We don’t know that Ozzie & Jose took the same doses, worked out the same hours in the same style, ate the same, treated their eyes the same. Since when do identical twins have identical skill sets anyway? I went to music school with identical twins. They were both good musicians, but one couldn’t play bass and the other couldn’t play sax. Maybe Ozzie C. would have been a great boxer.

Goes to show that there is more to this thing called life than just DNA and Environment. Ozzie and Jose Canseco are identical twins. Both look alike and have the same build. Presumably they both had the same upbringing — both were groomed for baseball. Yet, Ozzie never hit a MLB homer. He has the same DNA as the guy who hit 462 homers and stole 200 bases in 17 seasons.

But I guess my gripe is that every time some player does something extraordinary, we assume that it is steroids. You probably have seen all the articles talking about bulging biceps and head sizes when neither contribute to home run production. And all of it is mostly some uneducated hack sports writer taking a break from his “send Joba to the bullpen” analysis to write about something he thinks he sees.

We live in a steroid era. True. But we also live in a small baseball park era. And in a year-round conditioning era. And in the juiced ball era. Maybe those explain things better?

Barry Bonds could already hit.
Ozzie Canseco could not.
PEDs weren’t going to magically change O. Canseco into someone who could consistently put fat part of bat on ball.

Statistical analysis is not the end answer for every question. It’s merely a tool. I believe that N. Silver is a brilliant statistician, but he has no records of who was using, what substances were used, how much, for how long, etc. so his findings don’t really prove much on this question.

First, of course Bonds did PEDs. That is documented in gov’t files that eventually became “Book of Shadows” so there is no doubting it.

Or maybe Barry is just a freak of nature? Maybe Barry’s renewed devotion to physical fitness (while in SF) contributed to his improved performance? Maybe he is an anomaly? Ruth was more of an outlier when he hit more homers than any TEAM.

Or maybe, as you say, PEDs affected Barry differently than others. If you want to say that on the average there is no advantage to PEDs but for some people it really packs a wallop. Then I need a reason why Barry benefits from PED and training when Ozzie Canseco doesn’t benefit from PED and training. The anomaly explanation is more believable to me than “PEDs helped Barry more than other people” theory.

BTW, Nate Silver did look for an effect of PEDs on baseball performance in Baseball Prospectus and found nothing.

McGwire is an interesting example. He hit like 49 HRs his rookie year, skinny as a rail, but soon after bulked up big time. I was living in San Francisco, and everyone baseball fan in the Bay Area suspected the Bash Bros. were on the juice. McGwire missed a LOT of time in the early & mid 90s with ankle and foot injuries. I always theorized that his bulked up body was too big for his lower extremities to support. Who knows he might have been a better player without PEDs, y’ never know.

- What if they could be detrimental if used improperly? Then you’d expect many players numbers to go down as well.

Fair enough, that’s entirely consistent with the evidence.
I don’t say the evidence can rule out all possible scenarios in which PEDs are actually effective. If someone has some evidence that there’s a particularly good way to use them and other ways are detrimental, I’ll buy that.

I only picked decades because they line up more or less with A-Rod’s career. You are correct–it is arbitrary, and points out just how meaningless records really are unless you can reasonably compare across a wider time frame.

As for things applying across generations, it entirely depends on one’s generation. Sure, for 34 years (1927 to 1961), 60 was the all-time single-season home run record. And then for 37 years (1961 to 1998), it was 61. But note that those alive in the teens and 20s saw it go from 29 to 59 – more than double! – in just two years.

And that’s just home runs. The longevity of a record is a nice thing, but not the only thing.

Glass houses are indeed, an issue here, with some 90+ names left on that one list.

However, my point wasn’t that the league was weaker without Afrcian-American participation, but rather different due to a choice made by many within the game, which created an impact on the numbers we can’t ever know. If Satchel Paige was allowed to play in the majors in the 1930s, its entirely possible he may have faced Babe Ruth, instead of a white-skinned pitcher who actually did. Ruth might have hit 705 career home runs as a result – or he might have hit 720. Maybe the leagues would have expanded earlier, with more players to choose from – we know expansion tends to muck numbers up. Etc.

Context matters, and context is ever-present when it comes to the numbers.

What’s significant is age and arc:
Ruth peaked at 32, (60 HR) then sustained slightly lower in the first half of his 30s (46 to 54 HR) then moved steadily downward from age 37 on.

Bonds had hit more than 45 HR only once until age 35 when he went 49, 73, 46, 45, 45 to get to age 39, was injured for a year, then hit 26 & 28 in his early 40s at age that Ruth was retired. He was still among the most feared hitters in baseball, but was most likely blackballed/driven from the game.

markedly different arcs.

I have no problem accepting numbers in context, so long as we also choose to ignore all-time records (whose relevance matters only if we compare achievements across eras rather than only within a given era). Fine. Then let us not celebrate, say, A-Rod’s pursuit of the all-time HR record–he may merely end up as the 1990s-2000s HR leader. Let us not marvel at Ichiro’s all-time single season hit record, and so on.

Integrity isn’t saying “you cheated more so we’re better,” it’s saying “we all screwed up, let’s forgive, repent, and move on.”

I disagree with your formulation of integrity, which requires forgiveness. But in any case, I have yet to see repenting on anyone’s part–at least not plausible repentance. Finally, from what I have been reading over the last year or two, the prevailing attitude of most fans is that no one “screwed up.”

My position is an extrapolation from what I read on these threads in other sports forums. Perhaps I overstate the case, but by and large I stand by what I said. The beauty of the PED era is that for those who are scandalized (like me), the impossibility of proving who did what when casts a shadow on everyone, while for those who refuse to be scandalized, the ambiguities and gaps in the evidence provide infinite cover.

In a nutshell, that’s why I don’t care about PED use: no number is pure, everything is subject to context.

But even if we accept that the league was significantly weaker, at least all lily white players were competing against the same competition more or less. This is far different from the PED era when some subset of players–we don’t know who or how many–took some amount of PEDs which had some effect (how much we don’t know).

And this era seems to correspond to a period when offensive records were blown out of the water.