The New York Times-20080127-A Voice of Skepticism on the Impact of Steroids

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A Voice of Skepticism on the Impact of Steroids

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One of the most influential baseball minds of the last 40 years is angry. And he is coming out of retirement to vent.

Fans may not know Eric Walker's name, but they know his handiwork. Walker was a National Public Radio correspondent in the early 1980s when he began filling the San Francisco airwaves with his theories regarding baseball -- specifically, that on-base percentage was undervalued, fielding was misunderstood and power ruled all. One increasingly intrigued listener was Sandy Alderson, then a young Athletics executive, who soon hired Walker as a team consultant and with him devised the Oakland philosophy now called Moneyball. Walker has been out of baseball for 10 years and lives in a small farm town in eastern Washington. But the recent hullabaloo over steroids and other illicit substances has prompted him to conduct new research with a rather surprising conclusion: the popular perception that slugging across baseball has increased during the steroid era is almost certainly wrong.

If power were up, we'd see it in the statistics, Walker said. But the boost just isn't there.

Walker contends that popular measures often used to demonstrate the baseballwide effects of so-called performance-enhancing drugs -- like the rise in home runs per game and overall runs per game -- are the wrong place to look. Since any added strength hitters get from steroids would not help them make solid contact with the ball, but only hit it farther when they do, Walker instead examined a more appropriate statistic: total bases per hit, also known as Power Factor.

Although not all doubles and triples indicate power, P.F. does a far better job of isolating the effects that brawn would breed. It also helps see past historical rule changes like the height of the pitcher's mound and the size of the strike zone; such tweaks drastically alter the number of hits, walks and runs games feature, but they have much less effect on the distance that struck balls travel.

Walker examined overall P.F. figures for all seasons since 1900, and discovered that they have steadily increased from about 1.3 to 1.6 throughout those 100-plus years -- not since only the early 1990s, when steroids are believed to have begun their gradual rise in use and slugging effect.

Walker found two substantial and essentially permanent jumps. First was the 1920s, because of the introduction of a livelier ball and the sport's Babe Ruth-inspired embrace of slugging. The second was in 1993 and 1994, when P.F. suddenly leapt 7 percent to about 1.6, where it has since settled. Walker contends that such a jump is far more indicative of a change made to the ball -- which Major League Baseball has long denied -- than a steroid power boost, which would have produced an effect far more gradual as the decade progressed.

Subtract that 1993-94 spasm from subsequent records, Walker said, and you will find that power since 1980 has remained essentially flat.

There is no long-term uptrend in pure power, Walker said of the last quarter-century. Nothing to indicate that a gradual change in culture and steroid use affected how far balls were hit -- when they were hit in the first place.

He added: I have no doubt that to a swimmer in the Olympics, steroids have an effect -- even if the augmentation is minuscule, the augmentation is significant because those competitions are settled by an eye blink. In baseball, if it were there, we'd see it in those numbers. But it isn't there. If it's there, it's not a discernible one.

Unprecedented late-career numbers from some individual players who have been accused of using steroids -- like Barry Bonds's 73 home runs in 2001 and Roger Clemens's charge to 354 victories -- still raise the question of what benefits baseball players may receive from illicit substances.

But Walker is not a lone voice out in the Washington wilderness; many credible statistical analysts are similarly skeptical about how much steroids and other drugs may have distorted modern ballplayers' records. Regarding Bonds, for example, they note that, yes, his peak home run rates came at 36 through 39 years old, when most players are in decline. Then again, another slugger three decades before enjoyed almost the same late-30s surge: a fellow named Hank Aaron.

People who look at baseball stats know that the current era is different than it has been in the past, but it's not as abnormal as people might think, said J. C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Offense has been up, but for lots of reasons.

Walker is convinced those reasons have been wildly misunderstood, and has built a Web site (steroids-and-baseball.com) spelling out his theories in hopes that his message carries even half as far as Moneyball did.

I'm tired of people saying, 'This is what happened because I see more home runs,' Walker said. If you disagree with me, deconstruct the argument; tell me where it's wrong. If you can, more power to you.

As it were.

[Illustration]PHOTOS: Babe Ruth, left, inspired slugging in the 1920s, when a livelier ball was used. Barry Bonds's peak home run rates came between age 36 through 39, much as Hank Aaron's did. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY, LEFT, NATIONAL BASEBALL LIBRARY, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS; PETER DASILVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)