No.

There has been speculation that Raul’s dream season at age 37 is due to performance enhancing drugs.  This really makes no sense at all.  If Ibanez was going to do steroids, wouldn’t he have done them last year, since he was a free agent last off-season?  This would have maximized the money he could have made as a free agent.  It doesn’t make much sense to do the steroids AFTER signing the free agent deal.

So why is Ibanez on the best home run pace of his career?

Perhaps it’s his 20.7% HR/FB rate (that is, 20% of the fly balls he hits are home runs).  This is largely a luck-driven number that would be expected to regress toward the mean (around 10%) at some point.  My guess is that he’ll end the season around 14% HR/FB.  Basically, Ibanez is just on a hot streak.

Cheating?  Nah.

A bit lucky?  Probably.

Scroll down to read the main article for today – a recap of day 1 of the baseball draft!

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Kosmo is the founder of The Soap Boxers and writes on a variety of topics. Many of his short stories have been collected into Kindle books.

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