Steroids will haunt spring training

The New York Yankees say they are expecting a healthy Jason Giambi to report to their Tampa spring-training base. The San Francisco Giants’ main concern about Barry Bonds is a recovery from minor arthroscopic knee surgery that will push back his spring-training debut until mid-March.

But there’s no denying the fact that looming as a backdrop to the opening of training camps is the potential affects of a winter full of developments on the steroids front. As a result, issues such as possible implications for Giambi, Bonds and other players named in the BALCO investigation, to how many players might get hit with first-strike offenses under the new and tougher testing plan, to how different the game might be played have become as important as which teams got better over the winter.

We already know about fan reaction to steroid users, and it isn’t pretty. Even Yankee fans expressed disgust with Giambi. The amount of verbal abuse Bonds will face in opposing parks this season could be extreme, and the idea that his passing Babe Ruth on the all-time home-run list could be greeted with jeers and suspicion isn’t a good thing for the game.

Any player nabbed by the long-overdue testing program likely will face similar public scorn. And with the new first-offense suspension of 10 days, there could be significant financial loss, depending on who’s involved. Calculate a 10-day loss of pay for a player making $10 million a year based on a 180-day pay period, and you get more than a half-million dollars squandered. The bottom line is you can bet there will be more slightly shrunken bodies reporting to clubhouses across Florida and Arizona in the next couple weeks. That was the case last spring, when the testing program didn’t even have any first-offense penalty beyond counseling. Still, in clubhouses everywhere, players were visibly smaller to the naked eye.

How did that affect what happened on the field in 2004? Surprisingly, the number of home runs per game actually ticked up slightly – 1.12 homers per game in 2004 compared to 1.07 in 2003. Similarly, runs per game were up slightly to 4.81 per team from 4.73 in 2003.

But other factors besides less-bulkier sluggers also were in play. For instance, a new ballpark opened in Philadelphia, and like most in the wave of retro parks that began opening in the 1990s, it is a bandbox that promotes home runs. And, the suspicion is that pitchers also were heeding the testing, as velocities ticked down a bit.

Estimates are that about a quarter to one-third of players — or six to eight per team — had been using, and pitchers on the juice weren’t isolated cases. The benefit for them isn’t bulk and bat speed, but increased stamina and durability, and the ability to recover more quickly.

While the overall number of home runs did increase slightly, a closer examination reveals a bubble for 40-homer seasons that peaked in 1996-2001. In American League history, a player has hit 40 or more homers in a season 131 times. A total of 54 (or 41 percent) have come in the last 10 seasons. The numbers are almost the same in the National League, where there have been 136 different 40-homer seasons, and 59 (44 percent) have come since 1995.

But 1996-2001 marked six consecutive seasons where at least 11 players hit 40 homers, peaking at 16 in 2000. The average number of 40-homer seasons in that period was 13.5 per year. But beginning with 2002, there have been only eight, 10 and nine 40-homer sluggers in each of the last three years.

The extreme home run seasons follow a similar pattern, peaking in 1998-2001, when the seven highest single-season home-run totals in NL history all occurred. In 2001, Barry Bonds hit 73, Sammy Sosa hit 64 and Luis Gonzalez hit 57, and two others fell one short of 50. But nobody has hit 50 homers since in the NL, and only Alex Rodriguez (2001, 2002) and Jim Thome (2002) did it in the AL.

So what we’re seeing is a shift away from the freak years—particularly 1998-2001 -- when records were smashed—not broken—and most likely steroid use and abuse hit its peak. The stricter testing program and its tougher penalties should only reinforce this downward trend. And baseball should be a better game because of it.

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