Jose Canseco: Typhoid Mary of Baseball

www.iSteve.com/05FebB.htm#jose.canseco.typhoid.mary.steroids

"The Typhoid Mary of Baseball" -- The NYT writes:

"According to a report yesterday in The Daily News, Canseco contends in his book, "Juiced," that he injected [70 homer slugger Mark] McGwire with steroids in the bathroom stalls of the A's clubhouse. The two were teammates in Oakland from 1986 until Canseco was traded to Texas in 1992...Canseco had promised to name names in his book, and he did not stop with McGwire. The Daily News reported that Canseco claims to have taught [Ivan] Rodriguez, Rafael Palmeiro and Juan Gonzalez, who were teammates from his years in Texas, to use steroids."

Back in 1993, a baseball player agent whose brother was a major-leaguer told me that "Jose Canseco is the Typhoid Mary of baseball," because when he'd show up on a team, soon his new teammates started to inflate like him.

You may recall that Rafael Palmeiro came up with the Chicago Cubs in 1986, but was traded to Texas after 1988 when rookie Mark Grace emerged as the Cub's first baseman of the future. Grace enjoyed a fine old-fashioned career, hitting .303 with a career high of 17 home runs. Palmeiro, however, turned into a modern-style monster in Texas, hitting 47 homers in two separate seasons, and now has 551 for his career, 30 more than Ted Williams and 226 more than Joe DiMaggio, all without anybody ever thinking Palmeiro was a great player.

On the other hand, all three of the Texas Rangers Canseco named were good players before Canseco arrived, so I'm not convinced. Maybe they would have developed without him. But I am suspicious.

There's an interesting political angle: In last year's State of the Union Address, President Bush used his bully pulpit to denounce steroid use in sports. Bush, however, was the co-managing director of the Texas Rangers in 1992 when they acquired Canseco. Bush's partners didn't trust him enough to give him substantive power in running the team, using him as a front man. But, Bush claims, he did have responsibility for signing off on all trades, so he apparently approved the acquisition of Canseco, even though Canseco had been notorious as a steroid user since at least the 1988 post-season when Fenway Park fans showered him with chants of "Ster-oid! Ster-oid" and he responded by striking a Mr. Universe pose in the outfield. (The details on Bush and Canseco are in my "Out of the Park: Baseball & Steroids" article in the April 12, 2004 American Conservative.)

The Typhoid Mary of Steroids

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. Kaplan

This 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.

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

President defends steroid cheat Palmeiro

From the Washington Post:

David Jackson writes in the Dallas Morning News: "Little more than an hour after word of Rafael Palmeiro's suspension for violating Major League Baseball's steroid policy, President Bush defended the former Texas Ranger.

" 'He's a friend,' the president said in a White House roundtable interview with several Texas reporters. 'He's testified in public, and I believe him.'

"Citing Mr. Palmeiro's previous statements under the 'klieg lights' that he had not used steroids, the former Texas Rangers part-owner said: 'I believe him -- still do.' . . .

"Mr. Bush, who was part of the Rangers' majority ownership group from 1989 to 1998, has often spoken out against steroid use."

As you'll recall, the President was co-managing director of the Texas Rangers when his players, such as Rafael Palmeiro, started hitting prodigious numbers of homers. Granted, his partners didn't let him have much authority, but he claimed that he "signed off" on all trades, the most notorious of which was the 1992 acquisition of Jose Canseco, author of the recent steroid tell-all Juiced. As I wrote for UPI in "Bush Turns Against Steroids" on January 21, 2004 in response to Bush's denunciation of steroids in his State of the Union address:

In 1992, Bush's Rangers acquired in a blockbuster trade the ever more massive Canseco, even though he was then probably the most infamous steroid abuser in baseball.

Although Canseco had won the 1988 American League MVP award by being the first player to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases, his career as a Ranger is most remembered for one week in May 1993. First, a long fly ball bounced off the outfielder's increasingly block-shaped head for a home run. Three days later, Canseco volunteered to try pitching and blew out his elbow, ending his season.

Last year, after angrily ending a career cut short by injuries, Canseco was jailed when he failed a drug test for steroids, violating his probation stemming from a nightclub brawl he had gotten into alongside his brother Ozzie.

... When Bush's Rangers traded for Canseco in 1992, he had been the subject of steroid rumors for many years... Canseco's second World Series appearance in 1989 inspired novelist Anne Lamott to complain in "Operating Instructions," her best-selling diary of her baby Sam's first year of life: "I was explaining to Sam that Jose Canseco shouldn't get to play because of the obvious steroid use, that there is something really wrong with the guy ... It was obvious from Sam's expression that he didn't think much of Canseco."

The evidence was not subtle. When Canseco started in the minor leagues, he was tall and slender, but eventually bulked up to 240 pounds. Tellingly, he possessed the steroid user's equivalent of the portrait of Dorian Gray: his identical twin Ozzie, who stayed skinny and in the minors for years.

Bush signed off on all Rangers trades, such as the Canseco acquisition...

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

Rafael Palmeiro nailed for steroid use

The NYT reports:

Rafael Palmeiro, the Baltimore Orioles slugger who at a Congressional hearing in March vehemently denied using steroids, was suspended for 10 days today for violating major league baseball's steroids policy.

At a congressional hearing in March, Rafael Palmeiro said, "I have never used steroids, period. I do not know how to say it any more clearly than that."

The Orioles' first baseman is by far the biggest name suspended under baseball's recently toughened program, which tests for performance-enhancing substances. Over all, he is the seventh major leaguer this season suspended under the new program.

Last month, the 40-year-old Palmeiro collected the 3,000th hit of his career, joining Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Eddie Murray as the only players in history to amass 3,000 hits and 500 home runs.

In February, I blogged:

Back in 1993, a baseball player agent whose brother was a major-leaguer told me that "Jose Canseco is the Typhoid Mary of baseball," because when he'd show up on a team, soon his new teammates started to inflate like him.

You may recall that Rafael Palmeiro came up with the Chicago Cubs in 1986, but was traded to Texas after 1988 when rookie Mark Grace emerged as the Cub's first baseman of the future. Grace enjoyed a fine old-fashioned career, hitting .303 with a career high of 17 home runs. Palmeiro, however, turned into a modern-style monster in Texas, hitting 47 homers in two separate seasons, and now has 551 for his career, 30 more than Ted Williams and 226 more than Joe DiMaggio, all without anybody ever thinking Palmeiro was a great player.

On the other hand, all three of the Texas Rangers Canseco named [including Palmeiro] were good players before Canseco arrived, so I'm not convinced. Maybe they would have developed without him. But I am suspicious.

There's an interesting political angle: In last year's State of the Union Address, President Bush used his bully pulpit to denounce steroid use in sports. Bush, however, was the co-managing director of the Texas Rangers in 1992 when they acquired Canseco. Bush's partners didn't trust him enough to give him substantive power in running the team, using him as a front man. But, Bush claims, he did have responsibility for signing off on all trades, so he apparently approved the acquisition of Canseco, even though Canseco had been notorious as a steroid user since at least the 1988 post-season when Fenway Park fans showered him with chants of "Ster-oid! Ster-oid" and he responded by striking a Mr. Universe pose in the outfield. (The details on Bush and Canseco are in my "Out of the Park: Baseball & Steroids" article in the April 12, 2004 American Conservative.)

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

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

Nate Silver in 2009 v. a proto-Mommy Blogger in 1989: Who was more right about baseball steroids?

Mark McGwire & Sammy Sosa, 1998

Nate Silver, whose book I review here, is approaching the totemic status of Charles Darwin as a signifier of Science, Honesty, and the Triumph of the Democrats. This isn't his fault, but it's hard to avoid playing to the crowd of worshippers. Here, for example, is Silver's latest work of self-congratulation for Democrats: In Silicon Valley, Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns. So, it's worth documenting this former professional baseball forecaster's strikingly terrible track record at noticing the biggest thing happening to baseball statistics in his lifetime: performance enhancing drugs. 

I've always been interested in the effects of steroids since they are artificial male hormones and thus hugely relevant to the debate over feminism and whether sex differences are biological or cultural. Thus, I wrote a 1997 article for National Review called Track and Battlefield that reviewed track statistics for insights into the debate over Coed Combat. In it, I sketched out the history of steroids' impact on track statistics ... five years before Silver started writing about baseball statistics. I'd been following the impact of steroids on track and on baseball since the 1980s. The main difference between the sports was that track tested and occasionally caught cheaters, while baseball didn't test. My article came out the year before Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa made a travesty of baseball statistics and five years before Silver started publishing on the talent of ballplayers.

For example, here was the cover of the 1998 Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year issue. And this is what SI burbled:

"As is our custom late each fall, we at Sports Illustrated sat down to discuss nominations for the Sportsman of the ... No, we didn't discuss. We didn't even sit down. It was automatic. It was unanimous. It was the easiest selection in our history. It couldn't be one Sportsman of the Year. It had to be two. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. All in favor, say aye. All opposed, report back to your coma." 

"McGwire and Sosa gave America a summer that won't be forgotten: a summer of stroke and counterstroke, of packed houses and curtain calls, of rivals embracing and gloves in the bleachers and adults turned into kids -- the Summer of Long Balls and Love. It wasn't just the lengths they went to with bats in their hands. It was also that they went to such lengths to conduct the great home run race with dignity and sportsmanship, with a sense of joy and openness. Never have two men chased legends and each other that hard and that long or invited so much of America onto their backs for the ride."

In October 1998, Stephen Jay Gould had written a similar article in the Wall Street Journal: "A Happy Mystery to Ponder: Why So Many Homers?" I sent the famed science writer and Harvard professor a fax explaining that McGwire had already been caught back in August with a steroid precursor called Androstenedione in his locker, and that McGwire and Sosa were both obvious juicers. But, for some reason, he did not respond.

So, the impact of steroids was a big, big deal in American culture long before Silver got involved professionally writing about baseball statistics. Yet, he didn't seem to have much to say about steroids online until positive test results for performance-enhancing drugs started to leak out after a few years of Silver being in the business of forecasting performance. And, even then, for the next five years Silver kept being creatively but consistently wrong about the impact of steroids.

In May 2009, 21 years after Tom Boswell accused Jose Canseco of using steroids, slugger Manny Ramirez, who had finished the 2008 season by hitting an improbable .396, got caught by a drug test and suspended for 50 games. In response, Silver wrote in Baseball Prospectus about how surprised he and the whole sabermetrics community were:

In fact, Ramirez was frequently taken to be the counter-example, the guy who, come hell or high water, absolutely was not on steroids. He was so much of a freak that we assumed his hitting talents must have been freakish too -- God-given ability, and not the result of any sort of chemical intervention.

The problem for Silver with a superstar like Ramirez getting caught was that it shot a hole in the theory Silver had been promoting ever since positive tests started being leaked to the media in the mid-2000s: that the real juicers were the scrubs, not the superstars putting up all the seemingly ridiculous statistics:

The typical steroid user might not be the prima donna slugger who endorses Budweiser between innings but the "hardworking late bloomer" who is struggling to maintain his spot in the lineup or is trying to leverage a good season into a big free-agent contract. Certainly these players might have more economic incentive to enhance their performance, as compared to their counterparts who have already signed multiyear, guaranteed major league contracts.

Hence, Silver predicted in 2005 after having to respond to positive test results:

There is clearly something going on--but it is not producing the sort of predictable impacts that everyone expects. Nor, because of the complexity of the underlying chemistry, are we likely to see substantial changes in the game's statistics resulting from efforts to curtail use of these substances. 

Well, Silver turned out to be really wrong: offensive statistics have cratered since then due to drug testing.

In contrast, the impact of steroids on superstar Jose Canseco, the "Typhoid Mary of steroids," was obvious back in the 1980s to novelist Anne Lamott. That the Oakland A’s were up to no good during the 1989 World Series was so blatant that it even featured in the bestseller Operation Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year by proto-mommy blogger Anne Lamott:

I was explaining to [my baby] Sam that Jose Canseco shouldn't get to play because of the obvious steroid use, that there is something really wrong with the guy ... It was obvious from Sam's expression that he didn't think much of Canseco.

Why could a lady novelist taking care of her first-born notice what Nate Silver wouldn't?

She wasn't being paid to not notice.

Barry Bonds

With the San Francisco Giants slugger now only two homers away from Hank Aaron's career record of 755, much to the embarrassment of Major League Baseball, it's worth reviewing a few points:

- Bonds didn't start baseball's steroid problem. We now know from inside sources that Bonds did not use steroids for his first 13 years in the league, 1986 through 1998.

- Bonds was clearly the greatest player of the 1990s, despite being clean for all but 1999. From 1990 through 1998, he led the National League in park-adjusted OPS+ four times, was second three times, and third twice. That's slightly better than his godfather Willie Mays' best nine year stretch.

- Bonds started taking steroids in 1999 because he was jealous of the credulous admiration paid to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa for hitting all those homers in 1998. You kept hearing silly stuff like "McGwire and Sosa have returned the innocence to the game!" McGwire was caught with a steroid precursor in his locker in late 1998 and it still didn't instill many doubts. This drove Bonds crazy.

- Once Bonds got good at cheating with drugs in 2001, hitting a record 73 homers in 2001, he put up three seasons better than Babe Ruth's best (as measured by park-adjusted OPS+) at the ridiculously old ages of 36, 37, and 39.

- The reason Bonds was so much better than the other cheaters was because he'd been the best player in the game when he was clean. Bonds' normal talent + steroids = ludicrous ability.

- It was obvious that Bonds was cheating from 2001-2004. Nobody puts up those kinds of numbers at those ages. From 1986-1998, his career followed a normal arc (just at a much higher level than normal), with a peak at 27-28.

- Baseball stat guru Bill James was shamefully quiet during the many years while the steroid scourge distorted individual statistics, and he's not doing his reputation any favors by digging himself a deeper hole by still talking about Bonds' new wonder bat and other rationalizations.

- Bonds' late father Bobby was an extraordinary athlete who put up numbers that deserve Hall of Fame consideration, but teams had a hard time figuring out what to with him. And he smoked and drank heavily, which shortened his career to 15 years. Barry carefully avoided every mistake his father made.

- Barry was a nasty piece of work before he started on steroids, and they didn't improve his disposition.

- One reason steroid users tend to self-righteously deny accusations of steroid use is because they feel justified in their advantages because of all the weightlifting work they did. Steroids help your body recover from weightlifting faster, so users can work out a lot more.

- Steroid use in football appears to go back to the 1960s (quarterback John Hadl says his San Diego Charger teammates were popping steroids in 1966), but we don't have much evidence of it in baseball (a more lackadaisical game) before Jose Canseco arrived in 1986. (Here's my AmCon article on the history of steroids in baseball.)

- President Bush says he signed off on all Texas Rangers trades, which means he approved the 1992 trade that brought from the Oakland As to the Rangers Canseco, who had been accused of steroid use by Tom Boswell in the Washington Post back in 1988. Canseco's major accomplishment as a Ranger was having a fly ball bounce off his increasingly block-like head and over the fence for a homer.

- In general, I believe, California, perhaps because of the local Muscle Beach weightlifting culture, tended to be where steroids first had an impact on the various big-time sports.

- The popular governor of Bonds' state of California is muscle man Arnold Schwarzenegger, who began using steroids in Austria at around age 17 in 1964. I would imagine that Schwarzenegger used muscle-building drugs to get in shape for his comeback role in Terminator 3 in 2003, which helped launch his gubernatorial campaign.

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

"Jose Canseco, Hero"

"Jose Canseco, Hero" -- Novelist Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, expends 1,900 words on the NYT op-ed page to explain his hero worship of the ballplayer (whom a player's agent told me twelve years ago was "the Typhoid Mary of steroids"), without it ever occurring to Chabon that the reason he admires Canseco so much is precisely because Jose was loaded with synthetic masculine hormones.

While Chabon is more eloquent, his feelings are the same as those rhesus macaque monkeys who pay (in juice) to look at pictures of dominant male monkeys.

I used to think Chabon was dishonest. His novel about two Jewish teenagers in pre-WWII New York who invent a Superman-style character to express their opposition to Hitler, avoids all mention of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939-1941, which caused no end of conflict at the time of the novel in the Jewish Communist circles the story is set in, but is most conveniently forgotten today for purposes of demonizing McCarthyism. Chabon's novel also features another pet peeve of mine, the character who turns out to be homosexual despite having no traits at all that correlate with homosexuality.

But, perhaps I was wrong. Judging from this essay, Chabon, despite being wildly articulate, has no more self-awareness than those hero-worshipping monkeys.

Steve Sailer's homepage and blog is iSteve.com

Barry Bonds and Steroids

Sports Illustrated runs an excerpt from a book by reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams documenting seven-time baseball MVP Barry Bonds' performance enhancing drug regimen. It's all pretty much what you'd expect from my American Conservative article "Out of the Park" from two years ago, but what's new is that the authors have found (based on interviews with Barry's ex-mistress) that the direct cause of Barry starting to cheat was the intense jealousy he felt about the humongous hoopla over Mark McGwire's 1998 breaking of Roger Maris's homerun record, when it should have been obvious that McGwire was a juicer. (Indeed, late in the season a reporter found a vial of steroid precursor in McGwire's locker).

Toward the end of the 1998 season, Stephen Jay Gould wrote a celebratory op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about how the homer competition between McGwire and Sammy Sosa had restored the innocence to the game, yada yada. I sent Gould a fax suggesting that there was nothing innocent about it, that the explanation for their soaring totals was that they were breaking the law by using steroids. Gould never replied.

According to the article, Bonds never used anything stronger than a protein shake before the end of the 1998. Bonds was certainly the best all-around ballplayer of the 1990s, winning three MVP awards from 1990-1993 when he was in his later 20s.

His father, Bobby Bonds, had been a remarkable talent, with an almost unprecedented combination of speed and power, but teams had had a hard time figuring out how to use him. Moreover, Bobby was an alcoholic and chain-smoker, so his output fell off rapidly after he hit 30.

Barry inherited his father's power and speed, and avoided his failings. Bobby struck out almost twice as much as he walked, and Barry started his career with a similar pattern, but by 1996 was walking twice as much as he struck out.

Without performance enhancing drugs, Barry was one of the top 20 players of all time, and had a shot at the career top 10. Up through age 33, during which Barry was clean of steroids,, the most similar career to Barry's was that of Frank Robinson's, one of the greatest players of all time. Still, Barry's godfather was Willie Mays who was even better than Robinson. And Barry's career was following the normal path -- he'd peaked at age 27-28 in 1992-93 -- and he was now in his biologically inevitable decline phase.

At age 34 in late 1998, his stats remained terrific, but his body was slowly deteriorating, and lesser players like McGwire and Sosa were cheating to steal the limelight from him. He entered a home run hitting contest.

Moreover, Bonds is an anti-white racist, and the adulation for the cheating McGwire who is white, was driving him crazy.

On that trip [to McGwire's St. Louis in May 1998] Bonds began making racial remarks about McGwire to Kimberly Bell [his girlfriend]. According to Bell he would repeat them throughout the summer, as McGwire and Sammy Sosa, the buff, fan-friendly Chicago Cubs slugger who also was hitting home runs at an amazing rate, became the talk of the nation.

"They're just letting him do it because he's a white boy," Bonds said of McGwire and his chase of Maris's record. The pursuit by Sosa, a Latin player from the Dominican Republic, was entertaining but doomed, Bonds declared. As a matter of policy, "they'll never let him win," he said.

As he sometimes did when he was in a particularly bleak mood, Bonds was channeling racial attitudes picked up from his father, the former Giants star Bobby Bonds, and his godfather, the great Willie Mays, both African-American ballplayers who had experienced virulent racism while starting their professional careers in the Jim Crow South. Barry Bonds himself had never seen anything remotely like that: He had grown up in an affluent white suburb of San Francisco, and his best boyhood friend, his first wife and his present girlfriend all were white. When Bonds railed about McGwire, he didn't articulate who "they" were, or how the supposed conspiracy to rig the home run record was being carried out. But his brooding anger was real enough, and it continued throughout a year in which he batted .303, hit 37 home runs, made the All-Star team for the eighth time and was otherwise almost completely ignored. The home run chase, meanwhile, transfixed even casual fans, in the way that a great pennant race used to do in the old days.

He started using steroids after the 1998 season, but had trouble with injuries.

If Bonds had any doubts about continuing to use performance-enhancing drugs, they were eliminated just before the start of spring training in 2000, when he went to Cashman Field in Las Vegas to compete in the Big League Challenge, a charity home run derby broadcast on ESPN. Jose Canseco dominated the event. He hit 28 bombs in the last round, while Bonds didn't even make the finals. At one point Bonds saw Canseco take off his shirt: 255 pounds, seemingly not an ounce of fat, just gleaming, chiseled power.

"Dude," Bonds said. "Where did you get all that muscle?"

In the early 1990s, a friend, whose brother was a major leaguer and who is a player's agent himself, told me that Canseco was the "Typhoid Mary of steroids." Wherever he went, guys started imitating his use of steroids.

Bonds got more sophisticated in 2000 and had an excellent but not unbelievable year. Then, with the help of a world class steroid cheater, he went on a four year tear. As I blogged in 2004:

From the age of 36 through 39 he went on a four-year tear averaging 257 [on the Adjusted OPS statistic, which is the single best measure of productivity], which is better than Babe Ruth's single best season (1920) of 255, when he was 25. Ted Williams had a 233 when he was 38 but his surrounding seasons weren't too close to that. Bonds' last four seasons include the three best offensive seasons in the history of baseball. That just ain't natural.

Not surprisingly, steroids made Barry, who was never a nice guy, a nasty son of a gun. His girlfriend kept her old answering machine tapes with his diatribes on them in a drawer in case she ended up like Nicole Simpson. By the way, Barry told his white girlfriend that he had to get married to keep from losing all custody of his kids from his first marriage, and that he had to marry a black woman for the sake of the media, but that wouldn't affect their relationship.

One interesting detail is that Barry had never been "buff" before the drugs. A three time MVP, a man who had averaged more than 36 homers per year from 1990-98. So, that may something about athletes who are buff.

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

Moneyball A's celebrate 28th year as PED pioneers

Everybody knows that the Oakland A's baseball team are plucky underdogs who use advanced statistics to outsmart the big budget teams, as Brad Pitt showed when playing Oakland general manager Billy Beane in 2011's hit movie Moneyball. 

Of course, when statistical analysis isn't enough (and when is it?), the A's just cheat, like they've been doing since Jose Canseco came up in 1986. Tyler Kepner writes in the NYT:

He might be baseball’s most confounding player, at once a marvel and a miscreant. Bartolo Colon flunked a drug test last summer and served a 50-game suspension. Now he says he is pitching better than he ever has.

Colon is the 40-year-old ace of the Oakland Athletics, the only All-Star on the team leading the American League West. Few players are older or seemingly in worse shape than Colon, who is 5 feet 11 inches and every bit of his listed weight of 267 pounds. 

And yet, after a 2-1 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates at PNC Park on Monday, Colon was 12-3 with a 2.69 earned run average, pitching with enough confidence and precision to be the league leader in fewest walks per nine innings. 

... Who knew what to make of Colon last August, when he was suspended after testing positive for testosterone? He was 10-9 with a 3.43 E.R.A. when he was caught, after already pushing the system’s boundaries with the Yankees in 2011. 

Colon, whose career was sputtering because of injuries, had never told the Yankees that he was treated by a doctor who used Colon’s fat and bone marrow stem cells and injected them back into his elbow and shoulder. The doctor had used human growth hormone in similar procedures, but said he did not do so with Colon. 

It sounded shady enough, and the positive test, plus Colon’s subsequent link to the Biogenesis investigation, seemed to confirm that his renaissance was a mirage, too good to be true. Surely his cheating explained his success, and Colon, without the drugs, would decline. 

How do we know he's without drugs?

The A’s thought otherwise, as they often do, and brought him back for one year and $3 million, more than he had made in 2012.

Of course the A's signed Colon. The A's have had two general managers since 1983, Sandy Alderson and his protege Billy Beane, and the ballplayers they've employed have included notorious juicers practically the whole time. It's fun to make up bestselling airport books about how they win because their executives play the percentages, but let's not overlook names like Canseco, McGwire, Giambi, the other Giambi, Tejada, and Colon.

You'll notice that players now, finally, get penalized. But teams don't. And executives sure don't. If Billy Beane signs Colon and he gets away with cheating, the A's prosper. If Colon gets caught again and suspended for 100 games, the A's don't have to pay him for 100/162nd of a season. It's win-win.

Performancing-Enhancing Drugs, Part II

Malcolm Gladwell can seldom give up an argument with me, so now he's back to ask what would be so bad about this example:

"An aging pitcher is suffering from a variety of persistent injuries. They are healing slowly. He is depressed and lethargic, and anxious about his career. He goes to see his doctor. The doctor finds that the patient's testosterone count is low. He prescribes the pitcher a small dose of testosterone, as part of his rehab. The patient is desperate, and the doctor agrees to experiment with testosterone, and see if it speeds recovery."

He argues:

"But since the league's policies clearly can't govern drugs prescribed legally by a physican--particuarly if they are undetectable-- it has the effect of only preventing the use of drugs obtained illegally."

Sure, baseball will always have a hard time preventing marginal cheating. But baseball's big problem over the last dozen or so years has not been players taking modest doses under a doctor's supervision.

That's a problem, but it's hardly as big a problem as the full-fledged circus freak shows that have overwhelmed baseball going back to 1988 when juicing evangelist Jose Canseco became the first player to hit 40 homers and steal 40 bases in one season, and led the Oakland A's to the first of three straight World Series. Other freak shows include the late Ken Caminiti suddenly starting to take mega-blasts of steroids at the All-Star Break in 1996 and carrying the Padres on his acne-scarred back to the World Series and himself to the MVP; or McGwire and Sosa "returning the innocence to the game" in their ultra-hyped homer record duel of 1998; or Barry Bonds, with his head the size of a basketball, breaking the career homer record last summer; or Roger Clemens having the best ERA of his career (relative to the league and adjusted for park effects) at age 42 in 2005.

So, if the rules that baseball has finally put into effect could keep players down to the levels of juicing that a legitimate doctor might prescribe, baseball could still spare itself a lot of these humiliations in the future.

Of course, none of these guys suffered from some sort of innate deficiency in testosterone production that kept their testosterone levels below that of the average male and thus medically justified a prescription. They were all studly specimens to begin with.

Indeed, that's why baseball is a big business: it's a showcase for masculinity.

If Malcolm was looking for a better example, he could Google "golfer beta blocker."

Beta blockers are completely legitimate drugs that save huge numbers of people from dying of heart problems. They also seem to have the side effect of calming the jitters, which could be very useful in putting. Beta blockers are said to be used by classical musicians with stage fright. A number of professional golfers, especially on the age 50+ Champions Tour where "the yips" making putting troublesome, have beta blocker prescriptions. The Tour doesn't want to ban beta blockers because it doesn't want players keeling over on the green because they aren't allowed to take the medicine. (Some players who have taken beta blockers complain that they make them too calm, and hurt their tee-to-green game.)

The differences between beta blockers and testosterone, though, should be fairly obvious: First, beta blockers make the people who need them healthier overall, such as extending life expectancies. Second, they don't make players better than they would be if they didn't have a specific medical problem. (Nobody starts taking beta blockers and suddenly has years better than in their prime.) Third, like laser eye surgery, the side effects are not such that only fanatics would use them. They are used by millions.

Fourth, most popular sports are to some extent, in effect, a test of testosterone. (The Geezer Golf Tour ranks pretty far down the list of popularity, in part because of that.)

Fans admired Roger Clemens because he is a fine specimen of rampant masculinity. If he had had a low testosterone count to start with, he never would have put on the 235 pounds of solid muscle that allowed him to go 24-4 in 1986. When Clemens's testosterone count naturally dropped with age to the point where he could no longer compete up to his standards, he should have retired to the golf course and let the young bucks have their day, just as his elders once got out of the way and let him have his day.

Friedrich at 2Blowhards put his finger on part of the reason why we object to juicing:

The best answer I've been able to come up with is an evo-bio one. To wit, that most people unconsciously view sports as a display of reproductive fitness, not merely one more entertainment option among many. And those people don’t want their athletic displays of reproductive fitness being fiddled with by chemical means.

If you make this assumption, it sorts out what is really different about performance-enhancing drugs from other training aids. It’s okay to allow athletes to train for competition, because the discipline and capacity for hard work are also sexually desirable, inheritable traits. It’s okay to build up your body with weights, because the ability to maximize your muscularity is again an inheritable trait. And being crafty about your training regimen is a tribute to the athlete’s intelligence, another capacity transmittable to one's offspring.

Steroids, on the other hand, are clearly not inheritable and thus 'cheating'. A less reproductively fit athlete, one likely to produce less capable offspring but who is taking steroids can appear better than a more reproductively fit athlete who isn’t juicing.

Friedrich says:

Granted, if you would allow all the athletes to juice, presumably the most genetically gifted would still shine through relative to the other elite athletes.

No, because ever more juicing, Ken Caminiti-style, would still be tempting, so baseball becomes just a test of foolhardiness.

The best policy is to ban the major performance-enhancing drugs outright and institute rigorous testing. There will still be cheating, but it will be on a less ludicrous scale and the honest players will still have a chance to make the team without cheating.

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

Bill James Sold His Soul

You aren't supposed to say bad things about the beloved Bill James, the ex-boiler-room attendant who revolutionized the interpretation of baseball statistics, but now that he has finally spoken up on the issue of steroids in baseball, I have to say that his head-in-the-sand, don't-rock-the-boat act over the last 21 years has been disgraceful.

For example, his New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract of 2001 mentions steroids maybe twice, in passing, in 1012 pages.

By largely staying mum on the impact of steroids on baseball statistics since the topic first became widely discussed when Jose Canseco enjoyed the first 40-homer 40-steal season in 1988, James got himself a nice front-office job with the Boston Red Sox, and got to be part of World Champions in 2004 and 2007, teams whose biggest stars, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, were found to be on the juice in the 2003 test.

So, what does James have to say for himself now about his silence? Well, not much. Instead, he's written complacently, in "Cooperstown and the 'Roids," about how all the notorious drug cheats of the last two decades will eventually be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

But it wasn’t really an issue of some players gaining an advantage by the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs; it is an issue of many players using Performance Enhancing drugs in competition with one another. Nobody knows how many. It would be my estimate that it was somewhere between 40 and 80%. The discrimination against PED users in Hall of Fame voting rests upon the perception that this was cheating. But is it cheating if one violates a rule that nobody is enforcing, and which one may legitimately see as being widely ignored by those within the competition?

Hey, thanks for giving us that 40% to 80% estimate in 2009, Mr. Baseball Statistics Guru!

Moreover, that's a misleading way to phrase it. Perhaps 40% to 80% tried drugs at one point or another, but it's clear that 40% to 80% of the man-years weren't enhanced. Otherwise, we wouldn't see so many silly anomalies when players went on the juice, like Brady Anderson's 50 homers, or Ken Caminiti's second half of 1996.

Consider Barry Bonds. We have the full inside story on Bonds, and he comes out looking a little better than his public image would suggest. We now know he didn't touch performance enhancing drugs during his first 13 seasons, 1986-1998. From 1990-1993 he was the best player in the National League each year, and from 1994 to 1998, he was the second to fourth best player each year. If, say, 60% of his competition was on the juice, how could he compete with them?

During the 1998 season, obvious juicers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa got all that publicity for "restoring the innocence to the game," and nobody paid attention to Barry's usual monster season (.303 BA, 37 HR, 122 RBI, 120 runs, 130 walks, 44 doubles, 7 triples, 28 stolen bases, .438 on-base average, .609 slugging average, 1.047 OPS, 178 OPS+). If Barry had retired right then, he would have been a first ballot Hall-of-Famer.

Instead, resentful of the lack of press appreciation he got compared to what the cheaters got, he started dabbling with drugs in 1999, got good with them in 2000, and great with them in 2001 through 2004. When Bonds hit 73 homers in 2001 (previous career high 46 when he was eight years younger), it was perfectly obvious that he was cheating, but Bill James preferred to talk about Bonds' new maplewood bat, telling the WSJ in 2007:

I strongly suspect that the influence of steroids on hitting numbers is greatly overstated by the public. ...I've never understood why nobody writes about it, but the bats are very different now than they were 20 years ago. [Barry] Bonds's bats are still different from everybody else's.

Yeah, sure, if only I'd gotten me one of those special bats when I was 39, major league pitchers would have issued me 232 walks, too.

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

Noticing patterns

From the AP:

A person familiar with the negotiations tells The Associated Press that all players targeted for drug suspensions other than Alex Rodriguez have accepted 50-game penalties from Major League Baseball.... 

The person says All-Stars Nelson Cruz of Texas, Jhonny Peralta of Detroit and Everth Cabrera of San Diego are among the 12 who accepted penalties Monday. 

Others include Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli and outfielder Fernando Martinez; Philadelphia pitcher Antonio Bastardo; Seattle catcher Jesus Montero; New York Mets infielder Jordany Valdespin and outfielder Cesar Puello; Houston pitcher Sergio Escalona; San Diego pitcher Fautino De Los Santos; and free agent pitcher Jordan Norberto. 

MLB informed the Yankees on Sunday that [Alex] Rodriguez will be suspended for his links to the Biogenesis of America clinic ... 

Milwaukee outfielder Ryan Braun accepted a 65-game suspension two weeks ago, bringing to 14 the number of players - including Rodriguez - facing discipline in the probe, which was sparked when the Miami New Times published documents obtained from former Biogenesis associate Porter Fisher that linked several players to the clinic.

So, 13 players with Spanish surnames and Ryan Braun, a smart Valley Dude who weaseled his way to beating the rap once before by attacking the veracity of the poor bastard whose job it is to collect the urine samples of rich baseball players.

I've long been interested in the hidden history of the spread of performance-enhancing drugs. It's hard to come up with a history of performance-enhancing drug use in the U.S. because we only have records of those who got caught (leaving out those smart enough to not get caught), and, before testing, memoirs and inferences.

My guess is that steroids in American sports got started in the late 1950s in Olympic track and field, such as the weightlifting and throwing events. 

The geographic hotspots where PEDs made the leap into pro team sports likely included California (e.g., the 1963 San Diego Chargers) and the steel state of Pennsylvania, the home of barbell manufacturing and the doctor who invented Dianabol and gave it to the 1960 U.S. Olympic weightlifting team (e.g., the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers).

But, at some point, the Latin connection (e.g., Jose Canseco of Miami) becomes obvious in baseball. Alex Rodriguez, for instance, was born in New York, moved to the Dominican Republic, then went to high school in Miami in the early 1990s. By the way, Rodriguez has been paid $353,000,000 to play baseball. 

Latin ballplayers used to be known as wiry middle infielders who didn't get many walks. Over time, they became known as big sluggers. There are various reasons for this evolution, but we shouldn't overlook the fact that steroids could be bought without a prescription in corner drug stores in the Dominican Republic. Much of the rise of DR in baseball has to do with 16-year-old professional ballplayers shooting up steroids.

A hazier possible link is that certain sports doctors in Spain and other Mediterranean countries sometime around the Barcelona Olympics of 1992 developed a variety of more sophisticated ways to use chemicals to enhance performance than just to shoot up with steroids. Is that connected to Miami?

Finally, and most tenuously, there might be some distant Latin cultural connection to Mediterranean body worship in Renaissance Italy (e.g., Michelangelo's David), Rome, and Greece.

Photos of athletes: Nobody notices nuthin'

With the news today that Lance Armstrong is surrendering his seven Tour de France cycling titles, I want to return to my rant from last week that nobody seems to notice anything when famous celebrities look a little odd. Here, for example, is a picture of the veteran tennis-playing Williams Sisters from the cover of the upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine. Venus, on the left, looks like an enormously tall and extremely athletic woman in the peak of physical shape. As I recall, when Venus emerged as a pro in the 1990s, she set a record for velocity of service speed for a woman. So, Venus is really, really strong. If you want to see what a woman who can hit a tennis ball extremely hard looks like, look at Venus.

In contrast, her younger sister Serena, who won the Olympic gold medal earlier this month, looks like she's weighing in to fight Jake LaMotta in Comiskey Park for the welterweight championship.

Granted, these are sisters, not identical twins like Jose and Ozzie Canseco, back when the former was a slugging MVP and the latter was a skinny minor leaguer. Still, I'm fascinated that the two would agree to be photographed side by side. Obviously, the contrast doesn't seem to strike anybody else as interesting.

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

How did the Diveroli family qualify for "minority ownership" preferences?

Following up on the story of the 22-year-old international arms dealer Efraim E. Diveroli, whose AEY firm just had its $200-$300 million contract with the U.S. government yanked, I noticed that a company called Worldwide Tactical, managed by Efraim's father Michael Diveroli, operates out of the same address in Miami Beach and has the same fax number. What caught my eye was this line on FedVendor.com form for Michael Diveroli's Worldwide Tactical.

Ownership: Minority Owned

So, Diveroli's dad gets ethnic preferences on government contracts? Sweeeeet! (Here's a mugshot of young Efraim, who looks like maybe he's a big fan of fellow Miami Beach denizen Jose Canseco's health and fitness techniques.)

I explained how something like this could happen in a VDARE.com article "What's Spanish for Chutzpah?" which explains how a Polish-born entrepreneur named Liberman got himself declared Hispanic for the purposes of getting tax breaks on buying radio stations. See, the Libermans got tossed out of Spain in 1492, which makes them Hispanics.

But "Diveroli" appears to be an Italian Jewish name. Maybe they got themselves declared "Latinos" because their ancestors spoke some Latin 2000 years ago? Who knows?

Updated: See the comments for a 1984 NYT story on how the Reagan administration declared Hasidic Jews to be a "disadvantaged" minority for purposes of minority business development.

As it turns out, Efraim's AEY is officially listed by the federal government as being owned by an ethnically "disadvantaged" person. And it turns out that the Reagan Administration added "Hasidic Jews" to the list of who is eligible for affirmative action in 1984.

But are the Diverolis Hasidic Ashkenazis? The name sounds Roman Jewish. And is his mother's side of the family Botach / Boteach Hasidic either? Maybe -- that's what Efraim's uncle, the celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach was ordained as, but Shmuley's father claims to be an Israeli citizen and the rumor is that their background is Persian Jewish.

So Efraim must claim to be Hasidic in order for AEY to qualify as "disadvantaged." Funny, he doesn't look too Hasidic in this mugshot. I guess he must have lost his hat and beard on the way to the police station after he beat up that parking valet.

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

"Moneyball:" The Movie

When I talk about the bizarrely large impact that Bill James has had on American culture, I'm thinking about, oh, that Brad Pitt is starring in a movie version coming in September of Michael Lewis's book Moneyball. Pitt plays Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, whom Lewis celebrated for accepting the sabremetric revolution launched by James. Instead of looking for the best athletes, Beane found guys who can hit home runs and get walks.

Jonah Hill plays Beane's quant, Philip Seymour Hoffman is A's manager Art Howe, and it looks like Kevin Costner has a role as somebody because it's a baseball movie. Here's the trailer (via Jonathan Last), including exciting killer dialogue from Aaron Sorkin like, "Because he gets on base."

There's an alternative interpretation of Oakland's success in the early 2000s, which is that the franchise already had a history of playing Moneyball (i.e., guys who can hit home runs and get walks, such as the Giambi Bros., Michael Tejada, and David Justice) under the previous general manager Sandy Alderson (1983-1997), when Oakland went to three straight World Series (1988-90), which is three more than Billy Beane has accomplished. 

In this subversive view, the man who introduced Moneyball to Oakland wasn't Beane or Alderson or whomever, it was Jose Canseco, "the Typhoid Mary of steroids."

I like Bill James and Michael Lewis, but these journalists made a lot of money by not mentioning the elephant in the baseball living room: steroids. 

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

Should pundits publicly bet?

Former baseball statistics analyst Nate Silver, now blogging at the New York Times on elections, gives Obama an 86.3% chance of winning the Electoral College as of today. (I love the decimal point.)

Recently, Silver offered an even money $1,000 bet to TV talking head Joe Scarborough that Obama would win, for which he has been widely praised by the increasingly dominant-in-the-media sabermetrics boys. (You know, the baseball analysts who lauded stats-savvy baseball executives like Billy Beane, Bill James, and Sandy Alderson for their brilliant stats-driven insights that they could win baseball games with formerly skinny guys like Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, the Giambi Brothers, David Justice, David Ortiz, and Manny Ramirez who, remarkably, filled out into homer-hitting behemoths, thus proving Science! is always right.)

Yet, shouldn't Silver have defended the honor of his probability percentage forecast by offering Joe Scarborough odds of, say, 3 to 1? In general, shouldn't Silver present his odds not in scientific-sounding percentages all the way to the first decimal point, but as old-fashioned race track fraction odds like 3 to 1 or 11 to 2?

By the way, I have some sympathy for the NYT Public Editor's discomfort with public bets involving pundits, the best known of which was John Tierney winning $5,000 in a 2005 to 2010 bet with oil price forecaster Matthew Simmons that oil would not rise in five years from $65 per barrel to $200. As I wrote in 2010:

I certainly would have bet against Mr. Simmons, as well, but he didn't offer to bet me.  

My suspicion at the time was that Simmons was, more or less, writing a $5,000 check postdated January 1, 2011 to buy his book publicity right now on the NYT op-ed page. That might explain why he didn't haggle and try to split the difference with Tierney, such as putting the win-lose line halfway between $65 and $200, the way a real betting man trying to make money would. But a public bet that the price of oil would be, say, $132.50 or higher would have been kind of a boring story. In contrast, a man confident enough to put $5,000 on the round number of $200 is a man who is acting like he might know something, and thus you'd better buy his book to find out what it is.

I don't want to imply anything bad here about Tierney, who is a great guy. As far as I know, I'm the only one who pointed this out about Simmons bet. It's just not the kind of thing people notice.

Still, there is a lot to be said for public bets. I offered to bet pundit Michael Barone $1,000 in early 2004 that Hispanic turnout in the fall of 2004 would be closer to my estimate of 6.1% of the total vote than his 9% speculation (according to the Census Bureau, it was 6.0%), but Barone prudently shied away. Yet, Barone appears to have learned from the experience, so it was a net benefit for quality of discourse.

Moreover, I've long offered to publicly bet that various notorious Gaps in real world performance among demographic groups are not going to vanish over any tractable time frame.

In general, however, nobody is interested in betting against me that, say, school test scores in San Marino will continue to be higher than in Compton, or however you'd want to specify a bet over The Gap of gaps. That's too boring and depressing to bet over. People are interested in betting as action, not in betting as a tool for learning about reality. The more random the outcome, the more exciting it is to bet upon. The more scientifically predictable, the more dismal the action.

What if in 1969, Arthur Jensen had made public bets with leaders of the conventional wisdom, with Jensen taking the unpopular side that in 2012, 43 years later, The Gap would be about the same as in 1969? Would that have made him more popular at his death?

Ballplayers and age

Michael Sokolove is becoming my favorite sportswriter by combining the standard up close and personal reporting with the kind of big picture data synthesis that I prefer. He has a new article about New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter on his 37th birthday and the larger topic of aging in sports. 

Jeter, who signed a contentiously-negotiated 3-year $51 million contract in the offseason so he would get his 3000th hit with the Yankees, the only team he's ever played for, is a pretty terrible ballplayer this season, slightly worse than a generic "replacement-level" journeyman. Yet, that's kind of heartening in that it shows that Jeter, who has seemed like a class act during his long and remarkably consistent career, isn't juiced to the gills. (I'd add that Ichiro Suzuki, who is also 37, also appears to finally be in decline, too.)

That doesn't mean that Jeter never touched any steroids or HGH during his career, but, at minimum, if he did, he didn't let it go to his head like so many stars who flagrantly abused the stuff. 

Sokolove writes:

The mythology is that old-time players, who did not lift weights and knew nothing about nutrition, had mercilessly short careers. And that today’s players, who condition themselves year-round — often with the help of private trainers, the most up-to-date scientific methods, nutritionists and massage therapists — play longer and have more years of peak performance. It makes sense. It’s also not true. 

With more rigorous drug testing, a typical baseball career is beginning to look again as it did throughout the game’s history. Journeymen players stay in the game until their early- or mid-30s, and all-star-level players maybe a couple of years beyond that. A handful of superstars retain enough skills to make significant contributions into their late 30s. Those with the most talent almost certainly lose their skills at the same rate as lesser players, but they stay in the game for a long time because 85 percent of a superstar is still a very good player. 

The rotund, hard-living Babe Ruth was a productive player until age 39. Older baseball fans remember Willie Mays’s sad last years with Mets, when he was past 40 and couldn’t play anymore, and may assume that he hung on far too long. But at age 40, while still playing for the San Francisco Giants, Mays led the league in on-base percentage and stole 23 bases. 

Even the game’s greatest players, though, cannot defy biology. However long they play, their best seasons occur when they are still strapping young men in all their fast-twitch glory. 

Sokolove is being a little dogmatic. We've seen evidence of ballplayers in the past who extended their primes into their thirties by working out. Slugging shortstop Honus Wagner peaked in 1908 at age 34, probably because he lifted weights. Ruth got himself a personal trainer after his bad 1925 season and worked out during the winters, so he had his famous 60 homer season in 1927 at age 32.

What about more recent examples of late resurgences?

I could list some, but one of my readers has a theory that the impact of steroids on famous American sports statistics can be traced way, way back before Jose Canseco's 40-40 season in 1988. All those great seasons from the 1970s, 1960s, or even late 1950s that you think of as shining examples of a more innocent age? All on the juice, he asserts. After all, we know Olympic shotputters and the like were using steroids in the later 1950s, so why not professional athletes? 

QB John Hadl has said that the San Diego Chargers strength coach was handing out steroids in the locker room in 1965. Or how about The Juice? O.J. Simpson went from a pretty good high school player in 1964 to the most exciting college football player since Red Grange in 1967. How'd that happen? (When Ken Kesey read about O.J.'s little run-in with the law in 1994, he said: That sounds like a combination of cocaine and steroids.)

Growing up on the West Coast in the 1960s and 1970s, I assumed, like most people, that the outstanding performance of West Coast athletes was simply part of the general shift of money and talent to California. Maybe, but maybe there was also a Venice Muscle Beach / Hollywood / Castro Street gay / Olympic track & field steroids connection to West Coast pro athletes going on. 

I dunno. 

We do know that baseball players were using uppers by the early 1960s to be alert for ballgames. Having just brewed a pot of coffee to churn out this posting, however, I'm not feeling all that censorious about that. 

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

Barry Bonds moves past Babe Ruth on the career home run list:

Obviously, it's a joke. Yet, we now know that Bonds was clean through the 1998 season, which means that, even though other players, such as Jose Canseco, were clearly cheating with steroids as far back as the 1980s, Bonds was still the greatest player of the 1990s. It's a myth that steroids turned Bonds from a good player into a great one. He'd been a great player for nine years before he tried steroids. Steroids turned him into a cartoon superhero. In the nine seasons from 1990-1998, Bonds led the National League four times in the premier hitting statistic, Adjusted OPS+ (onbase percentage plus slugging average adjusted for park relative to the league, with a dash of paprika), finished second three times, and third twice. He was also a terrific baserunner and flyball snagger. The only thing he couldn't do well was throw. His only rivals as a hitter across this era were Frank Thomas and McGwire, both of whom were slow-footed first basemen.

Bonds had a certain amount of justification for feeling provoked into cheating after 1998 -- the 1998 home run orgy between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa was hyped to the heavens by the media as restoring the innocence to the game, when it was obvious at the time that something was fishy.

Bonds is such an unpleasant personality (and the drugs haven't made him a nicer person) that few will put his sins in historical perspective.

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

NBA team accused of discriminating against black basketball players

Business Insider reports:

The Minnesota Timberwolves go into the season with only five black players on their 15-man roster, and some people are calling it a conspiracy. 

From Jerry Zgoda and Dennis Brackin of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: 

"How did we get a roster that resembles the 1955 Lakers?" asked Tyrone Terrell, chairman of St. Paul's African American leadership council. "I think everything is a strategy. Nothing happens by happenstance." 

That strategy, Terrell and others in the black community believe, is to sell tickets to the Wolves' fan base, which is overwhelmingly white. 

Lou Amundson, JJ Barea, Chase Budinger, Andrei Kirilenko, Kevin Love, Nikola Pekovic, Luke Ridnour, Ricky Rubio, Alexey Shved, and Greg Stiemsma make up 2/3 of the T-Wolves roster, and they are all white. 

Minnesota civil rights activist Ron Edwards thinks something is up too, and he told the paper, "It raises some real questions to me about what's really intended. I think, personally, that it was calculated. Is this an attempt to get fans back in the stands? Minnesota, after all, is a pretty white state.''

I don't see much evidence at all that white Americans like foreign whites more than African-Americans, but it might someday happen. More likely, a small market team management might try a strategy of building a whiter team in the hopes of getting better team play interaction effects.

So far, the Timberwolves' Achilles heel (or anterior cruciate ligament, in the case of Ricky Rubio) has been injuries. Rubio, the former Spanish child prodigy point guard, has been out since the middle of last season, and Love, the closest thing to a white American superstar the NBA has at present (at least as measured by his huge points/rebounds numbers -- the rest of his game ...), recently broke his hand. So, we won't see if this strategy, if it is a strategy and not just randomness, works or not until the second half of the season.

One interesting study that I haven't seen done is differences in injury rates between races. I wouldn't be surprised if the prejudice against, say, white running backs in big time football might be based on a greater likelihood of white runners to get too dinged up to be effective. 

Back in the 1980s, Bill James did a rare race study comparing white and black pairs of baseball players with similar rookie year number for speed-related stats such as triples, grounded into double plays, defensive range, and percent of time caught stealing. He found a strong tendency for black ballplayers to maintain their speed later into their careers than white players. I can't find James' essay online, but here is Jon Entine's summary of it.

Now, this analysis couldn't distinguish between the differential effects of injuries on speed and the differential effects of aging on speed, but it's still about the best starting point I've heard of.

For example, on paper, Oakland's Reggie Jackson and Bob Allison, a 1960s Minnesota Twin who was electrifying for a few years, looked equally fast as rookies, but Allison's speed fell off faster, while Reggie stayed fast enough to stay in the league long enough to put up Hall of Fame career numbers. James also cites Davey Lopes's then-amazing 1985 season with the Cubs as a 39 year old part-timer in which he stole 47 bases in 51 attempts.

You might think that somebody would have looked into this more over the quarter of a century since then, but sabermetrics appears pretty allergic to obvious racial analyses. With the gigantic obsession in 21st Century America with fantasy sports leagues, in which hobbyists draft lineups and compete with each other based on their players' subsequent stats, you would think this question would be a big one. Instead, though, stat analysts appear content to let racial stereotypes and hunches, rather than statistically informed analyses, drive fans' decision-making in this regard.

I wouldn't be surprised that black athletes have greater resilience to the wear-and-tear of injuries, but I can think of a couple of other explanations for James' results.

The first is that James' methodology of finding matching pairs might not be that good. Assume that the black bell curve of speed is shifted to the right of the white bell curve, but you have only crude measures of baseball speed. For example, Allison led the league in triples as rookie with 9, which is a good indicator of speed, but it's a small sample size. Some of the other stats, such as defensive range and caught stealing, are confounded by baseball savvy. Maybe white baseball players tend to be savvier as rookies, while blacks tended to be multi-sport athletes who only decided to concentrate upon baseball at a later age? (Certainly Reggie Jackson evolved into one of the more cunning ballplayers by late in his career, but he was a star football player in college.) 

So, maybe Bob Allison was never quite the spectacular athlete that Reggie Jackson was, he just happened to have somewhat similar numbers based on not totally reliable measures. For example, James makes a big deal out of both guys being good college football players, but Allison was a fullback while Reggie was a defensive back. Big difference in likely speed. Perhaps white players who appear to be as fast as their matched black counterparts aren't really as fast on average, they're just the best that James' system can come up with. For example, I presume he didn't find any white matches for, say, Ricky Henderson, Willie Wilson, or Vince Coleman.

The second issue with the study is ... juicing. We don't know much about pre-Canseco experiments with steroids, but I'm developing some suspicions. 

I saw Reggie Jackson's titanic homer in the 1971 All-Star Game off the light stand on top of the third deck in right field of Tiger Stadium. It was almost unprecedented, but by 30 years later it wasn't so amazing. Barry Bonds hit two similar blasts in the 2002 World Series that the TV cameraman couldn't track.

As he got older, Reggie developed the top-heavy look of a serious lifter that became common in 1990s baseball. California muscle building culture was way ahead of the rest of the country in technical sophistication in the 1960s and 1970s.

Or consider James's example of Davey Lopes. 

I was a huge Los Angeles Dodgers fan during their strong 1970s, and I recall being at Dodger Stadium in the late 1970s when all the Dodger sluggers (the 1977 Dodgers was the first team with four 30-homer men) took a pregame jog through the outfield. They were men of average height, but extraordinarily wide.

Lopes was a leadoff man / second baseman whose career high in homeruns through age 31 was 10. Then he started developing more power and at age 34 in 1979 hit 28 homeruns, which seemed a bizarre total for a middle infielder at the time.

(Lopes' development, now that I think about it, had something to do with moving the outfield fences in at Dodger Stadium. In Sandy Koufax's 1960s, centerfield was 410 feet, then they brought it in to 400. The Dodgers had a lot of players who could hit minimal homers just over the outfielder's glove -- Ron Cey drove my Dodger-hating roommate crazy with a lot of cheap home runs that barely made it over the fence.) So, management then made the centerfield fence only 395'. Then MLB set a minimum of 400 in center, so they had to move it out again, but I don't remember the exact years.)

I'm just tossing some evidence out there, mind you, not drawing conclusions.

By the way, I only saw about a minute of the World Series, but I was happy to see that the Giants' young superstar catcher Buster Posey seemed to be built more like an old fashioned lithe athlete, in the mold of Roger Federer or Chris Paul, rather than a top-heavy 1990's slugger. Hope (and fandom) springs eternal ...