quote:

The "come on, just look at him!" fallacy is really tired at this point and has no actual science to back it up. It also ignores a lot of known factors of baseball, such as the ball itself, ballparks, pitching, strike zones, and the cyclical nature of the sport. There were boom and bust times for offense throughout the history of the sport.

serious gaylord posted:

He seems to think that all PED's do are give you massive gently caress off muscles which couldnt be further from the truth.

stickyfngrdboy posted:

So the fact a 37 year record was broken twice in one year by two men who took PEDs is a coincidence, or it was the ball's fault?

quote:

Are you loving kidding me? Do you even know what steroids do or are you just being ridiculous because your sport is under fire for being full of cheats?

quote:

Tactical changes? Smaller strike zones? Could you explain how these allow the best MLB hitters to be the best MLB hitters (the ones who also took PEDs)?

serious gaylord posted:

He seems to think that all PED's do are give you massive gently caress off muscles which couldnt be further from the truth.

dilbertschalter posted:

It's tired in the sense that it's comically hard to refute and thus you get obfuscation in the form of specious appeals to broader trends. From age 36-39 Bonds had, by OPS+, the third best, the best, the eleventh best, and the second best seasons a hitter has ever had. His previous best four seasons by OPS+ were Age 27 (42nd best) Age 28 (35th best) Age 31 (107th best) Age 35 (107th best). If you want attribute this to factors "such as the ball itself, ballparks, pitching, strike zones, and the cyclical nature of the sport" or "juiced balls, smaller parks, smaller strike zones, expansion, tactical changes, health & nutrition advances" feel free, but just know that you're totally wrong.

Mornacale posted:

Babe Ruth set the home run record at 60 in 1927. 34 years later, in 1961, Roger Maris broke the record with 61. He never hit even 40 home runs in any other season. Is this more or less unusual, do you think, than several exceptional power hitters happening to break power hitting records during the greatest league-wide power hitting era in the history of the sport?


Do you know how the human body develops for professional baseball players between the ages of 20 and 30+?


An increased understanding of the value of power and the acceptability of strikeouts led to more players swinging for the fences and hitting more home runs. A smaller strike zone allowed players to pick and choose pitches more, getting a higher percentage that they could drive. Offense skyrocketed league-wide. The best hitters, being the best hitters, took most advantage of these factors and put up historic offensive numbers. When the distribution has a large bias, the outliers will be very extreme; just the same as how the best pitching performances in eras with very low offense look bizarrely great.

A huge number of MLB players took PEDs. Baseball players have been taking PEDs since the 19th century. Some players who take PEDs completely suck; some are average; some are among the all-time greats; some never even make it to MLB. Some are hitters and some are pitchers. But for some reason you want to talk about three who happened to be elite home run hitters as if that proves some kind of point. It doesn't.


I'm a little confused how you are posting this in support of the guy who's arguing based on pictures of guys with big muscles.


Someone literally just posted a comprehensive study that says that we are correct. You, on the other hand, are going with common sense and your own ignorance of the sport of baseball. It's not persuasive.

stickyfngrdboy posted:

cool, you've convinced me.

stickyfngrdboy posted:

Mornacale posted:

Someone literally just posted a comprehensive study that says that we are correct. You, on the other hand, are going with common sense and your own ignorance of the sport of baseball. It's not persuasive.

quote:

Oh yes, this player was too good later in his career so obviously he cheated, another fallacy with no science behind it

Hank Aaron's best home run season was at age 37

Mornacale posted:

Babe Ruth set the home run record at 60 in 1927. 34 years later, in 1961, Roger Maris broke the record with 61. He never hit even 40 home runs in any other season. Is this more or less unusual, do you think, than several exceptional power hitters happening to break power hitting records during the greatest league-wide power hitting era in the history of the sport?

quote:

Someone literally just posted a comprehensive study that says that we are correct. You, on the other hand, are going with common sense and your own ignorance of the sport of baseball. It's not persuasive.

Karl Sharks posted:

The things you say here are negatives (injury/wear and tear and putting kids' futures on the hopes on something very hard to achieve), I don't think anyone can disagree, but how do you then conclude that more negative things should be allowed?

I mean it's like saying "oh, people don't take all of their antibiotics, which can lead to antibiotic resistant bacteria, so why stand in the way of just prescribing it to everyone with a sniffle and injecting it into livestock?" You're recognizing harmful aspects that exist and hopefully believe they should be prevented/mitigated while simultaneously adding more harmful things to the mix.

ElwoodCuse posted:

You have been offered several explanations for the offensive surge in baseball at the time and instead choose to conclude that it was all because of PEDs despite there being no proof that the changes/effects they produce make you better at baseball.

tbp posted:

To the doctor in the thread: does long term abuse of PEDs necessitate life-long mitigation thereafter? Someone mentioned in the thread earlier "low t therapy", is this always the case?

Also, does blood doping have many long term effects? Is that what caused the "cyclists awake at 2AM" thing?

serious gaylord posted:

If PEDS were pointless is making people better at baseball. Why did they take them?

lmaoboy1998 posted:

also the argument that 'wow! we see more 500 yard passes!' is really stupid in my opinion. the only reason a 500 yard pass is impressive in the first place is because its something of our own performing it; I compare it with my own abilities as a human being, and am amazed at the difference. if I saw a machine launch a ball 500 metres I wouldn't be amazed, because I know machines can do that. similarly, when I see someone on a cocktail of drugs throw a long ball I'm not particularly thrilled, because that's just what cocktails of drugs allow you to do. there's no real surprise, its not an achievement, who gives a poo poo.

Mr.Nice posted:

About the moral argument, it's not : "I shouldn't put harmful things in my body" but "by being a pro athlete I choose to agree to a set of rules, ignoring those rules would be cheating."

Fag Boy Jim posted:

also i think doping is much less of a moral issue and much more of an issue as to why people are interested in sport in the first place.

ElwoodCuse posted:

Professional athletes will try absolutely anything to gain an edge. Why do they all wear placebo garbage like those hologram bracelets or titanium necklaces? With the money at stake, anything is worth a shot.

BWV posted:

I see your reasoning. It makes sense. Saying something bad is happening already doesnt justify further bad. However in this case I think the "evil" of doping is so small in comparison to the larger issue at hand. My major issue is that in focussing only on doping as cheating we seem to convince ourselves that the rest of professional sports is somehow a place for fairness and moral goodness. Having sportswriters pen long diatribes against doping prevents us from considering how most sports in general rely entirely on athletes destroying their bodies for our enjoyment. Like I said, I'm perfectly okay with that, I accept it for what it is. I just wanted to bring up all these other ills in my last post only to suggest that the issue of doping isn't about a bunch of bad eggs cheating, but is the logical result of the professionalization of sports.

ElwoodCuse posted:

Professional athletes will try absolutely anything to gain an edge. Why do they all wear placebo garbage like those hologram bracelets or titanium necklaces? With the money at stake, anything is worth a shot.

ElwoodCuse posted:

Professional athletes will try absolutely anything to gain an edge. Why do they all wear placebo garbage like those hologram bracelets or titanium necklaces? With the money at stake, anything is worth a shot.

TelekineticBear! posted:

lol

PEDs have been rigorously researched and shown to work for decade after decade in practically every sport going, they are just some voodoo magic or lucky charm

Byolante posted:

Your comprehensive study posted on the page before was written by a author with a major conflict of interest. It also uses some rather odd statistical choices.

dilbertschalter posted:

Aging: not definitively shown to exist by science. I even included the Aaron example, because it isn't remotely on the same level, notably because he had reached similar levels, though not quite as high, of performance earlier in his career. Ted Williams had one of the best seasons ever at age 38, but again, he had reached similar levels earlier in his career. Bonds had never come even come close to reaching the level of production he sustained for four years at any prior point in his career. Again, if there's an actual explanation to that other than broader trends (all magically having an effect on him starting in 2001, I'd be interested.


This comparison is totally wrong/meaningless. Maris was in the prime of his career and his previous season was not that much worse (basically identical OBA, 40 points more of slugging percentage not a big change). Bonds was 36 and his OPS was a full 243 points higher than his best prior season. And he kept up that level for the next three years. The situations are not

Making inferences based on data is a basic and effective way of making judgments about the world. I'm well aware of the factors you've listed, but none of them explain the massive power spike Bonds had. Describing him as an "outlier" is nice, but you can't simply say "well, he was an outlier, that's that." You need to try and explain what caused his improvement (hint: massive PED use). The entire study is designed about as well as the website and is based on a completely unfounded assumption and

ephex posted:

They wear those items because they get paid to wear them so that idiots worldwide see their favourite sports men wear a thing and then proceed to buy that thing.

Mornacale posted:

Please link us some of this rigorous research that shows the impact of PED use on home runs! Then we can talk about a real thing rather than people assuming that whatever seems to make sense to them must be actually true.

Mornacale posted:

Please link us some of this rigorous research that shows the impact of PED use on home runs! Then we can talk about a real thing rather than people assuming that whatever seems to make sense to them must be actually true.

Barry Bonds is the single greatest human being who has ever lived on Earth, in the arena of hitting baseballs. The game entered one of the greatest hitting eras of all time. He mashed like it was going out of style. It was cool as all hell. Not one person in this thread has a shred of evidence of how much of a role any substances that he may have taken affected his ability to hit. The end.

By the way, it's funny that you let Hank Aaron off the hook, since unlike Bonds he's an admitted PED user.

quote:

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of infusion of 400 mL of red blood cells (RBCs) on 10-km track race time, submaximal heart rate, hematocrit, 2,3-diphosphoglycerate, and partial pressure of oxygen at 50% hemoglobin saturation. Six highly trained, male, distance runners twice donated a unit of RBCs, which was frozen for subsequent reinfusion. Eleven weeks after the second donation, they undertook a series of three competitive 10-km races on a standard 400-m track: before infusion, after 100 mL of saline solution, and after 400 mL of autologous, previously frozen deglycerolized RBCs. All subjects took all trials in this double-blind, placebo, crossover, experimental design. Running time was recorded at each 400-m split, and blood was collected prior to each trial. The data were analyzed by analysis of variance. Results following the RBC infusion showed a significantly higher hematocrit concentration, a significantly faster 10-km run, a nonsignificant decrease in submaximal heart rate (10 beats faster 10-km run, a nonsignificant decrease in submaximal heart rate (10 beats per minute), and no significant changes in either 2,3-diphosphoglycerate or partial pressure of oxygen at 50% hemoglobin saturation. Erythrocythemia induced by the infusion of 400 mL of autologous packed RBCs effectively increased performance capacity in a 10-km track race, probably due to an increase in oxygen delivery to the working muscles.

quote:

Tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) was recently identified as a novel steroid used illicitly to improve athletic performance. Although its structure is closely related to gestrinone, a 19-nor progestin, and resembles that of trenbolone, THG was never marketed, so information on its hormonal properties is not known. In this study, we demonstrate that THG is a highly potent androgen and progestin in a yeast-based in vitro bioassay system expressing human androgen and progesterone receptors. It has no estrogenic activity and no antagonism for any of the three steroid receptor classes.

quote:

Androgens exert their effects in many parts of the body, including reproductive tissues, muscle, bone, hair follicles in the skin, the liver and kidneys, and the haematopoietic, immune and central nervous systems (Mooradian et al., 1987). The androgenic effects of these hormones can be generally considered as those associated with masculanization and the anabolic effects as those associated with protein building in skeletal muscle and bone.

The effects of androgens are modulated at cellular level by the steroid-converting enzymes within the particular target tissue (Figure 1). In reproductive target tissues, testosterone can be considered to be a prohormone, being readily converted by 5α-reductase to the more potent androgen DHT. In other tissues, such as adipose tissue and parts of the brain, testosterone is converted by aromatase to the oestrogen, oestradiol. In bone, the mechanism of action of the anabolism of androgens has not been entirely elucidated but both a direct effect of testosterone and a mediated effect by aromatization to oestradiol are important (Orwoll, 1996; Zitzmann and Nieschlag, 2004). In the human skeletal muscle (collected less than 12 h post-mortem), 5α-reductase activity (either type 1 or 2) is not detectable (Thigpen et al., 1993), so testosterone itself is chiefly binding to the androgen receptor (as supported also by a number of animal studies, mainly in the rat). Aromatase expression and activity is significant in human skeletal muscle (Larionov et al., 2003) but whether the conversion of androgens to oestrogens within this tissue is physiologically important for mediating some of the myotrophic effect of androgens is yet to be determined.

quote:

Athletes and bodybuilders have recognized for several decades that the use of anabolic steroids can promote muscle growth and strength but it is only relatively recently that these agents are being revisited for clinical purposes. Anabolic steroids are being considered for the treatment of cachexia associated with chronic disease states, and to address loss of muscle mass in the elderly, but nevertheless their efficacy still needs to be demonstrated in terms of improved physical function and quality of life. In sport, these agents are performance enhancers, this being particularly apparent in women, although there is a high risk of virilization despite the favourable myotrophic-androgenic dissociation that many xenobiotic steroids confer. Modulation of androgen receptor expression appears to be key to partial dissociation, with consideration of both intracellular steroid metabolism and the topology of the bound androgen receptor interacting with co-activators. An anticatabolic effect, by interfering with glucocorticoid receptor expression, remains an attractive hypothesis. Behavioural changes by non-genomic and genomic pathways probably help motivate training. Anabolic steroids continue to be the most common adverse finding in sport and, although apparently rare, designer steroids have been synthesized in an attempt to circumvent the dope test. Doping with anabolic steroids can result in damage to health, as recorded meticulously in the former German Democratic Republic. Even so, it is important not to exaggerate the medical risks associated with their administration for sporting or bodybuilding purposes but to emphasize to users that an attitude of personal invulnerability to their adverse effects is certainly misguided.

serious gaylord posted:

Please stop replying to the concern troll.

Lets get this thread back onto the good track it was. There are some super hardcore insane performance stuff knocking around at the moment. The widely documented product that gave people an almost 60% better rate of stamina without any extra training has been mentioned, with the caveat of rapid cancerous tumour growths throughout your entire body.

However there are others out there, I'd like to know more about them.

Quasimango posted:

Obviously, those three are freakish outliers, but Sosa, Bonds and McGwire all came into baseball at a time when strength training was still viewed sceptically by a lot of people in the game

Karl Sharks posted:

Also, can someone explain exactly how EPO causes the blood to get so thick?

Mornacale posted:

Cool, could you expound on these issues? I'm willing to believe there's no good evidence either way (I personally find the conclusion of there being no [meaningful] effect to be difficult to believe), I just hate how steroids stuff always devolves into people repeating their assumptions over and over without--or in the face of--evidence.

Karl Sharks posted:

Also, can someone explain exactly how EPO causes the blood to get so thick? I found in an article it was due to polycythemia, but I can't find the actual biological mechanism behind it. The extent of my biology/chemistry knowledge is bio in high school and just finished up a year of organic chemistry, so basically nil but I loved learning about how different medicines/substances actually worked in the body.