Yesterday, MLB comissioner Bud Selig instituted a new policy in which all minor league players will be randomly tested for HGH. That is all minor league players who are not on the 40 man roster of the major league team (which is around 15 minor leaguers). Selig is making this move "to protect the integrity of the game."
I have no problem with this, except to say that the idea that Selig is taking the high ground for integrity is just ridiculous. Minor league players have no collective bargain rights. That means the commissioner can require them to do anything he wants. Make them pee in a cup, no problem, make them take a blood test, no problem. Selig unilaterally instituted steroid testing in the minor leagues, and the players had no say. Of course he did that well after the issue of steroids was already front page news. He could have also instituted a test for HGH at the same time, which was being called for, but he didn't. Instead he waited an additional nine years to do it. I'm glad the step has been made, and baseball is the first professional sport in America to require this test, but please don't gloat about something that you could have and should have done a long time ago.
Now part of the reason given for why HGH was not tested for in the past was the unreliability of the test. That is true, although many think it is still unreliable. But the problem is that the Olympic committee has been testing for HGH for years, and they have been going one step further. They have saved the blood samples so that when a reliable test was made that they could then test retroactively and know who was using and remove any prizes they may have won. MLB could have done the same, but they didn't.
This season is being called the year of the pitcher. Whenever anyone asks about the resurgence of pitching the one reason given is that the "hitters are no longer on steroids." There are two problems with this. The first is that in the testing program half of all the players caught using steroids have been pitchers, so that doesn't seem to work. (although a funny cartoon I just saw, asked how many home runs A-Rod might have hit had he not been facing pitchers who were juicing.) The second problem is that testing has been in place for quite a while, which leads to the question why is this happening now? You either have to say this year is an anomaly of some sort, which is all that can be said since one data point does not create a pattern or trend, or you have to say that steroids testing has not been effective if players were still knocking the ball around, until this year.
Another topic of conversation this year has been the spate of injuries plaguing teams. You need look no further than the Red Sox to see this taking place. There has been a lot of conversation about this as well, with lots of speculation of why this is happening, including working out too much, but what has not come up yet is the simple fact that steroids allow players to heal faster. That was really the major reason to take them.
Regardless of what all the pundits say, I do not believe that steroids can make you hit home runs. Instead, they enhance your performance by allowing you to work out harder and longer, and for your muscles to heal much quicker from those workouts allowing you to continue much sooner then you otherwise would. And, when you do get injured they allow you to heal quicker, getting back sooner. That means you remain healthier longer into the season, and the little nagging injuries that would have slowed down your production through the dog days of summer no longer happened. That is why home runs totals went up. Just look at Mickey Mantle. If he had been able to stay healthy he would have blown Ruth's single season home run record away, just like McGwire and Bonds, but come August and September his production always went down because he couldn't stay healthy.
Remember Andy Pettite's claim about why he used? It was so that he could heal quicker, and most of the players who have admitted to using, especially retired players, have said that was the reason they used. So now we are seeing the direct results of no steroids. The nagging little injuries that would not have been an issue 15 years ago are now putting people on the DL because they are not healing as quickly, and the cumulative wear and tear of the season is dragging them down. And we have a lot more data points for this because this has been happening for a number of seasons. Although I doubt that a reporter will go back and try and track DL assignments before and after testing, it would be a great story to do.
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