PEDs helped me and the guys I played with. We were young and stupid and we weren’t even close to MLB, but I got stronger really fast, hit the ball harder, and felt worlds better playing several games close together. I can’t imagine it’s any different for anyone else.

That said, A-Rod has to know by now that when he comes back he’s gonna be overwhelmed with booing for the rest of his career because people at this point suspect that he’s been using PEDs for far longer than he already admitted, and the circumstantial evidence is often too good for the public. If he’s willing to deal with that, I’ll give him more credit than I give him now.

Maybe just getting older but I just want to enjoy a sunny Saturday afternoon game, wicked sliders, diving ShortStops (pasta!) and Vin Scully soliloquies. The rest is just background noise.

Fans want to see a ball crushed 800 feet, so why not let Science help out? It is their bodies, and if they want to get rich and live for now, and get huge and not care about the side-effects, let them.

I think that would hurt baseball in the long run. It puts pressure on all the other players to juice, too, even if maybe they’d rather not. And if baseball players start dying young, like pro wrestlers, or get cancer like Lance Armstrong…parents are going to start thinking twice about letting their kids play baseball.

That said, I don’t think the Yanks can void his deal. Also, if he were knocking in 50 HR’s a year, nobody would talk of voiding his deal, if they found out he was juicing.

HGH hasn’t been tested in the past and that was what Andy took too. Football players will be tested for it next year.

I have said it before 1/2 joking, but I think the sports world will never be able to keep up with Science in cheating. The tests might get better, and years from now catch more peopel the way they caught Lance, but maybe we should just allow them to be drug crazed behemoths.

Fans want to see a ball crushed 800 feet, so why not let Science help out? It is their bodies, and if they want to get rich and live for now, and get huge and not care about the side-effects, let them.

Some of the Science from this could actually benefit society. A doctor working to help Bartolo Colon, could help Joe Shmoe too.

One thing I found interesting was what he said about HGH improving his vision so much he no longer needed glasses. Seems like that would be a big advantage to a hitter, even if it didn’t make him any stronger or faster.

On the factual side, however, Jay Jaffe wrote a fantastic piece for BP’s “Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers”, which came out in late 2011 I think? Jay’s piece did, indeed, take into account all the various factors that led to the offensive explosion of the late 90s-early 00s, and found that if it was anything, it certainly wasn’t the drugs. Like with Bradbury’s work above, I found it to be a quite compelling argument, but you may disagree.

“but you can look at individual players’ performance, their bodies, and hell, just ASK them” Yes, but the first two tell us nothing – strange performance spikes are common in baseball history*, and of course your body changes (and parts get bigger) as you age from your 20s to your 30s – and all the last one does is tell us who used. It does not tell us how or if the use affected the players’ performance. Like you said, that’s unknowable.

The phrase PED was, I think, born out of the need to have a shorthand name that wasn’t the complex chemical names for some of the compounds. That doesn’t mean those chemicals are necessarily performance-enhancing; labels and shorthand are not always right. If we really want to push on the term, it falls apart; what kind of performance do PEDs enhance? How does that performance help or not help a baseball player? Again, we don’t know.

*FYI – before Barry Bonds, the career leader in number of home runs hit during age-35 to age-38 seasons was . . . Hank Aaron.

But, his home run chase incentives were based upon a “clean” player assaulting the tainted Barry Bonds record. If he’s dirty, then that chase no longer has any meaning. So can that be voided?

[6] ITA. I can believe that people who cheat can decide to stop, but if the reason that they stop is because they got caught, then they likely will cheat again.

And of course the ballparks are smaller, etc. I don’t know if anyone has ever or will ever be able to do a study bringing all these different factors together in the right admixture (ahem) but you can look at individual players’ performance, their bodies, and hell, just ASK them. “Why did you take PEDs? Because it did NOTHING for you?” Of course not; they’re called Performance Enhancing Drugs for a reason. This isn’t witchcraft of magic, for chrissakes.

And even if it is a case of baseball superstition in a quasi-scientific veneer, THE PLAYERS are still intending to illegally get a leg up. Their intention is still to cheat.