By early 2005, during the denouement of the steroid era, Donald Fehr, then the executive director of baseball's players' union, had grown tired of the emphasis on performance-enhancing drugs as the reason behind the explosion in the game's offensive statistics, home runs in particular. Certainly, anabolic substances (Fehr's preferred term) were a factor in the rising numbers, but they weren't the only factor. At least as important was an issue in the larger sports culture, he said, and not singular to baseball.

"Everybody wants to see more scoring. It is true in every sport," Fehr told me then...


http://espn.go.com/espn/commentary/s...passing-record