The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

(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.

From the Albany Times Union:

The Times Union has learned that investigators in the year-old case, which has been kept quiet until now, uncovered evidence that testosterone and other performance-enhancing drugs may have been fraudulently prescribed over the Internet to current and former Major League Baseball players, National Football League players, college athletes, high school coaches, and a former Mr. Olympia champion and another top contender in the bodybuilding competition.

The customers include Los Angeles Angels center fielder Gary Matthews Jr., according to sources with knowledge of the investigation.

The interesting thing I wrote about a little at USSM is that his career year in 2006 was a lot of luck: hits dropping in. But Matthews really became a useful regular in 2004, in Texas, when his power spiked and stayed there. Normally, you’d think of it as a park effect, but 30 points of ISO is curious. I’d have to go calculate it out, but it’s larger than I’d expect from Arlington.

In any event, it would, if it proves out, show one of the more interesting things about steroids we’ve seen: that for hitters, it’s often the marginal players trying to fight for starting jobs that get into use, rather than established regulars. For Matthews, if it turns out that his 2004 resurgence, which still didn’t make him a star but at least put him in a position to get playing time to get lucky and land a $50m contract, it’ll demonstrate in quite real terms what the potential payout for drug use by marginal players is. A guy being passed around on waivers not that long ago, Matthews was looking at making possibly $1-2m/year while competing for jobs in spring training each year.

Instead, even if he’s so bad that he never gets another contract, he’ll have made vastly more, at the cost of the health risks.

The news of the week is that there looks like there is, at least, a reliable test for HGH use. I wrote in the book:

Many players who used steroids have moved to hGH. While it doesn’t help building the massive muscle bulk that anabolic steroids do, it has many of the beneficial effects players, especially older ones, generally look to steroids for. It’s not that hard to get, though it can be quite expensive. Most importantly, while hGH is banned, there’s no proven test for it right now. If a test can be proven reliable, the players will almost certainly have to sign up for blood draws, which would have to go through the collective bargaining process, and while players as a whole were willing to concede to urine tests in order to help their sport, getting them to take regular blood tests could be another matter entirely.

Can I just say thanks for coming out with this news while the book’s at the printer? Great timing.

This test is a blood test, as everyone suspected would be the case, so there’s that barrier, but the short time window is an even larger problem. Players aren’t going to agree to a blood draw every three days.

The good news, from a detection standpoint, is that random tests in-season should still catch users. A normal dosage schedule of HGH for people taking it for general anti-aging purposes is an injected dose 4-5 times a week. We can figure that’s the minimum an athlete using the stuff is taking. The chance they’ll be on a course of HGH and dodge a test is pretty slim.

If baseball implements any kind of testing, the effect will be huge. As you probably know, in the Grimsley Incident, we heard that athletes who previously used steroids moved to HGH to get many of the same benefits (and without some of the more horrible side effects). If HGH is on the same punishment schedule, with a 30-day suspension for first detection, it’s unlikely players will take that chance, and we’ll see a mass abandonment of HGH. Considering that HGH was there waiting, undetectable, with open arms for players who were on steroids before, there’s a quite real chance that we’ll see the kind of performance crash that people thought would happen in the first year of penalty-phase testing for anabolic steroids.

But if we get random testing, and players abandon, what happens then? I’ll write more about the future of the arms race, but we know they’re not all going to stop using performance-enhancing drugs if they’re forced to give up any one.