Steroids, if taken in sufficient quantities, could make a person more muscular. By by itself, the steroids could not make a person a great baseball player. For example, Barry Lamar Bonds was a great player long before he ever took steroids (assuming that he did). His talent was so vast that he took a middling Pirates club to the NLCS several years in a row. To hit major league pitching, you have to recognize in a fraction of a second, what type of pitch is heading your way, how the ball is rotating, the trajectory of the pitch, the speed of the pitch, and whether it will likely cross the plate or be inside the strike zone. If you guess wrong on any one of these things, you don’t get a hit. And if there are men on base, you have to consider the position on the bases of your teammates and what type of contact you want to make with the ball. That is what makes baseball so incredibly difficult to play on a high level.
With football and to some extent basketball, if you are strong enough or tall enough or fast enough, share physical strength will allow you to compete on a high level. With baseball, which is a precision sport, that is not the case.
Even if you can master hitting, you still have to learn to play a position in the field. So think of it. In baseball, unlike any other sport, to be able to compete at a high level, you have to be phenomenal at two completely unrelated skills. And both of these skills are fantastically difficult. That is what makes baseball the hardest sport to play well. Could steroid help? Yes, but keep in mind that before steroids could give you any help in the field or at the plate, you already have to be a fantastic ball player. You could give the average guy in a beer hall 500 steroids a day. He still couldn’t hit big league pitching.

Larraby on December 13, 2007 at 2:14 PM