These are bad, but I think Babe Ruth topped them all.
The Babe tried to do steroids near the middle of his career. Of course, steroids had not yet been invented, so he decided to accomplish the same effect in injecting himself with ground-up sheep testicles. (He also thought that would give him a bigger bat in the bedroom, if you catch my rather obvious drift. Viagra had not yet been invented either.)
The Babe was great at baseball, but he sucked at PEDs. He made himself so sick that he missed about a quarter of the season and wasn’t his old self when he got back in the line-up, a situation the Yankees attributed to a “bellyache.”
(Investigative journalism apparently had not been invented either.)
See if you can tell which season he did this. Here are his triple crown stats:
1923 41-130 .393
1924 46-124 .378
1925 25-67 .290
1926 47-153 .372
1927 60-165 .356
I’m pretty sure you answered that question correctly, even if you know absolute zilch about baseball.
The Babe missed the first 40 games of the season, and then totally stunk for three more months. As of September 7th, he was batting .266 with 15 homers.
He finally recovered in early September. From September 8th until the end of the season, he batted .350 with 10 homers in 28 games, slightly above his normal pace. But that was too little too late for the mighty Yankees, who finished 7th! Here are the team’s finishes from 1921 until 1928
1921 1
1922 1
1923 1
1924 2
1925 7
1926 1
1927 1
1928 1
Again, I think the sheep testicle year is pretty obvious.
We have no information about how the injections affected his other mighty bat, but he also separated from his wife that same year, so you can probably make an educated guess.
Given that the Babe was already the best player on the planet before he tried the injections, and therefore had everything to lose, that may have been the most incompetent cheating of all time.
How many other ball concoctions did the Babe try? Surely it wasn’t just sheep balls.
On the other hand, if this had worked how many homers is he bashing since the 60 homer season came two years later? Bonds was an incredible player but he topped out at 40 some homers at his natural peak. Just using Bonds’ ~30 homer gain as a guideline and I don’t think 100 homersi n a season is out of the question for a juiced Babe.
Babe probably cost himself at least 30 homers that year, the big galoot! There’s no telling how many he lost in other years from overindulgence, venereal diseases, and the other 998 natural shocks that flesh is heir to.