The marginal value of steroids

Dean Barnett, taking off from a Bill James comment(in which he is skeptical about attributing the late-90s HR binge to steroid use), says:

I’ve spent a lot of time in the gym over the past three decades, and have been around steroid use. Steroids don’t take a guy who can’t bench press 200 pounds and suddenly have him putting up 300. They help the user become stronger, but only at the margins. This marginal benefit is of most use to athletes in sports like track and field where improving your performance by 2% is the difference between being the world’s greatest and just another guy.

But an improvement of a few percentage points in baseball? You don’t go from hitting 30 homers to hitting 70 because of steroid use. Maybe 30 to 35. Possibly. The actual impact of steroid use in baseball would be much greater for pitchers who could get an extra foot on their fastball than it could ever be for hitters. I’m not mentioning any names, but real baseball fans know exactly who I’m talking about.

But equipment changes? Now there’s your Holy Grail. In the past two decades, the handles of baseball bats have shrunk down to almost nothing. That means hitters generate more bat-head speed at impact. A lot more. So the ball goes farther.

Let's assume that Dean's estimate of a 2% improvement is correct. So a juiced hitter hits a ball 357 feet instead of 350, 408 feet instead of 400. That will itself produce a large increase in home runs as warning track flyballs clear the wall instead. Marginal improvements in bat speed also probably cause balls to be pulled towards the line, where the fences are closer.

What does all that mean? HR rates are still a lot higher now than the late '80s. Since none of the equipment, ballpark or technique changes have been reversed, I think it's safe to consider that the 10-20% dropoff in HRs since 2000 is due to a dropoff steroid use.

In general, I think Dean's way off by assuming 2% is not a significant difference. It's probably the difference between a replacement level player and a solid contributor, or viewed from the other direction, the difference between a replacement level player and a career minor leaguer.

As for Dean's comment about pitchers, I've also always thought that steroids were probably being used more by pitchers. The 2% improvement (from 92 mph to 99 mph) in pitch speed would be huge and steroids would also help the pitcher recover between starts (recovery from injury was the original therapeutic purpose for anabolic steroids, anyway).