This would seem to qualify as a “Well, duh,” moment.

The Associated Press did its annual “roundup for league leaders story,” with the baseball regular-season ending … and Torii Hunter of the Angels was frank enough to suggest that the lowest homer pace since 1993 was about steroids being (mostly, it would seem) driven out of the game.

Kind of a “no-kidding?” moment, but I’m not sure anyone in baseball had made the connection quite so overtly.

I believe this is good. The connection being made, and the change it has wrought on baseball.

We already are looking back on the decade of 1995-2005, or so, as the Steroids Era. Homer totals went nuts, with all sorts of random guys hitting 50 in a season (Brady Anderson? Luis Gonzalez? Andruw Jones?) and three (Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa) crossing the Maris threshold of 61. (All three are now linked with performance-enhancing drugs, by the way.)

I like this new era, which takes us back to a time when a home run was a treat and not something you could reasonably expect to happen every few minutes.

I like it when there are other ways to play — and win — then waiting around for some steroid-puffed guy to put one in the seats.

This is more like baseball from its first 100 years. Not nearly as stereotyped, more park-effects (that chemical-effects) driven. With more subtlety and fewer wild swings in stats.

I like it. And I’m glad Torii Hunter came out and said what any intelligent observer of the game already was thinking.