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Thoughts on steroids, redux
I don't usually recycle posts but this one is from the early days of MR, and my view on steroids hasn't changed much. Excerpt:
Note that the Olympics probably prosper more from competitive balance than from a single dominant country. Was it really so much fun for the rest of the world to watch the Soviets win all those medals? This would predict that the Olympics should take special care to ban performance-enhancing drugs, which is indeed the case.
Baseball is again thrown under a cloud, and one obvious question is how much we have close substitutes for our increasingly damaged pride in the sport. The likely eventual outcome is a long-run equilibrium where all performance enhancements are allowed, thereby placing an inefficient tax on amateurs and performers who don't need to be the very best. Unless you think real enforcement is possible, the publicness of today's not-even-surprising revelations means the game has no other way to go. Common knowledge does matter. So even if some of you think it might be more efficient to simply allow steroid use and then look the other way, that is not obviously an attainable equilibrium.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 13, 2007 at 05:40 PM in Sports | Permalink
Comments
I really don't see what all the fuss is about , since no one is "forced" to use steroids if they don't want to (though I understand the arms-race logic to the problem) - why not just allow players to take what they want so long as they openly disclose what substances they are taking - and then let the fans decide which they prefer: average but clean athletes or superathletes on steroids
Posted by: enrique at Dec 13, 2007 6:31:52 PM
I agree with Enrique.
What should have happened in early 70's was a realization that we need to have medical knowledge out in the open, and not confined to some back room clinic.
Instead of banning performance enhancing medicine -for performances that people pay good money to see- we should have required that the knowledge which produced the performance enhancing medicine be shared equally.
Honestly, I go to baseball games to see Roger Clemens fire the ball right through the batter and Barry Bonds knock the ball out of the park, on down and away slider.
I don't want to see performance which is merely mediocre. I and other fans want to be amazed: and I was very entertained when Johnson beat Lewis.
And I loved watching Mcquire and Sosa whack the long ball - it is most gratifying to know that they were doing it against juiced up pitchers!
Posted by: michael webster at Dec 13, 2007 6:42:45 PM
"...No one is "forced" to use steroids if they don't want to (though I understand the arms-race logic to the problem)..."
The arms race logic IS the problem. Consider the backup catcher on a MLB team. If the team's catcher in the minors is using roids, then he could very well be out of a job if he doesn't, "Keep up with the Jones."
Of course MLB will have to decide whether it wants to regulate itself or not (and also, whether it plans to do so in a serious manner), much like how I have decided that I'd rather watch something else.
Posted by: Samir Nurmohamed at Dec 13, 2007 6:44:53 PM
From your 2004 post:
Now steroids can have one of two possible effects. First, steroids may make it easier to produce spectacular performances. ... If this is so, steroids may make a sport more fun for fans and more lucrative for both stars and non-stars.
A second possibility is that steroids level relative performance.
The answer to this question ought to be known by someone. The first case really has two variations. If the benefit is the same on some absolute scale for all users then everyone will get better, but the gaps won't change. If they produce a proportional increase then the gap between the top players and everyone else will grow. I'm guessing this second variation is what really happens.
My preference is to ban performing-enhancing drugs. To allow them, in any sport, is to require them. Once they become legal and open it is hard to imagine that there will be very many athletes gifted enough to compete successfully without using them. And of course this has spillover effects. It's easy to argue that a 25-year-old athlete should be allowed to decide for himself whether to take the risks involved. But there will be unavoidable pressures on college and high-school athletes to do the same. Teen-agers do not resist peer pressure well, and high-school athletes often overrate their chances at a professional career. Add the inevitable encouragement of some irresponsible coaches and there will be steroid takers too young to make sensible decisions.
In addition, I think that for baseball, at least, very widespread steroid use will be damaging. A 70 HR season every now and then is exciting, but when the game turns into a slightly more complex version of Home Run Derby it will lose interest.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Dec 13, 2007 6:51:54 PM
I prefer sports to spectacles. I don't see how performance-enhancement drugs would result in sport. Implicit in the expression "be a good sport" is the idea that competition is fair and revelatory of the inherent ability of the players. Sports games aren't about the spectators. Unfortunately, this has been lost on the American sporting world, and arguably European soccer is rapidly heading the way of American professional sports. I wish the Ancient Greeks ethos in this matter still pervaded our society.
Posted by: samson at Dec 13, 2007 6:54:52 PM
Why not recycle posts more often?
Posted by: Michael Bishop at Dec 13, 2007 7:04:02 PM
Excellent comment by Yomotov.
Posted by: sa at Dec 13, 2007 7:26:47 PM
ahhh steroids.....zits and shrunken testicles....together at last!
Posted by: david geertz at Dec 13, 2007 7:37:20 PM
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." (Hemingway)
In these sports it was understood that you chose your balance of risk and glory. I think racing has since been regulated to be far less deadly, and I know nothing about bullfighting, but this is certainly still true in the mountains. This might be a useful data point when trying to imagine sports with drugs allowed.
My first instinct is to allow everything. But I can't imagine the watching public greeting the death of a few baseball players who pushed too hard (as would happen) in the same way that they greet deaths of mountaineers today. Which makes me think we'll be stuck with drug bans (imperfectly enforced) for a long time yet.
Posted by: improbable at Dec 13, 2007 7:37:54 PM
No, you don't get it. If steroids were legal and untested, then there would be an arms race (or biceps race) to see who can survive the highest doses. Look at Ken Caminiti, who suddenly started taking megadoses in the middle of the 1996 season and went from nowhere to win the MVP award. He was dead a few years later.
A rigorous testing program can't insure that every single player isn't cheating, but it can keep the arms race toward Ken Caminiti-style ludicrousness and death under restraint.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 13, 2007 8:11:27 PM
Where's the evidence of the inevitability of the *arms race*? Why is To allow them, in any sport, is to require them?
There are multiple performance-enhancing activities, behaviours or lifestyles which athletes do not follow. Eating clean, staying away from Cristal and late-night hoochie parties will lead to better performance (ceteris paribus). Yet, how many NFL or NBA stars, superstars or schlubs do not follow such obvious and permissible regimes?
Maybe there is an optimum regime of permissible enhancements for any nobly imagined form of competition. samson's *sport v. spectacle* is more a continuum than a binary choice. Who is qualified to dictate the preferences of fans or athletes? The whole discussion boils down to each of us trying to force everyone else subscribe to our ideals.
Posted by: foxmarks at Dec 13, 2007 8:11:39 PM
Steve I'm not sure who you think doesn't get it...
The arms race you describe might occur at the transition. My point was that the equilibrium might look more like climbing, where everyone is always welcome to an extra helping of risk. And that I don't think the audience for TV sports would accept this.
Posted by: improbable at Dec 13, 2007 8:17:48 PM
But isn't the whole reason to become an athlete the "late night hoochie parties"? Actually, come to think about it, who care what time of day they are!
Posted by: angus at Dec 13, 2007 8:24:03 PM
Steve nailed it. It's not apparent from Tyler's post and several of the commenters that they understand what competitive steroid use does to the human body. Every athlete in a steroids-permissive environment will, by definition, overuse them. Every person that overuses steroids will suffer varying degrees of harm, mostly significant and long-term, sometimes lethal. There is no bright line between a top athlete and a wannabe, so competitive use of steroids would necessarily start from the youngest ages. These facts seem to be quite ignored in the "we can't regulate them so why bother" line of reasoning, or the "if everyone does them, then it's a level playing field" line of reasoning.
A libertarian argument might be that if someone wants to compete in a steroid-permissive world, then they can chose to balance the health risks with the possibility of glory--kind of a gladiatorial line of reasoning. As "improbable" notes above, that might be a tough sell to the viewing public. It would be an even tougher sell to the parents of high school athletes. I can deal with the possibility that my son might get cut in football tryouts because he can't quite run fast enough or hit hard enough. I wouldn't be able to deal with the possibility that he might be cut because he's unwilling to take steroids.
Posted by: M. Hodak at Dec 13, 2007 9:37:23 PM
Baseball is a particularly contentious sport to test the steroids issue because of its long and storied history. As compared to other American sports, baseball isn't so much a draw for the nonstop action as it is for the tradition, the rivalries, the races, and probably most of all the chasing of records. If the records/tradition part of the sport becomes meaningless, I have to believe that professional baseball will lose a significant portion of its appeal as a sport.
Posted by: meter at Dec 13, 2007 9:51:39 PM
The best policy is to strictly outlaw steroids, HGH, amphetamines, etc. Anyone who gets caught is thrown out of athletics in disgrace and serves jail time. However, enforcement should be sufficiently lax that most players use steroids anyway. Then, professional sports leagues and politicians can selectively enforce the prohibition to ruin the careers and reputations of whichever athletes they feel will be most satisfying to the bloodlust of angry white male blabbermouths.
Posted by: steve at Dec 13, 2007 10:08:23 PM
@steve:
Isn't this exactly the way it works now? Or was that your point?
Posted by: chas at Dec 13, 2007 10:51:32 PM
I've never been sure what sports are supposed to test. The public and the players are willing to accept some level of injury. Why is risk from steroids considered unacceptable?
If sports steroids were legal, would work be done to make them safer? Is there any way to estimate in advance whether steroids can be made safer?
Posted by: Nancy Lebovitz at Dec 13, 2007 11:12:49 PM
I am all up for legalizing all performance-enhancing drugs that are (relatively) safe.
Legalizing all performance-enhancing drugs would turn sports into a competition about who is the greatest risk-taker. Which nobody wants to know.
While I'm at it, in the Olympics and European football, all illegal drugs are on the doping list. That is, if you are shown to have taken marijuana or LSD, you are assumed to have tried to enhance your performance by those means. Ridiculous.
Posted by: LemmusLemmus at Dec 13, 2007 11:23:29 PM
Steroids help you get stronger and recover faster from fatigue. Clearly to take steroids is a physical advantage. However it is preposterous to assume that if steroids were legal/allowed then every MLBer would use them. Steroids only make you stronger and faster. They don't make you smarter. They don't improve your natural instinct to play baseball. If everybody would use steroids were they to be allowed then why are there small athletes? Certainly they have a max size they can reach. David Eckstein can never be as strong as Ryan Howard say, Steve Nash can never be as strong as Shaq. If size, speed and strength were the only thing that mattered than Carl Lewis would be the MVP of the MLB.
Should we bad artists or musicians from taking LSD or smoking marijuana because it is artificially making their art "better" or more "interesting" than if they were not to take it?
And since when should we care if guys getting paid $10 million a year want to ingest something that will lower their life span.
Many ex-NFL players who get banged up on the field for years suffer badly later in life and die early deaths because of the punishment they take. Should we ban running backs and the NFL as well?
I am short and skinny. I say its unfair that Alex Rodriguez is tall and strong. That creates an unfair advantage for him. He should be banned.
Posted by: JB at Dec 13, 2007 11:40:25 PM
Perhaps if performance enhancing drugs were legal and allowed in sports, there would be an incentive for companies to produce non-harmful performance enhancing drugs?
Or does everyone think that if performance enhancing drugs are legalized that no-one will come up with anything better than the same 50 year old recipe for synthetic testosterone?
Posted by: Rex Rhino at Dec 14, 2007 12:38:52 AM
I think Nancy L. made that very same point, Rex. It's a good one, and valid as far as professional sports go, but it doesn't answer two of my concerns: (a) performance enhancement drugs will become part of the competitive arms race, where the leading edge, experimental drugs will always remain higher risk, and (b) these things will cascade down to college and high school; where is the line of demarcation on what's allowed? Or am I just to resign myself to my kids getting juiced if they want to compete?
I'm not sure these are insurmountable problems, but I think they should be addressed beyond the arguments of "so what, let 'em take their chances" or "don't worry, not everyone will get hurt."
Posted by: M. Hodak at Dec 14, 2007 1:53:02 AM
The fact is even the "natural" athletes are competing with unfair biochemistry due to the luck of the genetic lottery. Often with negative health effects. Black men dominate American sports, and also have much lower average lifespans. It seems plausible there is a common biochemical reason, but there's no way to know with our current state of knowledge.
I think the source of the revulsion by the public is that steroids and HGH make our machine-like nature all too obvious. Most everybody finds the idea of humans as just complex machines to be abhorrent, so we react with anger and disgust. Sports steroid scandals bring this idea to all levels of society.
Mainly we just need better steroids, better drugs. Player A is born with the genetic machinery to produce certain chemicals more efficiently than Player B. Why shouldn't Player B be allowed to compensate?
What better use for drugs than to make us stronger, smarter, and better than we "naturally" would be?
It's interesting that we are accepting this more for mental health issues than physical traits. Millions of people take anti-anxiety and anti-depressants even though their symptoms aren't acute. For most of human history these people would have just been considered naturally shy, nervous, timid, or melancholic. But we now consider people who aren't confident and content to have a illness worth treating. Many choose to, but most don't.
Why shouldn't somebody be strong and fast if they want to? I look forward to the day when we can choose our own biochemistry. Sadly, our crude technology means there are many unknown risks and side-effects to modifying our biochemistry.
Posted by: jim at Dec 14, 2007 2:10:35 AM
"But there will be unavoidable pressures on college and high-school athletes to do the same. Teen-agers do not resist peer pressure well, and high-school athletes often overrate their chances at a professional career."
As I understand, the current high school situation is just as bad as in any professional sports. I went to a high school with a bad football team, but especially in the mid-West, high school coaches turn an eye to steroids.
TWO things make a person good at a sport: (1) Practice (2) Strength. Anyone can take steroids, hit the gym, and become better than all his normal friends at any sport. Take the same guy, and have him pitch against Barry Bonds, you'll see he is not as good as he thought. The situation is, steroids make better performances against non-steroid users in professional sports, but if they all took them, then I hypothesize that team sports would become more entertaining(eg. baseball - percent of home-runs to base hits will return to normal, basketball half court shots will become dominant strategy, etc.)
Posted by: brainwarped at Dec 14, 2007 7:20:25 AM
Even with roids baseball is painfully boring. They need to try something else.
Posted by: mack at Dec 14, 2007 9:37:34 AM
