by Peter Bagnolo

Created on: September 27, 2010

Ways for baseball to recover from steroids and doping scandals

First an accurate overview:

Steroids “doping” has nothing to do with the mechanisms which create home runs or high batting averages.  Those mechanisms will be displayed in the URL footnotes below this article. What will be shown here is how and why people were once again hoodwinked into a finger pointing lynch mob without knowing any of the scientific evidence needed to show the real reasons for Home Run expansion. After explaining some of it below and answering the title questions, I present no gossip or lynch mob gossip, but real scientists conclusions on the debacle of home run production.

Many scientists have proven, (Some at my request) that steroids had nothing to do with the home run farce that began sporadically beginning in 1910, again in 1920, 1930, 1951, 1961, 1987, 1991, 1994, and 1996-2005. The differences in those many years were that in the early days baseball admitted that they were “improving the baseballs.

As most people believed, in 1961 with attendance down, the idea of Mickey Mantle breaking the Babe’s record appealed to owners to snap up attendance, because a reality, but with the wrong fellow breaking the record. A fellow, Roger Maris, who unlike Ruth or Mantle had never before and never after hit 40 home runs in a season in his career.

“Common knowledge appears to be that whenever a number of people who were not sluggers have a big year simultaneously, the ball has been pumped. I called 1961 the Norm Cash Year where Cash finished the season at .361, leading the major leagues in hitting. 1961 was the only season in his career as a .271 lifetime hitter, that he hit .300. The next season, 1962, he hit only .243, a 118-point drop in BA.

Cash led the majors in total bases with 354, the 20th-best figure in major league history up to that time; no other player active in 1961 ever exceeded that figure. Further, he led the MLB in on-base percentage with .487, one of the highest in history by a player other than Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. He also led the MLB in OPS with 1,148, in Runs Created with 170. He only hit 40 home runs that one season and he hit 39 the next season, and 1961 and 1962 were the only seasons in which he batted in 100 runs or more. 1961 was the only season Cash scored 100 runs or more. He also hit his career high of eight triples in 1961. Cash had 100 or more walks in only two seasons, 1961 and 1962. All of his career highs came

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