Archive for PEDs

Yesterday, I looked at how one of the last seasons of the steroid era (2002) compares to the present one in terms of home runs, total offense, and overall value by position. To summarize the findings of that post briefly: while corner outfielders account for less production now than they did in 2002, infielders and catchers are now responsible for more of it. Moreover, players at the top of the home-run leaderboards now are accounting for a lower percentage of total league-wide homers than in the steroid era. There’s a more even distribution of homers, in other words.

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The 2017 season has seen offensive levels rise to a height unmatched in major-league baseball for quite some time. Overall this year, teams are averaging 4.65 runs per game, the highest mark since 2007 — though not quite the five runs per game teams averaged in 1999 and 2000. Most of the offensive increase can be traced to a juiced ball. There’s also been a lot of talk about the role of a fly-ball revolution of some sort or another in the establishment of a new league-wide seasonal home-run record.

An increase in PED use has now been raised as an issue, as well. MLB has administered both PED testing and PED-related suspensions since 2004; both have existed in the minors since 2001. Even with those measures in place, however, power continues to be associated with steroid use, and unfounded rumors have hounded the authors of every breakout season over the last decade. With the rise of power in recent years, the whole league is under suspicion. But how similar is this version of the league to the one now known as the “steroid era”? Let’s take a look at what the latter actually looked like and how it compares to now.

Our split tools are very expansive going back to 2002. This is convenient because 2002 was the last season that lacked PED testing of any kind. It might not have been quite the height of that period now regarded as the “steroid era” — that was probably 1999 and 2000 — but the league looked quite different before testing and suspensions were permitted.

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Dee Gordon‘s recent suspension has renewed the conversation about how to deter and punish PED users. The issue is complicated for a number of reasons. One specific reason — which I discussed this past Friday — concerns the possible benefit to owners of PED suspensions. Teams who employ aging players with large contracts actually benefit when those players are penalized by suspensions without pay. The longer the suspension, the greater the benefit. The principal examples of this at work involve the Yankees (with Alex Rodriguez and his PED suspension) and the Angels (and their frustrations concerning Josh Hamilton’s lack of suspension for substance abuse).

The noteworthy aspect regarding Gordon’s case, of course, is that he had just received a five-year, $50 million extension this winter. Naturally, the Marlins’ decision to offer Gordon an extension was based, in no small part, on his excellent 2015 season. But was Gordon’s success in 2015 based at all on the positive effects of PEDs? And when he returns to the club in the second half, will he be able to match that success without the aid of PEDs? Did Gordon essentially “dupe” the Marlins into $50 million?

The issue has little to do with moral integrity, but is instead purely financial. The possibility exists for a player to use PEDs, sign a big contract, then get suspended and see his performance decline while the owner remains on the hook for the contract. Players object to this sort of scenario because they see money going to players who are cheating instead of those who play clean. Owners, who have had little problem benefiting from players’ performances even if they are cheating, naturally object to the prospect of owing guaranteed money to players who are unable to provide production at a level commensurate with their contract.

While there is certainly a possibility of PED users benefiting from a large extension or free-agent contract, the questions is, has it actually happened? For this post, I attempted to identify situations in which an owner had been “duped” in this manner during the previous dozen years of PED suspensions.

Major League Baseball began suspending players in 2005, but the suspensions at that time were only for 10- days, hardly an indication that MLB was really ready for meaningful enforcement. Beginning in 2006, the penalty was increased to 50 games, and then in 2014, the current 80-game penalty for first-time offense was instituted. While MLB also suspends for amphetamines, the penalties are less stringent, and the stigma is not anywhere near the same. For the purposes of this post, those cases have been omitted. That leaves us with 31 players and 35 suspensions of at least 50 game since 2006.

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As Dave Cameron wrote two days ago, multiple reports have emerged about numerous baseball players connected to a clinic in South Florida that dispensed performance-enhancing drugs and has been nicknamed “BALCO East.”

Of course, as Cameron notes, “Rodriguez is going to get the most attention, because he’s Alex Rodriguez.” The Yankees are reportedly exploring all avenues to void the last five years and $114 million of his contract. But this is an interesting case, because, if they succeed, this would be the first time an active player would be successfully punished based on news reports.
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As you know by now, Melky Cabrera failed a drug test and was suspended for 50 games yesterday for using synthetic testosterone during the best season of his career. Cabrera will miss the rest of the Giants’ regular season, but he’s already been worth 4.5 WAR to the Giants, and some people within the game are grumbling that a mere 50 game suspension isn’t enough of a deterrent to prevent ballplayers from taking performance-enhancing drugs. If it isn’t an effective deterrent, is it an adequate punishment?

Kirk Gibson, the manager of the Diamondbacks, was outspoken yesterday. “Obviously, there’s not a big enough deterrent if it continues,” he told the Arizona Republic. “I think it should be a minimum of a year (for a first positive) and after that it should just be banned.” So what kind of suspension would adequately deter players from using banned drugs?
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Say the words “performance-enhancing drugs” in a baseball discussion, and if there’s more than two people involved in it, chances are, you’re going to get strong opinions on the topic. For Major League Baseball, the issue is most often centered around its records and awards, most notably the Hall of Fame.

But, if you look at every drug suspension in baseball (see the All-Time Drug Suspension list), players in the majors that have been suspended make up a tiny fraction of the total. Whether it has been players being able to afford substances or trainers to administer them that avoid detection, or the way that the program, called the Joint Drug Agreement (JDA), has been collectively bargained, major league players coming up positive in testing, or being caught through non-testing means termed non-analytics, chances are slim that a player under the major league testing program is announced as being under suspension.

Indeed, this year, there has been exactly one drug suspension under the major league policy (Edinson Volquez of the Reds on April 20), and last season there were just two (Kelvin Pichardo of the Giants, and the most high profile player to be suspended for PEDs since 2004, Manny Ramirez of the Dodgers).

The minor league testing policy, however, is a different animal. The number of players suspended each year is much higher, with the reasons being an incredibly complicated mix. There are young players in the Dominican and Venezuelan Summer Leagues that make up a large percentage of players that test positive each year. That ties into everything from players coming from desperate poverty to the buscóns– unlicensed managers/agents that work with some of the youngest prospects baseball has to offer. These young players, often times desperate, will do whatever a buscón will tell them. “Take this. Drink that,” without knowing whether what they are consuming is a vitamin or a possible banned substance. Throw in players from North America that are looking for any advantage that can get them into the majors, players using nutritional supplements that can be tainted with banned substances, plus drugs of abuse such as marijuana, etc. and, as mentioned, it gets complicated. (For more on the buscón culture, I highly recommend reading Sean Gregory’s Baseball Dreams: Striking Out in the Dominican Republic on TIME.com)

For MLB, the minor league testing program allows them to move unfettered by the MLBPA. Without being challenged by the union for the players, everything from the levels of a substance within the body, the ability to increase testing as the league sees fit, to the recent addition of hGH testing, are green lighted depending on the direction that the league wishes to go.

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