For some reason, though, Sinker's essay struck me very differently than other steroid madness rants have of late; I'm guessing it's a juxtaposition of arguments over steroids in baseball with arguments over the economic stimulus package just finishing its path through Congress. I've finally come to realize that the steroid debate in baseball isn't a medical debate or even a debate about sports -- it's a political debate. And like many political debates, the people involved who seek to take advantage of the situation for their own political gain are using really shoddy arguments to back up their position. If there's anything we've learned from the new Obama administration lately, it's that the only good way to defeat shoddy arguments is to get out there and push your own better arguments, so here's my attempt to do this on the steroid issue:
- Bud Selig claims he's considering reinstating Hank Aaron as all-time home run leader.
This is stupid, but not precisely the way Sinker says it is. Sinker is right when he says that "baseball fans and others" decide how to interpret the raw statistics of baseball (and 'others' probably refers primarily to the members of the BBWAA who vote on Hall of Fame inductions), but the statistics themselves can be shaped by MLB to some degree -- take the most famous case prior to this one, Roger Maris's 1961 season. Maris's 1961 season has been described as having an 'asterisk' in the record books, but that's not strictly true -- what is true is that for years the record books looked like this:
Most home runs, single season, 154 games: Babe Ruth (60)
Most home runs, single season, 162 games: Roger Maris (61)
Who was your 'home run king'? It all depended on how you wanted to look at it. Interpreting the stats, as Sinker notes, is a fan's and writer's game.
Based on this example, though, it's hard to understand how Selig expects to be able to put Aaron back on the top of the career home run list:
Most home runs, career, non-steroid user: Henry Aaron
Most home runs, career, steroid user: Barry Bonds (soon to be Alex Rodriguez, et al)
Not only is this not really a baseball distinction, it's a distinction that ultimately can't be ended -- at what point do we decide that baseball players aren't using steroids anymore and thus can be legitimately considered for statistical enshrinement? First, go hit 750 homers, then piss in this cup?
The more likely way in which Selig would attempt to reinstate Aaron as the 'official' home run king is to put Bonds, A-Rod, et al on some kind of permanent ineligible list, a la Pete Rose (which of course begs the question -- if the Commissioner has the authority to strike ineligible players' statistics from the baseball record, why is Pete Rose still baseball's all-time hits leader?) This, too, is a really stupid idea, and can be illustrated with a simple TwinsGeek-like 'player A/player B'
A - .346/915; 101 HR, 1599 R, 1464 RBI, 455 SB over 16 seasons
B - .356/940; 54 HR, 873 R, 785 RBI, 202 SB over 13 seasons
Though player B was a slightly better hitter by BA/OPS, and the difference in their playing time was a bit larger than the 16/13 seasons comparison would suggest (player A had approximately 8300 plate appearances in his career, while player B had approximately 5630), that seems to me to speak to player B's tendency toward injury rather than any knock on player A. In addition, player A hit over .400 three times in his career, led his league in hitting once, led his league in slugging five times (though they didn't keep track of that in his day), and led his league in home runs twice. Player B hit over .400 just once, never led his league in batting average, never led his league in home runs, and led his league in slugging just once. Player A is in the Hall of Fame, Player B is not.
Yet few baseball fans would likely recognize Player A as Ed Delahanty, who was elected by the Veterans Committee in 1945. His plaque notes that he went six-for-six twice in his career and hit four homers in a game once. Even once you know his name, you probably don't know much about him.
You might not recognize Player B by his numbers, but you'll recognize his name: Joe Jackson, placed on baseball's 'permanently ineligible' list by then-Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1920.
Selig doesn't have the power to remove Bonds's or Rodriguez's statistics from baseball's record, any more than Landis could remove Jackson's statistics or Bart Giamatti could remove Rose's statistics. Because of this, I'd expect that any attempt to restrict 'official' sanction for Bonds and Rodriguez (and others) will have exactly the opposite effect that Selig wants -- Bonds and Rodriguez and whomever else is held off the top of the career homers list will, for at least some portion of baseball's fandom, become the most popular players of all time, just as currently there are groups agitating for the removal of Rose and Jackson from the banned list.
- The 'cheating' argument.
Sinker quotes Roy Oswalt in an unfortunate rant about how Rodriguez's stats shouldn't count, because Oswalt himself has never taken Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs), and Rodriguez's 'cheating' could have cost Oswalt wins and thus money in his contract.
Well, for starters I can see why Oswalt is pissed: a check of baseballreference.com's Play Index shows that Rodriguez is a career 3-for-7 against Oswalt, with all three hits being for extra bases (two doubles and a homer) and three RBI. On the other hand, that's less than 10 plate appearances, and if 10 plate appearances can cost a pitcher millions of dollars on his contract, then baseball is a far more exacting game than I was ever aware of, economically at least. I might be a bit more sympathetic if Oswalt were bitching about Pedro Feliz (.452/1275 with 2 HR and 8 RBI in 32 career PAs vs Oswalt) or even Neifi Perez (.407/851 in 28 career PAs), but I find it hard to get my dander up over 9 plate appearances in an entire big-league career.
More to the point, I don't believe Oswalt when he says he's never used PEDs. Has he never had a cortisone shot? As Will Leitch points out in his book "God Save The Fan", cortisone is an injectable steroid just like the bad-boys use. And back in 2004, Oswalt admitted that he took at least three cortisone shots to deal with an injury in his rib cage that otherwise would have prevented him from pitching. The essay in Leitch's book talks about Scott Rolen, who got a cortisone shot prior to the 2006 World Series against the Tigers and helped the Cardinals win. But was there an outcry from Tiger fans over Rolen's 'cheating' costing them the World Series? Nope.
The argument seems to go like this: cortisone is OK because it doesn't let you do anything you wouldn't otherwise have been able to do when you were healthy, whereas HGH, the cream, and such gives you abilities you didn't previously have.
That sounds good, but there's not a lot of empirical evidence to back up that assertion, from either end.
Sure, we have anecdotal evidence relating to Ken Caminiti's shocking MVP season, Bonds's single-season HR record year, and Mark McGwire's 1998 run at Maris's record. But by those standards, anybody could be a steroid user -- I have a friend who makes a compelling argument that Kirby Puckett took steroids from 1986-1987, at just about the time that Jose Canseco was singing their praises while a youngster with the Oakland A's. After all, Puckett had hit just 13 homers in over 200 minor league ballgames, then hit four in his first two full seasons with the Twins before hitting 31 in 1986 and 28 in 1987. Then, at an age where players' power tends to slowly increase, Puckett's seemed to vanish, as he dropped to 24 homers in 1988 and just 9 in 1989, despite having nearly identical numbers of plate appearances in those three seasons: Puckett had 668 PAs in 1987, 691 in 1988, and 684 in 1989. Only then did Puckett's home run totals begin to increase again, at a seemingly age-appropriate rate that led to a new career norm of about 20 homers per year. Unless we're willing to kick Kirby Puckett out of the Hall of Fame, we clearly can't rely on just anecdotal evidence.
Problem is, we don't have a lot of empirical evidence linking steroids and actual baseball performance, and what evidence we do have tends to say that the impact of steroids in baseball is far less than the alarmists claim. Thomas Boswell writes that it's suspicious that Rodriguez's home runs leapt by 12 or so per year after moving from Seattle to Texas, even though Texas is a notoriously easier park in which to hit homers. Boswell ignores that Rodriguez moved to Texas for his age 25 season, and played there through his age 27 season, which tend to be the peak seasons of a player's career. Taking the development factor into account, JC Bradbury looks at the numbers and claims that steroids were worth about one extra homer per year in the seasons in which Rodriguez says he was taking them. (And harkening back to the Kirby Puckett example: Puckett's 1986 home run breakout occurred in his age 26 season.)
What we do have is a lot of empirical evidence showing that steroids can increase muscle mass, and then a leap of faith that says that players with bigger muscles must be able to hit the ball harder, ergo more homers. While I have little doubt that this is probably true in the aggregate -- the more players taking steroids, the more homers will be hit -- and that this hypothesis does fit the 'home run era' of turn-of-the-century baseball, I have a hard time reconciling that with the evidence we have of the people who were actually suspended for steroid use during that time.
For instance, when MLB announced ten players who'd violated the new steroid policy back in 2005, the only one of those players with any significant major-league success was Twins set-up reliever Juan Rincon. (Rincon's reward for his allegedly steroid-fueled 2004? A two-year contract worth about $1 million, or less than half of what the Twins have reportedly offered Luis Ayala.) About half of the players on the list didn't even have any major league service time, which immediately suggests that, if steroids are this magic potion that makes you a superstar, why these guys were still languishing in AA and AAA?
Or look at the famous Mitchell Report. There are a number of high-profile names on the list, not just Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, but reading through the actual report makes it seem as though the high-profile players on the list weren't looking at steroids as a way to make them greater, but to hang onto big-league jobs they already had. In that sense, most players' apparent image of steroids matches the experience that Mark McGwire had taking androstenedione in 1998 -- prior to 1998, McGwire had a few seasons that seemed to suggest that he could hit 60+ homers if he was able to play a full season (in 1995, he hit 39 homers in 422 plate appearances, while in 1996, he hit 52 in 548 plate appearances). If he could simply stay in the lineup for 650 plate appearances or so, the home run title would be all but locked up. Well, in 1997 he hit 58 homers in 657 plate apparances, but the impact was masked because he split his production between leagues -- two-thirds of the season in Oakland and a third in St. Louis. Then in 1998, McGwire famously hit 70 homers -- and did it in 681 plate appearances. Given his move from Oakland to St. Louis, much of that increase in rate could be attributed simply to a change in ballparks (in his 1997 split-season, McGwire hit 34 homers in 433 PAs in Oakland, just about his career rate to that point, but pounded 24 in 224 PAs in St. Louis, slightly better than the rate he had in all of 1998). What 'andro' did for McGwire is basically what cortisone did for Scott Rolen and Roy Oswalt -- allowed them to continue playing at a high level of performance when their physical condition would normally either prevent them from playing at all or would at least degrade their level of performance. If that's a PED, then it's a PED for McGwire and Rolen...and Oswalt, who really shouldn't be throwing stones from the porch of his glass house.
If you combine 'home runs are going up because of steroids' with 'nobody really good is being busted for steroid use', you get a result that absolutely cries out for a conspiracy theory. And while we do know that it's true that high-tech steroid designers are deliberately engineering their steroids to evade current testing technology, it's also true that these steroids are being taken by way more than just baseball players -- it's actually hard to argue that baseball is the driving force behind these 'designer steroids' when baseball is so late to the party on steroid enforcement -- the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency are way ahead of baseball both on enforcement and testing of athletes for PEDs, and not just artificial PEDs, either.
But where there are conspiracy-minded people, all it takes is one bit of evidence to get the engines whirling.
- The 'anonymous testing' brouhaha
The first official steroid test in MLB occurred during the 2003 season, thanks to an addendum added to the Basic Agreement between the league and the player's union in late 2002. An awful amount of misinformation about MLB's steroid testing regime could be clarified by referencing the publically available document: (the joint drug testing program is listed as Attachment 18)
Myth: The player's union was responsible for running the anonymous 2003 testing program.
Fact: According to the agreement, administration of the entire program, from 2003 and beyond, was placed in the hands of a Health Policy Advisory Committee (HPAC), consisting of four people: two doctors, one named by MLB and the other by the union, and two lawyers, one named by MLB and the other by the union. In the event of a deadlock, the two doctors were given authority to name a fifth member of the committee solely for the purpose of breaking the deadlock.
Myth: The union failed to destroy the anonymous test samples as they should, and MLB was thus able to get ahold of the samples and identify the players who failed tests.
Fact: First, the union wasn't in charge of the testing process, HPAC was. There's some evidence that HPAC turned the records over to the union for destruction once their own work was done, but as noted by Gene Orza, lead attorney for the player's union, the destruction was delayed by the receipt of a federal subpoena. MLB hasn't released the names of the players involved in the positive tests, and still cannot because of the agreement between MLB and the union (see below).
Second, because of possible issues with legal over-the-counter supplements creating 'false positives' for the test, the testing process had a unique requirement -- all players (not just those who failed the initial test) would be tested twice; the second test would occur at least five but not more than seven days after the first test. At the first test, players would be told that they should stop taking OTC supplements until after taking the second test. If more than 10% of the positive tests in the first batch showed up negative in the second, HPAC would be responsible for advising the Commissioner's Office and the union on how to adjust the testing program to ensure that players taking legal supplements were not unfairly punished by failing drug tests. This would help explain why, even though the testing occurred during the 2003 season, the actual records and results were not turned over to the union for destruction until November.
Myth: The anonymous testing was a gimmick that MLB had to agree to in order to get the union to agree to testing at all.
Fact: The agreement between MLB and the union (on page 167 to be precise) says this:
The confidentiality of the Player’s participation in the Program is essential to the Program’s success. Except as provided in Section 8, the Office of the Commissioner, the Association, HPAC, Club personnel, and all of their members, affiliates, agents, consultants and employees, are prohibited from publicly disclosing information about the Player’s test results, Initial Evaluation, diagnosis, Treatment Program (including whether a Player is on either the Clinical or Administrative Track), prognosis or compliance with the Program.
The problem is that the federal government seized the 104 positive tests from 2003 as potential evidence in the federal investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO). The reason should be pretty obvious -- BALCO was being investigated for selling Schedule III controlled substances illicitly (that is, directly to users without a doctor's prescription). A record of a sale of a steroid to a user without a prescription, then a record that the user failed a steroid test, would make very convincing evidence that BALCO was violating the U.S. Controlled Substances Act.
That prosecution is still banging through the court system today, however, partly because of federal screw-ups. For instance, the search warrant used by the Feds to seize the test results only named the ten players being investigated for their connections to BALCO, meaning that the government really only had authority to take those ten players' tests. It hasn't yet been explained why the government got all the failed tests.
It's also true that the union has been fighting a lot harder than the Commissioner's Office has to try to keep the names of the players who failed the tests out of the public record; that's why you're seeing Don Fehr and Gene Orza making these announcements and not Bud Selig or any of his lieutenants.
Myth: The union delayed testing in 2004 so that they could warn players of the upcoming tests.
Orza has been accused of this twice by unnamed sources in the Commissioner's Office -- he's denied the allegations both times. That in and of itself doesn't mean the allegations are untrue, but Orza's point is a good one: if these allegations were true, one would expect there to be evidence, and thus far none has appeared.
Penalty-based testing was delayed in 2004 at the request of the union, but the union asked for the delay in order to alert the 104 members whose tests were seized by the government. MLB agreed to the delay.
In short, if more people would actually read the primary sources involved in this news, there'd be a lot less misinformation out there. Another example of misinformation is Sinker's own suggestion that MLB could do something similar to what they did in 1986 with seven players who were being suspended for using illegal drugs. The problem with this alternative is that MLB and the union, when renegotiating the 2003 agreement into the current agreement, spelled out the allowable penalties for players who fail penalty-based testing, and Sinker's suggestion isn't included. (That's not to say that Sinker's suggestion is a bad one, just that it's not something in the existing agreement. Frankly, I have no confidence in Bud Selig's judgment over what's legal or moral, so I'd prefer to leave all of that in the hands of collective bargaining anyway.)
One last point for those who think this aggressive, 'zero-tolerance' policy on steroids is a good thing; there's reason to believe that the steroid policy may have directly influenced the Twins competitiveness in 2005.
Recall that first-baseman Justin Morneau had just earned the starting job in mid-season of 2004 and Twins fans were looking forward to seeing what a full season of Morneau as the first-baseman would look like offensively. Then during the off-season, Morneau suffered a bout of pleurisy. Despite the old-timey name, pleurisy is still a reasonably common condition, often occurring as a complication to rib injury or to bacterial or viral respiratory infection; it's an inflammation of the membranes that surround the lungs, and can be dry (without fluid buildup) or wet (with fluid buildup). Treatment for pleurisy generally consists of treating the primary condition, then treating the inflammation with anti-inflammatory drugs.
Well, there are basically two types of anti-inflammatory drugs: non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as aspirin and ibuprofen, and corticosteroids. Corticosteroids are significantly stronger than ibuprofen -- if you've ever spent time around an asthma patient, the inhaler they use when they feel an attack coming on contains a fast-acting corticosteroid. However, it's possible (though certainly not a given), because the high pitch of anti-steroid fever following the 2004 season, Morneau may have chosen to treat his pleurisy with non-steroidal pain relievers/anti-inflammatory drugs, extending his recovery time and keeping him at less than 100% effectiveness throughout the 2005 season (still by far Morneau's worst as a professional). And of course, given the reaction to Rincon's failed drug test during that season, it's hard to say that Morneau's decision was the wrong one -- sure, we all want to see our favorite players back on the field and 'playing through pain', but how many non-Twins fans would have given Morneau the benefit of the doubt when he says he was taking the steroid for pleurisy rather than to mask a PED?
Looks like the steroid discussion just got more complicated.
