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Originally Posted by ninja
@PMDL
I understand the point of marginal returns and where you're coming from on that. I happen to think that frankly, if you're not juicing you're not trying especially in all sports that you can get away with it in.
That said, do you think there is a distinction that we can make in regards to what people could do with and without? Take Barry Bonds. In all likelihood, Bonds is a surefire HOFer and is a member of the 600 homerun club. He was great. But rather, steroids made Bonds very great.
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The thing of it is, as has been mentioned so often, it's really hard to say where the line is drawn.
Steroids increase muscle mass, they increase recovery ability, and some of them can increase motor output (aka strength, power).
As a general rule using steroids to improve sports like baseball, tennis, anything with a fine skill requirement, is the equivalent of trying to get better handling out of your drifting Nissan Skyline by sticking a V-12 in it.
A brute-force solution to a problem that requires elegance, in other words.
There's no doubt that being stronger has contributed to his success, from a simple physics standpoint. Being able to apply more force to the ball, and to do so consistently over entire seasons, will no doubt play a role.
But by the same token, you can't just take any guy off the street, give him the same drug regimen, and get the same results. Joe Average probably won't have the coordination, the general athletic skill, the responses to AAS, and so on.
It's hard to quantify what kind of gains and athletic carryover would actually result from pharmaceutical assistance. In bodybuilding and powerlifting it's easy. More muscle is good for everybody, and more aggression/central stimulation yields more strength. But it doesn't affect fine motor skills that way.
The real benefit for these guys: recovery is strongly enhanced. Volumes of work that would slaughter a mortal are suddenly quite tolerable. That's the real magic that steroids work on this kind of sport. In a sense it'd be a better analogy to say that steroids simply boost the qualities that are already present.
In that sense, I think we're in agreement.
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For shits and grins, looking at Bonds' stats I'm going to assume that he started to juice in 1996. (I know that Game of Shadows probably pinpoints this down even further. Maybe someone who've read it knows) Obviously, without steroids, there's nothing in Bonds' past history that says he'd hit 73 homeruns in a season or even come close to breaking the all time record.
While Bonds' is probably done, and the margin between his record and Aaron's isn't going to be that great; at what point can we say that it wasn't Bonds' talent breaking the record but rather the help he had?
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That's a really hard question to answer. Unfortunately we just don't have that kind of data so any guess would be a very wild speculation (i.e., pulled from my ass).
The real question to me, though: how much does that distinction matter?
Are people really watching sports for some measure of sanctity? Or are they watching for the end result? I'll get back on topic before this spirals into a rant on the role of sports in our society.
For example, what differentiates improvement of the athlete from improvement of equipment?
Or hell, let's go even further: what differentiates improved training methods, improved nutrition, improved recovery/restoration methods, improved supplements, ad infinitum, from AAS usage?
In other words, why are we drawing the line in the sand with AAS considering the amount of money, time and research spent maximizing every other aspect of the athlete? It seems somewhat out of place.
Thoughts?