This post about Barry Bonds from a week or so ago prompted an interesting exchange in the comments between me and Gary Gaffney, a University of Iowa physician who blogs about steroid use over at Steroid Nation. Following on that exchange is this Michael Salfino/Grand Rapids Press article that raises questions regarding the conventional wisdom these days that steroid use dramatically increased home run totals in Major League Baseball:
Between 1995 and 2003, the era where, [steroids critics contend that] home run totals were inflated dramatically by alleged steroid use, each team hit, on average, 173 homers.
Unfortunately for [the steroids critics’ argument], home run totals per team post-steroid testing are actually up, not down: 176 homers for the average team in the average year.
Leaguewide, there were 5,250 homers hit on average between 2001 and ’03; 5,290 between ’04 and ’06.
One argument is that between ’00 and ’02, seven batters slugged 50 or more homers. Between ’03 and ’05, just one did.
But two batters, Ryan Howard and David Ortiz, hit more than 50 homers last year, and another, Albert Pujols, just missed with 49.
We again share the great insight by Art De Vany, professor emeritus of economics at the University of California-Irvine, that hitting home runs is an act of genius.
So, De Vany concludes, we must expect wide variance in the best years of athletes just like we accept wide variance in the best films of directors, albums of musicians or books by authors relative to their main body of work.
De Vany also concludes that large swings in individual home run performance are irrelevant to the steroids debate.
This year, teams are hitting homers at a 4,632 pace, which would be the lowest, by far, per team, in all the years cited by Kriegel except for ’95. The homer rate thus far could be a fluke that will correct itself going forward.
Still, it would be surprising if the year-end total cracked 5,000, about where it stood in ’02 and ’05. Swings of 10 percent are common in every era. In the modern context, that means a range of anywhere between 4,800 and 5,800 homers should be considered normal.