This is not to deny a march of reform. In the 1990s, the Lords of Baseball could not have been more complicit in the steroid era had Commissioner Bud Selig kept a bottle of Stanozolol on his desk. That changed. Baseball players and owners embraced reform. Testing procedures began and then grew tougher, and the players union eventually agreed to add blood testing, which is needed to find evidence of human growth hormone.

The players and owners deserve applause.

Yet let me play skunk at the garden party. Baseball catches just a handful of reprobates each year. And most are using Brezhnev-era steroids. A Mets relief pitcher, Jenrry Mejia, pulled off a bonehead trifecta last year, being nabbed for the third time in 18 months for use of a crude anabolic steroid.

Baseball also catches a tiny handful of players using more sophisticated drugs, including peptides and H.G.H. The biggest haul of players nabbed for using more advanced drugs came in the Biogenesis scandal of 2013, which netted more than a dozen players, including the bionic Alex Rodriguez.

For the most part, they were tripped up by paper evidence, not drug tests. Are we to assume that baseball players, faced with the possibility of absurd riches, now refuse to delve into this modern world of drugs?

I’ll put no names to suspicions. Many baseball players perform clean and deserve not to get a raised eyebrow from the likes of me. Players have career years, along with chiropractors who unlock their hips. Sometimes their launch angles really are NASA-ready.

But this explosion of home runs is suspicion-inducing. In ancient times, which is to say the 2014 season, 11 players hit 30 or more home runs. This season, 32 players are projected to clear the 30-home run mark. In 2014, a scrappy bunch of Kansas City Royals battled into the World Series. They had just three players who broke into double figures with home runs.

This year, the Royals are a less formidable team, and they have four players with at least 20 home runs; the team leader has already hit 37. Eight Yankees have hit more than 10 home runs, and two have smacked more than 30. The broken-down Mets have 10 players in double figures this year.