Yesterday JC Bradbury wrote a column explaining how the steroid issue in baseball is probably not going to impact the long-run financial health of the game. This analysis was based partly on The Wages of Wins. Today Bradbury has a column in the New York Times which details how baseball could eliminate steroids from the game. This column, as Bradbury explains at Sabernomics, is based on Chapter Nine of The Baseball Economist (which will be available in paperback in February). Bradbury’s solution is original, based on solid economics, and would more than likely work.
For details, read the column. And you should also read Bradbury’s comments on the column at Sabernomics. For those who don’t want to follow the link, here is what Bradbury said at Sabernomics:
My Proposal to Clean Up Baseball in The New York Times
In an effort to clean up the game, it is tempting to suggest the standard solutions that strengthen old rules and increase monitoring and punishments. The problem is that the scofflaws are always one step ahead of the police. We need a deterrence system that uses incentives to limit drug use.
This is from my Op-Ed in today’s New York Times: Let Baseball Players Police Themselves. My proposal is based on analysis that I present in Chapter 9 of The Baseball Economist. I offer two main suggestions that I believe would help reduce performance-enhancing drug use in baseball by getting incentives right.
First, I suggest a system of fines and bonus. This is a Pigouvian tax and subsidy system that taxes players in accordance with the external costs that users impose on non-users-users may feel the personal benefits of a higher salary outweigh the health risks-and then transfers the financial gains to non-users who earn relatively less due to the fact that they chose to remain clean. This has the deterrence effect similar to suspensions; however, the substantial fine revenue gives players who feel they are in a use-or-lose situation an incentive not to use and to identify new cheating methods.
Second, I propose handing over all monitoring and testing to the players. It is the players who suffer the most from steroids. They are in an arms races where steroids make no individual relatively better than any other player-hence, there is no financial gain-yet, users end up suffering health consequences. This resembles a prisoner’s dilemma game.
I feel that one of the reasons that players have been reluctant to submit to a testing program, despite their desire to prevent steroid use, is that the tests contain sensitive information beyond the use of performance-enhancing drugs. For example, owners would like to know what recreational drugs players are taking that might diminish their performances. Owners have an incentive to want players to use performance-enhancing drugs if it makes the players they hire better, and thus brings in more fans. I’m not saying that owners don’t care about other things, but money is certainly important to them. Marvin Miller has gone so far as to accuse owners of providing performance-enhancing drugs to the players in the past.
“In most locker rooms, most clubhouses, amphetamines – red ones, green ones, etc., were lying out there in the open, in a bowl, as if they were jellybeans,” he said. “They were not put there by the players, so of course there was no pressure to test. They were being distributed by ownership. I can’t remember ever having a proposal from the owners, that we’re going to have random testing or testing of any kind.”
I feel that the early drug-testing programs pushed by the owners were more about preventing recreational use than performance-enhancing use. Players, of course, like it when their peers use drugs to dampen performance. For this reason, the players are suspicious to have the owners involved. And the seizing of supposedly-anonymous drug tests by federal authorities in 2004 made players even more suspicious of what could happen to the samples they provide. Thus, I believe giving players full control will allow the players to adopt more rigorous testing procedures. It has the further advantage of assigning responsibility to a single party.
Wages of Wins Journal 
Pete23
December 15, 2007
Bradbury is finally acknowledging that there is steroid use in baseball! Until today he and Art De Vany were the only sentient being on the planet who were still contending steroids weren’t being used, and, if they were being used, they weren’t impacting results.
dberri
December 15, 2007
Pete23,
This column is taken directly from Bradbury’s book, so this does not represent a change of heart on his part. I think Bradbury has contended the following:
1. There are other explanations for what has happened in baseball over the past few years that do not involve steroids.
2. The evidence that steroids impact performance is not as strong as the media claims. This is especially true with respect to HGH.
3. But if you want to eliminate steroids, giving players the incentive to monitor each other is the way to go.
Brian
December 15, 2007
My proposal would be much simpler.
George Will once commented that if we gave the death penalty for double parking, we’d never have double parking and we’d never have to apply the penalty. The risk of penalty is simply never worth the advantage of the crime.
Let’s do the same for steroids. Forget the 15 or 50 game suspensions–let’s do lifetime bans and erasure from all record books. Teams forfeit all games in which a violating player participated. Then civil suits against the players for damaging the image of MLB and violating their contracts.
We’re not talking about the government depriving someone of his life or liberty, just forbidding a grown man to play a silly game as his job. The burden of proof doesn’t have to be “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Pete23
December 15, 2007
I read this today: “Hundley’s travels were not as wide as Segui’s, but Mitchell said his contacts had a large effect. Before the 1996 season, Radomski told Hundley that if he used steroids, he would hit 40 home runs, according to the Mitchell report. Radomski told Mitchell that he sold Deca-Durabolin to Hundley, who went on to hit 41 home runs in 1996. Hundley had not hit more than 16 in any season.”
But Bradbury and De Vany say sterioids have no effect. Bah!!
De Vany says that home run hitters are like Mozart, rare geniuses. And we were just lucky to get to see a few of them who happened to play at the same time. Bah!
Polar Bear
December 16, 2007
Agreed, Bradbury has always underestimated the pervasiveness and impact of steroids. He erroneously predicted the Kirk Radomski story would lead to nothing, instead it sourced much of the Mitchell report. Bradbury wrote,
“A former NY Mets bat boy—though he is not accused of dealing drugs while working for the team as a teenager—admits to selling PEDs to a few players. So what? We know that some players have used steroids, because a few players have failed tests. They had to get their stuff from somewhere. The number of players, dollar figures, and the stature of the figure involved are all small. This isn’t the Pablo Escobar of PEDs. Until we see more, this guy is a small-time pusher. ”
Also, Todd Hundley takes steroids and goes from 15 home runs to 40 home runs right after taking steroids, but JC Bradbury can’t see any statistical evidence of steroids impacting performance??!!
Polar Bear
December 16, 2007
This is what Bradbury wrote:
“While there is a cloud of suspicion surrounding some players this is hardly evidence that they cheated their way to success. Please read the following paper for a discussion of the statistical variance of home runs (http://www.arthurdevany.com/webstuff/images/HomeRunHitting.pdf). The achieved excellence by the sluggers you mention is all within the natural variance of home run hitting in baseball history.”
Polar Bear
December 16, 2007
JC Bradbury’s performance in the steroid debate reminds me of the Monty Python “black knight” scene– http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/grail-04.htm
I like to use that as a metaphor for someone that loses a fight but delusionally keeps saying they won. :-)