But I may not even have his name spelled right. During the congressional hearings, one of the people testifying was a guy named Hooten, who believed that his son's suicide was related to steroid use. He faulted himself for not noticing the signs, and might have benefited from the publicity King talks about.

He did, though, make one very sensible and concrete suggestion. He said that the way to reduce the usage of steroids by young athletes is go through the scouts and recruiters. He says they routinely send messages to kids that if they want to get drafted or want to get a scholarship, they have to get bigger.

There's a simple way to do this. Require a series of clean tests from anybody who signs a minor league baseball contract or a letter of intent. That is, to send a letter of intent, you must enclose a series of clean tests from a certified lab. To sign a minor league contract, you must test clean in advance of signing that contract.

You need to remove the incentive for kids on the bubble to try to get off the bubble by juicing. What the pros do doesn't really matter. As King says, they have the money and connections to staty ahead of the tests. But kids don't have either of those assets. Making kids clear the next hurdle after high school sports with a clean test would go a long way to solving the real problem.

It also takes high schools out of the business of drug testing, a place they really don't belong. This isn't about high school sports. It's about the next level.

King, the fact is that you don't know how many major league ballplayers are using steroids, and writing about it this way is lazy.

It's one thing to say that there surely must be more than 12 -- which I agree with -- but your "your [sic] dreaming" shtick implies that a very large number of players are getting away with it. That's an opinion for which you have no objective evidence.

(For those who are about to scream at me that the modern increase in home run hitting is obviously due to steroids, I'll point you here: http://www.arthurdevany.com/research.html. Enjoy.)

MLB conducted "survey testing" in 2003 -- no penalties, and names were not attached to positive tests. The program "catch rate" exceeded 5%, which triggered the 2004 policy (anonymity and treatment for first offence, suspensions for second offense).

So for a fact we know (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2003/baseball/mlb/11/13/mlb.steroids.ap/) that between 5 and 7% of MLB steroid tests came back positive in 2003. Admittedly we don't know if we can extrapolate this result to the entire MLB population, since there may be (and there certainly were at the time) undetectable drugs available. On the other hand, the new policy -- with stricter punishment -- may very well have had a deterrent effect.

(To preemptively debunk another common driver of public perception on this issue: the "fact" that Jose Canseco and other admitted users claim incidence of 25%, 50%, or 80% means nothing. I think that Canseco really believed that "everybody" was doing it; that's how he convinced himself that he wasn't really cheating. But to call him (or anybody else who gets caught) a reliable witness is laughable. These inflated numbers are just the cheater's brain doing some powerful self-justification.)

You usually do a great job of puncturing the common wisdom when it needs to be punctured. I think that this is one of those times.

In conversations about steroid use, or any drug testing, it is often mentioned that the drug makers are, technologically, always ahead of the drug finders. There's always a lag, so athletes that are inclined to cheat this way may feel (perhaps rightly) that they can stay ahead of the curve.

So I always wonder why no one ever suggests a time-lagged test, as a deterrent. In addition to the current testing, take a sample from each player that you can test three years down the road, after testing methodologies have caught up. If an old sample turns up positive, and the player is still active, they get penalized. Even if a player is not active, there could be enough damage to his reputation to be a discouragement (and besides, I think most players plan to be active in three years, so the threat of lost time would be real).

I know there would be some practical issues with doing this (chain of custody, sample storage) as well as some discussion over how to deal with substances that aren't illegal yet (and after all, how do you punish a player for taking something that no one has expressly declared illegal).

At the very least, though, this would cover substances which are already illegal but have no good current test. It would also encourage good, honest discussion about which substances are illegal, and why, something that I think has been sorely lacking.

...is nuts and King is right on on this one. Surely we can agree that with the flaccid nature of the old policy that only a small fraction of the juicers were caught? Can't we? I mean come on - any buffoon could have juiced nine months a year under the old policy and not come close to getting caught. Or he could just use something not on the list. Or he could employ a masking agent. And players still got busted. Ok, we 'know' 5-7% tested positive... but knowing everything else we know about steroid testing, it's intellectually dishonest to suggest that they caught anything near all of the cheaters. Deciding on a suitable multiple is difficult, but I'd be flabbergasted if it wasn't at least 100% more.

There were over 100 positive steroid tests in '03, '04 - http://www.louschuler.com/archives/sports/ - of course, lots of those positives were in AA and AAA. Raise your hand and fly around the room if you think players make it to the show and then stop juicing.

I checked out the Devaney paper that you linked to, and personally find it a little wanting. Here is an example of why, from page 19:

"Steroid advocates have to argue that the new records are not consistent with the law of home runs... They have to show that the Sosa, Bonds, and McGwire performances are impossible under the statistics of home run hitting."

This is a very strong theme of his paper. Basically, he is saying that in order to prove cheating, you have to prove that the results are otherwise impossible. This is pretty silly. It's a bit like saying that the poker player to your right can't be cheating, because it is statistically possible for him to catch pocket aces three times in a row. Just because something is possible without cheating doesn't mean it wasn't done by cheating.

Next, on the same page:

"There are two other hurdles the steroid hypothesis must clear. One must show positive proof of steroid use by a record setting home run hitter and, further, that steroids are the cause. There is slim evidence on the first score. We should note that only 9 players have been suspended for testing positive for steroids in thousands of tests; approximately 3990 players were in the big leagues over the past three years. That is only a positive rate of 0.002."

This gets a little trickier, but I think he is cherry-picking his evidence. At this point, we have a dodgy statement by McGwire, and leaked reports of Bonds' substance use. We also have full-on admissions by three other MVP-winning players in the past 15 years: Canseco, Caminiti, and Giambi. Even at the 5-7% you cite, we should expect to see about 40 players a year using (based on a 25-man roster, more if you go to 40-man). So, players are using, and the big guys in particular seem to be.

It is harder for me to address the argument that steroids, when used, just don't help that much. I'm not a doctor or a biologist, so his saying "...muscle hypertrophy will not increase the important fast twitch muscle fibers that home run hitters rely on" doesn't help me much.

I will say that I've heard the more basic form of this argument, that steroids don't help hand-eye coordination, the primary skill in hitting home runs. I always wonder, then, why Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, and Wade Boggs never led the league in homers. Strength matters. It just does. It is a separate and necessary component of home run capability.

Devaney is basically saying that steroids help develop a certain type of strength, but that this type of strength doesn't really come into play. Maybe. Perhaps players are cheating in vain. It would certainly be ironic if the players who are cheating ineffectively are the same ones who otherwise would be destroying records without any help. But for the moment, I am just not convinced.