each season in each league averaged 30.7 home runs a year.
In the '80s (extrapolating the strike season of 1981 to a 162-game schedule) that number held remarkably steady at 31.1.
So for 40 years in Major League Baseball the home run leaderboard deviated very little. In each decade the 200 players that made up the two leagues' top 10 for each of the 10 seasons in the period averaged between 30.9 home runs and 32.6 home runs.
That form held for the first three years of the 1990s as the top 10 homer hitters in each league averaged 31.5 home runs a season.
So taking the 860 individual seasons that produced 43 top 10s in each league, the average slugger in the top 10 in his league between 1950 and 1992 hit 31.3 home runs.
But something began happening in 1993. The top 10 home run hitters in the American League hit 367 home runs and the top 10 in the NL smacked 363 for an average among those 20 sluggers of 36.5.
The jump in 1994 was even more obvious, but that season's strike obscured a historic home run season as both leagues' top 10 leaders were on pace to hit well over 400 home runs.
From 1993 through 2003 -- a period that encompasses A-Rod's admission of use -- the yearly top 10 home run hitters from both leagues (accounting for the shortened '94 and '95 seasons) averaged 41.7 homers a season.
During this period we fell all over ourselves to provide alibis for the players that would make the stats legit. It was expansion, particularly Coors Field. It was lousy pitching stretched too thin. The new parks were bandboxes. The ball was juiced. We had reporters flying to Central American factories where the baseballs were made to find an answer other than steroids.
But it's all clear now.
With the advent of testing and penalties in 2004, those ridiculous numbers have begun going down. In the last two seasons, the average has dipped to 35.7 (apparently HGH can only do so much). And last year not a single player in the American League hit 40 home runs.
Using 1993-2003 as the Steroid Era gives us a fairly simple calculation with which to weigh the cheats. The best sluggers in the majors for 43 seasons averaged 75 percent as many home runs as the best sluggers in the Steroid Era.
So there we have a definition for our asterisks.
If a player used steroids -- as Alex Rodriguez admits he did -- you can multiply his Steroid Era totals by .75 (or just lop off a quarter) to yield an honest result.
For A-Rod, that would mean subtracting 95 of the 381 home runs he hit during the Steroid Era, a penalty that would still leave him with the impressive career total of 458 home runs, but would make his assault on 755 and 762 less inevitable. (Juicers will not get the benefit under this system of prorating their stats based merely on the years they admit doing roids. The adjustment will be applied to every season they played in the era.)
Bonds hit 482 home runs in the Steroid Era so he'll lose 121 home runs, leaving him with a career total of 641, good for fourth place all time, behind Willie Mays (660), Babe Ruth (714) and rightful home run king Hank Aaron (755). Now if we can only purge the images of that nauseating pursuit and passing of The Hammer in 2007.
With all the cheats on the all-time home run leaderboard, it might be easier to just put an asterisk next to Hank Aaron's 755* with this notation:
* Aaron was not on steroids.
Before steroids were outlawed in baseball the only reasons a player might choose not to do them -- while his peers blasted off into the stratosphere -- would be a strong personal morality or the fear of unhealthy side effects.
If his assignations with strippers and pop superstars are any indication, A-Roid probably didn't have a huge problem with the morality part. As to the health concerns, there's just no way to convince an immortal-feeling 20-something that this drug that will make him feel even more immortal might be hurting him.
Shrinking genitalia and bacne apparently aren't much of a deterrent when your stats are fully engorged.
So another hero has fallen. A-Roid. A-Fraud. He was 75 percent of the man we thought he was.
------------------
my favorite part:
With all the cheats on the all-time home run leaderboard, it might be easier to just put an asterisk next to Hank Aaron's 755* with this notation:
* Aaron was not on steroids.
0
Comments
<< <i> because the best players in today's game have to compete (on average) against much better players than those which the best players in prior eras had to face. This fact needs to be controlled for before we can try to determine the inflationary value that steroid use has had on HR production. >>
Boo did you mean to say that "the best players today have to compete on average against much worse players than those which the best players in prior eras had to face."? Otherwise your argument would be that the current players average HRs should be lower than those of previous eras not higher.
<< <i>
<< <i> because the best players in today's game have to compete (on average) against much better players than those which the best players in prior eras had to face. This fact needs to be controlled for before we can try to determine the inflationary value that steroid use has had on HR production. >>
Boo did you mean to say that "the best players today have to compete on average against much worse players than those which the best players in prior eras had to face."? Otherwise your argument would be that the current players average HRs should be lower than those of previous eras not higher. >>
Holding all other factors constant, today's elite players (e.g., the top 5% of the league) should have lower HR totals (and lower totals in just about every other statistical category) then the elite players of the past. As such, the effect which steroids have had on the game is probably much, much greater then an analysis of this sort would suggest.
Or at least that's the way I see it. Am I missing something?
If the argument is that players are so much better today than in the lets say 60s or 70's players that even the bottom 5 guys on teams like the Pirates current roster are superior to the players when the league was more contracted. I don't know how to prove that off the top of my head. It makes sense the game evolves, players evolve etc. but man there are alot of factors you would have to correct for to prove it out.
In conjecture I have heard alot of grumbles by players of lets say 60s era about how they didn't get to face alot of crappy pitchers like those thrown out there today and a ERA of 4.00+ was a ticket to the minors for a starter. After seeing alot of the bottom of the Pirates pitchers roster last year (Manzanillo oh my lord) I would agree that maybe hitters are better today but the lower rung pitchers are much worse.
It's a little weird looking at the back of players cards and not seeing one pitcher on a whole team with an ERA above 4.20. Let alone the 5s and 6s you see today. Is that due to the batters being better? It is an interesting argument on both sides.
I think its odd how on the Mike & Mike show this morning they were talking about why didn't the clean players come forward sooner (like Moyer, Pappi and Oswalt have done recently)? Well it is a boys club and if you ratted out a Yankee I am sure there were guys in your own club house doing it too. Also who wants to be the snitch? Also MLB and the Union really didn't want to pull back the curtain and have everyone see a needle as the ringleader of the HR circus.
I think alot of players who were cheated out of Bonuses (Mike Greenwell for one) for awards or didn't make rosters due to the cheating should really, really be mad at their own union.
<< <i>I guess I would see it that the talent is diluted due to the fact that there are more MLB jobs where in the past when say there was like 16 teams the roster spots were much harder to make.
If the argument is that players are so much better today than in the lets say 60s or 70's players that even the bottom 5 guys on teams like the Pirates current roster are superior to the players when the league was more contracted. I don't know how to prove that off the top of my head. It makes sense the game evolves, players evolve etc. but man there are alot of factors you would have to correct for to prove it out.
In conjecture I have heard alot of grumbles by players of lets say 60s era about how they didn't get to face alot of crappy pitchers like those thrown out there today and a ERA of 4.00+ was a ticket to the minors for a starter. After seeing alot of the bottom of the Pirates pitchers roster last year (Manzanillo oh my lord) I would agree that maybe hitters are better today but the lower rung pitchers are much worse.
It's a little weird looking at the back of players cards and not seeing one pitcher on a whole team with an ERA above 4.20. Let alone the 5s and 6s you see today. Is that due to the batters being better? It is an interesting argument on both sides. >>
Yeah, you'd have to weigh the fact that there are more job openings nowadays into the analysis. But as the pool of potential players expands the qualitative difference between an average player and an extraordinary player should be growing smaller, which means crazy stuff like-- Oh, I don't know, say 57 HRs by a shortstop, or 71 HR's in a season by a 40 yr. old man-- should not be occuring (or, to be more precise, probably should not be occuring).
<< <i>No matter how you slice and dice it the drug factor definately killed the record books and was a bigger deal than was thought.
I think its odd how on the Mike & Mike show this morning they were talking about why didn't the clean players come forward sooner (like Moyer, Pappi and Oswalt have done recently)? Well it is a boys club and if you ratted out a Yankee I am sure there were guys in your own club house doing it too. Also who wants to be the snitch? Also MLB and the Union really didn't want to pull back the curtain and have everyone see a needle as the ringleader of the HR circus.
I think alot of players who were cheated out of Bonuses (Mike Greenwell for one) for awards or didn't make rosters due to the cheating should really, really be mad at their own union. >>
I think it's premature to assume that Oswalt, Moyer, Ortiz, or whomever is clean. Until MLB tests for HGH all you have is a guys' word-- and as we've seen, a MLB player's word isn't worth spit when it comes to the issue of PED's.