Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Juicing?

In the steroid age of major league baseball, everyone with great stats or a large jump or drop in stats from one year to the next is a suspect of juicing. No great player can escape the wrath of being a suspect. Some are clean, though, and should be rewarded greatly for their efforts to become the greatest, without using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Here's the problem, how do we find the juicers? The MLB does have testing to make sure the players are clean, but someone can slip under the radar. The tests may be mandatory, but mistakes can be made. Here, I will explore a few suspects of juicing and whether i think they are and/or were juicing.
Suspect 1: Ryan Theriot, SS, Chicago Cubs
Ryan Theriot is known as a contact hitter. He hits in the upper .200s to the low .300s. He had only hit 7 homers over the past four seasons with the Cubs. This year, however, he has already hit 7. In the past three years, he has actually lost power, too. In '06 he hit 3 homers in 134 at-bats. It took him 537 at-bats to reach the same mark in '07. And last year he got 580 at-bats and had a total of 1 home run. 1 HOME RUN!!!!!!! This year with 283 at-bats and he already has 7. A huge transformation. But the question is, can you improve from 1 homer to an estimated 14 or 15 homers, being that he keeps the same pace, just by working in the gym and working on your swing? My answer is no, Theriot is, and obviously was, not juicing.
Suspect 2: David Wright, 3B, New York Mets
This year David Wright has hit 5 home runs. Last year he hit 33. The year before that he hit 30. The next year he hit 26. Thye year before that he hit 27 long bombs. And in his rookie year, he hit 14. Well then, what's with the big drop-off? Wright isn't even on track to tie or beat his rookie total, which he got in only 263 at-bats, and this year he already has 284. His average has been through the roof this year, though, at .345, his best ever. But he has lost a considerable amount of power. He was the 5-tool player, minus the speed. Now he's a 3-tool player. Has he realized he could easily get caught? I think so. I believe David Wright did take PEDs. With all the big stars of the past being caught and having their records tarnished, he realized he needed to get clean. That's my opinion.
So, these are two examples of possible PED users. These are just two examples of many possible PED users in the MLB. Theriot and Wright have two completely different scenarios, and now you can take the facts from above to make your own conclusions on other people you think may be taking PEDs (like, for instance, Big Papi David Ortiz? Just throwing a name out there ; )).