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Old 10-05-2007
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Gonzaleznut Gonzaleznut is offline
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I doubt he was juiced up in '92 and '93 when he won the two home run titles.

You can't blame any player who used because major league baseball turned a blind eye to it. They needed to recapture the magic after the strike in '94 and they knew the only way to draw fans back to the ballparks was to have prodigious home run hitters who put up big numbers. McGwire, Sosa, Canseco, Bonds, and even Juan were sucked into that. Players will do anything possible to get to the top and you can't blame them for wanting to be successful.

To compare the 90's with any other era is unfair. Each era in baseball (usually classified into decades), must be assessed independently. It is what it is. Nothing more.

The simple way to look at it is from a peer group standpoint. Was Juan one of the great players of his era when compared with others of his era? Absolutely. Easily a top 5 hitter.

As a reminder, they still inducted Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson to the Hall of Fame even though the mound was raised in the pitching dominant 60's. Were they great already...you bet, but that advantage hyper-inflated all of their numbers. You never hear anyone complaining about that unfair advantage given away by MLB.

Roids simply made already great players put up gaudy numbers. You can't tell me that McGwire, Bonds, and Juan weren't already great before roids...they were. They would have had HoF caliber careers without roids, but they took the chance to get that extra edge to get ahead and baseball did nothing to stop them.
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