Nor could most non-professional baseball players. However, steroid use among major leaguers can turn those 370 foot fly outs into 400 homers with enough frequency to break longstanding records.
I’m not sure the steroids had that big of an effect on the game. When Mark McGuire is hitting 500 foot home runs and Sammy Sosa is hitting balls onto Waveland Ave. those are going to be home runs with or without steroids. Those two in particular either hit it a mile or they struck out, there really wasn’t an in between. They weren’t hitting home runs into the first row, they were all in the upper deck or out of the park entirely.
Baseball has a long tradition of cheating or otherwise playing fast and loose with the rules. The freak out over steroids was entirely media driven, I don’t think fans gave a hoot when it was happening and even now after years of harping on the issue a majority of fans just don’t care. Heck, these days baseball is trying to figure out how to create more offense because ultimately offense is what gets fans in the stadium.
Absolutely right. Not to mention extending careers with superhuman production waaaay past the point of normal human decline.
Freegards
Baseball much more than other sports likes to think they preserve comparability over time when it comes to official records.
Nobody cared much about steroids until records were blown away instead of players just getting a little edge over their own competitors.
I am not sure how (or if) we address these “problems” in baseball and other sports. Players are now bigger, stronger, faster and better than they were in the “olden days,” even without PEDs. Equipment is better, too. This is true in all sports. Pole vaulters went from what, bamboo poles, to fiberglass and now to some sort of composite material. The surface on which they run has been improved. The shoes they wear are better, etc. etc. The advances in golf technology are too obvious to mention.
Given these advances, must we put an asterisk after every broken record? Perhaps we should draw the line at PEDs. But what of vitamin supplements, and God forbid, Gatorade? It is an issue of line drawing. I suspect the lines will be erased eventually.
And in the great scheme of things, does it matter? You go to the movies, and the guy gets the girl (or the guy gets the guy, etc.) or he does not. You go to the game and the home team wins or it loses. You go home and about your business.