Good article by ESPN's Rob Neyer cutting through the spin. The 104 players that tested positive comes out to 8.7 percent, and that's only the ones that were dirty at the time of that particular test.

Also, I don't know what the half-life of steroids are in the body, and what the administration schedule is, but somebody must. In other words, if you're supposed to take them every six months, and it shows up in your urine/blood for three months afterward, it would be possible to figure out how many players were likely to have merely lucked out due to the timing of the test. And that doesn't account for better ways to mask it or anything else. It further doesn't account for players using prior to 2003.

What I like least about this is that it makes player evaluation hard from a fantasy perspective. Will Andruw Jones bounce back, or was the only reason he was any good due to steroids? Did Travis Hafner stop being good because of injuries, or was it coping with an injury without the steroids to help him heal faster and perform better?

It's already enough of a challenge to temper our skill-set analysis with manager mind-reading and second-hand medical opinion. Now we have to speculate on which players were on roids, too. Besides the obvious (Bonds, Sosa, McGwire) freaks, I wonder if there's a good way to determine whether a player was likely to juice.

A couple ideas I've had are: freakish size/strength, freakish fitness, e.g. a player who is too ripped like Nomar and freakish plate discipline (I can't explain why that would be but Bonds, McGwire, Giambi and even Sosa all had it). This makes me suspect Albert Pujols and Brian Giles among others. Other factors include massive unexplained career years, e.g., Adrian Beltre, Brady Anderson, Bill Hall, Jay Bell, Bret Boone and unusually late career peaks, Bonds and Roger Clemens, for example.

A lot of people find this issue boring and understandably so. But instead of bellyaching and sanctimoniously grandstanding about it - maybe we need to accept it and adapt to it when we make our cheat sheets.