Alas, Barry Bonds, the home run king who surpassed Hank Aaron, also admitted to unwittingly using steroids.
Sammy Sosa, meanwhile, maintains that he never failed a drug test.
Sosa’s answer — that he never failed a test for PEDs — echoes responses he’s given in the recent past. In a 2018 interview with ESPN’s Jeremy Schapp, Sosa said he “never had a failed test in the country” and “never missed any test at the major league level.”
But, …The New York Times reported in 2009 that Sosa did test positive for a performance-enhancing drug in a 2003 conducted by the MLB that allowed players to remain anonymous.
In reality, drugs have always been a part of baseball, whether it was steroids or “greenies” amphetamines. Even Aaron, who surpassed the Babe only to be bested by Bonds, admitted he used greenies once.
The home run leaders mostly thrived during the steroid era. And pitching has gotten better in the last 20 years. Every team has five or six pitchers who thrown 95+ miles per hour. It used to be one or two who threw that hard.
Sosa, McGwire and Bonds kinda erased themselves already. They all went biking with Lance Armstrong.
Is baseball wanting to create excitement about Aaron judge breaking Maris’s record, because they don’t want to focus on the steroid era records?
We can all debate about the records set during the steroid era , but they are still officially in the baseball record book. They are still the official records.
I keep expecting the players to collapse suddenly. The thrill of watching sports is gone.
The Bud Selig quotes are priceless.
The “experts” have an incredible knack for being totally full of it.
I remember Major League Baseball.
When Roger Maris beat Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs, people made an issue over the fact that he had not done so in 154 games (the length of the season when Ruth was playing). Judge has a chance to beat Ruth’s record in 154 games.
All I care is about is stop interrupting SEC Football to show Judge’s at bats. Nobody cares.
Judge (number 99) will hit his #61 - 61 years later.
I cannot believe the lame Yankees announcers even dared to compare Judge to the steroid “record holders”.
Boooooo!
He’s juiced. Then again, the pitchers probably are, too.
If you’ve followed the bouncing ball since the Lance Pharmstrong debacle, you might have figured out that every sport on the planet (including professional badminton) is still doped to the gills, and getting away with it because they have adulterants and masking agents to make whatever they’re taking undetectable. I noticed more evidence of that fact earlier this year in the results of the Tour de France.
Pharmstrong’s winning average speed in the 2005 Tour de France was 41.6 kilometers/hour (the fastest of his seven “wins”), and we know to a certainty he was doped. The 2022 winner’s average speed was 42.1 kph. So if they had cleaned the sport up, it should be slower now, yeah? But it isn’t, it’s faster.
But that’s not the telltale sign. The telltale is the speed of the LAST place finisher. The 2022 TdF’s LAST place finisher averaged 39.6 kph. That makes him faster than every WINNER of the Tour de France before 1998 (except 1992, which Pharmstrong won, until he didn’t).
So now the LAST PLACE rider is faster than when the greats like Eddy Merckx and Greg Lemond won.
And this year there were this many positive doping tests at the TdF: 0.
You might be thinking that cycling is a whole different sport from baseball, so they wouldn’t dope the same. It is a different sport but the approach to doping now is one of minimal gains. Take everything that helps, even if it’s only a little. And a lot of littles add up. So they’re all taking EPO, anabolic steroids, human growth hormones, peptide, and ketones. What differs from one sport to the next is the amount of each. Cyclists, for instance, only take tiny doses of testosterone for faster muscular recovery. Baseball players take larger doses of testosterone for better arm strength and bat speed.
And the Tour de France is the most undeniable example that they’re doping with impunity, and only rarely ever get caught.
The expression they use in cycling is, “You can’t fail the drug test unless you first fail the IQ test.” In other words, it you got caught, it was because you did something stupid. It’s that cut-and-dried, and that easy a test to thwart.
Many variables like the baseball is different, the bat is different, the stadium designs, the length of the fence, the height of the pitchers mound, players training better.
Babe Ruth did his best pitching and hitting after eating hot dogs and drinking lots of alcohol.
Sorry, that should have been "marginal" gains, non "minimal."
Take everything that helps, even if only a little bit, and take as much of everything as you can and still escape detection. In some cases the limit has a threshold (like hematocrit, or caffeine [yes, the World Anti-Doping Agency {WADA} has a caffeine limit]), so you can take it, but only so much before getting popped.