Is the Hall of Fame Already Tainted?

MLB Hall of Fame: Numerous Reasons For the Increased Offense from 1993-2009

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In 1992, the National League team run leader was the Pittsburgh Pirates with 692 runs scored. The next season, in 1993, all but four teams in the NL eclipsed that number, with the Philadelphia Phillies leading the league with 877 runs that season. That started a trend where by 1999, ten NL teams scored over 800 runs in the season, and the average team was now scoring 800 runs – 100 runs more than 1992’s leader! So was it all PEDs that caused the offensive boom?

1993 was notable as it was the first season that Major League Baseball had expanded since 1977 added the Toronto Blue Jays and Seattle Mariners. In 1993, the league added the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins. As we see, the runs nearly instantly bumped up. Interestingly, when the next level of run scoring league-wide took off, 1998, was the next expansion, when the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Rays (then called the Devil Rays) were added. Typically, it is notable that offense does increase after expansion because pitching gets spread out across the league, so quality pitching is tougher to find for a few years as teams tend to have to adapt to the new environment with the additional teams. Adding four teams to the league in a 5-year period certainly would increase the offense on a league-wide scale.

Starting with the opening of Camden Yards in 1992, over half of the teams in major league baseball got new stadiums, and many of them were very hitter-friendly. The addition of the Colorado Rockies brought one of the most offensive-friendly environments baseball has ever seen at the major league level even before opening Coors Field in 1995. Notorious hitter-friendly environments opened in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Arizona opened in that era with the new Yankee Stadium and its lefty-friendly right field porch opening in 2009 to end the era. There were some pitcher-friendly parks in the era, but even those parks decreased in size from their predecessors. The only park built in the era that really increased in size over the previous park in place was Safeco Field in Seattle.

Next: Baseball's Culpability In the Issue

The last one that I personally would like to speak to a little bit is training. The Oakland A’s were known in the early 1990s for being innovative in their weight lifting program, something that baseball had strongly shunned prior to the late 1980s, believing that power lifting would lead to increased injuries in baseball players. The Oakland Athletics hired famous strength coach Bob Alejo in 1993, becoming the first team in major league baseball to hire a full-time strength coach. Alejo was quickly joined by Fernando Montes of the Cleveland Indians and Steve Odgers of the Chicago White Sox, but with the strike of 1994, adoption of strength coaches across the league took until the late 1990s to become universal. Before this, players were responsible for their own weight lifting, if their team even allowed them to do any lifting at all. The A’s were known before Olejo for being the only team in the major leagues to have a dedicated space for free weights rather than weight machines.

Professional football had strength coaches as part of coaching staffs before the NFL/AFL merger. Professional basketball had strength coaches before the 1990s. Halfway through the 1980s, the NHL had full-time strength coaches on staff within the league. Yet, it wasn’t until 1993 that professional baseball implemented this. Explosive lifts, like squats, power cleans, and deadlifts are extremely good lifts for building the type of hip and leg torque needed to hit a ball farther or throw a pitch harder. This training was incredibly clunky through most of the 1990s, but many players who reached the majors had never lifted free weights as part of baseball training before getting to the major leagues, and that quickly turned many players from minor league doubles hitters to major league home run hitters.

I’m a huge advocate of power lifting myself, and I honestly believe that continued work in this area could be the next level that addresses Tommy John surgeries and oblique injuries that seem to plague the sport due to athletes attempting to hit the ball extremely hard and throw balls extremely hard without the requisite body strength to both safely produce that effort and absorb the response to that effort.

Add up all of these changes going on in the game during the “PED era”, and you begin to understand that perhaps there was more than just PEDs at work here, but I’m not naive enough to think there weren’t PEDs involved in the game, of course. Let’s examine what baseball did about the issue.