Suspicions Among Players, Who Was Using?

This is an article from : The St. Cloud Times

There are few things more unfair than guilt by association. But it happens all the time these days in major league baseball, where the syllogism often goes something like this:

A. Many major league baseball players from the last quarter-century have admitted to or been accused of using illegal performance-enhancing drugs.

B. Joe Blow was a major league baseball player during that time, and at some point in his career had a major spike in productivity.

C. Therefore, Joe Blow must have been consuming steroids like they were Pez.

Perhaps it’s easier to ignore this issue when it’s Joe Blow.

But how about when it’s a beloved player from your favorite team? Or a Hall of Famer? Or both?

For Minnesotans, that hypothesis gets tested in The Bill James Gold Mine 2008, the latest in a series of annual books of baseball statistical analysis by historian and statistician Bill James.

Among other features, James’ book has a section on atypical seasons: Players who — for one year, for whatever reason — grossly overachieved (Norm Cash in 1961, Darin Erstad in 2000, etc.) relative to their career numbers.

It also chronicles players who grossly underachieved for a year, at least from a home run standpoint. And among them are a pair of 1984 Minnesota Twins: Kirby Puckett and Gary Gaetti.

“Two of the greatest home run under-producers of all time were teammates: Kirby Puckett and Gary Gaetti in 1984,” James writes. “Puckett hit no home runs, Gaetti hit only five.

“Suggesting the possibility that the Twins’ two World Championships may have been aided by their team being among the first to discover … well, I’d better not go there. Nor will I point out that Gaetti was bald and had acne and Puckett died young.”

In between those lines, James basically is insinuating that Puckett and Gaetti got into performance-enhancing drugs in the mid-1980s, helping the Twins muscle up and win the World Series in 1987 and 1991.

Want a little more guilt by association?

As a (relatively) skinny 175-pound rookie in 1984, Puckett did not hit a home run in 557 at-bats. He hit four homers in 691 at-bats in 1985.

And then, all of a sudden, Puckett cranked 31 homers in 1986, 28 more in 1987 when the Twins won it all. He went on to hit 203 homers over the final 10 years of his career.

Puckett also beefed up to about 225 pounds by the time he was done playing, and probably was in the neighborhood of three bills when he died in 2006.

Did he just learn how to hit with power? Did he just like to eat? Or, was there something else involved?

Gaetti, after hitting 25 homers as a rookie in 1982 and 21 in 1983, suffered his inexplicable power outage in 1984.

Then he took off: 20 in 1985, 34 in 1986, 31 in 1987 and 28 in 1988. Gaetti ended up hitting 360 homers in a career that didn’t end until 2000.

He also lost his hair and had complexion issues, factors that can be byproducts of steroid use. Again, the insinuation is that the G-Man hit the juice, which enabled him to hit a lot of those homers (and save on haircuts).

Fair or not, there’s a drug-related shadow of doubt about virtually every statistical accomplishment of baseball’s last quarter-century.

Nobody can pinpoint exactly when the steroid era began. But there is overwhelming evidence that the feats of a lot of players wouldn’t have happened without artificial enhancement.

And every time there’s a ridiculous power blip in a career path (like Luis Gonzalez’s 57 homers in 2001, Brady Anderson’s 50 in 1996, and pretty much anything Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa did from the mid-90s on), there’s an assumption of guilt.

Some players deserve that assumption. Some don’t. But the line between the two has been forever blurred.

Twins fans who remember those joyous Octobers in 1987 and 1991 would like to think that their guys were clean, that Puckett simply learned to drive the ball and Gaetti just happened to have a bad year and bad follicular genetics. We’d all like the memory of those World Series championships to remain unsullied.

But because of the specter of performance-enhancing drugs, that’s the reality. And baseball has nobody to blame for this but itself.