June 20, 2007

Speak of the Devil

The day after I accused sainted baseball statistics maven Bill James of intentionally ignoring the steroids outbreak of the 1990s in his 1,000 page 2001 book The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, the WSJ interviews James in his Fenway Park office (he's been a paid insider since 2002):


His theory on baseball and steroids may or may not be odd, but it is certainly not in vogue. "I don't know," he says, when asked if steroids account for the surge in home runs in the late 1990s. "Speaking globally . . . the reality is that there are many changes in the game which could cause batting numbers to jump. And no one really knows to what extent the increase is a consequence of steroids. I strongly suspect that the influence of steroids on hitting numbers is greatly overstated by the public." Other factors include ballpark dimensions and bat design. "I've never understood why nobody writes about it, but the bats are very different now than they were 20 years ago," Mr. James says, with different woods and finishes. "[Barry] Bonds's bats are still different from everybody else's," he notes.


He's being disingenuous. Of course lots of factors contributed to the home run surge, including all the recent retro-design parks that are built like old hitters parks such as Ebbetts Field. And everybody took up weightlifting, which is perfectly admirable as long as they don't use performance-enhancing drugs. (Honus Wagner was the greatest player of the first decade of the 20th Century because he was just about the only player of his era to lift weights.)

But we now know that many of the historic seasons of the the last two decades were drug-tainted, starting with Jose Canseco's 1988, when he became the first player to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases, and including the late Ken Caminiti's MVP surge in the second half of 1996, McGwire's (and likely Sosa's) famous 1998 homer binge, Jason Giambi's monster MVP season in 2000, and Barry Bonds' surrealistic seasons in this decade. (Here's my 2004 American Conservative article on steroids.)

This wasn't a surprise. Thomas Boswell accused Canseco in a Washington Post column in October 1988 of taking steroids. A baseball agent told me in the early 1990s that Canseco was the "Typhoid Mary of steroids."

How can we be sure if any recent MVPs and Cy Young award winners were clean? Okay, skinny guys like Ichiro Suzuki and Jack McDowell, sure, and unimposing guys like Greg Maddux, and guys who didn't lift weights, like Ken Griffey Jr.. But for lots of the other guys, who knows?

James had to know that, say, Barry Bonds suddenly having in 2001 the greatest season (according to James' own Win Shares metric) since Babe Ruth his .393 in 1923 was ridiculous, new bat or not. But, making a stink about steroids wouldn't have done James' chances of getting hired by a big league team like the Red Sox much good.

I suspect that James was able to kid himself that using steroids was just like pitchers (such as Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry) throwing the spitball (which had been outlawed in 1920, a couple of decades before Perry's birth). Everybody knew Perry was throwing the spitter, but the baseball ethos is the opposite of golf, where players call penalties on themselves. In baseball, it's the umpires' job, not yours, to catch you cheating.

But steroids aren't spitballs. They have serious side effects on the players' health, and on their mood, which affects people around them. When, say, the Canseco twins beat up people in a nightclub in the throes of 'roid rage, that's not at all like the spitter.

By the way, I discovered in James' Historical Abstract a new explanation for Stephen Jay Gould's famous observation that in the early decades of baseball there was more disparity between the best players and the average player (although there have been a lot of super-spectacular seasons since 1993). Gould, being an intellectual, attributed it to intellectual disparities -- Wagner, Cobb, Ruth, etc. knew how to do things that other players didn't yet know how to do.

There's some truth to that. Ruth, for example, taught himself how to take a huge uppercut swing to hit home runs, which gave him a big lead over the rest of the league. Cobb pointed out that Ruth was allowed to get away with this because he was a pitcher -- if he'd been a hitter, his manager would have forced him to swing level to hit line drives like everybody else. But nobody cared what a pitcher did when fooling around in batting practice.

A few years earlier during the heart of the dead ball era, right-handed slugger Gavvy Cravath figured out how to hit opposite field home runs over the short right field fence in Philadelphia, hitting a record 62 in three seasons. Almost everybody knows how to hit opposite field homers today, but Cravath's breakthrough wasn't followed up on for decades.

Another reason for the disparity is that until Branch Rickey built the farm system, the proportion of the top players in the major leagues wasn't as high so the quality of the average player was lower. Cravath spent two of his peak years in the minors. Lefty Grove, maybe the greatest pitcher ever, spent five years playing for an independent minor league team in Baltimore. West Coast athletes often spent years in the Pacific Coast League -- for example, Joe DiMaggio spent three seasons from age 19-21 with his hometown San Francisco Seals when he was no doubt perfectly ready for the majors, as Ken Griffey Jr. was at the same age. But the Seals were an independent team, not a farm team, and thus didn't sell DiMaggio until they got a fair price.

But, a new reason I hadn't thought about before was that in the old days only superstars could afford to devote their offseasons to staying in shape (or just relaxing and getting recharged for the coming season). The average player had to get a job. When Ruth had a lousy 1925 season at age 30 due to hedonism, many observers assumed he was washed up. Instead, he hired a personal trainer and spent his winters tossing medicine balls around in a gym (or whatever it was they did back then for exercise). He came back to enjoy nine more spectacular seasons, including hitting 60 homers in 1927. If you spent October through February working in a mill or lifting crates on a loading dock, it was hard to compete in the summer with a superstar.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

20 comments:

  1. Steve, I've wondered what your thoughts would be on economist, prof. Art DeVany's paper,"Steroids, Home Runs and the Law of Genius" (PDF), in which he posits that steroids most likely were not the cause of the home run spurt in the late 90's.Citing, on the way, Wilfred Pareto and Charles Murray, among others.

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  2. While steroids were a major factor in the power explosion (especially with regard to some of the individuals mentioned) of the 1990s, it really is hard to isolate it from the other factors listed.

    The biggest question that is consistently ignored is how many pitchers were using? Steroids aren't all about muscle mass, but also recovery time.

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  3. I have to take issue with one thing you said,Steve,and that is that Bill James is ignoring steroids just to get some fancy job with the Red Sox...which you kind of implied. I dont know why he is being so ostrich-like,but it seems unfair to accuse him of being a league "Ho". His whole career is built on statistics,he probably desperately wishes the whole steroid thing would just go away!

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  4. See, if you want comments, you have to bring Jews up.

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  5. Anonymous #2 has a good point. Clemens is probably just as much a cheater as Bonds, but gets none of the flack. You could also argue that the ability of top pitchers to use steroids to keep pitching long after they should have retired may to some extent balance out the offensive advantage enjoyed by home run hitters. So while certain exceptional individuals like Bonds may have inflated stats, on the whole these things average out.

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  6. See, if you want comments, you have to bring Jews up.

    This is true. But the comments come from both Jews and "others."

    I have always thought about starting an anti-Semitic web site and then advertising lots of Judica, Kosher foods, and trips to Israel as probably 50% of the readers would be Jewish.

    [OK, I really didn't think about starting an anti-Semitic web site, but you get the idea.]

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  7. Damn, my post comes at just the time when it's not funny anymore. ;)

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  8. Steve --

    To amplify on Bloom's comments, steriods are out of James expertise.

    How can you quantify steriod use on performance? Develop statistical measures? Any of that? It's outside James ability to do what he does: show statistical measuring devices. Therefore he doesn't address it.

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  9. One way to use statistics to estimate steroid use is to measure how anomalous the statistics are for certain recent players versus players in the pre-steroid era. For example, Bonds' career followed the classic arc publicized by Bill James with a peak at 27-28, followed by a long decline -- until he suddenly goes nuts from age 37-40 and wins four straight MVP awards with hitting statistics relative to the league better than Babe Ruth posted from 25-29!

    That just ain't natural, and Bill James, more than anybody, had to know it.

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  10. As for economist DeVany's paper saying steroids aren't involved in the recent home run surge, my thoughts are:

    He's wrong, I'm right.

    We now _know_ that many of the long-suspected sluggers were doping. Canseco wrote a book about his own use, Bonds' personal trainer went to prison, Caminiti told all to Sports Illustrated, McGwire wouldn't deny it when he was under oath in front of Congress, Giambi has apologized, Palmeiro got caught in a blood test, etc.

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  11. I believe Art De Vany played minor league baseball at some point, so I think his insights might be worth paying attention to. I think a big part of his point was that there wasn't much evidence that steroids actually made you a better home run hitter, as opposed to making you bigger and bulkier. (I don't remember whether he addressed the whole issue of extending careers, which is a kind-of different measure.)

    Check out some of his discussion of the movie industry. He's really big into distributions that don't have a stable mean, because they're dominated by rare extreme events. I think he used the same family of model for both home run record years and for blockbuster movies.

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  12. I believe Art De Vany played minor league baseball at some point, so I think his insights might be worth paying attention to. I think a big part of his point was that there wasn't much evidence that steroids actually made you a better home run hitter, as opposed to making you bigger and bulkier. (I don't remember whether he addressed the whole issue of extending careers, which is a kind-of different measure.)

    Check out some of his discussion of the movie industry. He's really big into distributions that don't have a stable mean, because they're dominated by rare extreme events. I think he used the same family of model for both home run record years and for blockbuster movies.

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  13. "I think a big part of [De Vany's] point was that there wasn't much evidence that steroids actually made you a better home run hitter, as opposed to making you bigger and bulkier."

    Except that bigger and bulkier ballplayers _were_ hitting more home runs -- e.g., the career high for a clean, natural-looking Barry Bonds was 46 at age 28. Then, Barry suddenly got awfully top-heavy from drugs and hit 73 at age 37.

    I don't want to pick on Barry too much because he resisted steroids longer than some of these other guys -- he was clean through 1998, when all the McGwire-Sosa "they've returned innocence to the game" nonsense in the media drove him nuts with envy. Barry knew he was the greatest player in baseball (which he was), yet these two obvious cheaters were being treated like the second coming of Ruth and Gerhig. The point is that Bonds was so good clean that when he started to cheat, he just made a mockery out of the statistics.

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  14. As for pitchers, well, I don't know. Occam's Razor would suggest that Roger Clemens' late in life return to superduperstardom was drug assisted, but I don't know enough yet.

    My guess is that moderate cheating would help pitchers a lot but massive Ken Caminiti-style megablasts would likely wreck their arms.

    I haven't noticed a profusion of pitchers suddenly throwing 105 mph fastballs the way hitters started hitting 450 foot homers. On the other hand, there have been lots of extraordinarily high strikeouts per innings pitched marks in recent years. But, the number of innings pitched per year is down.

    So, yes, I'm sure there was a lot of steroid use among pitchers, but there don't seem to be quite as many ridiculous transformations as among hitters, like Brady Anderson suddenly showing up in spring training looking like the Incredible Hulk and boosting him season best in homers from 21 to 50.

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  15. "I haven't noticed a profusion of pitchers suddenly throwing 105 mph fastballs the way hitters started hitting 450 foot homers."
    I'm in the L.A. area this week, and there was an article in the Times about radar guns and how old-timers believe the guns used nowadays are inaccurate because too many people are clocked as throwing over 100. One guy said (paraphrased from memory): "I once clocked Nolan Ryan at 102 and I once J.R. Richard at 101, and I don't believe anyone ever threw harder than those two. Now they claim guys are throwing 100 every day. That can't be true." But maybe it is true and there is a sinister reason for it.

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  16. Thanks. The LAT article says the highest speed ever recorded is Zumaya's 103. It seems like Nolan Ryan was recorded at 100 or 101 the first time a radar gun was ever used on a TV game, about 30 years ago. So, that's not much of an increase, especially considering that Ryan threw 250 or 300 innings a year, while the super hard throwing relievers today throw well under 100.

    On the other hand, the umpires took away the high strike. You used to see power pitchers with rising fastballs -- That's what made Sandy Koufax so devastating. His fastball rose and his curve dropped like an anchor. Batters would guess wrong and miss by a several feet. But he didn't become Sandy Koufax! until the strikezone was expanded vertically in 1963. That and the move to huge Dodger Stadium in 1962 is how he went 97-27 in 1963-66. Now everybody has to pitch under control all the time and not let the fastball sail up out of the shrunken strikezone.

    Also, you don't see the crazy windups anymore, like Juan Marichal's high leg kick, because of fear of base stealers. That may take a few mph off the fastball.

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  17. My uncle tested bats for Louisville Slugger using some software and equipment he developed to measure stress and resonance in structures such as the hulls of nuclear submarines.

    He was paid a lot of money per bat model to determine which ones had the longest sweet spots and best acoustic signature (I'm not well-versed in the technical aspects of acoustics, but everyone knows that a good hit has a distinctive, solid crack that you can feel as a batter and even hear as a spectator). Shortly after this the latest home run era began.

    Coincidence? I'm not so sure. I think there was more than just bio-chemical technology that went into the increase in home runs.

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  18. Thanks, very interesting about bats.

    I don't doubt that bat technology improved, raising the general level of hitting. Everybody in the big leagues can afford to buy the latest bat, just like new driver technology lengthened everybody's average driving length on the PGA tour.

    But that doesn't explain the historically anomalous performances relative to the rest of the league that have been cropping up, like Barry Bonds garnering the three highest OPS+ statistics in history from the age of 37 onward.

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  19. I've long thought that with aluminum or composite bats and an engineered ball the consistency of baseball could be regulated much better.

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  20. Having read your 2003 article on George Will's review of Philip roth's novel turned into movie, I wondered if you'd go another route...and attribute an athlete's greatness to genetics.
    A myth of late, "Was Babe Ruth black?" started by either Spike Lee or Nation of Islam Elijah Muhammad perhaps, seems to be gaining actual credibiity in some circles. Even though it has been well established that Ruth's parents on both sides migrated from Germany (a nation with virtually no Africans during the 19th century).
    It really may boil down to some folks insistance that only legitimate true "Aryans" must look the part,and therefore if you're not with blue eyes and blonde hair you must have a different and or darker minority in your DNA lurking somewhere.
    And since the evidence we have does not bare it out (regarding Babe Ruth) then obviously it must be an Oliver Stonian Conspiracy (who really killed JFK and why is everyone covering it up). And we wonder why US education lags behind other first world nations.

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