Just after the start of every baseball season, the game hits a bit of a lull. It’s too early to tell what’s going on with any particular player or any particular team, and so you start to see and hear a lot about certain trends, like 39-year-old middle infielders leading the league in batting average, or zany utility players with cornrow mullets who are helping their team win with hustle and scrappiness. Usually, these trends turn out to be nothing, but they pass the time until we get into the meatier part of the season.

This year, we saw a spate of “home runs are up” stories. Every year sees a pile of these, but when the majors were briefly on pace for the biggest home run season ever in April, they spread like fungi. They also made me really cross, on two accounts. One is that even league wide numbers are statistically meaningless after two or three weeks, so anyone extrapolating something from them and presenting their theory as anything but a bit of trivia or novelty is being either a bit ignorant or a bit dishonest.

The other, more important one is that these sorts of numbers have been twisted to suit an agenda. Last year, home runs were down slightly, so it was widely (and somewhat ridiculously) taken as evidence that drug testing was working. This year, they’re up slightly, so it is widely (and just as ridiculously) taken as evidence that drug testing is not working. There are many reasons to think that drug testing is having some success, and many more to think that an awful lot of players are working the loopholes in the process to their advantage. Home run numbers are proof of none of this; they’re just home run numbers.

For instance, going into play yesterday, home run rates had declined to exactly where they were in 2004 – 2.22 per game in the National League and 2.30 in the American League. Those are up from last year’s rates (2.04 and 2.14, respectively), but not by enough to be particularly noteworthy, especially in the AL. Is drug testing now working as well as it was when it was first instituted in 2004, but less well than last year? The silliness of the question points up the silliness of using these sorts of numbers as proxies for the efficacy of drug testing. Very few players are being caught by these tests, and while no one’s under any obligation to think that makes the sport clean, it’s not fair to massage a few numbers and then use them as evidence for your suppositions.

Still more curious to me than home run rates fluctuating is that despite home run rates being up over last year, runs per game are down in the NL, from 4.57 to 4.39. (They’re the same in the AL – 4.73 last year, 4.74 this year.) Again, it’s too early for any numbers to be really meaningful, but anyone looking to offensive levels as proof of their beliefs as regards drug testing would need to explain this one pretty thoroughly. Looking back to 2004, runs per game are way down – in the NL they were 4.69, in the AL, 5.04. Drawing conclusions from these numbers, you’d think steroid testing (or something else) was cutting down offense significantly.

Of course, there’s no way to draw any conclusions from any of these numbers. Personally, I’m impressed by how low run scoring is, considering that the vast majority of the elite pitchers who played in the World Baseball Classic spent April getting knocked out of the box, and are just now rounding into form, and considering that what looks to be a good new hitter’s park opened in St. Louis, replacing a decent pitcher’s park. But that’s just me.

What’s really impressive is that people still hold the assumption underlying any attempt to correlate home runs or scoring to steroid use – that high offense is caused (on a league-wide scale; I’m not disputing that juiced up players hit better) largely by steroid use. This ignores that pitchers take steroids, too, and that any testing program should theoretically affect them as much as, if not more than, the hitters. It also ignores that the current high-offense era wasn’t caused by steroids.

Want proof? In 1992, the AL scored 4.32 runs per game, and the NL 3.88.The very next year, those numbers leaped to 4.71 and 4.49, respectively, which is pretty much where they’ve stayed ever since. Unless everyone started taking steroids all at once in the 1992-93 off-season, you have to think something suddenly happened to drastically reshape the game’s offensive climate.

Small ballparks, weight training, tightly wound balls, changing strike zones, and all the rest played their part, and the most likely explanation is that those all converged at once, along with steroids, just as many factors from Babe Ruth’s uppercut swing to the banning of the spitball converged in 1921 to bring an end to the Deadball Era. It’s not a neat explanation, but it makes a lot more sense than anything else, and certainly a lot more sense than picking out a few numbers from a big pile and using them to whack around Major League Baseball, which, for better or worse, has the testing program in place that people have claimed they wanted all along.