No it’s not the same thing as sacred, but I will maintain that no other sport can truly rival baseball for the cachet that numbers like 755, 714, 4256, 56, .406 all have.
As for competition, if you have one guy who uses and one doesn’t, that’s unbalanced competition right there. And though the pitchers and fielders might have been using at equal rates too, if we’re to judge by the numbers steroids has an uneven effect in promoting offense.
I can see why you want to ignore polls, since it doesn’t square with what you claim, and directly relates to the question where the other does not. Attendance has been steadily increasing since kicked down by the strike, and has continued doing so even after the sport began cracking down on the stuff and suspending players. I could just as easily spin that as people responding and appreciating the efforts to clean the game, but it’s not a gauge for judging what people believe about steroids.
Yes it is the same thing as sacred, you just don’t want to use the word. I will maintain that nobody who isn’t at least a part time baseball fan knows what ANY of those numbers mean.
In some ways roids are just like any other kind of exercise that works, people that use it have an advantage. Especially when roids weren’t even against the rules. If doesn’t really matter if fielders are doing it, but pitchers doing it does. On the one hand roided pitchers are going to have faster pitches which are harder to hit, on the other hand they’re going to have faster pitches which when hit go further. So it’s hard to really tell if it should be holding down or promoting the offensive numbers.
I ignore polls because polls are stupid. Especially for something like this where we have the ultimate pol: revenue. If what people say when asked doesn’t jive with how they spend their money then you should ignore what they say, it’s the money that matters. And baseball revenue has gone up during the steroid era. They were recovering since the last strike, but there was a MAJOR increase during the home run derby year, that’s simple irrefutable fact. There’s no spin there, it’s simple fact, at no point during the roid era, not when it was being discussed by reporters, not when it was being ignored by the MLB, not when the MLB finally put their first silly rules in, not when the MLB finally put in rules that included punishment, has baseball’s number dropped. If the fans gave a good damn about roids the numbers would have dropped during some part of that, the fact that they not only didn’t drop but CLIMBED shows they don’t care.