The Brady hunch

Brady Anderson is on the Hall of Fame ballot this year. This makes me feel incredibly old, although at the same time I feel a little surprised that he retired as late as 2002. He's one of those guys known for doing one thing - in Anderson's case, his 50-homer season of 1996 - so it sort of seems like he only played that one year and then vanished again. The season was a ridiculous anomaly for Anderson - he only had 210 career home runs in 15 seasons, meaning that nearly a quarter of his career total came in a single one of those. He also had a career SLG of .425, which is pretty low, even for a center fielder; in 1996, his SLG was .637, almost 150 points higher than in any other season.

The thing that gets me is that this data is always used to advance the "Brady Anderson did steroids in 1996" argument. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, but if he did, I doubt it was the steroids that helped him. People who use fluke seasons like this to accuse people of drug use seem to forget that the history of baseball is pockmarked with similar cases, long before PEDs hit the scene.

Take, for example, Hack Wilson; his 191-RBI season in 1930 is still a record (and understandably so). Wilson hit 56 home runs that year; while this wasn't the leap that Anderson took, as Wilson had topped 30 in 1927, 1928, and 1929, it was still nearly 50% above his previous career high. Or how about Roger Maris, who hit 22 more home runs in 1961 than in any other season? And the single most analogous example is probably Davey Johnson, who hit 136 career home runs in 13 big-league seasons - and fully 43 of them in 1973. He only reached double figures four other times and never topped 18; at least Anderson had two other 20-HR seasons. I don't think anyone would argue Johnson was on steroids.

What's more, how does this even make sense? 1996 was two years before McGwire and Sosa - two guys pretty much universally assumed at this point to have been juicing in the late 90s - led their assault on history, so if steroids were capable of turning Anderson into a power hitter that quickly and effectively, why did he drop back off in 1997? Should we believe that he only used them for one year, and then quit for whatever reason even though he clearly could have made a good deal more money by staying on them? At any rate, I've never seen any evidence suggesting that steroids can turn singles hitters into home run hitters; maybe they can help turn doubles hitters into home run hitters, but Anderson didn't hit all that many doubles either. He hit for middling average (.256 career) and took a decent number of walks (a reasonable .362 career OBP). Also, while most suspected steroid users were speedsters who started hitting home runs and stopped stealing bases (like Sosa), Anderson still stole 21 bases in 1996, more than he stole the following year when he retreated to 18 homers. I also don't remember Anderson showing much physical evidence; certainly his head didn't blow up that I can recall.

So why is it that Anderson has to have used steroids? Only the number 50 is really suggestive of it, and Davey Johnson shows that it's perfectly possible to have a season like that before steroids even entered the game. Ultimately it doesn't matter; Anderson clearly isn't making the Hall of Fame, and once he's off the ballot he should be fully consigned to the dustbin of history. But at the risk of sounding like an apologist, I don't see why every post-1994 fluke season has to be steroid-based. It just doesn't seem likely that only a couple guys could actually make consistent use of them, while the bulk of users either didn't see a substantial increase or else turned into, say, Richard Hidalgo (15 in 1999, 44 in 2000, 19 in 2001). Sure, we risk being made fools of again if we're too credulous... but barring a real smoking gun, isn't it a lot more enjoyable that way?