Bonds and his alleged use of you know what

This diary makes no sense.

If we assume the rumors are true then Bonds took illegal steroids to help him gain an unfair advantage over players who did not use illegal steroids.  I don't see how the potency or detectability would make it better or worse.

On that note what makes you think that the "strength" of a steroid is what makes it able to be detected?

What you are forgetting is that up until recently MLB basically did jack shit to make sure its players aren't using...

According to most steroid experts I've read on T-Nation, not very potent at all. Topical ointments like "The Cream" have very little if any effect outside of local treatment. "The Clear" from what I've read could certainly help a female athlete, especially for endurance, but would have very little effect on a male, especially in regards to strength gains.

Rxmeister is correct in that the clear could not be detected because it was an exotic, anabolic substance that chemists had yet to create a test for.  However he would not have automatically passed a steroid test because of cycling. Some steroids can stay in your system for up to 16 months.  You do not get their effects when you are not using them.  If you are not careful, you can actually have the opposite effect, and have decreased testosterone. A topical steroidal cream can have an effect on a male subject, you would have to use a very large dose to have any real effect. From what I understand wasn't "the clear" a oral steroid. The clear would boost recovery time and strength levels.  To answer the original question "potency" has nothing to failing a steroid test.  If you are ingesting or injecting exogenous testosterone, you will fail the test because your epi-testosterone levels will not match up with your blood testosterone levels.

Basically any steroid (or at least the ones in discussion) contains the chemical compound testosterone, or some sort of derivative that mimics the function of testosterone.  Testosterone has a certain chemical "blueprint" for the sake of conversation.  To make them different, steroids are then fixed with other chemicals to make them balanced and to make them function differently.  

With that said, the only way to "detect" a new steroid, is to know exactly what other chemicals are attached to the testosterone base chemical.  The only way they are able to test for the known steroids is because they know exactly what the "blueprint" looks like.  So the only reason why the clear and the cream were undetectable is because 1. the testers did not know exactly what chemicals to look for, and 2. because there were no syringes or other signs of traditional steroid use.

It then becomes apparant that, because you can fix countless different chemicals to the original testosterone, it will be close to impossible to ever get rid of steroid use.  People will always look for an edge, and people will always keep making new ones to sell to those people looking for an edge.

The real question you should be asking is why other steroid users do not hit as many home runs.  And why the only other big steroid users that were not pitchers or minor leaguers were guys like Sosa and McGuire - guys who were home run hitters before the steroids.  

Barry has exceptional hand-eye coordination, pitch recognition, his father helped Barry by studying pitchers and he learned from that.  He was raised in a baseball family and had great players around him his whole life (you could make an argument against that for the last couple years...).  Barry was basically destined to be a great baseball player, but his attitude made him destined to be despised.