Baseball News - Say it ain't so!



Swinging a bat is much like throwing a ball. Strength can only take you so far before your own ability takes over.

The proverbial crap is hitting the fan in Major League Baseball this week. Jason and Jeremy Giambi have admitted to using steroids during their baseball careers; Barry Bonds has admitted to unknowingly using steroids, along with several other San Francisco Giants. Where’s the breaking news, you might ask? These weren’t exactly the best-kept secrets around. Some would call it cheating, but as far as Major League Baseball is concerned, it is merely a violation of the substance abuse rules (at the moment, anyway). Bonds taking steroids is no different from Grant Roberts smoking marijuana. He broke the law by taking illegal drugs, but by no means did he actually receive an unfair advantage. Jason Giambi, in his testimony, said that he noticed no real improvement with the steroids.

When you’re looking to hit a ball a great distance, the first thing that comes to your mind is strength. This guy has to be strong; he just hit a ball 500 feet! What it comes down to is bat speed. The quicker you swing the bat the harder the bat will hit the ball. Strength does not necessarily equal bat speed, it’s much like throwing the ball. Strength is definitely a factor to a certain extent. Obviously an infant can not pick up a ball and throw it 95 mph, but if a full grown man can only throw a ball 80 mph and another 90, does that make one stronger than the other? Billy Wagner is probably the smallest guy in baseball, yet he throws harder than anybody in the game; is he the strongest player in the game? Everybody in baseball can hit homeruns nowadays; it doesn’t take any more strength out of Omar Visquel to hit one homerun than it does to hit two…or three or four etc… It can be assumed that everybody has the bat speed to hit 40 homeruns, but not everybody has the rest of the talent necessary to hit 40 over the wall, the ability to actually hit the ball. For most hitters, it’s as simple as not having that home run stroke.

Barry has always been one of the most patient hitters of all time, even before the steroid speculation he appeared headed for Cooperstown. Bonds is a very unique case. He is the only other player next to Hank Aaron himself to perform so well after the age of 35. Who would have thought he would break the home run record in 2001 at age 37? Especially when his previous career high was 49. In the year 2001, Barry Bonds was probably hitting in the best lineup of his career; he had Jeff Kent batting behind him, who finished with 22 HR, 106 RBI as well as a .298 batting average. It didn’t hurt that Kent was the reigning NL MVP either. Rich Aurilia finished with 37 HR, 97 RBI and a .324 batting average. What we have here is a chicken or the egg situation; did Bonds do so well because of Kent and Aurilia, or did the Giants middle infield do so well because of Bonds? Either way, we know for certain that this is the first time in Bonds’ career that he had that much protection in the lineup. When you’ve got a hitter as patient and as good as Bonds, and you’ve given him the ability to see as many pitches as he wants, Bonds can sit back, wait for his pitch and crank it over the wall. Because of his 2001 campaign, Bonds became the most feared hitter in baseball. So much that his on base percentage had gone from .582 to .529 to a whopping .609 in 2004. With nearly every pitcher on the mound panicking because Barry is at the plate, Barry can waste several pitches each at bat. If Barry thinks it’s close, he doesn’t have to swing. Rarely have pitchers come after him. Like 2001, Bonds is able to wait for his pitch and hit it over the wall. Don’t want to give him his pitch? Fine, he’ll trot on down the first base line. That has been Barry’s approach his entire career; with all of the extra respect around baseball from his 2001 season, we should have seen this coming.

People see Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and assume it was the steroids that made them great, when, like it or not, they were great ball players to begin with. It’s the Bonds’ and the Giambi’ that stand out because they are on that upper tier of players. Whatever they do wrong will be magnified 1000 times. Nobody is telling Benito Santiago to erase his records from the books, because he doesn’t have any. Steroids do not give a baseball player talent. Steroids aid in building muscle, and muscle does not mean better baseball player.




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