The Pecan Park Eagle

HGH and the Top 20 Career HR Leaders

Barry Bonds
His 762 MLB Career HR Total Leads All Others.

The Top 20 Career HR Leaders in MLB History

Notes.

Because of the 3-way tie for 20^th place, 22 men cover the top 20 spots.

There are 3 group categories for our 22 career Top 20 HR leaders: (1) HOF Members; (2) HOF Prospects: and (3) HGH Guys – those guys – proven or not – whose production has been suspected, at least, as helping the power hitting totals in each of their careers.

Hall of Fame Members = 13

Hall of Fame Prospects = 3 (including one still active man, Albert Pujols.)

HGH suspect Guys = 6 None of these six guys have been convicted of HGH use in a court of law, but there’s been enough suspicion in the Court of Public Opinion to hang each of them twice. Once suspicion convicts you in the public mind, it’s very hard to nearly impossible to ever again gain independence from that verdict in the minds of fans and other concerned members of the baseball public.

My questions remain: What do we do with the records of these guys over time? Are we going to punish the offenders by gradient offense – or simply paint them all with the same brush and treat all those large HR totals as being totally due to the powerful, but variable stuff they may have been using, consciously or not. In so doing, do we simply look past these record totals as though they never happened?

Look! We’ve learned a lot more about HGH since it starred twice – first as the savior of baseball through McGwire and Sosa in 1998 – and then as the destroyer of the game through the Bonds and Company numbers of the early 21^st century that sprang up in the Big Mac and Sammy Show wake period of time.

We now understand better that HGH is associated with faster tissue repair – and with the increase in muscle strength. But we’ve also come to grasp – if only a little better – that there is no known HGH that improves eye-hand motor coordination in a way that directly turns any batter who uses it into Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, or Willie Mays.

Will we ever give the HGH guys a little recognition for their statistical records – or shall we simply leave them buried forever – anonymously together – in baseball’s own purgatory for lost souls?

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Bill McCurdy

Publisher, Editor, Writer

The Pecan Park Eagle