Quote:
Originally Posted by JustinD
If you have some time, I would read "Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans". It has some great discussions relating baseball to neurology. It uses Cubs fans as a discussion point of fandom. They have some interesting information as to these substances and baseball.
On Greenies - "Amphetamines produce little or no enhancement in reaction time but significantly reduce the effect of fatigue on a person’s ability to track a moving object such as a ball. Dextroamphetamine, an amphetamine variant this is popular as a recreational drug, improves decision-making and reduces impulsivity in healthy human beings, which would be an effective enhancement for batters that tended to swing at balls outside of the strike zone.”
This was the how and why so many used them to slow the game. My personal favorite description of greenies was used by Doc Ellis, an avid user of just about everything, in "No No, A Dockumentary". If you have not seen it yet, I would reccomend. It is fantastic.
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I'd not be surprised if there was some small positive impact on home run totals; energy stimulants may well produce a gain here. I've never seen any evidence at all or any real attempt at a statistical analysis, merely quoted opinions like this. But it would not be surprising.
The unanswered second question, logically necessary to make Aaron guilty of anything, is of course impossible to answer as there is no evidence whatsoever beyond the fact that some people want him to be guilty so that it can justify the desired perspective that the big stars of all eras are guilty.
There's another big difference between the previous past eras and the steroid era. Even simply ignoring the falsehood that any attempt to gain performance is the same whether or not it violates the rules and whether or not it works - is that one of them works on a logical and evidentiary basis and the other is not evidentiary. We have mountains of evidence against Bonds, and pure speculation that simply suits some folks narratives on Aaron. These are not the same.