He was also a cheater, taking bespoke steroid cocktails, so there's that.
Further, having the discussion of "steroids" being centered around *steroids* is a bit of an oversimplification as by and large the state of the art had moved on by the heyday of Bonds/McGuire/Sosa. Nevertheless, the focus was always on the chemicals that made players big & strong, meanwhile the ones that helped to *preserve* muscle and/or enhance recovery speed were more impactful.
And even then, simply looking at things like power outliers over time isn't useful. State of the art in terms of play style changed over time. For instance there have been eras where players were intentionally hitting for contact and eras where players were intentionally hitting for power.
Or, one can just relax in the knowledge that players have been cheating, chemically or otherwise, from time immemorial, and that it's impossible to retroactively sort out. So if we compare players relative to their peers and then use that to compare across eras we can get a better sense. But it's folly to read too much into all of this.
That's just way too hand-wavy for me. Not all crimes should be categorized as misdemeanors. We have misdemeanors and felonies for a reason.
For instance, it was understood by those in the uhhh let's call it "sports nutrition" circles at the time that as a class pitchers were benefiting more overall than batters from the chemical enhancement options of that era. But yet the focus was on the home run hitter outliers. Why?
And let's also not forget that the poster children of the anti-steroid brigade are players who would have likely already been all time greats. Anyone who thinks that a Nobody became a HoFer is deluding themselves. Further: who had more to gain? The already great talent, or the marginal AAAA player who was just looking for an edge to make a team out of spring training?
My point here is that views like you're espousing are too black & white, and too narrowly applied. There's *way* too much noise to sort it all out. None of the household names of "the steroid era" were doing anything different than most of the other players. They were just already great.
That's exactly what I proposed above. I didn't say I was right. I proposed a methodology to say that I'm right (or wrong).
> Statistical outlier analysis of different time periods would help settle this matter.
Such an analysis would need to: a) prove that such outliers are caused by cheating, b) prove *which* form of cheating led to those outliers, c) prove that each individual outlier *was* taking part in that form of cheating, etc. And even then all that manages to capture are outliers. It doesn't capture the hordes of players who weren't outliers, rather they were only in the league because they were using whatever form of cheating to help make the cut.
In other words, the strong anti-cheating stances when applied to historical players is just as handwavey as the let it go philosophy I espoused earlier.