Can Steroids Hit a Baseball?

Arguably the hardest thing to do in all of sports is to hit a round ball with a round bat. If you look at in terms of physics it seems hard, but for those of you who have played baseball at a high level, you know it's even harder than that. In Major League Baseball, the players are not only hitting a round ball with a round bat, but they're doing it while the ball is coming in at ninety miles per hour or above. If a fastball coming in at a hundred miles per hour was all that these hitters saw, baseball would be the easiest sport in the world because they knew what was coming and could time it up. People in America fail to think that these hitters have a split second to decipher between a fastball at 100mph and a change up that looks the same but is only coming in at 75 mph. Batters in the MLB have two-tenths of a second to react to a ninety mile per hour pitch, which means it's even less than that to react to a one hundred mph pitcher, which you could see thrown by Cincinatti Reds closer, Aroldis Chapman. Like I stated earlier, that would be a lot easier to hit if he didn't throw a nasty curveball. In the MLB a curveball appears to be coming straight for a hitters head until it drops off at the last second and crosses the plate for a strike. However, some of the best hitters do a great job of picking up the spin of a curveball, which is why it's not the hardest pitch to hit. Ask any baseball player from high school to the MLB what is the hardest pitch to hit, I guarantee that well over half of them would say that it is a change up. The reason it is so hard to hit is because it looks like a fastball coming out of the pitchers hand and is so hard to pick up that it's an off speed pitch, you think it's a fastball until you swing and look silly.

You might be curious to why I am preaching about the difficulty of hitting in the major leagues? After giving you the background and difficulty of hitting, nowhere did I mention steroids hitting a baseball. As you all know, last week, the National Baseball Hall of Fame failed to induct any players. The biggest reason was the controversial topic of steroids. Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Jeff Bagwell, among others were robbed from the Hall of Fame and it's no secret that it was because if steroids.

Personally, I don't agree that they should be kept from the Hall of Fame for accusations of steroids. People make an argument that they "cheated," and honestly that is an absurd thing to say because steroids didn't hit those home runs and steroids didn't make all those plays in the field and steroids certainly didn't help them react to the pitch and square it up on the barrel. How you lift and how hard you work in the weight room is going to determine how strong you get. I'm not saying they didn't take steroids, because I think they did, just like 80% of players in the MLB. But in order to get stronger you need to put hours of hard work in the gym. Cheating is when you altar the game to make sure your team wins. Cheating is done between the lines during a game. Another reason that this irritates me that they didn't get into the HOF is because an unidentified source that works in the medical field working personally with Major League Baseball told me that before spring training about 80% of players have high testosterone when they get their blood work done. These guys are just the ones that got caught because they were continuously tested but steroids are becoming a part of the game of baseball.

Voting for the Hall of Fame is done by a majority of people who've never played the game of baseball since they were twelve years old. They just think it's cheating because its helping them get stronger. It would be cheating if they were participating in a weight lifting competition but of course, that's not the case. I want everyone to imagine themselves in the MLB, playing 162 games, only one off day a week, at the field early in the morning and leaving late at night, on the road for days at a time, oh and lets not forget that these guys are doing this physical torture in their late thirties. People who don't know baseball say, well it helps them hit the ball farther, yes that's correct, but a lot less than you think. Bat speed is what allows hitters crush the ball 500 feet. Have you ever watched Dustin Pedroia hit? Well if you haven't he is 5'7" and 165 pounds. So that means it's impossible for him to hit a home run, right? That's false, because Pedroia has hit 90 home runs in his career. Now they're are people that will argue that it's not even close to Bonds 762, and certainly that is correct. But what they don't know, is why that margin is so large between the two. A word all of you are very familiar with, approach, but you never think of that word in terms of baseball players. Barry Bonds had an approach every time he stepped in the batters box, hit the ball out of here. If you look back on Barry Bonds career, you will see he had a lot of fly ball outs. Because his approach was always to hit the long ball, which means his swing was different than Pedroia. Bonds would drop his back shoulder trying to get under the ball so it would give him an opportunity to hit a Lon fly ball out of the stadium. As some of you don't know, when a pitch is thrown on the outside part of the plate, hitters are taught to wait back and hit the ball to the that side of the field, which would be to right field for right handed hitters and left field for lefties. Bonds tried to pull most balls because you have more power pulling the ball, because he was a "home run hitter." On the other hand, Dustin Pedroia's approach is to take what the pitcher gives him. He has a level swing, and tries to hit the ball in gaps of the outfield, depending on the location of the pitch. Every once in a whole, Pedroia will get a pitch right at his belt, known as a perfect pitch to hitters, and hit a home run.

I would love for a body builder who has taken steroids to grab a bat and play a game in the major leagues. He's going to do amazing because since he took steroids, he's cheating and it will automatically make him hit home runs, isn't that right? Absolutely not, I would be willing to bet all the money in the world that he would not get one hit, in one hundred at bats. But as the voters say, taking steroids is cheating. If that's true, why couldn't the body builder hit home runs? It's simple really, steroids don't hit home runs.