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It’s been a fun baseball season. But the storm cloud of steroids has hung over the game for years now, especially tarnishing Barry Bonds’s assault on the all-time home run record. Tufts University physicist Roger Tobin is a big baseball fan and recently did some calculations to evaluate just how much of an impact steroids could actually have on power hitting.
When he crunched the numbers, he found the following: steroids might bring about a 10 percent increase in muscle mass. That extra muscle could help a batter swing five percent faster. And that extra bat speed could cause a ball to jump off the bat 4 percent faster. Doesn’t sound like much. However, if you add four percent initial velocity to a model distribution of trajectories of batted baseballs, you can increase homers by a full 50 percent.
Tobin’s research will appear in the American Journal of Physics. He notes that weightlifting and smaller ballparks also played a role in pumping up the number of home runs. But the power surge of the ‘90s coincides with steroids more than the other factors.
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Add CommentBat speed/strength is also very important in control and being able to wait slightly longer before swinging. If you can adjust quicker to the pitch and hit the ball on the sweet spot you will also increase your HR total. The total HR's would have been even higher if it hadn't been for some pitchers being juiced up also. Even though the ball travels farther with increased pitch speed, it's harder to adjust too and hit on the sweet spot.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe difficulty with Professor Tobin's calculations lies in the assumption that steroid use increases muscle mass uniformly: it does not. There is, as the literature abundantly makes clear, a marked differential between upper-body musculature--basically the shoulder girdle--which is where almost all the steroidal augmentation takes place and the rest of the body; yet as is well known it it almost wholly lower-body musculature that is responsible for the forces applied to a hit baseball (c.f. Robert K. Adair's book"The Physics of Baseball"). When the calculations are made with the assumption that, say, 1/3 or 1/4 of the muscle-mass increase is in the muscles actually responsible for power hitting (which may still be an over-generous assumption), the supposed large gains in home-run hitting evaporate almost completely.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSecond, if one actually does the math on plausible increases in bat speed, making due allowance for the portions of time spent in the different stages of moving the bat and then accelerating it, the net effect of even Professor Tobin's assumed 10% overall body gain in muscle mass--allowing, again, for reasonable distribution of that increase among the various muscle groups--come down to the equivalent of taking less than 1 mile an hour off the speed of a 90 mph pitch. That may not be uttely negligible, but it is close to it.
Finally, it may be noted that while not dispositive of the issues concerning pitching, a 2006 Washington Post article ("Do Steroids Give A Shot in the Arm?")--in which a number of leading baseball-knowledgeable medical experts were extensively interviewed--strongly suggested that steroids give no substantial assist to pitching.
For reasons better addressed by psychology than physics, there seems to be a widespread urgent need to believe that use of PEDs has "corrupted" baseball, and the performance records in it. But the evidence is just not there.
I think without the juice many of today's natural stars would be very second rate.
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