22nd
An interesting look at the potentially meaningless effect of steroids by one of my favorite statistically literate Cubs bloggers. Jives really well with earlier observations that A-Rod’s home run rate wasn’t altered by steroids. As Keith Law so tactfully framed the question of PEDs, “Every writer who talks about HGH as a PED is a moron - the available studies say it doesn’t enhance athletic performance. People write about steroids as if they turn the pre-deal Roy Hobbs into the post-deal Roy Hobbs, but the evidence simply isn’t there to support it.” Here’s Colin Wyers’ take:
I don’t think it’s steroids, though. Look at the changes in the graph - the change in run-scoring environments was an event, not a process. It strains credibility to try to explain the data with steroids - you’d have to have all of your juicers start getting help from their cousins at roughly the same time, sometime during the 1993 season, to explain the events on the ground…..
For whatever reason, it became a lot easier to hit baseballs hard and far right around the 1993 season. (The most likely culprit is actually the baseballs themselves, so from here on out we’ll simply refer to the “livelier ball.”) This livlier baseball was of greatest benefit to people who could hit the ball in the air to begin with….
But the evidence for a massive, steroid-fueled change in baseball offense simply isn’t there. Rosenheck notes:
None of this means that steroids are necessarily the cause of the separation. But the game’s fans are probably in no mood to write off the association as mere coincidence.
But that’s almost certainly what it is - a coincidence.
