MORE on Steroids (Part 2)
In case you missed Part 1, from Thursday, this is a continuation of my rebuttal to many of the assumptions about baseball’s “Steroid Era,” which James and I first addressed on The A-Rod Chronicles. That one dealt with questions like, “How did players get so big?” “How did all the records get broken?” and “Why did so many guys hit so many home runs?” But this one deals with questions posed by baseball’s two most notorious alleged steroid users: Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds.
4. The Roger Clemens Question (Wasn’t this guy washed up?)
Related to the idea, explored in Part 1, that PEDs can make great players out of players who were never good is the idea that they can restore greatness to formerly great players. Steroids are seen as unnatural in the way they help players defy the aging process, and perhaps nobody came to represent that more than Roger Clemens.
In 1996, Roger Clemens was 34 years old, and already a Boston Red Sox icon after a storied 13-year career. He’d won an MVP and three Cy Young Awards — only Greg Maddux and Steve Carlton had won more than that, and had it not been for the absurd votes in 1990 (when Clemens finished second to Bob Welch) and 1992 (when he finished third behind Dennis Eckersley and Jack McDowell), he would have had the most of all-time.
But he’d dealt with injuries in the mid-90s, and his win-loss record in 1996 was below .500, so there was a sense that he was past his prime. He was a free agent, and the Red Sox did not re-sign him; Boston GM Dan Duquette infamously referred to the “twilight” of Clemens’ career.
So Clemens signed with the Toronto Blue Jays, where he immediately had two of the best years of his career, winning two more Cy Youngs. Then he was traded to the Yankees, where he pitched five more seasons, earning ANOTHER Cy Young and recorded his 3,000th career strikeout. Then he went to Houston, and won a SEVENTH Cy Young Award. In total, after leaving Boston and embarking on the “twilight of his career,” Clemens pitched 11 more seasons, won four Cy Youngs, and recorded 162 wins plus 2,083 strikeouts (both about 45% of his career totals).
When Clemens was later linked to steroids, this seemed like the obvious explanation for his late career turnaround, and a perfect explanation of why so many other players would resort to PEDs late in their career. Steroids were how you beat Father Time…
Except that Clemens’ supposed “turnaround” was greatly exaggerated; Clemens was never really washed up in any real sense of the term. There were two main reasons for this misperception: 1) a misplaced emphasis on a starter’s Win-Loss record, and 2) a misunderstanding of the context for Duquette’s “twilight” comment.
Let’s start with the Win-Loss record. For most of baseball history, a starting pitcher’s wins and losses were considered, by far, his most important statistics. There was some logic to this — the whole point was to win the game, so who cared how many strikeouts you had or how many runs you let up along the way, as long as you pitched your team to the win? But fans and writers took this to an absurd degree, to the point that in 1990, Clemens had a 1.93 ERA and a league-leading 10.4 bWAR, and even a great 21-6 record… but he lost the Cy Young because Bob Welch (2.9 bWAR) won six more games.
And in the mid-90s, Clemens had some really bad W-L records. From 1993 through 1996, he was just 40-39. And, to be clear, Clemens WAS worse those years, as he was pitching through multiple injuries. But the Win-Loss records dramatically overstated the problem. In 1994 and 1996, he was second in the AL in bWAR among pitchers. In September of ‘96, just weeks before he left Boston, he struck out 20 batters in a game, tying the record he had set ten years earlier. Yet he never got more than 11 wins, so there was a sense that his best years were behind him.
Reinforcing this sense is the fixation on Duquette’s “twilight” comments, which have led some to believe that Clemens was not actively pursued that off-season. But, in fact, Clemens signed the biggest contract ever given to a starting pitcher after the 1996 season, and he was actively courted by several teams, including the Red Sox. Boston simply would not match Toronto’s offer, and what Duquette actually said, after Clemens left, was: “We had hoped to keep him in Boston during the twilight of his career.” In other words, Duquette was expressing REGRET about the fact that Clemens’ EVENTUAL “twilight” would not take place in a Red Sox uniform — he was not justifying a decision to avoid Clemens by saying the twilight had already started.
And, look, obviously Duquette misjudged Clemens’ value, and obviously Clemens himself was personally offended by these comments. They DID seem to motivate Clemens to reconfigure his workout regimen (which likely included steroids). But the idea that Clemens’ career was on life support, and that PEDs were what saved him, is poppycock. Clemens was an all-time great pitcher who, outside of two bad years in the mid-90s, was basically always one of the best pitchers in the game, from his first year to his last.
That he had such a long career is unusual, but by no means unprecedented for a great pitcher. Nolan Ryan pitched until he was 46 (and had a 301 strikeout season when he was 42!); Tom Seaver until he was 41; Greg Maddux til he was 42. Steve Carlton won a Cy Young at 37. Randy Johnson won four consecutive Cy Youngs from age-35 to age-38. Justin Verlander won a Cy Young just last year, when he was 39.
And, in fact, there’s very little basis for the assumption that steroids help you sustain your career for longer than you would otherwise be able to play. In fact, steroids generally lead to greater risks of injury and premature breakdowns by adding more muscle than a body would typically support. Mark McGwire only had 10 healthy seasons in his career, and injury problems led him to an early retirement by his 38th birthday. Jason Giambi also was done as an everyday player by the time he was that age (though he held on in part-time roles for five more seasons). Jose Canseco missed at least 40 games in all but one season after he turned 26, and was out of the league by his 37th birthday. And don’t even get me started on A-Rod, whose hip issues began when he was 33, after which he basically never played a healthy season, as we covered in the last episode of the podcast.
The idea that steroids are some Fountain of Youth is really based entirely on two guys: Roger Clemens, whose “twilight” was, as we’ve seen, greatly exaggerated; and, well, the central figure of the Steroid Era…
5. The Barry Bonds Question(s) (What the hell? I mean, seriously, what the HELL??)
Full disclosure: As a skeptic of the effects of steroids, the challenges presented by Barry Bonds are, by far, the hardest thing to argue about. For one, we have pretty solid evidence that he used PEDs, and used them consistently from 1999 to 2004. And in those years, he was an otherworldly baseball player. Quite simply, it seemed like he had solved the game. There is no point in trying to put those years into words. Just look at his Baseball Reference page from those years, and see all the bold:
Maybe the craziest number, to me, is the 120 intentional walks he got in 2004. There are many years when no player in baseball is walked that many times UNINTENTIONALLY. Bonds only came to the plate 617 times that season, meaning that nearly 20% of the time he came up, the other team preemptively surrendered because they didn’t believe they had any real chance of getting him out.
His dominance in those years was SO inexplicable and unprecedented that they seem to cry out for some chemical explanation. The Juiced Ball theory really doesn’t seem to be enough. After all, most of Bonds’ best years came AFTER the peak of the Juiced Ball, so it’s tempting to instead attribute the results to drugs. But I will nevertheless endeavor to put some things in perspective.
Barry Bonds was already really, really good. Sometimes people overlook this. But from 1990 through 1998, before he ever supposedly did steroids,* Bonds was one of the best hitters in baseball history. He hit 327 home runs, the third-most of any player over that span, but even that undersells him, because he was not primarily a home run hitter. He hit doubles and triples and stole bases. And most importantly, he got on base. He led the league in walks five times, and in intentional walks every year from 1992 to 1998. He won three MVPs in that stretch, and was still somehow underrated. In other words, it is not quite that shocking that the best four-season stretch in baseball history would come from someone who was ALREADY one of the best hitters in baseball history.
*As a reminder, the narrative around Bonds’ steroid use, as reported in the book Game of Shadows and elsewhere, is that Bonds saw the attention around Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa during the home run chase in 1998, believed that those guys were both on PEDs and that their success was causing his own accomplishments to be overlooked, and so decided to start bulking up and using PEDs in 1999. Some will say that we can’t know for sure he never used steroids prior to 1999 — but if you lose the timeline, then you lose the best evidence for the effects of steroids, which is Bonds’ surge in production from 1999-2004.
Barry Bonds was not that old.
One thing people always bring up about Bonds is that these otherworldly seasons happened when he was “supposed to” be in the decline stage of his career. He turned 37 in 2001, which is long past the age when most players are in their prime, and this supposedly proves he was on drugs. But this doesn’t make much sense. For one, as mentioned above in the Clemens discussion, there’s no real evidence that steroids can extend your career and most of the guys with ties to PEDs (McGwire, Canseco, Sosa, Ken Caminiti) had careers that ended abruptly and prematurely, and were not able to extend their primes.
But, more importantly, if you compare Bonds to his actual peers — that is, the historic greats of the game — you see that playing well into your late 30s and even 40s is not some shocking event. Hank Aaron ALSO put up his best offensive season (most HRs, highest OPS+) in his age-37 season. Babe Ruth had an OPS+ of 201 at that age. Willie Mays had his best year at age-34, and got MVP votes when he was 40. Ted Williams won a batting title at 38. Stan Musial was a great hitter until he was 42. It’s just not that weird for great players to stay great into their late 30s or early 40s. There are obviously counterexamples, guys whose careers ended earlier or who were dogged by injuries in their 30s. But not all players are not doomed to that fate, so we don’t actually need to invoke drugs to explain Bonds’ late-career success.
It’s really hard to separate Bonds from the league’s reaction to Bonds.
As I said before, I don’t even think the home runs Bonds hit from 2001-04 were the craziest thing he did those years. In fact, other than his record-setting ‘01 season, he never led the league in home runs or even finished second in that stretch. Because the league simply decided not to pitch to him. He was intentionally walked 68 times in 2002, then 61 times the next year, and then 120 the year after that. The previous single-season record for IBBs was 45. He only broke the home run record by three — but he broke the IBB record by 75!
And that’s not even including the unintentional walks, which were often “unintentional” only in name. Pitchers were so careful with Bonds that he often went whole games without seeing a pitch to hit – there were three games in 2004 where Bonds had at least four plate appearances without an official at-bat, because they all ended in walks. The top three seasons in total walks were all recorded by Bonds in that stretch. This, even more than the home runs, is why Bonds’ offensive numbers from ‘01-’04 were so insanely high. His walks were high, which meant his on-base percentage was high, which meant his OPS was high, which meant his OPS+ was high.
And surely SOME of this was related to the increase in Bonds’ home run rate, which was arguably due to steroids. But that can’t explain all of it. Bonds’ home run rate was high in those years, but not exactly unprecedented. Mark McGwire and Babe Ruth had put up similar numbers, as did Josh Gibson in the Negro Leagues — but none of them reached base as much as Bonds did. Plus, his walk rate stayed high in 2006 and 2007, even after his home run rate went way down. His high walk rate seems to have been largely caused by a league-wide decision that the best strategy against Bonds was not to pitch to him, combined with unprecedented discipline and possibly the best eye in baseball history.
It’s really tough to separate the decision to try to hit home runs from the decision to use steroids.
Clearly, Bonds changed his hitting approach around 1999. For most of his career prior to that, his fly ball rate was ~30%. Since 1992, it had never been higher than 32%. But then in 1999, it shot up to 39.9%, then in 2000 went up to 42.4%, and then in 2001 it reached 44.4%. That year, his record-setting season, also saw Bonds’ highest strikeout rate and lowest ever ground ball rate. In other words, he was trying to hit the ball in the air more, at the cost of some more strikeouts and fewer balls in play.
Obviously, this is not inconsistent with a decision to use steroids. If you were going to try to hit more home runs, and you believed PEDs caused players to hit more home runs, then using them would go hand in hand with changing your approach at the plate, and altering your off-season workout regimen (which Bonds also did in 1999).
But this makes it difficult to isolate the precise causes. Was the spike caused by steroids, or the change in approach, or the added muscle? How responsible were the steroids responsible FOR the added muscle? (FWIW, Victor Conte, who certainly has incentive to take the credit, is not convinced.) It’s not just that we don’t have randomized, controlled trials here — it’s that using Bonds as your main source of evidence means relying on someone who is ALREADY an exception to most rules.
Could most people simply will themselves into hitting more home runs at the age of 35? Obviously not. Could Barry Bonds, who had ALREADY hit more home runs in the ‘90s than all but two people BEFORE making this decision? Maybe… Could most people put on 20 pounds of muscle in one off-season without chemical assistance? No way. Could Barry Bonds, who was one the greatest athletes who ever lived? Maybe…
It’s easy to simply throw your hands up and say, “Of course steroid use contributed to Bonds’ crazy stretch! How else could you explain it??” But then Bonds cannot be your only data point. You can’t just say that we know Bonds’ surge was caused by steroids because steroids increase offensive production, and we know steroids increase offensive production because Bonds was on steroids during his surge. You need to find some other example of steroids turning someone into a superhuman hitting machine, or at least something close, for four consecutive years…. And you just don’t.
If you squint, you can KIND OF convince yourself that McGwire’s 1996-1999 seasons are comparable, but it’s not really close. McGwire did not see the same surge in his walk rate or the same high batting averages — he even hit 22 fewer doubles. All McGwire did was hit home runs, in one of the most home run-friendly environments in the history of baseball. The best OPS+ McGwire recorded in that stretch, 216, was 15 points below the lowest recorded by Bonds in his stretch.
There’s a temptation to use steroids to explain the Bonds years because, otherwise, we don’t really have an explanation. But, you know, that’s life… Accept the mystery!
Steroids have become a sort of catchall explanation for baseball mysteries, but there’s a startling lack of rigor about the analysis. For decades, people have been repeating claims for which there is essentially no evidence. Steroids extend careers! (Really? Because most guys connected to PEDs seem to have had much shorter careers…) Steroids increase offensive production! (Really? Because most of the players doing them seem to be pitchers and backup infielders…) Steroids caused the home run explosion of the 1990s! (Really? Because it seems perfectly timed with changes to the ball, which have been the main cause of every other increase in home runs in baseball history…)
And I can’t help but think that the credulity people show comes from the moral stigma involved. To deny the effects of steroids sounds like you are making excuses for players who used them. But these are really two entirely separate questions. The immorality of cheating does not depend on the efficacy of that cheating. But exaggerating the extent of the problem DOES allow the league to take more extreme and draconian measures to “solve” it — and those “solutions” are always, conveniently, pretty anti-player. I wonder if there’s any particular player who that has hurt…