Perhaps Giambi can explain to us why Bonds' accomplishments were so far beyond his (already considerable) talents in the 1986-99 period. Maybe he was just in a slump until he hit 35?

Interesting analogy you make to use of PED and use of recreational drugs.

It's the short-term temporary illusion that recreational drugs make you feel better when, in most cases, on a long-term basis, they really don't succeed in making many people feel better overall.

I believe much the same to be true with steroids/HGH use in baseball, reflected in Giambi's comments.

Short-term, confidence boost, yes.

Muscle Mass increase, yes. Whether that additional mass is utilized to faster bat speed has not yet been proven conclusively for obvious reasons.
And Bonds always had lightning quick bat speed and hit some monster tape measure home runs even back when he was built like a popsicle stick.

You would have to improve bat speed, which is a combination of strength and speed. Very difficult to do both. Many believe without being blessed with good genetics ie: higher proportion of fast-twitch muscle fibers, that increased mass in most cases is irrelevant except to make for a better looking squad coming off the bus.

I thinks that is what the David Ortiz's and Giambi's are getting at when they acknowledge what Bonds is doing is admirable on some level.

Either he's the only one who has figured out how to combine PED use with maintanence of the unique sports skill of hitting a baseball (hardest thing to do in sports IMO) while avoiding injury and breakdowns assoicated with PED use.

Canseco's career derailed due to injuries. There are others Jose implicated who you could argue had potential HOF careers detoured primarily due to PED use.

I think that's the reason for the apparent disconnect between fans response to Bonds and players response. Among players, most of the negative stuff has come from pitchers (Schilling, Lidle, Wendell) although Clemens was surprisingly positive except for the love tap to the elbow guard incident.

Hitters know how difficult it is, with or without PED use to hit home runs. And unfortunatley, for what it's worth, they have become the human guinea pigs as to whether the stuff works or doesn't work effectively, if you temporarily put ethical issues aside. We won't know the long-term health ramifications for this set of guys for another 20-30 years.

Ultimately, you're always going to be left with the ethical dilema of whether the risk of being caught and the long-tem health issues are worth the potential reward of being a Major League player, on whatever level.

Would you take a winning lottery check today, worth anwhere between $1M and potentially hundreds of millions, if you were told that if you won you could lose 10-20 years off your life?

What's the old smokers retort? "Well, it's the last twenty years, they weren't going to be very good years anyway"

The saying goes, "There is no magic pill..." But, the saying is wrong! There are lots of them!

Steroids improve hand-eye coordination and cognative thought processes. So says a co-worker of mine who is on a steroid prescription for his back condition.

I can also personally testify about a couple illegal drugs (that I haven't used in the last twenty years). LSD definately improves hand-eye coordination. For a second opinion, Google Doc Ellis:

http://www.sirbacon.org/4membersonly/docellis.htm

Cocaine definately improves the efficiancy of the cognative thinking process. The only time I ever aced a calculous exam was the day I tooted right before entering class. And it was easy! Previously, I struggled to maintain a C grade.

Given my personal experience and the anecdotal evidence, I think the hypothysis above deserves futher investigation.

Hey anonymous,
Are you still tooting, because last I checked, LSD is a hallucinogen. I guess you could hallucinate better hand-eye coordination. And 'roids help your hand-eye coordination too and your "cognative" thought processes as well? You better get off that Love Boat, pal. It's a killer. So Coke helps with math, huh? What does it do for spelling?

"LSD definately improves hand-eye coordination."

That may be the funniest line I have ever read on this site. At least until I got to the "calculous" story.

The military did a study on the cognitive effects of various drugs using spider's webs to provide objective, visual results (google it yourself). To summarize, at no time does drug use increase your ability to accomplish any task without screwing it up entirely. Coordination would be the first skill to hit the floor (unless you are Dr Johnny Fever).

I guess that is why we don't have alot of Mr. Universe winners at NASA or or at the top of the All-time BA list.

I don't think anybody ever accused antone of taking teroids or other PEDs to improve their batter's eye or coordination. It's strength and recuperative advantages people were after.

Barry was always a great hitter. Steroids allowed him the strength to put 70 over the wall instead of 30. And the ability to work out harder and not feel the effects.

If it didn't work, he wouldn't do it. None of them would.

I would say people take drugs because they believe they work. Often, the reason people believe that something works is because it does. But one of the effects of driving performance-enhancing drugs underground is that it leaves an athlete thinking about using reliant on rumor and legend much more than would be the case otherwise. The player isnt probably going to know for sure that so and so is using, or what he's using, and wont know about those who tried it and stopped.

And sabermetrics is in part founded on the thought that even participants can be fooled into misunderstanding their own experience when received thinking and small sample sizes meet.

All that said, I do think steroids/hgh/etc improve performance, but I think the question is at least open as to how much they improve performance, and I also have little doubt the Bonds would be among the game's greatest if he and the rest of the league had never used the stuff.

"To summarize, at no time does drug use increase your ability to accomplish any task without screwing it up entirely."

That one's pretty funny too. Is that study by the same military that is currently pumping U.S. troops full of drugs to help them perform better on the battlefield? Funny, they must really believe in the placebo effect.

I think: It's naive for you to think that drugs don't confer advantages to their users, it's naive for users to think that there won't be unintended/negative effects, and it's nearly impossible to have constructive debate since most of us fall back on deeply entrenched stereotypes and rhetoric.

capybara- well said.

Gee the Bonds apologists are coming out of the woodwork. Who will be next? Rafael Palmeiro? Mark McGwire? Sammy Sosa? Gary Sheffield?

I think for a player the decision to use steroids and risk long term health comes about at the same time a player commits to spending more time on his physical conditioning and more time in the gym in order to be a better player. Yaz won a triple-crown (doubling his career high HR total of 20 to 44 in 1967) after spending time doing weight training after the 1966 off season, presumably without the steroids. So it is a question as to what causes the better performance, the time in the gym or the steroids. More likely steroids help, but w/o the gym time and skills to hit a ball, maybe not so much.

As for the "Everyone else was doing it." excuse, this is certainly a very good excuse. If the perception at the time is that those players having career years are doing so because they are using steroids, and you are struggling to maintain your performance numbers which may be good (but diminished because other players are doing better), or marginal (in which case you risk losing your job to a steroid user), then as a player you would have to consider using, especially when there were no penalties for doing so.

It is easy for fans to take the moral high road and say steroids are wrong and is cheating and players should not do it, no matter what the consequences to their careers. But the average Joe probably does what he needs to do to keep his job and get promoted, even if it means lying to the boss or client, or stealing someones idea, etc. It happens.

Human nature being what it is, you do what you need to do to compete. There is a line that should not be crossed of course, for example taking actions that hurt others can never be condoned, but steroids hurt only the player and indirectly their familes, and even then it is a trade off for long term health for short term success (or maintenance) that translates into dollars.

Baseball knew about steroid use, and saw it as a positive, and by their inaction encouraged the use. It was only when Congress got involved that they and the players agreed to do something about it, and even then one wonders how effectivethe policies have been up until today.

Hell, all this talk is makin' me jones. Somebody call the pusherman. I'm in need of some advantages. What's the drug that makes me a Hall-of-Fame blogger and richer than all the other chumps?

And while you're at it, pick me up a penis pump.

I agree with the sentiment that if Giambi's gonna talk, TALK. However, Crank, Bonds late-career surge mirrored the explosion in offense in all of baseball. Read http://www.onlybaseballmatters.com/archives/2004/04/28-skip_bayless_has_a_column.php if you want to talk about the issue coherently.

As for sir bacon, um, that was essentially dead on.

geb4000, get a grip. Reasoned debate does not an apologist make.

In my opinion, Charles Slavik had it right. Athletes may use because they THINK it works, but no one really knows it does. The fact that it helps build muscle does not mean that the additional muscle translates to hitting a baseball harder or farther. HGH does absolutely nothing to enhance athletic performance (unless you are prepubescent or have a hormone deficiency), and slow-twitch muscle development from anabolic steroid use can by no means be assumed to have the intended baseball effects. Bulkier, yes; dead-lift stronger, yes; faster bat, no.

John, you are wrong, and slicing the numbers at 1995 only muddies the waters so as to obscure the point. Bonds' sudden, drastic and sustained leap forward at age 35 is wholly unprecedented in the game's history.

Crank, even if you are right that "Bonds' sudden, drastic and sustained leap forward at age 35 is wholly unprecedented in the game's history," that still does not prove that steroid use was responsible. Correlation does not equal causality, and I think we are too quick to assume steroids result in improved baseball performance without any real evidence that they do.

Yeah, Crank, you should know better. Aren't you a politics guy? Who was the youngest U.S. President of all time...JFK? This would imply that all prior Presidents and subsequent Presidents were juicing because they reached their pinnacles after 35 [was it?]. The only thing we have to fear is age itself. Not a defense of Barry (remember that guy from "Club Paradise"?...makes me think of him...what a dork). But how did all those Presidents become so smart in middle age?

As I have explained before, to argue that steroids don't help power hitters you have to argue either that (a) steroids don't help make you stronger or (b) physical strength has nothing to do with hitting for power.

I'm not convinced of either of those propositions.

Steroids don't make you stronger. They allow you to make yourself stronger quicker.