Your characterization of me is irrelevant.

I responded to your original comments, because I believed you raised a good point, i.e., is there a distinction to be made between the players of decades ago who used less powerful stimulants to give themselves an advantage, and their modern counterparts who use more technically exotic concoctions to do the same thing, i.e., give them an edge.

Your comments indicate that you believe that the Hank Aaron generation should get a pass, because of the simplicity of their act, while on the other hand you believe that the modern offender’s act is more egregious because it involved a prolonged process.

You wrote: “Popping a greenie for a pick-me-up is a little different than enlisting a team of chemists and doctors to monitor the levels of nutrients, hormones and chemicals in your blood, and administer chemical treatments to adjust them to the appropriate levels to gain the maximum returns based on where you are in the chemical treatment cycle that said chemists and doctors have prepared for you.” I’m not trying to paint you into a corner; I’m trying to get you to agree that you wrote these words, because you were thinking them, and if you were thinking them, then I’d like to discuss your thinking with you. Now, what is it about that concept that you find so strange?

I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but what I find strange, is that you shared you thoughts with a few dozen people, and out of the few dozen people who read your commentary, six people responded with comments of their own, and of those six, you only responded to me. Now if your comments did not have merit, you would have received no responses, and if my comments did not have merit, then you would have ignored them completely, clearly you had a dog in this fight.

FYI: I didn’t notice the age of the page, and frankly, it’s unimportant to me; it’s the discussion that I find interesting.

Lastly, I don’t thumb the discussions I’m involved in. I leave that to cur and his crowd, they’re into the popularity thing.

BTW: I’m not little.

Of course not… mainly because amphetamines are instantaneous, and steroids require actually working out. Steroids don’t improve your focus or give you more energy, they just help you build muscle. Kind of like food.

So you’re right, steroids don’t come close to comparing with the benefits that amphetamines provide a hitter.

I think I’ve said all I really have to say about the subject. You’re attempts to paint me in to a corner here are, well, strange to me.

I stand by my assertion that “essentially the same thing,” is a reductionist, over-simplification. The semantics are now freely yours to circle and calculate and redistribute as you will. I haven’t really got a dog in this fight.

And for what it’s worth, this thread is two days old, and three pages back now. You and I are the only ones viewing it. The up-thumbing of your own comments (and down-thumbing of mine) is poor form, and, well, strange to me.

You wrote the words; you should at least have the courage to own them.

You wrote: ”I don’t go to great lengths.” Really? The following is approximately 90% of your original post, i.e., the one I originally responded to: “Popping a greenie for a pick-me-up is a little different than enlisting a team of chemists and doctors to monitor the levels of nutrients, hormones and chemicals in your blood, and administer chemical treatments to adjust them to the appropriate levels to gain the maximum returns based on where you are in the chemical treatment cycle that said chemists and doctors have prepared for you. […] That said, substantial differences exist, in terms of “intent” between amphetamine use and 1980′s Jose Canseco style locker room butt syringing, and again between those and the organized, professional cheating that Balco (and labs like them that we may not even know about) provided to players in the 90′s and 00s (and presumably offer still today.)” If using approximately 90% of your comments is not going to great lengths to make a point, then you either don’t know what going to great lengths is, or you’ll go to any length to obfuscate your own behavior.

Your above comments also shows that you are condemning by comparison, the players who are implicated as participants in the “professional cheating that Balco (and labs like them that we may not even know about) provided to players in the 90′s and 00s”, as opposed to the player who used amphetamines. In essence, you are claiming that amphetamine use is acceptable, and “Jose Canseco style locker room butt syringing”, is not acceptable.

If you “accept that nuance matters in this world”, then you must also recognize the value of the obvious.

Now don’t put words in my mouth, friend.

I don’t go to great lengths and I don’t “condemn” anybody. If you’re looking for a stand-in for “Anti-Steroid Zealot #4,” I ain’t him.

I’m commenting only the sophistication of the process, the lengths gone to achieve the desired effect, and the lengths gone to to deceive.

If Aaron thought he was gaining some chemical advantage, he certainly could have done much more, even in his day, than pop just pop a greenie in a day-game-after-a-night-game situation. Bonds left no stone unturned.

All we know Aaron to have done is pop greenies, and we know this only because he said so himself.

Nowhere have I condemned anyone or claimed Bonds to be some bad guy and Aaron to be the knight in shining armor. I quibbled with the words “essentially the same thing.”

If you want to talk about “scales of justice,” you have to accept that nuance matters in this world.

Your comments go to great lengths to put as much distance between Aaron’s amphetamine use, and the chemicals that other players used. By doing this, what you’re trying to disguise is your own attempt at creating a cognitive dissonance among the readers.

Putting Aaron at one extreme of your argument, and all the modern-day tainted players at the other extreme, is an attempt to demonstrate an unbalanced scale of justice.

At the same time, you’re hoping that no one will notice that they have one thing in common, i.e., they all used a chemical stimulant. No amount of verbal hocus-pocus will change the fact that Hank Aaron admitted using a PED, however primitive it was in comparison to what is being used today. One thing hasn’t changed, our moral compass still points in the same direction.

Using a chemical substance, of any kind, to help a player, in any way, is either wrong for everybody who did it, or it’s not. There is no gray area.

To ignore what Aaron did, and condemn Mark McGwire, is hypocritical.

Schiller, wouldn’t you agree that this is the source of your cognitive dissonance?

Obviously, Aaron broke Ruth’s career home run record after 1971.

I’m not sure why people think “not wasting your life and talent” should = insult, but just the fact that the terms “nerd” & “geek” = insult in the minds of some speaks very poorly for how the lives of those people have turned out.

Anyhow, coffe break’s over: back to geeking my way through another 8 hours on the job.

Now, Mark McGwire happens to be #1 at 10.61AB/HR. Barry Bonds comes in #3 at 12.92. Hank Aaron is #38. McGwire used steroids, so I will go with #2–a man who hit a HR every 11.76 at bats, Babe Ruth. He is known to have used Brown-Sequard solution (animal testosterone) at least once, but that was not illegal back then.

Now, I’m only too happy to listen to a cogent argument as to why I should judge one group of PED users differently than another, when both were violating the same baseball rule and (after 1991 when steroids became illegal without a prescription) the same law.

Yep, I’m someone who never played beyond high school level, not counting intramurals in college or base leagues when I was in the military. What of it? Let’s see a cogent argument that you have to be an athlete to understand athletics.

I am indeed expert in terms of physiology, effects of various medications on the human body, and the research behind it–both in terms of treating disease and on human performance. That’s part of my profession.

I also read extensively. If that makes me a “nerd” or “geek” or any other weak, high school insult you wish to throw out there, I accept them proudly.

That line is excerpted from an article by Tom Verducci (“Getting Amped”) that was in the same Sports Illustrated issue as his seminal “Totally Juiced” article exposing steroid use in baseball. So your “lined up” snark fails. If you bother following links I posted yesterday in this comments section, you can also find Sports Illustrated articles relating to both steroids and amphetamines in sports–including baseball– dating back to the 1960s.

There have also been many articles and even scientific studies on the efficacy of steroids, amphetamines, and HGH, some of which are also linked below by cur68. You can also lookup various rule changes, timelines of ball composition changes, when various ballparks opened or were reconfigured and realize the record books issue is more complex than who took what drug. Feel free to do some actual research yourself rather than relying on anecdotal evidence. That said, even checking the anecdotes yields more questions–such as Barry Bonds is reported to have used steroids for several years but only hit over 50 HRs the year he hit 73. If the issue were as simple as being juiced to the gills, he would have been expected to come close other times too. This also leads to why I and others tend to use success rates such as AB/HR or Sabermetrics rather than cumulative stats, because rates are more robust, ie less prone to error from other variables like injuries.

All that said, you will note that I have never once equated amphetamines with either steroids or HGH in terms of either efficacy or mechanism of action. They are not the same. However, one more time, their use without a prescription do violate the exact same law and the exact same baseball rule. The “crime” being the same, logically the judgment upon the user should be the same.

(BTW abnormal facial changes and irreversible head growth are more a HGH side effect than a steroid effect.)

So, ask yourself, what would help hitters but not pitchers? Maybe, I don’t know, a change in ball composition and manufacturing that results in a ball that travels farther? Like the one introduced in mid-1993.

Big difference between legal use, use to help defend our nation’s interests and keep our aviators safe, and illegal use to help a ball player play a game.

You are at least right in that use of drugs to enhance performance extends beyond sports.

Is that what you are saying? steroids make you hit the ball farther right?

But popping greenies is illegal and against the rules, while that second thing is what every professional athlete does. The only difference between Bonds’ program and a legit program is WHICH chemicals and hormones are used. Supplements, vitamins, caffeine, electrolytes etc etc. Babe Ruth didn’t have the benefit of Gatorade; perhaps we should give everyone after him an asterisk.

“Chicks dig the long ball”