First of all, we need to lose the term “steroid era” in baseball. All that label describes is the period of time when the sport’s leadership weaponized the use of performance enhancing drugs by ignoring their long-obvious presence among elite athletes.

Only with the Balco revelations in 2002 and the 2007 Mitchell Report was Major League Baseball at last shamed into doing something about doping. That was four decades after Olympic sports began policing illegal substance abuse. Even then, it took years before baseball’s commitment to testing resembled effective international standards.

Furthermore, we need to be grown-up enough to admit that the improved drug screening and stiffer penalties have not magically eliminated banned substances. Just this year, more than two dozen players in the major and minor leagues have been busted for various steroids, including repeated cases involving Stanozolol, an old, old favorite that got sprint champion Ben Johnson spectacularly stripped of his gold medal at the 1988 Olympics.

With the curtain pulled back on this ongoing nefarious behavior, then, there is the persistent riddle of statistics, and just what effect juicing should have on baseball’s precious records. No other sport is as obsessed with averages, means and medians to theoretically collate career accomplishments of men who played the game in different decades—even different centuries.

Two recent posts on the FiveThirtyEight web site considered this pickle, citing a SurveyMonkey Audience poll asking Americans whether some players’ stats should be subject to a “steroid discount.” (Another dilemma here: Would a discount be applied to players merely accused of doping by credible sources as well as those who have admitted drug use or have failed tests?)

FiveThirtyEight reported that 41 percent of poll respondents believed all records should stand as they are; 23 percent said dopers should have their records wiped out completely; 36 percent suggested some reduction percentage. FiveThirtyEight subsequently settled on three charts, one reflecting actual home run totals, another with home run numbers reduced by 20 percent and another downgrading long-ball stats by 33 percent. (Other batting stats and pitching records were not considered.)

According to those calculations, the notorious Barry Bonds drops from No. 1 in all-time homers (762) to No. 4 (657) via the 20-percent discount and No. 6 (588) with a 33-percent penalty. (Bonds, it should be noted, played the last of his 22 Major Leagues seasons in 2007 and never failed a drug screening, while MLB did not commence “survey” drug testing until 2003, and did not establish even moderate penalties for positive tests until 2004.)

Alex Rodriguez, who likewise never failed steroid screening though he has twice confessed to doping, would have his homer ranking slip from No. 4 (674) to No. 7 (598) and No. 11 (548) in the FiveThirtyEight models.

Here I acknowledge the absolute impossibility to know just who has cheated and who hasn’t, as well as an aversion to canonizing ballplayers based simply on their athletic skills—naturally produced or not. (A modest proposal: Skip Hall of Fame enshrinements and limit a demystified Cooperstown to its fabulous museum aspect, housing a full record of player history that includes any proven moral turpitude. This would minimize the danger of affording venerated status to really good athletes by hanging their plaques in a reverential hall and allowing their grand statistics to confer on them the title of Great Men. And would address the problem of deputizing a group of baseball writers to determine which players are worthy of entering the Hall’s pearly gates.)

I confess, with baseball’s ever-proliferating formulas—WHIP, WAR, VORP and so on—being numbed by numbers. So I give the last words on the subject to my friend Tony Spota, whose elaborate set of impressive quantitative measurements enable him to rank every player in baseball history.

Tony Spota in his statistics lab

(Among the Spota equations are Ye=(G/300) + (Ab/1000) and C=[2(W+Sb)-K]/(Ab+W), which conspiracy theorists might mistake for nuclear codes but which are carefully devised and weighted to consider, beyond the usual batting and slugging averages and defensive numbers, what he calls “productivity” and even “cunning.”)

Bottom line: “Records should stand,” Spota has concluded, though his overall evaluation of players does not ignore the doping quandary. For ranking purposes, he applies a 10-percent steroid penalty to what he defines as each player’s “quality” (as opposed to “longevity”). And he places that level of punishment not only on players who have had a positive drug test, but also to those included in the Mitchell Report and those who have admitted doping. Even, he said, “a guy like Ivan Rodriguez who, when asked about using steroids, said, ‘God only knows.’”

Arbitrary? “It’s my formula,” Spota reminded.

Fair enough. In the end, by making his various integers and digits dance, he figured that Barry Bonds’ widely accepted use of steroids—though never legally proven or acknowledged by Bonds—knocks the mighty slugger down from No. 1, all-time, to a less-heroic No. 8. (Still not so bad. Spota’s top six are Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Hank Aaron, Cy Young and Stan Musial.) Likewise, via the Spota rules, Alex Rodriguez falls from 23^rd to 52^nd, Roger Clemens from 27^th to 60^th, Rafael Palmeiro from 31^st to 66^th.

“By the way,” Spota warned. “All of this gets blown away when we start genetic engineering.”

Ah. The “bionic era.”