Steroid mess will change
face of major leagues

Everyone knows the steroid mess will change baseball forever. But no one really knows how.

The small changes are obvious. Even a lax testing program brought home run numbers down at the top of the leader board last year, and that downward trend seems certain to continue with the government involved and commissioner Bud Selig squabbling with the union over the parameters of a real testing program.

The other numerical shoe to drop will be the overall homer numbers, which means lineups will no longer be packed with top-to-bottom power.

But these two downward shifts represent the tip of the iceberg, because two much bigger changes are on the horizon: (1) the unassailabilty of Barry Bonds single season HR record and (2) the death of Moneyball.

Bonds' numbers will provide the more immediate, emotional story line. Start with his 73-home run season: when Sen. John McCain delivered his verbal steroid smackdown to union president Donald Fehr, he might as well have put Bonds single-season number of 73 alongside Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak and Cal Ripken's 2131 consecutive games as a permanent record, asterisk or not.

The numbers buzz will pick up immediately when Bonds passes his godfather, Willie Mays, on the all-time home run list with number 661 sometime in early April.

Pundits and players alike will debate the validity of Bonds' status in the HR record book (gosh, that Selig gag order really worked well, didn't it?), and that debate won't go away, especially if Bonds can continue hitting homers without his Balco brew.

In effect, the steroids scandal puts Bonds in a no-win bind. If he hits 50 or more, he approaches Babe Ruth's all-time record of 714 with Hank Aaron's record not far behind on and his legitimacy as a slugger under a cloud. If his numbers drop and he hits less than 50, Bonds still mounts an assault on the 700-HR summit, with his critics claiming he wouldn't have gotten anywhere close to any records if he hadn't been on the juice.

Wherever Bonds lands on the all-time HR list, chances are his place in the top three will be secure for a very long time.

Of the currently active sluggers, only three stand a whiff of a chance of catching Bonds, Ruth and Aaron: Sammy Sosa, who is approaching his late 30s, Ken Griffey, Jr., who hasn't had a healthy season in the new millennium, and Alex Rodriguez, who might have stood a chance of catching the big three if he'd at least had the option of steroids supplements to keep his homer numbers up for the next decade.

Without that option, Rodriguez becomes a long shot at best when it comes to catching Bonds, especially if he spends the next decade launching long flies into "Death Valley" in left-center in Yankee Stadium. Pretty interesting irony for a guy who probably left Seattle for Texas in part because the big park threatened to keep his all-time HR numbers at a fairly mortal level.

The ongoing debate about the home run numbers will provide plenty of drama this season and next, but it may not be the biggest steroid story. If steroids have played as large a role as many believe in the home run binge during the last decade, a strict testing program could spell the death of "Moneyball," the offensive success formula used by the likes of Billy Beane, Theo Epstein and a host of other young GMs.

Here's why: In addition to drafting college players with a track record of success, one of the key tenets of Moneyball is accumulating players with a high on-base percentage who can supply a modicum of power (i.e., 20 HR or more a year), whether or not they can also add speed or hit for average.

The logic is simple -- if those hitters take walks and get on base frequently, the result is increased run production when the hitters behind them knock the ball out of the park. The system is also cumulative, i.e., the more pitches those hitters see, the more fatigued pitchers become and the more bullpens get stretched out, which means more two- and three-run homers over the course of a game and a season.

But if the power production of those secondary sluggers begins to drop below the seasonal 15 HR mark, the Moneyball formula takes a big hit. Without the long ball to drive in runners, teams would be forced to play station-to-station to score runs, because the speed game of hit-and-run and bunting gets de-emphasized in Moneyball. In that scenario, the only number that goes up is the LOB total from game to game, because a lot of runners who used to trot around the bases in front of a home-run hitter will be left stranded if team power numbers go down.

For purists, though, the dark steroid cloud could come with a silver lining.

If Moneyball does take a hit as a result of increased steroid scrutiny, the result would be a concomitant rise in the use of "little ball" to produce runs.

Bunting could come back into fashion, and the lost art of the hit-and-run might be revived. In theory, players could begin to become more fundamentally sound, especially if they're less bulked up to jack the ball out of the park.

Several teams have already anticipated this trend. Inspired by a spacious ballpark, the Seattle Mariners have built "little ball" into their offensive equation for years, and the Mets are following in their footsteps by rebuilding with speed and defense up the middle after being burned by bulked-up former sluggers like Mo Vaughn.

The trend could track down to the small market teams as well. Among the small spenders, the models would be the Twins and Indians, with both clubs relying on speed, defense and young pitching over expensive sluggers to key their rebuilding plans. And if baseball can somehow manage to put together a valid testing program and make the results stick, they could have plenty of company in a couple of years.

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