Bill James Should Offer Opinions About Win Shares, Not Causes of Death

The worst part of the Steroid Era in baseball is that we'll never be quite sure who was or wasn't on drugs during the years when testing was nonexistent. We all have our suspicions about players whose production and/or muscles exploded but they usually remain just that. Bill James, however, went a step further in his new book The Bill James Gold Mine 2008.

Cameron Martin of the fine baseball blog Bugs & Cranks was reading the section of the book devoted to Atypical Seasons which highlighted years that saw players over or underachieve in notable amounts. James found that two of the greatest home run under-producers played for the 1984 Minnesota Twins. Gary Gaetti only went yard five times that year while Kirby Puckett didn't hit a round-tripper all year, which led James to this conclusion.

"Suggesting the possibility that the Twins' two World Championships may have been aided by their team being among the first to discover...well, I'd better not go there. Nor will I point out that Gaetti was bald and had acne and Puckett died young."

Yes, James suggests, with no supporting evidence (and his physique as evidence to the contrary), that Puckett died at 45 because he used steroids. Is it unusual that he then hit 31 home runs in 1986 and went on to average 19 per 162 games over the rest of his career? Absolutely. Is the only possible answer that he was abusing performance enhancers? Not by a longshot and saying otherwise does a disservice to both him and James's reputation as an objective analyst of baseball. Only one of them's undeserved.