Asterisks of Gall(?)

One of the biggest news items in the last week was the release of the Mitchell Report, which investigated the prevalence of steroid use in Major League Baseball. Pretty much everyone has had something to add to the discussion on performance enhancing drugs. I've been following the story as it develops and had some scattered comments of my own (unfortunately, grading lots of tests and finishing up for the semester prevents me from putting this in the usual essay format):

1) The Blame Game - People have been quick to vilify some of the players named in the Mitchell report as cheaters. For some of the bigger names, such as Roger Clemens, the buzz surrounds whether or not they should be inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame or not. I am having a tougher time burning effigies of these players. Why? Because they aren't the real culprits behind baseball's "steroid era."

Here is my take. Suspicion of widespread use of steroids and other drugs was growing as early as the late 1980s and early 1990s. Major League Baseball did not take any steps as far as stringent testing and penalties until over a decade later. In the meantime, the use of performance enhancers likely lead to increases in wages and length of tenure for the average player. Given the low level of deterrence and potentially large expected benefits, players went for steroids and HGH, their preferences for health and discount rates notwithstanding. Perhaps there were even externalities from usage: a single player or groups of players performing better and accruing higher wage earnings likely upped the ante for everyone else to performance better, further tipping the cost/benefit balance over to usage.

In any case, the MLB did nothing for a really long time. Not only that, post the strike induced lock-out in the early 1990s, the game was essentially "saved" in the eyes of paying fans by the steroid induced home run chase in the summer of 1998. The MLB's inaction and their packaging of the game in terms of increased power hitting and speed likely created the right kind of incentives to induce the marginal player into trying to get the extra boost.

2) Asterisks - Putting asterisks on records held by suspected users of performance enhancing drugs seems like a difficult proposition to me. If the Mitchell Report is indeed the tip of the iceberg, and use of agents like anabolic steroids and HGH was (and is) widespread, it is hard to distinguish between "legit" and "cheater-induced" records and probably unwise to try and do so. Rather, interpretation of statistics should be left up to discerning fans.

Still like asterisks? Given the discussion in (1), try this one: MLB*.

3) "Steroids don't help you ______" - Some players and analysts claim that performance enhancing drugs do not really help you become a better baseball player. Two supporting arguments are generally cited. First, steroids and HGH do not help you develop the mechanics to hit a ball, work a pitch count, etc. Second, many of the players named in the Mitchell Report are scrubs - steroids didn't help them hit 50 home runs or clock 95 on their fastball.

Regarding the first point, here is a quote from Ken Caminiti (just one of a brilliant collection in http://www.baseballssteroidera.com):

"The stronger you get, the more relaxed you get. You feel good. You just let it fly. If you don't feel good, you try so hard to make something happen. You grip the bat harder and swing harder and that's when you tighten up. But you get that edge when you feel strong. That's the way I felt. I felt strong, like I could just try to meet the ball and -- wham! -- it's going to go 1,000 mph. Man, I felt good. I'd think, Damn, this pitcher's in trouble and I'd crush the ball 450 feet with almost no effort. It's all about getting an edge."

The second argument is really easy to deconstruct: we simply do not know how these players would have done had they not use steroids (assuming the allegations are true). The scrubs on the list may have never even made it to the major leagues without the extra jolt. Steroids likely provide a boost to players sitting at any level on the baseball skill distribution: they don't have to make you an all-star, but they may make you slightly better than you were before. In a competitive industry, this might be all the edge you need.

4) "The game of baseball has been denigrated" - Can anyone honestly tell me that this scandal, involving individuals cheating in order to perform better, is worse than the 1919 White Sox scandal and the match fixing scandal in international cricket where, in both cases, teams intentionally threw games? Sports have weathered these storms in the past. Baseball will be always popular and its heroes will come and go, steroids or not.

5) What to do now? - One the one hand, the Mitchell Report suggests stringent testing, harsher penalties and player education to stem the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball. On the other hand, some analysts argue that it is impossible for testers to keep up with innovations in performance enhancers. After all, existing tests still cannot detect "the cream" and "the clear," substances Barry Bonds is suspected to have used. In fact, Marion Jones, who admitted using these products never tested positive, covering over 160 tests in sum. In this situation, these observers argue that legalizing these agents in the game and regulating their use with physician oversight might be a better way to go in terms of player health and leveling the playing field.

I'm not sure where I stand on this one, though I think I would lean towards trying to rid the sport of performance enhancing drugs. For one thing, I'm not really convinced by the "arms race" argument against more stringency. Following Gary Becker's seminal analysis on crime, suppose that the average player will use steroids if the expected benefits outweigh the expected costs. In this framework, expected costs are equal to the probability of being caught * the value of the costs themselves. Those who think we'll never catch steroid users believe the probabilities will be too low to give any bite to the costs. On the other hand, increasing penalties, publicly "outing" suspected users, and introducing uncertainty into Hall of Fame chances may jack up the costs enough to outweigh the lack of change in the probability. After all, do you think many players or managers are going to try and pull a Pete Rose now given all that he has been through? Social norms and pressure can be powerful and perhaps more stringency, then, could be a good policy to go with.

A thoughtful post by The Sports Economist provides more arguments for "cleaning up" baseball. One of the more interesting thoughts in that piece, which was alluded to earlier here, is that steroid use by a given MLB player has externalities: others will want to use it in order to compete and this will be true all the way down the pipeline. Where it becomes dangerous is at the level of younger people, who do not possess the resources to have a personal trainer monitor their use. This could have adverse health consequences both in the short and long run.

There is some evidence of noteworthy use of steroids in high school. This piece in JAMA suggests that almost 7% of high school senior athletes have used anabolic steroids. Of these, many started on their regimens as early as junior high. 7% seems like a pretty big number to me. What would be nice to have are figures relating likely steroid-driven adverse health events among this group and information on why these kids decided to initiate such regimens. That way we could get a sense of the extent to which externalities are operative in steroid use.