Study: Steroids Could Significantly Increase Home Runs for Professional Players
By Alexis Madrigal
September 25, 2007 | 9:31:00 AMCategories:
Sports
A Tufts physicist and baseball fan
will publish an article in the upcoming issue of the
American Journal of Physics detailing how a small increase in muscle mass could increase the amount of home runs a professional-baseball-level player would hit by over 50 percent.
It is well documented that steroids increase muscle mass, but what was unclear was how that physical change would translate to on-the-field performance. The prevailing sentiment was
summed up by Oakland A's third basemen Eric Chavez. He told the
Boston Herald, "Everyone talks about being on the juice or whatever, but you still have to be able to hit. If you can't hit, nothing is going to help." But then, how to explain the explosion of home run hitting from about 1995 onward?
Roger Tobin, the study’s author, calculated that a 'roided-out size increase in muscle mass (10 percent) would allow a hitter to strike a baseball about 5 percent faster. For you or me, the 4 percent increase in ball speed that our higher bat speed would allow us to generate wouldn’t mean much. Chavez is right, for guys who can’t hit, steroids don’t help. We’d still fly out to center. But for professional baseball players playing in parks that were designed with normal human biological strength constraints in mind, that extra 4 percent means an “increase home run production by anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent," according to Tobin.
Baseball rulemakers had set the distance from homeplate at around 400 feet to dead center because that was the discrete threshold that allowed some home runs but not too many. By changing the upper bound of their strength, already excellent hitters became like adults playing in a kids’ baseball field. Which is exactly the point, right?