It seems whenever we think the steroids scandal can't get any worse, it does just that.
When three-time Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones admitted to steroid use on Friday and returned her five medals from the 2000 Sydney Games Monday, it was just another round in the saga that has come to define sports' modern era.
Although the publicity of performance-enhancing drugs has prompted chemists and doctors alike to try to demystify the physiological impact of these drugs, the physics of steroids and the way in which increased muscle mass improves athletic production has been largely neglected.
Until, that is, Tufts physics professor Roger Tobin decided to investigate these drugs from a whole new angle.
Tobin's article, "On the potential of a chemical Bonds: Possible effects of steroids on home run production in baseball," which will be published in the November issue of the American Journal of Physics, focuses on the modern home run hitters to determine whether muscle mass attained from steroids alone could account for the 20 percent increase in home run production during the four-year period from 1998 to 2001.
"If we look in other sports that we know have had steroid use, like track and field, we don't see such dramatic changes in the records," Tobin said. "The question I wanted to ask was: is it possible that changes of that magnitude could be caused by steroid use?"
Instead of focusing on a specific player, Tobin used a mathematical model to conclude that even a 10 percent increase in muscle mass could increase a hitter's home run production by as much as 50 percent - surely enough to account for Mark McGwire's 70-home run season in 1998 and Barry Bonds' 73-homer output in 2001.
Unlike other records, home runs are an easy target when it comes to pinpointing changes over time. Because they are relatively rare and fall on the tail of statistical distribution, even a minor change in physical ability has the potential to yield a major change in home run production, Tobin said.
Still, Tobin's research is not an indictment of the era's big sluggers; it merely confirms the plausibility of steroids' active role in skewing recent home run records.
"This doesn't prove anything about whether anyone used steroids in baseball," Tobin said. "The same analysis would apply if a player gained 10 percent muscle mass by doing more weight training. This is not an indictment of Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa or baseball players in general.
"This shows - and it was a surprise to me - that it's not silly to think that the effect that we're seeing could have been significantly influenced by steroids," he continued.
While steroids could certainly be the main culprit in the statistical home run spike, there's no denying that changes in the nature of the game have yielded a formula more conducive to power numbers. With smaller ballparks, lighter bats and better weightlifting regiments, it should come as no surprise that balls are flying out of the park with greater frequency.
"They're juicing the ball, they're making the parks smaller and looking at the hitters and saying they're taking drugs to do all this," said University Professor Sol Gittleman, who specializes in American baseball history. "You don't need to take drugs, and as Roger said, you can probably get the same effect by weightlifting."
The percentage of players who are, in fact, relying on performance-enhancing substances to achieve these feats may never be determined, but Senator George Mitchell and his commission investigating past steroid use in baseball are still trying to pull together all the information they can. After hearing about Tobin's research, they contacted him to learn more.
Although, on the surface, the commission's reception to Tobin's research appears to be a step in the right direction, Gittleman is skeptical that this information will be used productively.
"They do everything badly," Gittleman said. "They've been doing it ever since the game was started. The owners are dumb and greedy and they look for scapegoats and are combative with the unions ... you just have to wait and hope that someone will come around and say something intelligent, and you hope that they will - maybe Senator Mitchell will - but right now it still looks like a witch hunt."
Whether Major League Baseball is indeed conducting itself in such a manner is up for debate, but it's clear that Tobin's approach has opened a new window through which steroids may be researched.
"I don't think physicists are the ones who normally would look into [steroids]," Gittleman said. "Everybody has been looking at the chemical and physiological components of it. Nobody talked about the physics of it, so Roger got into that and just made a breakthrough."
For his part, Gittleman hopes Major League Baseball can just put the steroids debacle in the past.
"They should put this all behind them," he said. "They should start testing and get it all done and stop with Bonds and leave the rest of them alone. They need to tell them what they shouldn't take and keep the testing going and forget with this asterisks business.
"This is not going to stop ball players from trying to get an edge," he continued. "That has not changed in 150 years - it's still all about how do you get an edge."
