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February 16, 2007

Prospectus Q&A

Andy Andres

by David Laurila

Andy Andres teaches a class called "Sabermetrics: The Objective Analysis of Baseball" at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Andres is also an Assistant Professor of Natural Science at Boston University and has taught a seminar in Exercise Physiology and the Physiology of Human Athletic Performance at Harvard for over 15 years. A data analyst for Ron Shandler at BaseballHQ, Andres has a PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry and Physiology.

David Laurila sat down with Andres for Baseball Prospectus to talk about Sabermetrics 101 and the effect of steroids on baseball.

David Laurila: A common argument is that steroids don't help a hitter make solid contact with a 95 mph fastball, which is more important than any distance that might be gained from their use. Is that a valid point?

Andy Andres: In my opinion, it's not. Most people understand that you can increase the distance you hit a baseball with increased strength, but what isn’t understood is that increases in skeletal muscle power increases the speed of muscular contraction. That improvement in quickness would increase bat speed. While he was on his run in 1998, Sammy Sosa was interviewed and said that he had learned to wait on pitches longer. Those words were really code for “I can swing the bat faster.” The time involved is milliseconds, so the important difference was that his bat speed had improved. I think it’s clear that better bat speed improves the amount of time for pitch recognition, and that is likely enough to make a difference for elite hitters.

DL: A hot topic is Human Growth Hormone (HGH), which is reportedly replacing anabolic steroids in a lot of locker rooms. How effective is HGH?

AA: Conventional wisdom says that everyone is on HGH now because there’s no test to detect it, but what they don’t realize is that there’s a night and day difference between HGH and anabolic-androgenic steroids. Studies have shown that HGH supplementation will increase muscle mass; but there is little, if any, evidence of strength gains in these studies. In other words, when HGH supplementation has been studied in normal males, there are reports of small gains in muscle mass, but there seems to be no evidence from a randomized, double-blind study that you gain strength from HGH alone. If there is any effect of HGH, it is likely to be a small effect, especially compared to how anabolic steroids improve strength and baseball performance.