Ryan Braun tests positive for PED

[KC_Connection]

Originally Posted by whoman69

So its just a coincidence that after baseball started cracking down on steroids, these records have not been approached again. Did baseball players all of a sudden get worse?

No, it just suddenly became a pitching era around 2008 (several years after they started drug testing). There are many theories for why that happened, but the biggest is that MLB changed their baseballs once again (probably to fool the fans/media into thinking that their testing was making some kind of a difference).

Here's a bit of reading about MLB's history of doing that:
http://steroids-and-baseball.com/
http://steroids-and-baseball.com/cha...baseball.shtml

Remember that pitchers were using PEDs just as much as hitters were. Wouldn't we expect a dropoff in performance from them without PEDs, too? We certainly haven't seen that at all (at least not since 2007/2008 when offensive levels fell around the game).

The point to take out of all of this, though, is that there are many more factors outside of PED use that can be attributed to both higher and lower offensive levels throughout the game.