Steroids Before Testing
July 29, 2015
I recently had an
exchange with a sportswriter and Hall of Fame voter regarding Barry Bonds and
the steroid era. His opinion that Bonds deserves enshrinement wasn’t all that
novel or intriguing, but his reasoning was. He was certain that Bonds used
steroids, but felt that if a player was never suspended for using, then it
doesn’t matter if he ever tested positive. It’s an interesting point of view,
putting the entire value of the behavior on the sentence and none on the
conviction. Given the history of our country’s mandatory minimum sentencing
laws, the flaws in that line of thinking should be pretty self-evident so I
won’t spend any time on it. But he also felt that Bonds was compelled to use
steroids because, in his words, “everyone was using”. He later clarified that
he meant that everyone was using before the 2003 MLB survey testing and then
cited the Mitchell Report, several books and his own observations of big
players and home run records as his proof.
So I took it as a
challenge to see if I could discover if these sentiments contained any truth.
First of all, I’ve read a number of those same books and while they make many
broad claims, very few offered names. Jose Canseco’s books
were probably the most noteworthy in this regard, and positive tests have since
proved many of his claims true. But the number of players he exposed was
relatively small. Ken Caminiti once estimated that
80% of the players were using, but a player guesstimating how many other
players are secretly guilty of the same offense as he without having any
evidence is about as useful as a creationist estimating how old the Earth
is. Gossip is rarely proof. And of
course he has an incentive to suggest that the vast majority were using. Doing
something wrong doesn’t seem as bad if he was one of many rather than one of
only a few.
Since
major league testing began in 2003, there have been roughly 860 positive tests
returned. That includes all players in the minor leagues as well. So of the
roughly 19,000 players who have played professional baseball in the
That’s since 2003. However,
I believe there is evidence to at least cause reasonable doubt regarding the
commonly held notion that prior to 2003 everyone was using.
At least one team, the
Baltimore Orioles, had mandatory testing clauses in the contracts of the
majority of their players as early as 1986. This was disputed by the Players
Association as an illegal invasion of privacy.
The Orioles stopped the practice but I’m not sure if it had gone to
court whether or not their contention would hold up as numerous companies have
similar testing policies. The owners historically have won most such cases over
what they are and aren’t allowed to do.
Nevertheless it proves that some in the sport were trying to do
something about the issue well before testing was instituted.
In 2001, the minor
leagues instituted a new drug program, administered in two rounds of random
testing to be taken during the season. It netted 9.1% positive results. The following year, the number of positive tests
fell to 4.8%. In 2003 it was 4%. By 2005, only 1.78% tested positive, and that
number dropped to 0.36% in 2006. At least in one respect that first year of
testing was significantly different than the first major league survey test:
there was no half-year grace period between the announcement and the
implementation of the testing in which players could get clean. So the 9.1% is
probably a fairly accurate reading of the overall usage. It's also reasonable
to assume that two years of testing in the minors had some impact on the number
of players in the majors using even before the 2003 survey test.
Some other things to
note: minor league players don’t make much money. The average minor league
salary is below the federal poverty level. So those players can’t afford to
spend a ton on complex stacking supplements or masking agents. Despite the
incentive to do everything possible to get to the big payday in the majors,
only 9.1% were identified as choosing the drug route. Of course, their paltry
income means that not a lot of them can afford to cheat, literally. But what about the players who can, namely major leaguers?
The Mitchell Report is
commonly cited as proof that it was an epidemic in baseball. Kurt Radomski was just one distributor named in the report and
his client list included 53 major league players. Surely there must have been
dozens of others just like him. The Mitchell Report actually lists 87 players,
but according to the report, 24 of those players used exclusively after survey
testing began and only 36 were confirmed to have been using before the 2003
survey test. Of those, only 12 continued to use in 2003 or later. Additionally,
the Report, which investigated three distribution sources (not just Radomski) plus several players not tied to one distributor,
covered players using as early as 1993.
From that date until the survey test, 3128 players played Major League
Baseball, which means the Mitchell Report, which admittedly was an incomplete
investigation, proved only 1.1% of the players were using before survey
testing. There were 27 other players named in which there was no date
associated with their usage, but even including them moves the needle very
little. And Radomski was considered a fairly big
fish, distributing to players on a number of teams. There would need to be
nearly a hundred guys just like him to get the percentage of users to 50%.
A more likely scenario
is like the 36 players who were named as using before testing: two thirds of
them stopped once the survey testing began. Assuming that ratio is
representative of the rest of the players, since only about 4% of the players
have since tested positive that figures to be only about 12-13% using before
testing began. This is essentially how polling is done and for the most part, historically
speaking, it has been accurate.
It only takes one dullard
driving slowly in the middle lane of an interstate to cause a traffic jam
behind him/her. It only takes one multi-million dollar lawsuit over spilled
coffee where the actual details were not widely disclosed to make everyone
believe that our justice system is nothing more than a lottery. There have been
even fewer details revealed about “the steroid era” thanks to the lackadaisical
job the sportswriters did in investigating it. I can think of only two – Jon Saraceno and Christine Brennan – who even made a legitimate
effort to raise the issue. The point is that it did not require “everyone” in
baseball to use steroids in order for some players to begin to voice their
concern and force the sport to begin testing. It didn’t even take a majority
using. It only took a few players, like Bonds, Canseco
and Caminiti and those in the Mitchell Report, to
change the way the game was perceived, how it was played and it’s relevance in
history.
Baseball is a game of
both statistics and impressions. If you attend 10 games over the course of a
season and the same guy gets two hits in each of those ten games, there’s a
decent chance that he’s a pretty good hitter. It’s certainly possible that he’s
a bad hitter and you just happened to be there on his good days. But the more
you see him and the more times he keeps getting two hits, the more it looks
like those impressions represent the truth. Unfortunately with the steroid era
we don’t have a complete record. But the more one looks into it and the more
data that comes to light, the more it looks like the usage was less widespread
than was previously thought and the excuse that “everyone was using” becomes
less and less reasonable.