Steroids?

Although it may stick in some people's craw, I make no special consdierations concerning players who may or may not have used steroids or other PED's.  What's done is done, and the fact is we'll never know exactly how much was actually done.  And while some players have admitted it, some got caught and many more are suspected; in the end, these selections are based on wins and, dirty or not, those guys (and their steroids) helped their teams win.  (Likewise, I also allowed the inclusion of Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte and Pete Rose, who may have helped their teams lose!)  Plus, given their widespread usage, PED's pumping up league averages across the board for a period of time, their inflated performances get automatically discounted when it comes to calculating WAR. So a lot of the advantage they might have had numbers-wise disappears when being compared across eras.

The players who really get screwed over by the whole steroids thing are the clean players, who were very good, but not great.  Because of the inflated offenses league-wide, the performances of these guys get discounted, and a season that might have been worth 5 wins back in the 1980's may only be worth 2 now.  But the only way to fix that would end up unfairly penalizing guys from cleaner eras, who definitely got their wins legitimately!  It's a mess, yes, but it's well above my pay-grade to deal with it.

And besides... There are many factors other than steroids that contribute to today's inflated offenses: Smaller parks, a smaller strike zone, better training / player health, league expansion, the Designated Hitter, the shorter pitching mound, not letting pitchers throw inside like they used to... You get the idea.  Even if we could clearly identify who was using steroids, it would still be impossible to clearly separate the effect of steroid usage from the effects that all of these other factors have had on overall offensive output. Time will tell if the relative Pitcher's Year that we just came off of (2010) will be the new normal, or just a fluke. (And WAR accounts for it anyway!)