Bill James’ silence
Steve has the details. I haven’t followed baseball in a long time, and I never did follow it closely, but I remember not be able to align the Sammy Sosa of the White Sox years with that of 1998. If it weren’t for drugs would Ken Griffey Jr. have been a much bigger deal in the 1990s and 2000s?
Labels: baseball
Steroids greatly reduce recovery time from injury. Griffey was perhaps the greatest player of the 1990s (the decade as a whole). His career we derailed by injuries in the 00s. Keeping him on the field more surely would have improved his production.
And what makes you assume Ken Griffy Jr. abstained from steroid use?
There are ways to use steroids and avoiding the huge mass gains we saw in Sosa/Bonds/McGuire, athletes who compete in weight classes optimize their steroid use for relative strength.
And what makes you assume Ken Griffy Jr. abstained from steroid use?
his power stats “sucked” comparatively. if he did use steroids he was a moron since he didn’t get any discernible return compared to the other players who did.
Steroids accelerate the recovery of full force generating capacity in acute muscle trauma, I’m not sure the same can be said for ligament or tendon injury.
It’s difficult to make a judgement on how effective Griffy Jr’s steroid use might have been. He could have been using a lower dose, different steroid stack, omitting growth hormone (if bonds/sosa/mcguire used GH), trained differently due to chronic injury, etc.
In his prime, Griffey supposedly didn’t lift weights, so it’s unlikely he was doing steroids. (The usual path to steroids is that you start out pumping iron, max out, then look for some chemical something to help you workout harder. It would be very strange to take steroids without lifting weights, because most of the benefit comes from allowing you to work harder in the weightroom.) Griffey had back to back 56 homer seasons, so that’s probably about the peak of how many homers a modern player can hit unboosted: 55 to 60.
I believe steroids are permitted for injury recovery, i.e. the restoration of normal function. Griffey probably was given steroid medications for that purpose.
Steroids have a significant impact on strength and muscle mass without any regularly strength training. In this study 600 mg of testosterone, not a huge dose, the testosterone only group had increases in squat/bench strength similar to that of the training group.
Simply taking steroids while performing regular season training and playing ~150 games will result in significant performance enhancement. Not lifting weights is insufficient evidence to suggest lack of steroid use.
Griffey was a fine player, but pre-steroids Bonds (there seems to be a fair amount of confidence that he didn’t juice before 1999) was a much better one.