Posted by: BHL (Knight1285@aol.com) on Thu Mar 17 23:55:25 2005

Hi All:

It seems that the MLB is immersed in a probe to find out whether statistical hitting abberations are steroid-related. To be precise, few are willing to implicate others; as a result, the purity of certain achievements will always be questioned from this day hence. Yet, the trial might incite quite a few to accuse small home run hitters that their achievement is derived from substances, rather than stellar mechanics.

This conclusion seems to be based on the pretense that all undersized batters have about the same power as an Ichiro. Thus, one would be led to believe that any small hitter hitting for power is a bonafide "cheater" (i.e., steroid user). When put into context, though, this type of reasoning is illogical, since small rotational hitters / weight-lifters like Jimmy Winn hit many impressive home runs prior to the availability of doping materials.

Of course, players like Mel Ott pulled every pitch, so they did not need to "juice up" in order to clear the center field fence.

As of now, I'm interested on hearing about whether home runs are caused by effective mechanics, anabolic derivatives, or a mixture of the two.

I'm open to all comments.

Sincerely,
BHL
Knight1285@aol.com

P.S. Personally, I equate the steroid hearing with McCarthyism.