But let’s digress into actual facts. I present you your stick figure:
This is Frank Thomas, in 1987, at the age of 19:
http://forums.collectors.com/messageview.cfm?catid=11&threadid=864561

Andro is STILL legal in Canada, it’s in every GNC and supplement store. Come on up and get some acme and muscles. LOL. Hey Jose is that you or your brother ??

It just happens to some people. It’s probably more likely on a a large person who is also a Catcher, wearing a chest protector and baseball jersey for half of the year – most of which fall on the hottest days and nights of the year.

But that would just be common sense and that’s too much to expect from the self-loathing opportunistic media cynics.

Androstenedione is a biologically steroid, but back then it was legally classified as a nutritional supplement.

Seriously, though, what is your point? Do you believe that Frank Thomas came out of the womb looking like Hercules? Because unless that’s what you believe, then he had to have bulked up at some point. When exactly do you think that was? Because my guess is that it’s at the same time as Bagwell did; to wit, in his early 20s.

Then, check out the cabbage borscht, smoked meat sandwiches, maple smoked meat and bacon donut holes and Boylan’s diet cream soda at Caplansy’s Deli on College Street in Toronto, two blocks east of Bathurst. All your misconceptions about our neighbor to the frozen north will be vanquished.

just because they failed to make it illegal doesn’t make it ok to inject yourself with drugs.

I know in our current climate this is a major faux pas, but if you are going to rail against something, shouldn’t you at least know wtf you are talking about? Andro isn’t taken via an injection. It’s taken as a pill, and was available at any GNC during McGwire’s heyday. Do you understand that? It was freely available for anyone to purchase.

Everyone talks about performance enhancing from a hitters standpoint, but those same hitters had to face guys who may or may not have been taking exactly the same meds. Trying to hit a ball coming at 90+mph from 60’6″ away with a 34oz piece of lumber may be one of the hardest feats in sports, and while PED’s may help the ball travel farther, they won’t help at all if a hitter doesn’t have the timing and hand/eye coordination to make good contact. I don’t advocate cheating by any stretch of the imagination. But if the on the field numbers measure up, unless someone is proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt…you have to put them in.

God, if only he were a bit bigger and not a stick, just maybe then, he’d be a hall of famer.

He even admitted it. Read here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/07/sammy-sosas-skin-photos-p_n_349602.html

Easy on the angry pills today, buddy, kay? You gotta go vote and you don’t wanna be detained for erratic behaviour again.

Everyone gives a pass to guys like Griffey and Jeter because they are the “good guys” in baseball. I’m not accusing those guys in particular of using, but I don’t think they should also automatically assumed to be innocent. It’s just arbitrary.

I had a Bagwell-Thomas argument of this sort, in which the other party was absolutely convinced that Frank Thomas was clean and Jeff Bagwell wasn’t. I pointed out that their career numbers are eerily similar, and he insisted that was only because Bagwell put up huge numbers in a “small handful” of steroid-fueled seasons. So I showed that the two men’s HR/SLG/OPS numbers season-by-season were actually very similar, with each having a 10-year-run of very good (but not freakish) seasons.) He said that may be, but Bagwell grew “mysteriously” in his early 20s while Thomas was “always” strong. So I presented a picture of Thomas at age 19, looking like a stick figure. Having been refuted three times in a row, he refused to provide any more arguments for his position, and said that it didn’t matter what the evidence showed, that he “just knew.” Awesome–hard to argue with that!