From a brief, good piece “on continuity and baseball statistics” by Ben McGrath:
Remember 1987? Brook Jacoby—Brook Who?—hit thirty-two home runs. Wade Boggs, never before a slugger, hit twenty-four. The next season, they hit nine and five, respectively. The game’s self-appointed custodians that year whispered about juiced balls, not juiced bodies, but was it any less a disruption of the perceived natural order? More home runs were hit, per game, in 1987 than in 1998, the year, now tarnished in so many fans’ memories, of McGwire and Sosa.