People are people. Some make good role models and some don’t. No matter their occupation.

“Roger Tobin, the study’s author, calculated that a ‘roided-out size increase in muscle mass (10 percent) would allow a hitter to strike a baseball about 5 percent faster. For you or me, the 4 percent increase in ball speed that our higher bat speed would allow us to generate wouldn’t mean much. Chavez is right, for guys who can’t hit, steroids don’t help. We’d still fly out to center. But for professional baseball players playing in parks that were designed with normal human biological strength constraints in mind, that extra 4 percent means an “increase home run production by anywhere from 50 percent to 100
percent,” according to Tobin.”

What a weak sauce argument. You’re denying the popular opinion and you want me to find a specific scientific study about steroids and home runs, like such a thing would exist in order to hold on to your argument? Really dude? Great, find me hardcore scientific study showing that global warming caused more home runs and we have a deal.

Despite this weak argument, here’s some info about a study:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/09/a-little-more-m/

Hmm…published in some rag called “Wired” with the study itself published in “American Journal of Physics”. Their conclusion: Steroids totally help you hit more home runs.

Boo-ya.

Go ahead and prove me wrong. Find a single study (a scientific investigation of the data, not lazy narrative) on power production in baseball that has been able to link it to PED use….I’ll wait.

You can’t be serious. Steroids have been repeatedly shown and used to increase muscle strength faster and easier than with regular routines. Just because there is not a direct 2 grams of steroids per home run ratio doesn’t mean drugs that greatly help increase muscle mass wouldn’t have a effect on performance. I’m not saying it has the same effect on everybody or that everyone used them in the same way. But the fact that the propagation of steroids use coincided with mass explosion in home run to historic levels is a pretty strong correlation.

I don’t know how you can say with a straight face that global warming is a bigger effect on home runs than steroids. This is positively insane. An average increase in of perhaps 1 or 2 degrees over the course of a decade has more impact that drugs that have help muscles grow faster and stronger?* Take a step back. Take a deep breath. Re-read that statement and please, please tell me that is just a bit of hyperbole and you’re not that crazy.

*(in baseball anyway. Obviously global warming was way huger global impacts less anyone here think I’m spouting oil industry propaganda. For god’s sake, I voted for Nader once).

This statement shows some very serious naivete on your part, Craig. As a fellow father of a young boy(who is now 14) we don’t really get to choose who his role model is going to be. We can mold him…we can guide him…and we can try to push him toward ourselves, doctors, Mother Theresa, Ghandi, etc. However, when he sees Ryan Howard and, yes, Joe Blanton hit a home run IN PERSON at Citizen’s Bank Park, during Game 3 of the 2008 World Series, as a 10 year old, nothing and nobody is going to stop those two players from being Role Models to him. Nothing and nobody is going to tell him that he shouldn’t try to “Be Like Ryan” or “Be Like Joe”. It’s now a running joke that I say Blanton sucks and he says “2008…World Series…Game 3″

So we can TRY as we might to say “Those guys are just ballplayers…they are not people to emulate in your everyday life” But it ain’t gonna happen. Young, impressionable kids spent the 90′s idolizing guys like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa…there wasn’t much a parent could do to talk their kids out of making those guys Role Models. They all end up cheaters and you seem to want to blame the parents for these kids having them as their role models? You mean a 16 year old who idolized Mark McGwire and saw he was taking Andro wouldn’t do the same thing that their idol did? Even if that same 16 year old’s father told him not to take Andro, do you honestly think he is going to listen to his father when his role model is hitting 70+ home runs? Come on man.

Gatorade didn’t make a BAZILLION dollars off the slogan “Be Like Mike” for no reason. Michael Jordan was a role model. So was Tiger Woods. And there’s not much that most parents could do about their kids having those people as Role Models, even if they ended up not being the greatest role models in their private lives.

Global warming has probably had a bigger effect on HR rates than steroids. It might sound like a joke or hyperbole, but considering the effect on temperature on ball flight…it is most likely true, as the last 15 years have been warmer than it was during the previous 100 years of baseball.

Eh, maybe I’m just jaded by all of these cheating cheaters cheating the game I used to love but now hate because of steroids.

Do I believe everyone who takes steroids will turn into a power hitter? NO
Do I believe that steroids have the same effect on everyone? NO

…but

Do I think 36-year-old Barry Bonds would have hit 73 homer runs, or Sosa would have three 60 home run seasons without steroids: Absolutely not.
(I think they both still would have been excellent players though)

Many factors drove the explosion in offense in the 1990s and 2000s. Steroids were a huge part of that, and denying it is a pretty substantial bit of willful ignorance. I never understood the “no basis in science” thing. What science books are you reading? Steroids accelerate muscle growth, which, when exercised properly, vastly increase bat speed which would lead to more powerful swings. It’s not like players used ‘roids because they loved needles and were too timid for heroin.

I’m not saying this as a anti-steroid crusader. I think Bonds, Sosa, Mcgwire, etc should all go to the hall. They played in an environment in which steroids were rampant and there is no real way to know who used, who didn’t, or how much effect steroids had on any individual player. But please don’t start claiming that steroids have no effect on athletic performance, because it’s a pretty insane claim to make.

Even as a kid, I never really looked up to athletes. Maybe it helped that I came of age with the ’77 Yankees. There was so very little about the public image of that team than any kid would want to emulate, aside from winning.

Oh, I don’t know about that entirely. I’d say there could be *plenty* of lessons there. They just may sometimes be about ways NOT to live / act / behave.

Otherwise, my opinion of this book, having read that excerpt, is that if you need athletes to role model your kids, then you might wanna reassess your parenting a bit. Toast, anyone?

I sure hope that no world events happen between now and 2019 that interferes with the bubble I’m constructing.