It doesn’t take long these days before a player having a career year starts hearing accusations of steroid usage. First of all, baseball is a game largely determined by luck. Second of all, unless your name is Madoff, any endeavor with small sample sizes will show some natural variance in your performance.
But we really need to step back here. The canonical steroid-whisper career year is Brady Anderson’s 1996. Suppose that steroids are effective enough to triple his home run totals. Shouldn’t he have gotten around to trying them before his ninth year in the majors? Furthermore, were they just so darn effective he decided to not take them for the rest of his career? There are probably still many MLB players taking PEDs, given past permissive attitudes, the fierce competitiveness of the majors, and the fact that being caught doesn’t seem to be a career ender anymore. We likely aren’t done hearing about the lengths the game’s greats have gone to be the greatest, but trying to ferret the users out by looking for single year performance spikes is asinine.