All of this talk about Maris and Ruth and 60 and 61 homers, and McGwire and Sosa and steroid use, and later Barry Bonds, brings us around to another question:

"Maybe the players weren't playing 'clean', but was MLB playing 'clean' as well?"

After the 1994 strike, home run totals increased dramatically. Was that all due to steroid use, or was the ball juiced also?

Hitting even 50 home runs used to be kind of a magic number, since so few players reached even that total, but it seems as though after '94, guys hitting 50 homers in a season were a dime a dozen, which leads me to believe that the ball was juiced as well as some of the players.