By John Klima
Staff Writer

The late scout Bob Zuk wasn’t the most popular man in the game, but he was good, and this annoyed his competitors as he antagonized them with methodologies and philosophies they resented. Zuk didn’t care what others thought, wouldn’t think twice about lying for a player he believed in, and he thrived on his unique skill to view baseball differently.

The first half of the 2007 season has shown us that we, too, can again look at baseball in different ways.

The steroid era may symbolically end the moment Barry Bonds passes Henry Aaron, but in truth, there are many signs that if it is not completely over, then it has significantly slowed down. This is not to say that there aren’t guys trying to break the rules, because cheating is a core value of baseball. But it is July, and the signs that appeared in April remain, and now it is safe to discuss. The meaning of power, in both hitters and pitchers, is being re-centered to a balancing point the game had abandoned in the past 15 years. This should have never been a morality issue. This was just another case of players adjusting to the game.

Watch batting practice. Notice how many players are focused on hitting line drives now rather than lifting the ball. Some baseball people will suggest, as they told Zuk, that batting practice swings can’t teach you anything. Zuk, who signed Willie Stargell, Reggie Jackson and Gary Carter, did not agree with that thought.

Watch in-game swings. Note the inside-out and defensive swings. That is a sign of a balance, between a pitcher getting the inside-half of the plate back, regaining confidence in pitching low-and-away, and the hitter not having the same muscle to drive the ball to the opposite field.

Note the number of name sluggers who had slow starts this season and the question arises: did they start slower because they were adjusting, not only to their new bodies, but to new pitching?

Look at the home run leaders, and what is striking is that these are hitters who posses natural power. There are no surprises. Prince Fielder, Ken Griffey, Ryan Howard, Alex Rodriguez, Vladimir Guerrero, yes, even Bonds, all have natural power. You can ridicule the home runs Bonds hit from 2000-2006, but it doesn’t change the fact that he always had strong hands. There’s a reason that power was coveted in the pre-steroid era. It’s because only the rare had strong hands. They can, as Zuk would say, wring a bat with their bare hands.

Throw peanut shells at Bud Selig if you must, but inside major league locker rooms, everyone can see the difference between torsos this year and torsos in the last few years. It’s OK to be a bad body ballplayer again. Somehow it’s become an unpopular opinion to believe that the game is off the juice. What the first half has shown us begs to differ.

To argue that the surge of pitching is due to only so many good arms at one time runs counterintuitive to the thought process of the game. Isn’t this the business where everyone whines that they have no pitching? It’s not that there’s more good pitching. It’s that about 20 pitchers in their 20s have matured. It’s also that many pitchers, who were as guilty as the hitters, have come down. This means pitching-to-contact is back. This means getting away with a few more mistakes than facing hitters with gigantisms allowed for.

The college pitcher who could bump to 95 is now working at 88-90. The veteran who was pitching at 95 is now working at 92-93. Somewhere in there is the line between pitchers who know they don’t have to throw as hard anymore and pitchers who can’t throw as hard as they used to.

It leads to a basic equation: a reduction of velocity across the board levels the game and makes those with explosive out-pitches – Dan Haren’s splitter, John Lackey’s curveball – twice as effective. It helps command pitchers – Jamie Moyer, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine – defy age.

These philosophies are unpopular, just as Zuk didn’t win many friends. The steroid issue has become so distorted that it’s easier to say more players are on than more players are off. Zuk’s lessons are accurate as the game cycles back to a balance between power, skill, and competition.

Meanwhile, Selig, who brought competitive balance, may be bringing another balance. The car dealership skills in Bud are evident. His stiff penalties on minor leaguers essentially forced the franchises to govern their inventories. As a result, minor leaguers are browbeaten, while older players (well, except for Sammy Sosa and Bonds), drift from the game, and active players revert to what they were supposed to be in the first place.

In many ways, Ichiro’s inside-the-park home run Tuesday at the All-Star game signified something that only last year could get you scoffed at. Ichiro has always been a technician, a self-absorbed perfectionist. He isn’t exactly beloved inside the Mariners clubhouse, but nobody in the dugout cares how you treat others when you hit .360. His power is an extension of skill. Only last year, the notion of a complete offensive threat being anything less than a home run hitter was considered obsolete.

You can evaluate power as power again. This is wonderful. Zuk believed in the distinctly unscientific method of the sound of contact, which means he’d never get a job working for the Oakland Athletics.

On the contrary, Zuk never had much love for evaluating pitchers, and this year may prove to be one of the best in recent times. There are already fifteen 10-game winners this season and nine more with nine victories each. That means 24 pitchers have a chance to win 20 games.

The steroid era made the 20-game winner an endangered species. It bottomed out in 2006 when there were no 20-game winners for the first time since 1995, perhaps coincidentally, the first year after the strike wiped out the World Series. There have been only seventeen 20-game winners in the last five years, compared to 22 in the five years before that and 23 in the five-year period before that.

Despite all this, steroids are still a dirty word in a baseball clubhouse. Players have Roidar, and if you mention that nasty little word, the room goes silent much, like a classroom when a kid in the back of the room steals the teacher’s keys.

There are pitchers with multiple put-away pitches at the big league level, and frankly, a lot of the pitchers on this list would win if hitters came to the plate with IV drips of HGH taped to their back pockets. But the fact that only the powerful seem to have the power now – and that goes for pitchers as well as the hitters – is the greatest sign that the game has reclaimed much of the balance that it lost.