Juiced? Don't Worry, Be Happy

In this season of discontent about performance-enhancing drugs, a pair of academic baseball junkies offer a contrarian view of steroids and HGH. The stuff doesn't work. If this is (fair & balanced) revisionism, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
More Juice, Less Punch
By Jonthan R. Cole and Stephen M. Stigler

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?

These drugs can cause physiological changes and lasting health problems, and they may have pronounced effects in individual sports like cycling, swimming, skiing and track, where the difference between a gold medalist and an also-ran is sometimes measured in hundredths or thousandths of a second.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Barry Bonds’s career has been the most scrutinized, and in fact his home run production in the years after he supposedly started taking drugs does show significant average gains. But individuals always vary, and choosing specific cases does not yield general conclusions.

What should not be overlooked is that Bonds’s profile is strikingly like Babe Ruth’s high performance level until near the end of his career, with one standout home run year — a year in which other players on other teams also exceeded their previous levels.

During the last six years of Ruth’s 22-year career he hit 198 — or 28 percent — of his 714 home runs; Bonds, in the last six years of his 22-year career, hit 195 — 26 percent — of his 762. There is no convincing way to demonstrate that Bonds’s performance owed more to drugs than Ruth’s did to his prodigious use of alcohol and tobacco.

Our results run contrary to the prevailing wisdom. One reason might be that most baseball skills depend primarily upon reaction times and judgments, factors unaffected (or even degraded) by these drugs. Also, in a team sport like baseball, other variables affect individual performance: quality of one’s teammates, home ballpark, changes in the strike zone, injuries and pitching. These factors could mask very slight performance changes like the ones we found.

It is possible (but not addressable by these data) that one effect of drugs is to help players compensate for decline as they age, and thus to extend their careers. But there is no evidence in these data for performance enhancement above previous levels.

More study of this question would be valuable. But the results here are intriguing, and could send a simple message to America’s youth who aspire to fame and fortune as professional baseball players: Don’t use these drugs — not only can they increase the risk of serious illness, they also don’t enhance your performance on the diamond.

That might, in the end, be a more effective message than one based solely on ethical and moral injunctions.

[Jonathan R. Cole is a professor of sociology at Columbia. Stephen M. Stigler is a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago.]

Copyright © 2007 The New York Times Company

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