The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

In the March 2007 Play, which I got with my New York Times, Bobby Valentine said

I always thought I was a smart guy. And then I realized I’m a dumb guy – because I was managing against the Oakland A’s and I was firing our conditioning guys because our guys weren’t getting as strong as the A’s. If I knew what was going on, I probably would have gotten very upset and either insisted that all my guys do it or I would have blown the whistle, I’m not sure. But I was stupid.

To start, Valentine’s a candid guy, and I took this as if he was serious.

When Valentine managed the Rangers between 1985-1992, he saw the rise of the steroid-fueled Canseco A’s, starting in 1985 but really catching on the next year. I wasn’t able to find a citation for Valentine firing his conditioning guys, which would have been great, but assume it’s true.

It means, at least, that during the initial rise of steroids, when the A’s were really the only team with more than one guy juicing and lifting, it was not widely known what was going on, and Valentine, in the same division and, as he notes, a smart guy, didn’t get wind of it for a while, long enough to get frustrated and can some people.

It also means, if Valentine fired more than one coach, that there were conditioning coaches who hadn’t figured it out, or at least didn’t tell Valentine, which seems unlikely.

It’s interesting if only to put these things on a timeline. 1985-?, the degree to which other teams realized what was going on and adopted use varies, but we know that it

Rafael Pamleiro, who late in his career failed a steroid test, saw a power spike that people have pointed me to during Valentine’s stay (pre-1990 vs post-1990). The 1991-1992 teams have a couple players (Sierra, Gonzalez) I’ve heard mentioned as possible steroid users. So if you accept that, it wouldn’t seem to have taken more than a few years for Valentine to pick up his own, though it doesn’t look like the whole team was on them (though… Jeff Huson did hit two home runs in 1991…).

The other interesting thing in his statement is his reaction: that he either would have encouraged everyone to use, or he’d have finked them out. We know reasonably that it didn’t take Valentine all that long to figure out what was going out, and as far as I know having read all the history-of-steroid books (which are quite depressing) Valentine didn’t go after the system. That leads us back to that last paragraph: when he figured it out, was it around 1990, and did he then encourage his big guys to get a-juicing?

Oh, for a chance at a follow-up question.

Also in the interview, Valentine talks about how the tight-knit, insular nature of Japanese baseball essentially prevented players from using steroids: it was too hard to go undetected, and the peer pressure against it was so strong that it never caught on. I’d add that the nature of Japanese baseball, where they play a lot faster, with more run-and-gun, bunt-for-a-hit strategies. If the game doesn’t encourage – and teams don’t financially reward – bulking up and hitting for power, players won’t do it.

Coincidentally, the Rangers fired Valentine 86 games into the 1992 season and not long afterwards traded for Jose Canseco.

(I’m back from Phoenix!)

Nate Silver wrote

The moral panic over steroids has tended to cloud the underlying economic reality. There are a couple of points in a baseball player’s career where the financial rewards for improved performance are highly non-linear. One of these is when the player is on the cusp of establishing himself in the major leagues, and the other is when he’s due to hit the free agent market.

This is an outstanding point. I’ve talked here (and in the book) about how steroid use makes more sense on the margins, but it’s also true that contract years provide a massive incentive to go on them that year. Whether that means you go with an older drug or seek out something supposedly undetectable, the gains are potentially amazing.

Nate mentions reducing this incentive through better evaluations: teams should look at a player’s career and not weight the last year so heavily, and I certainly agree with that — but anyone who’s followed baseball knows that teams, as a group, don’t do a particularly good job valuing players rationally when it’s time to hand out checks.

But what Nate doesn’t mention is the other end: baseball’s massive incentive to cheat for players on the cusp of major leaguedom. There’s a solution to that, too, which is to make the minor leagues pay more. Right now, the difference is so huge that it makes a lot of sense to try and use steroids if that seems like the only way to make it to the next level.

The problem here is the players, as a group, have no incentive to do this. The MLBPA historically hasn’t represented minor league players who aren’t on a major league roster. A better evaluation of contracts for free agents potentially helps even the FA dollars out and, assuming that players do use those drugs during contract years, better distribute them to clean players. A significant increase in minor league pay will likely be opposed both by teams, who don’t have a collective bargaining unit beating them up over it, and by players, who see it as a cost that would lower the amount of money teams would have available to spend on payroll.

I’m interested to see if this issue’s addressed. If both sides were well and truly serious about reducing steroid use in the sport, removing incentives would make a huge difference, and this is a place where they’re directly weighing that greater good against the potential direct costs. I’d bet the direct costs win out, and we don’t see any significant action to improve the lot of marginal players.