The Times Wastes Ink On Steroids

The Times delivers a laugher by professors of sociology and statistics on the impact of steroids in baseball:

More Juice, Less Punch

By JONATHAN R. COLE and STEPHEN M. STIGLER

Published: December 22, 2007

FOR those of us who love baseball, this has been a hard time. The Mitchell report named many players past and present it said used steroids and human growth hormone, and the news media had a field day focusing on the lying, the cheating and the betrayal of the game and its fans. Yet no one has asked a fundamental question: Do performance-enhancing drugs improve performance in professional baseball?

No one has asked whether steroids help baseball players?  My goodness we must all be stupid - back in 1976 people were asking whether the East German swimmers were stronger because of steroids; in 1988 people wondered whether Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson was faster because of steroids.  Yet in all the hoopla following the McGwire-Sosa home run duel in 1998 and the Bonds reprise a few years later, no one thought to ask the fundamental question of whether steroids might produce a faster, stronger, more productive baseball player?  Please.

But let me extend the list of Frequently Unasked Questions with this - do these cloistered professors have access to Google?  Unsurprisingly, the question of steroids and baseball productivity has been kicked around for years.  In fact, the Times editors provided a "No, steroids don't help" guest piece in 2004, forcefully rebutted by the Baseball Crank here.

Well.  Setting aside the improbable point that this is not terra nova, let's see what the authors have to say:

But in a complex team sport like baseball, do the drugs make a difference sufficient to be detected in the players’ performance records? An examination of the data on the players featured in the Mitchell report suggests that in most cases the drugs had either little or a negative effect.

Hmm - so players endured these health and professional risks to no benefit?  Sort of counter-intuitive, especially with the examples of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens looming over the debate.

For pitchers identified by the report, we looked at the annual earned run average for their major league careers. For hitters we examined batting averages, home runs and slugging percentages. We then compared each player’s yearly performance before and after he is accused of having started using performance-enhancing drugs. After excluding those with insufficient information for a comparison, we were left with 48 batters and 23 pitchers.

I am not a big baseball stats guy but I know enough to know that a pitchers ERA is not regarded as the state-of-the-art measure of his effectiveness.  As for hitters, what about On Base plus Slugging Percentage as the relevant measure?  What about home runs per at bat, rather than per season?

And what sort of age adjustments are we talking about here?  Was the sample of steroid users predominantly aging veterans trying to delay the inevitable decline of skills?  Did it include people (like Andy Pettite) who used steroids briefly for rehab purposes, not for the more commonly understood goal of performance enhancement?  Here we go:

For pitchers there was no net gain in performance and, indeed, some loss. Of the 23, seven showed improvement after they supposedly began taking drugs (lower E.R.A.’s), but 16 showed deterioration (higher E.R.A.’s). Over all, the E.R.A.’s rose by 0.5 earned runs per game. Roger Clemens is a case in point: a great pitcher before 1998, a great (if increasingly fragile) pitcher after he is supposed to have received treatment. But when we compared Clemens’s E.R.A. through 1997 with his E.R.A. from 1998 on, it was worse by 0.32 in the later period.

Wow - Clemens ERA was higher from age 35 on then when he was a youngster in the pre-steroids era, so steroids didn't help him.  Kidding?  How would they propose to evaluate an alternative hypothesis, to wit, that sans steroids Clemens might have been out of the league at age 38, instead of hanging on until he was 44?

Hitters didn’t fare much better. For the 48 batters we studied, the average change in home runs per year “before” and “after” was a decrease of 0.246. The average batting average decreased by 0.004. The average slugging percentage increased by 0.019 — only a marginal difference. So while some batters increased their totals, an equal number had falloffs. Most showed no consistent improvement, several showed variable performance and some may have extended the years they played at a high level, although that is a difficult question to answer.

Some players improved and some declined. But the pattern for the individuals’ averages was consistent, and the variability of players (with the exception of home run counts) was low. There is no example of a mediocre player breaking away from the middle of the pack and achieving stardom with the aid of drugs.

I will say this - the Mitchell report included a lot of unfamiliar names of wanna-bes and never-weres.  Defenders of Bonds and Clemens can point to that to argue that their guys were Hall of Famers who got a bit of a boost from steroids, not journeymen who became stars because of the juice (Don't ask about Canseco or the Giambi brothers...)

However - even if the statistics show that steroids don;t help everyone, so what?  Suppose I had a drug that, for utterly unfathomable reasons, cured the common cold instantly in 25% of the people

Comments

[curtis]

Now, if they'd just ban exercise,motivation and genetic predisposition.I could be a contender.Oh, and age, definitely age.

[kim]

I wonder if Bill James has wondered.
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[Len Wechsler]

I have to disagree with you. Keep in mind that steroids do help in a lot of ways and are certainly bad for the body.
However, a key element in hitting, the key element, is hand-eye coordination. There are three players with more than 700 home runs and only one (probably) used steroids. And Mays who is fourth almost certainly did not.
More players did hit more than 500 home runs in recent years than in the past. However, there are more than a few good reasons for that.
1) There are about twice as many major leaguers playing each year. Old days there were 16 teams, now 31.
2) Careers are longer because players take better care of themselves. Now that salaries are far higher, players don't go off to other jobs in the off season as they used to do. They keep in shape and they play longer.
3) Because there are a lot more pitchers, there are a lot of really weak ones. That helps the really top hitters.
4) They play five percent more games each season.
5) A lot of the newer parks are "launching pads" for homeruns. Atlanta has been that way for years. ARod hit a lot more homers in Texas than in Yankee Stadium (which is a really bad park for right hand hitters)
6) In the old days, only whites were allowed in the majors. Mays was the first big time black home run hitter elected to the Hall of Fame and that was in the late 1970's.

Pitchers have some advantages as well.
1) Far better trainers than in past years. Think phrases like "Tommy John Surgery."
2) A lot of weaker hitters
3) More relievers around. Pitchers get relieved a lot faster these days. Almost no complete games. A lot of runs were scored in late innings as pitchers tired.

One other point--- a lot of the players who used HGH, and even some with steroids, did it to come back more quickly after injuries.
I had Bell's Palsy a few years ago and had steroid treatments, five pills. That would have gotten me in trouble with major league baseball if I weren't past 60 with a lousy curveball.

A long-term use of steroids brings up muscle and improves speed. What does it really do for baseball players? For football, basketball, track and field it is easy to see the value. But ARod is about five inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than Mays...and is considered a bit skinny. Baseball players have not increased in size as compared to those in other sports.

[Tom Maguire]

Now, if they'd just ban exercise,motivation and genetic predisposition.I could be a contender.Oh, and age, definitely age.

How soon they forget - Michael Jordan, a Little Leage All-Star ar age 12, was a bust as a ballplayer a bit later in life despite the general perception that he was a pretty fair athlete.

A long-term use of steroids brings up muscle and improves speed. What does it really do for baseball players? For football, basketball, track and field it is easy to see the value. But ARod is about five inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than Mays...and is considered a bit skinny. Baseball players have not increased in size as compared to those in other sports.

Your last two sentences seem to point in opposite directions - A Rod would have been a giant in the 30's-50's (OK, Jimmie Foxx / Hamron Killebrew were giants - A Rod would have been big.

And broadly speaking, baseball players almost never lifted weights in the old days, and now they do (I have seen an article about Lou Gehrig working out at a Manhattan gymnasium but there were no details about how much iron he was pumping, and he was an old football player, IIRC).

So, I think hitters and pitchers are bigger, stronger, and faster due to improved training, and steroids are a useful complement to a heavy training program.

Put another way - when you say you disagree with me, are you saying Bonds did *not* benefit from steroids? Given the way his size and stats took off after he juiced up, that seems improbable.

[Tom Maguire]

Having just looked it up - Foxx and Gehrig were legendary strong-men in their day (Foxx's nicknames included "Beast or Double X or Maryland Strong Boy").

But they are listed as 6 feet tall, 200 lbs, as was Mickey Mantle. For comparison, D Jeter is 6' 3" 195; A Rod is 6' 3", maybe 215-225.

[Dr. Manhattan]

Tom:
Check out this BP piece, which I think is available to non-subscribers:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=4845

[Ralph L]

I'm sure they just want the bigger arms and manboobs to make it easier to pick up girls, in both senses of that phrase. The tens of millions of extra dollars they earn are just a side benefit.

[other tom]

From un-Google-aided memory, I beleive that in the years before wunesses say he began using steroids, Bonds averaged one homerun per sixteen at-bats. Since he began, he has averaged one every eight at-bats. And this dramatic change occurred just at the age when almost every ballplayer who has ever lived began to decline.

In the 79 decisions before he began steroids, Clemens's record was 40-39--he had become a journeyman. Immediately upon starting to use them, he became virtually unhittable--and won his next fourteen decisions in a row.

[Rick]

My confidence in the author was not enhanced by this casual mention of the way one player's success can influence another:

It is said that when Honus Wagner saw Babe Ruth hitting home runs he altered his hitting and increased his home run output from less than 10 a year to 40 a year.

Perhaps this guy is really thinking of one of Pittsburgh's Waner brothers. Big & Little Poison. Their time was a decade after 1917, and the Pirates got clubbed in the 1927 series by the Babe.

Cordially...

[SteveMG]

It appears (anecdotally) that steroids both help the excellent-to-great players both extend their career or top years while also greatly improving the numbers for those specific career seasons.

And perhaps mitigating/slowing the decline after those top seasons. They can play longer albeit at a less-than-great level.

For everyone else, it's a mixed bag.

As we learn once again, life just ain't fair.

SMG

[BumperStickerist]

One practical and extremely cheap solution would be to make ball players wear the same size cap as they wore when they were called up to 'the show' during their entire career.

Watching Barry Bonds stuff his 8 1/4 size melon into his 7 5/8ths cap might act as a deterrent.

[Neo]

Yet no one has asked a fundamental question: Do performance-enhancing drugs improve performance in professional baseball?

Darn. There are lots of fundamental questions that go unanswered.

[Tom Maguire]

Perhaps this guy is really thinking of one of Pittsburgh's Waner brothers. Big & Little Poison.

Without looking it up I am highly confident neither Waner ever hit 40 homers in a season (I blame Stratomatic baseball in my youth).

Lloyd had 27 for his career; Paul was more of a Pete Rose/ Tony Gwynn type - 1 MVP, 3 batting titles, never led the league in slugging or home runs season (best was 15).

[kim]

Well, I looked. Bill James is fairly agnostic about the question. He notes that the problem arose, like with immigration, when the rules were ignored.
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[kim]

Hey BS, if the gloves don't fit, you must convict.
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[kim]

Neo, it really is the question of the day, and it's nice to see Pat Sajak spin the wheel. Erl Happ and Leif Svalgaard and many others are nicely explicating solar influences on climate regulation over at climateaudit.org on Leif's eponymic thread.
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[kim]

Woof, Mark Bowden has an excellent piece about waterboarding in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
=======================

[other tom]

I've seen a fairly broad consensus holding that the Steelers of the 70's were the first NFL players to use steroids (many of them acknowledged it), and that it afforded their offensive line a huge advantage. A number of those guys have already died of the various ailments associated with steroid use.

[Donald]

Hey! Wow! Something I can actually comprehend...ERA is the total bottom line on pitching. No matter what era, that's the key. Folks, I'm right on this, this makes Tom an evil, right wing, lying, hating hater of all things good and right. We simply need no other evidence. Man what a hater.

[Donald]

Kim, stick with the important stuff. mkay (Merry Christmas!)?

[SteveMG]

Clemens denies, strongly, the allegations: Video link.

OTOH, what else could he do?

[MayBee]

SMG- Two kinds of people strongly deny allegations against them. Those who are not guilty, and those who are.
The frustrating thing to watch is people like Marion Jones who don't just deny, but call their accusers all kinds of dishonest.

[kim]

Donald, I remember the first time I tried 151. Someone had just called me a no-partying motherfucker. He was trying to make the point that anything newsworthy had already happened in New York, and I was responding by agreeing with him but pointed out that the news was reporting it happening in California, now. Happy holy days to you and George, too.
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[Ann]

Way off topic, but:

Why does the holiday season bring out the worst in us? I have been in Richmond, Va one day and the sister-in-laws are in full BDS mode. Over breakfast I had to hear how Cheney loves to torture people. One sister-in-law took my daughter to a movie where an advertisement for the National Guard was shown. My daughter kept text messaging about the ravings going on by sister-in-law.
She told my daughter to sign up for the National Guard was to sign up for your limbs being blown off!! And at dinner we were told the only news show to watch for the truth was Keith Obewann. You can't ask them questions, because they can't answer and then they just start calling you names.

I have a week to go, any advice? I need help. Anyone got funny questions that will drive them mad?

[clarice]

Drink..Take up smoking so you can excuse yourself to go outside. Do not repeat this adventure. A FULL week!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[glasater]

Ann--get Coulter's book "How to Talk to a Liberal--If You Must".

[Rick Ballard]

Ann,

Consider taking the kids out to Civil War battlefields and Williamsburg (about an hour away). Then you can have a nice discussion with the kids at the table concerning McClellan's stupendous inability to take Richmond in '62 which led to his being relieved in '63 and becoming the Copperhead candidate in '64.

If you do it right you can cast Sanchez as a latter day McClellan with Petraeus becoming US Grant. A visit to Williamsburg opens the opportunity to discuss the Democrats support of slavery from the inception of Democrat Virginia right through to the end of the Civil War, picking up the segregationist gauntlet again in 1876-78 and remaining firmly opposed to Civil Rights until the end of the '60's.

If you do it right they'll throw you out by Wednesday and you can head up to DC and take the kids through the Smithsonian for a few days.

[clarice]

HEH! Rick'd be a fine substitute for Ann Landers.

[Ann]

You are all a god send. I have not laughed in 24 hours. Now I cannot stop. One because I love my husband and therefore have spent 20 plus years spending Christmas in beloved Virginia. Only recently, has it become a hazard.

Clarice, I think I started smoking the day I spent the first Christmas in Va. and starting drinking, come to think of it on the same day!! My father-in-law who I loved the most gave this to me one Christmas: a carton of cigarettes, a bottle of Dewars and a Presidential Bush Calendar.
Of which, one of the sister-in-laws proclaimed as all my vices. Too Funny.

[Ann]

Rick,

Good advice, I take my daughter to every historical site in Va I can on every trip and tell her how important history is and some day she will thank me. Well I cannot wait till she thanks me but the last trip to Appomattox, was all about shopping for a T-shirt. I still think it will sink in one day.

[sbw]

Ann, Democrats are very compassionate people who take their unexamined principles for granted. Don't expect to tell them anything. Don't try. They don't know history, but think they do.

But for Christmas, buy them copies of P. J. O'Rourke's "On the Wealth of Nations." I just bought six copies.

On the off chance they read it, it's eye opening to discover that many of the "tried and true" ideas of the Democratic Party were tried in the middle 1700s and failed. Adam Smith explains why.

And if they don't read it, at least you will have. You'll discover that real compassion takes time, doesn't take unworkable shortcuts, and recognizes the limitations of government.

[Ann]

Thanks Sbw,

I will take your advice. Compassion does take time, mostly with age.

[Elliott]

Good luck, Ann. You could try should steering the conversation to Huckabee. It would be interesting to see whether real Democrats have a soft spot for him. You might even reach a shocking bipartisan consensus concerning hopeful Mike.

[Peter England]

The best way to deal with liberals is to out-liberal them.Look them straight in the eyes and ask them what are they doing to address their innate racism.
Every time they reach for a goody,drink,cigarette,candy start banging on about their carbon footprint.Out do them in greenness,tell them your 3 ton SUV 4*4 won and award for the lowest emissions of any car on earth.
Then as the coupe de grace,ask them how we are going to save Darfur if nobody joins the military,who knows it might even cut the holiday short.

[centralcal]

I don't know about Ann, but I am sure gonna use Peter England's suggestions for dealing with my liberal relatives! Very clever!

[Jane]

Merry Christmas Eve everyone!

I'm somewhat relieved that everyone has very odd families, and many of us just hold on tight until they go away after the holiday.

My family is simply crazy. It will take me weeks to clean up after them after they leave.

It's only 2 days - and once again I am trying to find grace! HO HO HO

[centralcal]

"It's only 2 days - and once again I am trying to find grace!"

Alcohol, baby, alcohol! Bailey's in the coffee. Rum in the coke. Martini's with canapes. Wine with dinner.

Two days will pass quickly and if you pace yourself carefully, there will be no dis-grace!

Merry Christmas Eve, all.

[Peter England]

centralcal,
Dont forget the sherry in the trifle,brandy in the Christmas pudding.
Interestingly,now I don't have any relatives,I don't drink any more.

[clarice]

My mom's very "highstrung" (better now that she's 86). She doesn't drink at all. Early on in her visits, I found they were more endurable if I added a little drop of alcohol to everything--It DOES work.

[centralcal]

"Interestingly,now I don't have any relatives,I don't drink any more."

No relatives?! How is that possible? Surely, you jest, Sweeney Todd!

[Jane]

I've now been drinking for 5 days - which would have been like heaven if I were Hit's age.

I've just put the boeuff Bourgingnon in the oven, it will cook for hours and the smell will overtake the house soon enough. That may be the biggest comfort of the day, particularly when my whacky relatives begin to descend.

Joy Joy Joy

[Rick Ballard]

Ann,

If you can get this printed , it would make a fine piece for calm, rational discussion over the next few days.

Or possibly less.

[Peter England]

No,they gradually upped and died,relatives are buggers for doing that kind of thing. You have a sock auntie who buys you socks every year,then you don't.Get to my age, you realise it is a fact of life and you buy your own socks.

[hit and run]

Jane:
I've now been drinking for 5 days - which would have been like heaven if I were Hit's age.

And how. We went Chistmas light viewing last night, after heavy drinking.

Lots of traffic around that house. Probably took 45 minutes in line to get to it. And then there were some people trying to cut in line! Oh the nerve!

That's what they make sun roofs for. I made good use of ours.

And I was the screaming moonbat for once. I was happy to embarass my family...those line cutters got what was coming to them.

Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men.

[kim]

Celebrate progressive illiberality.
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[clarice]

Hit, I can't wait to read the books written by your kids about their childhood...Daddy Dearest or something.

[PMII]

Merry Christmas to all!

Christmas lights always remind me of the candle lights at Antietam Battlefield in early December (assuming they still do it). They light a candle for each of the victims of that battle - ~ 23,500 of them. It's truly amazing. If you ever get a chance to see it, you will never forget it.

[kim]

Novak's got a stocking stuffer about the CIA. Sweet!
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[Jane]

The link to Kim's article is under my name. (Hint to Kim)

[PeterUK]

Hillary to clamp down on computer generated cartoon sex. Why can't she just use the parental control on Bill's laptop?