Back in 1993, a friend from high school who had become a baseball player's agent told me that Jose Canseco was the Typhoid Mary of steroids: you could see the effect of Canseco's proselytizing steroids on his teammates in Oakland and then in Texas (co-managing director: George W. Bush. Here's my 2004 American Conservative article on Canseco, the Bush dynasty, Andrew Sullivan, and steroids, which came out the year before Canseco's tell-all autobiography).
Ray Fisman in Slate points to a 2007 study by two labor economists confirming Canseco's role spreading steroids around those two teams, plus his later clubs.
Learning Unethical Practices from a Co-worker:The Peer Effect of Jose Canseco
Eric D. Gould and Todd R. KaplanThis paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in the last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his autobiography, Canseco claims that he improved the productivity of his teammates by introducing them to steroids. Using panel data on baseball players, we show that a player’s performance increases significantly after they played with Jose Canseco. After checking 30 comparable players from the same era, we find that no other baseball player produced a similar effect. Clearly, Jose Canseco had an unusual influence on the productivity of his peers. These results are consistent with Canseco’s controversial claims, and suggest that workers not only learn productive skills from their co-workers, but sometimes those skills may derive from unethical practices. These findings may be relevant to many workplaces where competitive pressures create incentives to adopt unethical means to boost productivity and profits.
Canseco's outgoing personality contrasted with the more furtive and even anti-social personality of later steroid users, such as Barry Bonds, who introduced Gary Sheffield to his training methods, but who basically didn't like his teammates.
A couple of years ago I wrote, "You'll notice that the topic of art forgery is more interesting to philosophers than to art historians, who would prefer not to think about it. Philosophers like to ask questions like, 'If this small sketch was so beautiful it was worth a million dollars when it was a Raphael, why isn't it worth anything now that it's a Hebborn?'"
The basic motivation of art historians and of baseball historians, such as Bill James, is hero worship. Thus, art historians don't like to think about how many famous paintings are, in whole or in part, forgeries, while Bill James did everything he could to avoid thinking about the impact of steroids on his beloved baseball statistics.
Of course, there's also the crass financial conflict of interest: James finally got himself a nice job with the Boston Red Sox, whose two best hitters, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, were juicers. If he'd been sounding the alarm about steroids for years, would he have gotten that job? The same questions can be asked about museum curators.
Of course, there's also the crass financial conflict of interest: James finally got himself a nice job with the Boston Red Sox, whose two best hitters, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, were juicers. If he'd been sounding the alarm about steroids for years, would he have gotten that job? The same questions can be asked about museum curators.
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42 comments:
Why is it that even academics are now giving into the lazy use of the plural pronoun "they" when the singular masculine pronoun "he" is appropriate?
In this case, where Gould and Kaplan write, "we show that a player’s performance increases significantly after they played with Jose Canseco," the correct use of "he" would not, I hope, even offend the hyper-feminists who call for "gender neutral" language. At least for now, all Major League Baseball players are men.
Of course, by the time the college students that I teach are out writing in public, the English language will have evolved even further downward.
What's unethical about using steroids? Changing your diet and using supplements like creatin chemically alter one's body for better performance. There are long term health risks, but a lot of things do that we don't consider immoral.
As for the idea that it's somehow cheating and we need to use asterisk for the new record holders, while it's true that older generations didn't have steroids, they also didn't have as sophisticated understanding of nutrition/training/supplements either.
Legalize roids. Look term it isn't as bad for you as smoking or drinking daily and you might get tens of millions of dollars out of it. It seems to me that a lot of pro athletes have taken to steroids because the cost/benefit ratio comes out looking pretty good, and they're right.
Here's a good movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkL1T-CZPfs
"Bigger, Stronger, Faster"
Refreshingly even-handed, re: 'roids.
Given that people are socially-approved (and even pushed) to destroy their health for their job in a number of ways (long hours/stress, poor diet, insufficient sleep, insufficient exercise) over a greater number of years, perhaps ultimately resulting in serious damage as well, a few years of highly-compensated steroid use can pale in comparison.
This is not to say it’s a good thing of course – the flipside is that if steroids are allowed, all athletes will basically have to use them in order to have any chance.
Random thought: I’ve noticed much of the blogosphere tends to assume that if anyone is buff, they’re roiding. Physiques such as Tiger Woods etc are not that impressive, and definitely not out of the range of the achievable for those who follow good diet/exercise programs - particularly those for whom athletics is their job, and thus can do extra workouts, get more rest, etc (training really hard can wipe you out for other tasks).
Speaking of Sullivan-
How prevalent is steroid use among young gay men?
I know one doesn't have to be athletic to lift weights, but when you see the pics of the gay crowd parading around at Fire Island and other meat markets, you realize these are the guys you remember from high school, the kids who were pretty disinterested in any physical activities and who were often pretty thin, weak, or, in some cases, pretty overweight for their age.
And, for those gay men who do take 'roids, do the drugs make them more masculine-acting in non- sexual contexts? For instance, there is a body of evidence that suggests there is, for many, a "gay voice" and that most straights are pretty good at recognizing gay behaviors regarding voice, body movements, etc. Bailey is studying this still. I am wondering if steroid use would minimize some of those behaviors.
We know what cheating is in cards. It's having an ace up your sleeve. But in a poker tournament it's also having an electronic aid that helps you calculate the odds. It isn't considered cheating to have studied the odds and committed them to memory. The rule seems to be that if your odds calculations come from within your body it's OK.
Similarly if a batter were to have some kind of hitting machine at home plate it would be considered cheating. But why is using technology just to get stronger considered cheating?
The answer I would suggest is that it is totally arbitrary like the rules adopted in auto racing. There is a new Porsche that uses a flywheel as a hybrid form of power supplement. The flywheel stores braking energy and can return that energy for no more than seven seconds. In it's racing debut this machine trounced all other cars before it failed from an unconnected mechanical problem. The racing judges had already assessed a weight penalty but it wasn't enough. I expect that all such hybrids will be banned from racing in the near future.
It's happened before. Andy Granatelli entered a gas turbine at Indianapolis which did very, very well. Turbines were thereafter banned. Racing is supposed to "improve the breed" but that's not what happens at all. Technology has to be crippled if it works too well. Competitiveness must be maintained.
So it is with baseball. We suppress hormone technology not because it's unfair, a cheat or immoral but it spoils the competitiveness at least until everyone gets "juiced". If baseball stands against biological technology its likely that it will be baseball that crumbles not hormone therapy.
Testosterone is a natural substance not a drug. When I lifted weights in college I could have used it. I wanted to create a better physique. Like many other substances a little is beneficial while to much is - well, too much.
If as seems likely that in the near future when almost all young men who lift weights will take a little T so as to get results faster, it will be very damn hard to distinguish normal routine T use from unwise, outlawed, "too much" T use.
In the mean time all the hysterical rhetoric about androgens as criminal sound increasingly like "Demon Rum" or "marijuana - assassin of youth". Let's cut back on the hyperbole. It's just a game.
Albertosaurus
The people using steroids now often use 10 times their normal levels of testosterone. They are walking around with the amount of T that two horses should have.
Ive seen a Harvard doctor remark in a documentary that he has seen men who were taking 100 times their normal amount of testosterone.
The effects of using testosterone or T-precurser hormones like this (other than the acne, "bacne", premature male baldness, thinning and ageing of the dermis, shrinking testicles and inablility to make enough sperm, and roid' rage), are usually far off in the future. Multiple decades off. It will be interesting to me in about 20-30 more years to see just how many men will develop prostate cancer due to steroid usage in their twenties and thirties, overstimlating the prostate tissue and upping their PSA levels in their youth. I have no doubt we will see many guys who "were active for years" drop dead of heart attacks mysteriously in their fifties, leaving family and friends scratching their heads.
Back in the day guys were taking maybe 2-to-3 times their normal levels of androgens in cycles, but since so many other men hit the gym now, the dedicated muscle-freak needs to take much more to "stand out". The athlete looking to gain the extra edge has to take more to really be ahead of the competition.
One development that is shocking to me is the athletic usage of HGH, which will make your cells start to divide again, literally making your internal organs grow and giving many modern bodybuilders huge "guts" that have large abdominal muscles, as well as enlarged hearts, livers, and kidneys.
Barry Bonds was a better baseball player at 36-39, than he was when he was 26-29. Thats simply ridiculous. This is the most astonishing before/after picture of Barry pre-and post-roids you'll ever see, because the pre-shot is when Barry was 28, just traded to San Fransico. He had been lifting for years, and was about 200lbs.
http://www.fightinphilsfans.com/BigBarryBonds.jpg
In the after photo, Barry is about 230-240. Barry was able to put on 30-40 lbs of mass after 28 years of age, and despite the fact he already worked out.
Simply put, its not fair to make the honest athlete concerned about his long-term health (i.e. a man who wants to know his grandchildren and great-grandchildren), risk his health to keep up with the Barry Bonds' of this world in my opinion.
Im glad they test em'.
The best example of what roids can do is to look at the winners of the Natural Mr. Olympia contest vs. the top contestants of the Mr. Olympia. The drugged guys have so much more mass. The only winner of the Natural Olympia in the past with big size was American Gladiator Mike O'Hearn (6-3 and 250).
Steve Sailer's comment about art forgeries is particularly interesting. And it highlights a big difference between the history of the visual arts and the history of classical music.
Classical music forgeries are very rare compared with art forgeries (Fritz Kreisler and various members of France's Casadesus dynasty are among the very few examples of long-successful music forgers) and little money is involved with them. There does seem a universal assumption that, for instance, a Beethoven manuscript really is a Beethoven manuscript. I myself wouldn't think any the less of Beethoven's symphonies if they turned out to have been composed not by Ludwig Van The Man but by Fred Bloggs of Byrdstown, Tennessee.
"Classical music forgeries are very rare compared with art forgeries"
Good point. Is it that we have made so much technical progress in painting over the years, but not in music composition? If you composed a symphony worth of standing with Beethoven's 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9th and you tried to pass it off as Beethoven's 10th, well, that would be ok with me.
"What's unethical about using steroids?"
Ask Marcus Williams, back-up tight end for the Raiders. In a meaningless practice, Bill (I use everything known to man and frequently fly into a rage over nothing) Romanowski crushed his eye socket and ended his young career. This was just one of many incidents involving Romo's practice field rage but the one which most exemplifies the price others pay for a user's habit.
I get the impression that the commenters supporting steroids are philosophically in favor of steroids but *recreationally* not especially interested in baseball. The reason to ban steroids in sports is that it makes sports uninteresting. No longer a contest of baseball talent, but a contest of pharmaceutical talent. And nobody gives a crap about pharmaceutical talent. So when fans discover steroids proliferating, they stop caring about the sport. That's a good enough justification to ban them.
Philosophical arguments that such a ban is arbitrary (e.g., "why ban steroids but not vitamins?") are irrelevant. Arbitrary rules are fundamental to any sport (why are the bases 90 feet apart and not 95, why should you be out on 3 strikes instead of 4). Consider this just one of many arbitrary rules necessary to make baseball an entertaining pastime.
I was going to say something almost identical about Beethoven vs. Vermeer. Music is wildly abstract--moreso than even the practice of mathematics. Visual arts are firmly concrete. The difference in production stem from this. The "value" of art is whatever abstractions can be artificially created around the work, and not the work itself. See Wolfe's "The painted word" for instance.
Richard Hoste said...
What's unethical about using steroids?
They're against the rules. Using them is cheating. What part of this do you not get?
There are long term health risks, but a lot of things do that we don't consider immoral.
Using steroids is against the rules, regardless of whether you think it is "moral" or not.
Legalize roids.
Heck, let's legalize tarring the bat and spitting on the ball! Are you with me, Hoste?
why is using technology just to get stronger considered cheating?
Is that supposed to be a serious question? If a ball player gets a bionic arm attached that will let him throw a fastball at 300 MPH, you'll sit there scratching your head going "Is this cheating?"?
Get real, ya dumb limey.
This is an especially meandering and pointless post. You should stick to your bread and butter: White-aggrievement and how no one is giving your love.
Steve Sailer asks, "Is it that we have made so much technical progress in painting over the years, but not in music composition?"
No, I'd be inclined to think that it's a matter of the sums in classical music being, by the standards of today's visual art market (or pulp-fiction market), so small. Sure, we've had the occasional modern classical music millionaire in the shape (okay, I use the term "shape" advisedly) of Luciano Pavarotti. Still, beneath the superstar rank occupied by a Pavarotti or a Herbert von Karajan or a Jascha Heifetz or a Vladimir Horowitz (the last-named would order caviar flown in from abroad), the average classical performer is stuck at the sort of income level which your Cy Twomblys and your Chris Ofilis - Ofili was the creep immortalized by his painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung - would consider chump change.
Even a currently fashionable pianist like Lang Lang, with recording contracts to burn, would be living in upper-middle-class comfort rather than in luxury. As for classical composers, the only way for them to get rich these days is to write music for movies or commercials.
Basically the reason that Painting X becomes worth squillions when it's thought to be painted by Rembrandt, but would become worth $0.00 if it were thought to be painted by ... well, by me, is because the art market is a Weimar Republic of hyperinflation. Not, I'd argue, because of anything specifically relevant to art as opposed to classical music. I speak as one who, far from being enough painting talent to produce an imitation Rembrandt, would find it impossible even to produce an imitation Jackson Pollock.
The public steroid thing is a dangerous thing for the business of marketing baseball to kids, future fans and their parents.
A lot of childless single men here may not care if sports devolve into freak shows of steroid brinkmanship, but parents do. Shortly before or during middle/HS, the dream of playing pro ball permanently dies for nearly all men. There after sport is purely entertainment for us guys and we like things pushed to the limit.
Kids are pretty impressionable and parents like to give them the gift of believing in dreams no matter how impossible. If becoming jacked up on steroids becomes a publicly acceptable means of training for sports like baseball, most parents who pay attention are going to steer their kids away from that kind of dead end rather than start juicing them in preschool.
For those interested, here are Jose Canseco's statistics, along with a list of the teams he played for:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/cansejo01.shtml
I say he goes into the Hall of Fame. People in the future will either think that steroids are good or not so bad, in which case Canseco will be viewed as a pioneer and innovator. Or the MLB will effectively ban them or curtail them, in which case he will be given credit for making the extent of steroid use public. He's had an impact, which will have to be incorporated into how people think about the history of the game in some way.
I don't think James's lack of attention to steroids can be blamed on hero worship per se, since he was never afraid to call any particular individual player overrated. If there was a psychological cause, I think it was more that he feared the whole system would come crashing down and he would have wasted his life, as would be the case if a large percentage of art masterpieces proved to be forgeries.
Anyone who has seen first-hand what steroids can do for a person knows that the impact is huge. A non-user can't compete with a steroid user, so I see no way that using steroids isn't cheating. Steroid usage gives an unnatural advantage.
I just got back from a trip to Europe. If you spend any amount of time in art galleries there, you will come across art students sitting at easels copying paintings for the gallery, to be sent to other galleries. Many paintings will have written on a plaque below them "original copy resides in the __________ gallery". I guess it makes sense to share the lesser known paintings with other art galleries.
I like how the authors pretend their work has some broad generalizable significance beyond being a great piece of baseball scandal.
Most classical musicians are so poor, they don't even have enough money to use steroids!
The one really comprehensive classical-music-related fakery of modern times was the Joyce Hatto scam, where the financial returns were minimal, and where the motivation seems to have been not greed but a shabby-genteel attempt to strike back at the recording establishment. (I say "seems to have been" because the extent, if any, of Hatto's own involvement in and knowledge of her husband's chicanery remains obscure.)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3669195/Joyce-Hatto-Notes-on-a-scandal.html
I think the Bill James issue is more due to the steriods showing up at the same time as a bunch of other trends in baseball:
1) Better understanding of offense; in the old days teams would look at batting average to evaluate a player. Today teams look at much more sophisticated metrics and there are players that really add to run totals that would never have gotten the chance to play 20 or 30 years ago. Look at Mark Reynolds on the Diamondbacks for example. He set the record last year for strikeouts by a hitter in a season with over 200. While doing this he hit over 40 home runs and was worth a bunch of runs over his expected replacement.
2) Understanding of the benefits of being strong. The old school baseball lore was that being big and strong was bad for a ballplayer; too bulky, injury prone, etc. Take a look at the difference in player size between today (mostly steroids free (and smaller players than 5 or so years ago)) and 1985. I bet part of that is selection and part of that is training. Scouts probably didn't like guys who were "too bulky" to play ball back in the day. Today, the bigger you are the better as far as scouts are concerned.
3) Changes in bat size and material. Bonds was famous for using a maple bat (in addition to whatever else he was known for); the lore is that maple bats are more fragile but better for hitting. On top of that, players are using thinner handled bats and better manufactured bats (from wikipedia):
"Formerly, bats were hand-carved to a template obtained from a fixed number of calibration points; today, they are machine-turned to a precise metal template: these templates are kept in the bat manufacturers' vaults"
In other words, every major leaguer can have a bat that exactly suits his swing.
4) Change in approach. Bill James actually noted at one point that the old school idea was that you can't drive an outside pitch hard to the opposite field (right field for a right handed hitter, left field for a left handed hitter). This idea existed in people's minds without any real evidence. When aluminum bats were introduced in college ball, players started doing exactly that because the improved bat speed from the lighter bats allowed it. They carried this habit over to using wooden bats and discovered that it worked. Now pitchers lost a major weapon in forcing hitters to make weak contact. A similar transition went on the 1930s when Babe Ruth ignored the conventional wisdom that said that you can't hit home runs at a high enough rate to make up for the extra outs you'd get on fly balls from using an uppercut swing. Nothing was stopping that piece of wisdom from dying except the presence of an example to demonstrate it's folly.
Along with all of this going on, you've got players (pitchers too, though) using steroids in large numbers for the first time.
Steve, you're a quantitative guy: how many of the extra runs were from steroids? How many from changes 1-4?
I don't think that Bill James ignored the issue but that he didn't have any actual insight into how big an issue it was and how large of an effect it had. Missing that key data, he kept mostly silent. He goes out of his way in the his baseball history book to intentionally underrate contemporary players simply because you don't have the kind of information about and perspective on them and their achievements that you do about players from the past.
Please don't post this if it's a double; blogger gave me an error last time.
I think the Bill James issue is more due to the steriods showing up at the same time as a bunch of other trends in baseball:
1) Better understanding of offense; in the old days teams would look at batting average to evaluate a player. Today teams look at much more sophisticated metrics and there are players that really add to run totals that would never have gotten the chance to play 20 or 30 years ago. Look at Mark Reynolds on the Diamondbacks for example. He set the record last year for strikeouts by a hitter in a season with over 200. While doing this he hit over 40 home runs and was worth a bunch of runs over his expected replacement.
2) Understanding of the benefits of being strong. The old school baseball lore was that being big and strong was bad for a ballplayer; too bulky, injury prone, etc. Take a look at the difference in player size between today (mostly steroids free (and smaller players than 5 or so years ago)) and 1985. I bet part of that is selection and part of that is training. Scouts probably didn't like guys who were "too bulky" to play ball back in the day. Today, the bigger you are the better as far as scouts are concerned.
3) Changes in bat size and material. Bonds was famous for using a maple bat (in addition to whatever else he was known for); the lore is that maple bats are more fragile but better for hitting. On top of that, players are using thinner handled bats and better manufactured bats (from wikipedia):
"Formerly, bats were hand-carved to a template obtained from a fixed number of calibration points; today, they are machine-turned to a precise metal template: these templates are kept in the bat manufacturers' vaults"
In other words, every major leaguer can have a bat that exactly suits his swing.
4) Change in approach. Bill James actually noted at one point that the old school idea was that you can't drive an outside pitch hard to the opposite field (right field for a right handed hitter, left field for a left handed hitter). This idea existed in people's minds without any real evidence. When aluminum bats were introduced in college ball, players started doing exactly that because the improved bat speed from the lighter bats allowed it. They carried this habit over to using wooden bats and discovered that it worked. Now pitchers lost a major weapon in forcing hitters to make weak contact. A similar transition went on the 1930s when Babe Ruth ignored the conventional wisdom that said that you can't hit home runs at a high enough rate to make up for the extra outs you'd get on fly balls from using an uppercut swing. Nothing was stopping that piece of wisdom from dying except the presence of an example to demonstrate it's folly.
Along with all of this going on, you've got players (pitchers too, though) using steroids in large numbers for the first time.
Steve, you're a quantitative guy: how many of the extra runs were from steroids? How many from changes 1-4?
I don't think that Bill James ignored the issue but that he didn't have any actual insight into how big an issue it was and how large of an effect it had. Missing that key data, he kept mostly silent. He goes out of his way in the his baseball history book to intentionally underrate contemporary players simply because you don't have the kind of information about and perspective on them and their achievements that you do about players from the past.
"Steve, you're a quantitative guy: how many of the extra runs were from steroids? How many from changes 1-4?"
That's a good question, but not a good excuse for Bill James to stay silent on steroids and human growth hormone for all those years. It was flagrantly obvious in the 1990s and early 2000s that players were following unheard of career paths ... at the same time their heads were changing shape!
There was always an honorable middle ground for James in between naming specific names and getting lost in trying to precisely attribute the increase in offense among all the possible causes. He could have come out and said: "Look, some of these crazy statistics we're seeing are no doubt just natural random fluctuations, but no way could they all be natural. I'm not going to name names because statistics can't tell for certain, but I need to get this message out there that there is a lot of cheating going on."
But he didn't do that.
Also, Bill James's discoveries were themselves an impetus for PED cheating. James found that homers and walks were the basis of a winning offense, not the Maury Wills, Ichiro Suzuki skills. Well, you can buy homers and walks from a guy down at the gym.
This development wasn't James's fault, but you can understand why he might not be in a hurry to call attention to it.
Baseball statheads really don't come down too hard on players. They do trash GM's though. It would be nice for a few of them to write something like this. GM X made some dumb moves in the 90's but his team was probably cleaner then most so his abysmal win/loss record may partially reflect that fact. This may not be an important study but they do make an important point. Namely, not all teams benefitted or almostly certainly used PEDS at the same rate. Shouldn't there be some humility among the intelligentsia when reviewing the past moves of GM'S including one President Bush.
"Speaking of Sullivan-
How prevalent is steroid use among young gay men?"
Apparently it's a big thing:
http://www.gaypsychotherapy.com/GLRbody2.htm
It makes sense that gays would be big into steroids. Gays tend to be thrill-seekers and risk-takers -- less apt to err on the side of caution when it comes to experimenting with sex or drugs.
One side-effect of a raised testosterone level is increased sex drive (another is impaired judgment). 'Roid use became big among gays starting around 1980. Could be using 'roids helped propel the AIDS epidemic.
A while back on another forum I weighed in on a thread about meth use that I thought the dangers of meth were overblown. I had used what was then called 'speed' occasionally in the late seventies/early eighties as a study aid when I was in college. It helped keep me up for all night cram sessions. Otherwise, I did not use the drug. I knew a lot of other college students with the same use pattern. I'd seen a few peers become 'speed freaks', but even they generally quit using after burning out. Because of my experience/front row observations I proposed that meth/speed is not all that addictive. At this point someone who identified himself as a gay male responded that meth has been a scourge in the gay world because gays tend to be addictive personalities and are less able to regulate their behavior.
"What's unethical about using steroids?"
Ask Marcus Williams, back-up tight end for the Raiders. In a meaningless practice, Bill (I use everything known to man and frequently fly into a rage over nothing) Romanowski crushed his eye socket and ended his young career. This was just one of many incidents involving Romo's practice field rage but the one which most exemplifies the price others pay for a user's habit.
Nonsense. Nobody ever got drunk and punched or killed somebody? That's not an argument for banning alcohol.
I get the impression that the commenters supporting steroids are philosophically in favor of steroids but *recreationally* not especially interested in baseball. The reason to ban steroids in sports is that it makes sports uninteresting. No longer a contest of baseball talent, but a contest of pharmaceutical talent. And nobody gives a crap about pharmaceutical talent. So when fans discover steroids proliferating, they stop caring about the sport. That's a good enough justification to ban them.
No, steroids isn't going to turn you or I into the next Barry Bonds. It's just one factor among many, combining with genetic talent, work ethic, nutrition, vitamin and supplement intake, etc that determines how good a player is. And there's no evidence for your claim that sports fans lose interests because they know the players are juicing. They have that "it's cheating" reaction because they're simplistic and foolish, but the reason they do is because it's illegal. They'd have the same reaction to protein bars if they were banned.
Philosophical arguments that such a ban is arbitrary (e.g., "why ban steroids but not vitamins?") are irrelevant. Arbitrary rules are fundamental to any sport (why are the bases 90 feet apart and not 95, why should you be out on 3 strikes instead of 4). Consider this just one of many arbitrary rules necessary to make baseball an entertaining pastime.
All the arbitrary rules relate to what goes on on the field. What players do to train themselves off the field/court has never been one of the arbitrary rules of sports.
This is an important issue, as the future will be filled with transhumanist and eugenic ways to apply medical technology to improve ourselves in ways more important than athletic ability. Biotechnology is one of the great accomplishments of man, will save the white race and must not be held back for some imagined "purity" of a sport.
By the way, Mikey Mantle was on amphetamines in 1960. His records don't count either.
"Biotechnology is one of the great accomplishments of man, will save the white race and must not be held back for some imagined "purity" of a sport."
What do you mean by that, Richard?
"Nonsense. Nobody ever got drunk and punched or killed somebody? That's not an argument for banning alcohol"
We're talking about pro sports here and whether roids ought to be sanctioned right along with aspirin and anti-inflammatories, not whether some gym rat wants to use them.
Lots of training camp and practice skirmishes take place between teammates. A hung-over ball player is NOT likely to maim his teammate. He's not even likely to be able to drag himself to practice on time much less be able to use all his strength and power.
"Gays tend to be thrill-seekers and risk-takers -- less apt to err on the side of caution when it comes to experimenting with sex or drugs."
Back in the day when they were in the closet, was it this way? Of course, some risk taking just in order to find sex partners would have been necessary in those days. On the other hand, there are some studies, one Scandinavian study quite large, suggesting that there is a higher prevalence of serious mental health problems among homosexuals, even when controlling for societal attitudes about homosexuality. I think they are doing follow-up research on that now to try to discover if there's a biological connection or if the correlation is due to problems encountered due to society's attitudes. Sounds like a familiar HBD topic.
Other studies do show some correlation between homosexuality and compulsivity and neuroticism as well.
Cultural norms change very quickly these days. For the young gay male who has travelled to the city to meet his own kind, there must be quite the competition to look good. Roids do offer a quick fix to those of that mind.
"Random thought: I’ve noticed much of the blogosphere tends to assume that if anyone is buff, they’re roiding. Physiques such as Tiger Woods etc are not that impressive, and definitely not out of the range of the achievable for those who follow good diet/exercise programs - particularly those for whom athletics is their job, and thus can do extra workouts, get more rest, etc (training really hard can wipe you out for other tasks)."
Re Tiger: It's not so much his physique, but the fact that he gained about 40lbs. of muscle in several months in his late 20s when he had already been doing an intense strength and conditioning program from the time he was at Stanford. It's not like he just started lifting when he gained to mass and the mass was gained too quickly even if he had just started lifting.
Unlike at least one other commentor I think this is an interesting thread. Steve writes with courage and occasional brilliance about black people's IQs but these do tend to get repetitive. Blacks are dumb, so what else is new?
But the steroid controversy divides the populace into those who are afraid of the future from those who can accept change. This is interesting.
There's no doubt that the world would be simpler if steroids didn't exist, but this genie refuses to go back in the bottle. Many here seem to react with name calling - cheats, freaks, unethical practitioners, etc..
The future is coming at us fast. Very soon we can expect manipulation of the genome so as to infuse different muscle fiber types into arms and legs. Dick Cheney should look forward to this development because there may be a way to rebuild his heart muscles. But we can be pretty sure that all of the hysterics here who decry steroids will totally flip out when young guys start to boost their complement of fast twitch fibers so as to run faster and jump higher.
These kind of future shocks are inevitable. Steroid use is just the first swallow of summer.
I also detect a nasty big government attitude in a lot of the comments. We are told that there are dire consequences of taking steroids. I suppose there are. So what? As Paracelsus noted a long time ago all drugs are poisons at some dosage level. If some guy actually takes one hundred times the amount of testosterone that he should, again so what? There are fools everywhere and this guy won't be bothering the rest of us very long - evolution in action.
Mayor Bloomberg wants to protect everyone in his city from salt and fat lest his weak, stupid and infantile populace eats the wrong things. That "nanny state" mentality perfuses the psyches of too many here.
Yes, you can overdose on testosterone. You can overdose on sleeping pills too. Chug-a-lug a bottle of vodka and you will surely die. There are at least three drugs in my medicine cabinet that would kill me if I took too many pills. I know this is true because there have been two episodes on "House" caused by overdoses of drugs I take everyday.
The world today is unprecedentedly safe. We evolved to routinely face danger, but just a few thousand years of civilization means we have less to fear than ever before. Let's not wimp out because we are just now beginning to understand our own biochemistry. We should face the future in the knowledge that more substantial changes are coming.
Courage.
Albertosaurus
This is unrelated, but by some strange accident, I stumbled accross your Jackie Robinson article that appeared in National Review back in '96.
I even remember the Halifax coffee shop I was when I read it, but I could never remember who wrote it. Glad to have stumbled on it, and your blog!
It was a wondeful article.
Cordially
Joe
To I said,
Thanks for the link to
http://www.gaypsychotherapy.com/GLRbody2.htm
OT, but "How to Be Successfully No-nmonogamous" caught my eye. Should be required reading for anyone who believes it's a positive for society that hetero marriage and the traditional family unit survive the onslaught from all sides. What I read there parallels the gay relationships/marriages I know.
Where I live, steroids have become a problem at the high school level with wrestlers.
Oh, this article has it all! Ozzie's at it again.
http://cbs2chicago.com/sports/White.Sox.manager.2.1836931.html
Deals with HBD (Latinos vs. Asians) even though Ozzie doesn't look at it that way ...please-- someone tell Ozzie *why* Asians are viewed differently; baseball; steroids (poor Latinos are easy pickings according to Ozzie, who, I guess, has never asked himself why it is that poor Vietnamese manage to become successful in 1-2 generations).
It's priceless. Steve, you can have a field day with this.
Chicago White Sox manager spout of--HBD (baseball, steroids,
As a matter of fact Jane Austen used "they" in referring to a the third person singular of uncertain gender. But then she was a woman, wasn't she?
Still, it was not an illegal construct. Grammar was pretty flexible at one time--as the 19th century wore on, it became more rigid.
Albertosaurus: But the steroid controversy divides the populace into those who are afraid of the future from those who can accept change. This is interesting.
Am I afraid of a future which is populated by roid-rage-driven sodomites, with shrivelled, disfunctional testes, in dire need of new heart valves by their 50th birthdays, popping every manner of methamphetamines at all-night rave parties?
Who then sober up each morning to accuse Bristol Palin, at the age of 17, of having given birth to a Down's Syndrome child?
Well - yes and no.
It's certainly not a world that I would wish to inhabit [or even cross paths with], but given all the sodomy and the shriveled, disfunctional testes and the oppressiveness of the ambient nihilism, it's not a world which is going to reproduce itself.
Just ask the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Romans, or the ancient Persians - if you can find any.
One difference between music and visual art is that art forgeries can be of two types: either the forgery of an existing painting or the forgery of a painting in the style of. Music forgeries can only be the second type, as music is an abstraction rather than a physical object like a painting.
I mean, someone could of course forge the original sheet on which a composer wrote his symphony, but I am under the impression that the original manuscripts are not generally considered as valuable as original paintings, as the original sheets on which the music is written is the plan for the art and not the art itself.
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