Steroids + Sportswriters = BS

I like Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, but I think his suggestion that sabermetrics will account for steroids is ridiculous. I am also a firm believer in the value of sabermetrics, to the point that a snarky sabermetric-based blog is one of my favorite and most frequently visited sites (even if it is certainly not the most frequently updated of those sites). And I do think that steroids have negatively affected baseball, most visibly everything under the bill of Barry Bonds's now comically oversized batting helmet. But, as I always do when people ask me about steroids, I will point out a few things:

• First, technically speaking, steroids were not illegal in baseball when most of the accused were allegedly taking them. Sure, they were illegal in the U.S., but so is adultery in most states, and we're sure not holding dudes out of the Hall of Fame for that. (Wade Boggs, I'm looking in your direction.)
• Second, just taking steroids doesn't make you good. It does help, admittedly. But it does not make you good. (Felix Heredia, I'm looking in your direction.

We can debate the effect of steroids all we want, and you can likely convince me that there is a tangible and unfair benefit to using them (for baseball, not for adultery). But it's Lewis's claim (which was likely just made off-the-cuff, but which was printed in The Paper of Record anyway) that we (that is, the baseball community, of which I am ever-so-tangentially a part) will have access to a statistically meaningful number of steroid-users' statistically meaningful abuse histories. Here's Lewis:

But I do believe that eventually we’re going to know a lot of people who did them. And it is going to be really interesting when those names and dates become available, what’s done with it to try to factor in steroids into the record books.

Factor it into the record books? Like, applying a steroids coefficient to the years of 1989-2003 for confirmed steroid users? Will we need a separate number for HGH?

The author's article Rob Mackey continues:

As Lewis points out, it has become common to register the exact number of feet a home run travels, so it may soon be possible for statistics gurus to come up with a reasonable number of feet to subtract from homers hit by players proven or suspected of juicing.

Meaningless. Do we count it as a home run if it wouldn't have gone over the fence but would have traveled far enough to bounce off Jose Canseco's head? It just may NOT soon be possible for statistics gurus "to come up with a reasonable number of feet to subtract from homers hit by players proven or suspected of juicing." What if the guy took steroids, but didn't work out enough to get Bonds huge. What if he only did leg presses? Is there a relative effect? A new number of feet for guys who took the cream versus guys who took the clear? What about Gary Sheffield before and after Barry Bonds stole his personal chef?

Mackey's elaboration on the proposed "steroid coefficient" (my coinage, or at least a coinage I did not consciously steal) gets even more outrageous when he brings the new math to the old school:

And, of course, once we have a number to divide by, there’s nothing to stop us from multiplying with it too, to estimate how many home runs players from earlier eras might have hit au jus. As Lewis says, “Babe Ruth might say, if he were looking at the game now, ‘Boy, think how many home runs I could’ve hit if I could’ve done those steroids,’ which he probably would’ve done.”

I can go on and on about how stupid Mackey sounds here, even though it's really just a jesting little article. I'll just say: Thankfully, it's not Lewis implying that we should take all the F9s on Ruth's scoresheets, determine how many feet they probably flew before being caught using the "Ford Model T Tale of the Tape"TM, and then apply the coefficient to give the Babe an extra 100 dingers. But it is Lewis implying that Ruth would have juiced. I contend Ruth wouldn't have juiced, because as I indirectly pointed out above, you need to work out to get the benefit of 'roids, and the Bambino does not strike me as Gold's Gym kind of guy. But what am I? Just an lapsed baseball historian, I guess.