IF I HAD A VOTE IN THE 2013 BASEBALL HALL OF FAME ELECTION, PART 1: A HISTORIC REFERENDUM

Guilty Until Proven Innocent? . . .

In 1996, at the start of the inflated home run period, center fielder Brady Anderson of the Baltimore Orioles hit 50 home runs in his age-32 season. Anderson had never hit more than 21 home runs previously (in 1992), and his highest subsequent total was 24 in 1999. In 2001, the same year in which Barry Bonds set the single-season home run mark with 73, left fielder Luis Gonzalez of the Arizona Diamondbacks notched 57 homers. Like Anderson, Gonzalez doubled his single-season output in 2001; in a ten-year stretch from 1996 to 2005, in his ages 28-to-37 seasons, "Gonzo" averaged 26 homers a year, hitting no more than 31 long balls in 2000; removing those outlier 57 homers in 2001, his nine-year average is 22 homers.

The 2001 season also saw a pair of middle infielders post career-high single-season marks. Seattle Mariners' second baseman Bret Boone hit 37 home runs in his age-32 season after never notching more than 24 previously (in 1998); Boone hit 35 homers in 2003, and had four other seasons in which he had collected at least 20 homers. Coincidentally, San Francisco Giants' shortstop Rich Aurilia also slammed 37 round-trippers in 2001, at age 29, nearly twice as many as he'd hit at any time in his career.

The 2001 season was a curious one, and we will examine it shortly, but the outlier experiences of the four players above, particularly the three with career totals in 2001, the apex (or nadir, depending on your outlook) of the steroids period, has been almost automatically attributed to the use of PEDs. Granted, Boone was named specifically in Canseco's book Juiced although he has (almost as automatically) denied the charge, and Gonzalez went as far as holding a press conference to deny allegations of PED usage.

In the wake of 104 names listed in the Mitchell Report that include Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Stanton, and Rondell White—all on the 2013 Hall of Fame ballot—and the results of a 2003 drug test, whose existence was stated in a 2009 news report and whose number included Sammy Sosa, another 2013 ballot choice, and Alex Rodriguez, who admitted to using PEDs from 2001 to 2003, the assumption is that a player whose performance, particularly his home-run production, seems abnormal must have been using PEDs—they are guilty until proven innocent. (Certainly that is the stance of websites that have high search-optimization rates such as the Bleacher Report and the Good Men Project, which seems to have a larger, sanctimonious agenda that strikes me as being a little creepy, but that is another story.)

That assumption seems to have borne out as true based on one of the earliest player admissions.

. . . Or Is It Proven? The Curious Case of Ken Caminiti

To tell from the experience of Ken Caminiti, there is no denying that PED usage has some kind of an impact on performance. In 1996, the San Diego Padres' third baseman became the NL MVP in his age-33 year with an outstanding offensive campaign that included career highs in batting average (.326), home runs (40), and runs batted in (130). Caminiti subsequently admitted that he had begun taking PEDs that season and continued to do so up to his 2001 retirement. (He then died prematurely of a drug overdose at age 41 in 2004.)

For the seven years between 1989 and 1995, when he became a full-time player through his ages 26 through 32 seasons—commonly regarded as a player's prime—Caminiti posted a .269/.335/.410 slash line and averaged 29 doubles, 14 home runs, 67 runs scored, and 73 runs batted in while generating a 107 OPS+ (a little better than league-average) and 16.6 WAR of his career 30.9 WAR. For the seven-year stretch from 1996, when he began using PEDs, through his final season in 2001, his ages 33 through 38 seasons, Caminiti posted a .282/.377/.522 slash line and averaged 22 doubles, 23 home runs, 68 runs scored, and 74 runs batted in while generating a 135 OPS+ and 15.4 WAR of his total 30.9 WAR. (Caminiti's first two seasons, in 1987 and 1988, produced a minus 1.1 WAR, if you are wondering how 16.6 and 15.4 seem to add to 30.9.)

Can a player get better even as he moves through his decline years of the mid- to late-thirties? Can "improved conditioning, nutrition, and training techniques" really be that effective? Or are those code words for performance-enhancing drugs?

Caminiti joins the procession of players, either through implication or admission, connected with steroids, including the biggest names of the last two decades: Bonds, Clemens, McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, Jason Giambi, Juan Gonzalez, Kevin Brown, Eric Gagne, and a host of others including Mike Piazza, who has admitted to using "andro" (androstenedione) early in his career, a time when it was not yet illegal, and Jeff Bagwell, who is merely guilty by appearance. The verdict for alleged or admitted steroid users has indeed been guilty: Bagwell, McGwire, and Palmeiro, each with solid Hall of Fame cases, have struggled to earn votes while Brown and Gonzalez fell off the ballot sooner than expected. With Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa on the ballot for the first time this year, it will be an explicit instead of a de facto referendum as all three, divorced from PEDs, would be considered first-ballot Hall of Famers as we near the announcements of the 2013 vote.

However, outliers do occur. Hall of Fame third baseman Wade Boggs was a doubles machine but was never considered to be a home run threat (although ironically his 3000th hit was a home run; only Derek Jeter has ever repeated that feat for his 3000th hit). Yet in 1987 Boggs slugged 24 home runs, three times his usual seasonal number until 1994, when he approached double digits in homers (11) for only the second time in his career. Recall from the table above that 1987 was an outlier year from the period 1980 to 1995, with Boggs now among that tier of 82 hitters with 20 or more home runs in 1987.

Another Hall of Famer, right fielder Tony Gwynn, was similarly not considered to be a home run threat, having reached double digits in homers once—14 in 1986—prior to 1994, when he hit 12 round-trippers. Yet late in his career, in his age-37 to age-39 seasons, Gwynn posted double-digit home run totals in all three years including a career high of 17 in 1997, one shy of that career high in 1998—although he did it in 131 fewer at-bats—and 10 home runs in 411 at-bats in 1999.

This late-career power surge coincided with the heart of the Steroids Era—moreover, admitted steroids user Ken Caminiti, who began using PEDs in 1996, was Gwynn's San Diego Padres teammate from 1995 to 1998. Gwynn's career defies the conventional wisdom of the straight-line decline of a baseball player's skills as he moves through his thirties: Gwynn won four consecutive NL batting titles from 1994 to 1997 (flirting with .400 during the strike-shortened 1994 season when he finished with a .394 average in 110 games), when he was in his age-34 to age-37 seasons. In fact, for the last six years of his career as a full-time player, from ages 34 to 39, Gwynn posted a .358/.402/.504 slash line (his career slugging average was only .459) with 174 hits, 34 doubles, 11 home runs, 75 runs scored and 76 runs batted in. These are not the statistics of a player in decline, particularly one who was nagged by a heel injury during the 1996 season that required surgery prior to his age-37 season. Furthermore, as any change in a player's appearance in the Steroids Era is regarded with suspicion, Gwynn's appearance did change as he went from a lithe young ballplayer to a portly veteran hitter dubbed "The Round Mound of Batting Crowns."

This is hardly to suggest that Tony Gwynn used PEDs at any time during his justifiably Hall of Fame career. Yet his late-career excellence, including an admittedly modest power surge, is an aberration compared to the average player's experience—and any anomalous event during the Steroids Era, such as Brady Anderson's 50-homer season, has been automatically regarded with suspicion.

Every individual event must be evaluated on its own circumstances, yes, which means that blanket condemnation also cannot be employed. For example, even if several hitters who post high home run totals are materially or circumstantially linked to PEDs, any hitter regarded as clean who posts a similar high total disproves the contention that all players were juicing and thus not all the numbers are tainted—moreover, it suggests that there might be other causal factors for the power surge during the Steroids Era. Such a situation revealed itself in 2001.