SI.com article wrote:Circumstantial Evidence
To some experts, the changes in Bonds's body in recent years constitute persuasive evidence of steroid use. No one at his age could put on so much muscle without using steroids, these observers reason.
According to team media guides, which are often imprecise, Bonds has grown one inch in height and gained 43 pounds since his rookie year of 1986. In 2004, the Giants reported his weight as 228, but sources familiar with Bonds say he was heavier. Bonds himself has claimed all the weight gain is muscle, not fat. In '97, when the Giants reported that he weighed 206, Bonds told USA Today that his body fat was an extraordinarily low 8%. In '02, when Bonds's weight was listed at 228, Greg Anderson told The New York Times Magazine that Bonds's body fat was even lower: 6.2%.
The belief that the changes in Bonds's body reflect steroid use is supported by the research of Harvard psychiatrist Harrison Pope, an expert on the mental-health effects of steroid abuse. In 1995, in The Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine, Pope and three colleagues published a mathematical formula for use in determining whether a person is using steroids. The "Fat-Free Mass Index," as the formula is called, predicts steroid use from a series of computations involving the subject's "lean muscle mass," which is determined from height, weight and percentage of body fat. The higher the index number, the leaner and more muscular the individual is. The average 30-year-old American male scores 20, Pope says, while the former Mr. America Steve Reeves, the most famous muscle man of the presteroid era, scored 25 in his prime. A score of more than 25 indicates steroid use.
In 1997, when Bonds reportedly weighed 206 and had 8% body fat, he scored 24.8 on the index. In 2002, when Bonds reportedly weighed 228 and had body fat of 6.2% his score was 28 -- well over the level of a "presumptive diagnosis" of steroid use.
