One of the constant themes here is the power of narrative in sports. We like a good, clean narrative. Take Tiger Woods. Let's say Tiger Woods never wins another major championship. I think he will win again, but let's just say for argument's sake that he does not. What will the narrative be?
It will be this: Tiger Woods was well on his way to becoming the greatest golfer who ever lived when his personal life spiraled out control and he never recovered from that.
Would that be the whole story? No. I don't think so. I'm not sure it would even be the major part of the story. If Tiger Woods never wins another major it will be because he hit his mid-30s when most golfers begin to lose their game, because his knee never came all the way back, because putts stopped dropping (as they tend to do), because talented younger golfers came along, because equipment changes flattened his advantages, because ... because ... because ... the world is more complicated than any single line. Was Tiger Woods' six-month romp through the tabloids devastating? I have no doubt. Did it play a role in his slump? I have no doubt. But there are a thousand other factors flying around here.
Over time, I suspect, those thousand other factors will be lost to time and the story will be: Tiger messed around, got caught, and never was the same.
Why? Because that's an easy-to-follow narrative. And because the public explosion of Tiger Woods' personal life is the most interesting part of the story.
This same, I think, is true for the sudden and rather shocking drop in baseball offense. We are only through about six weeks of baseball, so the sample size is small. But the drop does seem real and precipitous. Hitters throughout baseball are hitting .249/.319/.382. Even comparing that only to April performance over the last 17 years, the numbers are way, way down.
From 1994-2010, hitters in April hit .264 -- so that's down 15 points.
Their on-base percentage was .345 -- so that's down 26 points.
Their slugging percentage was .421 -- so that's down almost 40 points.
But it's more than just the averages. There has not been a single year since 1994 when batters hit this sparsely. The lowest batting average since 1994 was last year's .256, so that's down. The lowest on-base percentage was a .330 in 2007, so that's way down too. And in no season since 1994 have hitters slugged less than .400 in April.
So even just comparing April to April, early season to early season, the numbers are quite stark. That's if you go back to 1994. But, as you probably already know, if you go back to the decade or so BEFORE 1994, well, suddenly the numbers look perfectly in line.
To remind you, this year's core numbers: .249/.319/.382
From 1981-1993: .252/.322/.378
Yep, that's just about the same.
So, the narrative is clear and clean: What we have here is a return to normalcy, right? The clean narrative is that baseball has rid itself of the plague that was steroid abuse and now hitters are back to normal ... and that's the whole story.
Do I believe that's the whole story? No. I don't. Do I believe that it's even MOST of the story? No, I still don't. I suspect that the role of the decline of steroid use in the decline of offense is, percentage wise, the same as the role that Tiger Woods' personal foibles played in his decline as a player. I think steroids are a factor, yes. but I think there are a thousand other factors too, many of them that are hidden from view.
That said, though, I'll tell you something that I do believe: I believe that steroids are pretty much out of baseball. I don't believe this because the numbers are down. That's something more complicated. I have a different reason. But the main point is this: I think baseball is just about steroid free.
I know people are cynical about this, and they have every right to be cynical about it. For so long, just about everyone around baseball -- and I'm talking players, management types, owners, writers, broadcasters -- were blind to the steroid story in baseball. There were a few people who saw it pretty clearly early on -- this week's Poscast guest Bob Costas was banging the drum quite a while back -- but most of us didn't. There was no testing. There was no outrage. The home runs were fun to watch, at least for a while.
And while I tend to think that there were numerous other prominent reasons offense exploded in the 1990s -- hitter-friendly ballparks, a juicier ball, tighter strike zones, harder bats with thinner handles and so on -- it is undeniable that many of the hitters who dominated the era (McGwire, Sosa, Palmeiro, Giambi, A-Rod, Sheffield, MannyBManny etc.) were either admitted or implicated PED users.
Baseball began more stringent steroid testing in 2005, but that's not the reason why I think steroids are out of baseball. We all know that testing can only go so far, that the cheaters will always have more resources and motivation than the testers, and that they will keep inventing new PEDs that don't trigger positive test results. Pro football has had testing for much longer, and I have little doubt that PEDs are rampant in pro football.
No, there's something more here: Massive, massive public pressure. If a player is caught taking steroids in baseball, he's disgraced. If he's a great player, he will get humiliated in the Hall of Fame balloting. If he's a good player, he will get savaged in the media and by fans. If he's a mediocre player, he will find it hard to get work -- teams don't need that sort of publicity anymore. We've seen this happen. We know it's real. And this sort of real public pressure is not there in football for many logical and illogical reason.
In baseball, the public pressure is so intense that, I think, it has transcended reason and fairness and perspective. Now, if a player has a hot month-long stretch, the whispers begin. If a player hits more home runs than his history suggests, the whispers turn to murmurs. With this sort of heat surrounding the game, it seems to me you'd have to be (1) Desperate; (2) Arrogant beyond reason; (3) Detached from reality to take the chance of getting caught using steroids in baseball these days.*
*MannyBManny, from what I can gather, was all three.
So, yes, I think steroids are pretty much out of the game now. Oh, I'm sure there are spare players who are still using, whose careers are on the brink or who just believe they are too smart to get caught. But baseball has ALWAYS had those players willing to push the edge. What made the Selig Era so troubling, looking back, is that there were much greater incentives to use than to not use. Baseball wasn't testing. Baseball was proudly peddling home runs. The odds of getting caught were miniscule. Nobody seemed to care. And the health-issues that steroids cause are fuzzy and disputed and, anyway, simply not a strong enough deterrent to prevent a lot of people from using steroids.
Now ... yeah, the risks have gone way, way up. Take steroids? Become infamous. And I think most players will not take that chance. Baseball players are no different from anyone else. The vast majority of them want to be liked. They want to be admired. They want awards and prizes. They want the best kind of fame. They want to be remembered well. Who wouldn't? When I was growing up and dreaming of playing baseball, I did not dream of being despised and considered a cheater. I dreamed of making All-Star Teams and having my posters on walls and signing autographs and going to the Hall of Fame. Getting caught using steroids in 2011 (as compared to 1999) can crush those dreams.
So, yes, I do think that steroids are mostly out of the game. I don't think that's the only reason that baseball numbers are down. I don't think it's the biggest reason. But I will admit it's probably the most interesting reason.
Joe, didn't you say sometime about a year ago that you believed that Tiger would never win another major? That it was correct to write him off?
ReplyDeleteI think what he said was that he didn't think Tiger would ever break Jack Nicklaus' record, not that he would never win another one.
ReplyDeleteI've been of the opinion that perhaps MLB, in attempting to make it appear that the testing programs are indeed working, may have altered the ball, deadened it somewhat if you will.
ReplyDeleteI think many people agree that there have been times when a "juiced ball" (no pun intended) was used (hello 1987) in an effort to increase run product and therefore fan interest; if that were true, then it is possible they would try going in the other direction if it suited their needs.
Anyone agree / disagree / think I'm nuts (likely).
One other thing that most ball players also want is their testicles
ReplyDeleteThen what Joe is the biggest reason?
ReplyDeleteJoe says:
ReplyDelete"If a player is caught taking steroids in baseball, he's disgraced. If he's a great player, he will get humiliated in the Hall of Fame balloting. If he's a good player, he will get savaged in the media and by fans. If he's a mediocre player, he will find it hard to get work -- teams don't need that sort of publicity anymore."
Brian Roberts (among others) would beg to differ.
I'd say it more this way: If you're a big home run hitter, and you have a big head and otherwise look like a juicer, and you're somewhere in between "kind of a jerk" and "complete asshole" to the press, then PEDs will ruin your career in the manner you describe.
On the other hand, if you're a scrappy little second baseman, or a reliever, or a long-time borderline HOF starting pitcher on the most storied franchise in baseball and you sound really, really contrite about it, then you can get away with using PEDs pretty much scot-free.
Offense is largely down due to pitchers throwing more cutters than ever. At least that's the narrative I like.
ReplyDeleteWhat Rob says above is very possibly one of the strong storylines. How about also that the weather in all the east coast and midwest cities has been atrociously wet, damp and damn cold most days this spring. (I see where the AAA International League has already had more postponements in 2011 as they had all of 2010.) Will MLB hitters heat up a bit as the weather presumably warms and dries - Probably a little...
ReplyDeleteSubtle adjustments to the ball, in my opinion, have made the biggest difference. Most players won't come out and say it because it sounds lame, but there have been a few that say it just comes off the bat differently. I know; it's anecdotal.
ReplyDeleteBut even a once-a-week slow-pitch softball player (i.e. me) can tell you there is a massive difference between the balls used from league to league. There is easily a 10% difference in flight, if not a little more.
I guess my conspiracy theory is that MLB had the incentive to soften the ball ever so slightly to give the statistical appearance that PEDs have been tamed. I'll never be able to prove it, of course.
"steroids" might be out of baseball. I doubt that HGH and other designer drugs are out of baseball.
ReplyDeleteAlso, can we also connect the dots about this column being about Steroids being out of baseball and Tiger's return to the earth as a golfer?
@ Mark Coale
ReplyDeleteI thought the dots have already been connected. People often look for the easy narrative as an explanation for something, when in reality there often a multitude of factors that have contributed. I think that applies to both Tiger and baseball.
Then what Joe is the biggest reason?
ReplyDeleteI share NMark W's view that the weather, as mundane as it is for a reason, is the reason.
I doubt that HGH and other designer drugs are out of baseball.
There is actually very little evidence that HGH is an actual performance enhancing drug, beyond its placebo effect.
Count me as one who believes changes in the ball itself has more effect on offense from year to year (or era to era) than anything else.
ReplyDeleteIt is an established truth that baseball juiced the ball in the 20s to put more fans in the stands following the Black Sox scandal. Would it be astonishing to learn that they did the exact same thing following the strike in 1994?
To me the drastic change in offense from the early 90s to the mid nineties and from 2010 to 2011 (if it sticks) points to small conspiracy among a select few (i.e. Bud Selig and others in the Commissioner's office), than some simultaneous decision by hundreds of players to start juicing at exactly the same time.
I guess the question would be if people consider things that help people recover quicker from injury as "performance enhancer."
ReplyDeleteAs always, the line is very arbitrary.
Steroids? Bad. HGH? Bad. Lasik surgery? good. Tommy John surgery? good. Greenies? Bad. Beta Blockers? Bad.
@mckingford - Where do you get that idea about HGH? It helps grow muscle, recover from injury, and has been touted as many as a wonder drug for vitality. How exactly is that not performance enhancing?
ReplyDeleteI think hitting is down because pitchers are pitching better. Pitchers are pitching better because the steroid users are gone.
ReplyDeleteBecause a fastball down the middle doesn't automatically get deposited into the upper deck, a pitcher can have relative confidence in challenging hitters. Also, because pitchers today either pitched in the steroid era or were trained in the steroid era, they had to develop better strategies to get hitters out.
Thus, the art of pitching advanced by necessity, as evidenced by the proliferation of the cutter across baseball. So a pitcher on the mound today isn't as fearful of making mistakes as they were just a couple of years ago. They also have improved pitching skills. This all makes it harder on hitters, who no longer have steroids to boost their own skills.
The title to Joe's article addresses one question (why steroids are out of baseball), but the text ends up dealing with a different question at times (why offensive numbers are down). I was never quite sure which related to the Tiger Woods analogy. I can agree with Joe's answer to the first - public opinion.
ReplyDeleteBut for the second question, Joe doesn't give us much of an alternative to the drop of steroid usage. He talks about why numbers went up in the 1990's. Hitter-friendly parks? Still have them. Juicier ball? Good argument for conspiracy theorists, with some validity; but for the numbers to go down now, you have to argue that the ball has been deadened. Tighter strike zones? (more on that below). Harder bats / thinner handles? Still have them.
The bell-curve Joe cites regarding the pre-Selig era power numbers (low) / non-testing era (high) / post-2005 era (low) is too dramatic to not attribute to steroids as the primary factor.
One other thought - There could be a correlation in the patient hitting approach in which many players have been schooled. Both walks and strikeouts are way up the past decade. Working the count deeper cuts two ways. People have been willing to live with the strikeouts, as long as the power numbers went with it. What we have now is the strikeouts without the power.
I absolutely love that there are people blaming the weather. As if this year's April weather is the worst for any April since 1994. Come on, now, perspective is a wonderful thing.
ReplyDeleteIt's absolutely a conspiracy-ish sort of thing, but what is the argument against the contention that MLB has deadened the balls?
ReplyDeleteAnd, like, again, it sounds weird, but there have also absolutely been "heat wave" seasons. Look at 2006. League slugging at its highest since 2000. There has to be some reason.
@Ebessan I'm pretty sure the burden of proof lies on the people making the contention that the ball has been deadened. Why should we have to disprove something that hasn't been proven?
ReplyDeleteWhat about HGH?
ReplyDeleteMike Morse is another borderline guy who got caught, admitted using, and has no trouble getting work. The guys who get blackballed are the jerks and the ones who tainted the capital H History of the game: Bonds and Sheffield, for example, were still highly productive sluggers, but couldn't get jobs because of the combination of their jerkiness and the fact that no one wants to help legitimize History-cheaters.
ReplyDeleteI do believe steroids are out of the game because of testing. Once some players stop using and the numbers go down throughout the game, there is less incentive/need for others to use and you get a gradual decrease each year.
pip - absolutely correct. "Well, you can't prove that they DIDN'T deaden the ball" is not a valid means to prove that they did.
ReplyDeleteI do think that modifications to the ball have likely played a role in the offensive numbers spiking and now diminishing. To me it seems the simplest (and least verifiable) way to make an artificial, across-the-board adjustment to the batting/pitching balance.
But of course I have absolutely zero hard evidence, so my idea is merely a suspicion.
In the legal world, there is this idea that court is public theater. People need to see wrongdoers get punished, often times severely, to convince them not to commit bad acts and to show them that the justice system punishes people who do bad things. A lot of people argued that, after the housing bubble burst, we needed to put some high profile people in jail so that the country could see that people who caused so much damage to the economy do get punished. If the economy crashes, and people think that wall street tycoons and CEOs caused the crash because of their own greed, people lose faith in the justice system if no one goes to jail. We don't need to put everyone in jail, just a couple of prominent people. With that accomplished, the theater is complete and people can go on with their lives with some satisfaction that the system works.
ReplyDeleteI guess it's the same with baseball. As long as baseball punishes a few of the "bad" people, everyone will feel a little better about the steroid era. And, of course, the theater is much more satisfying if we punish people that most people never liked anyway--Bonds and Clemens for example. They're the Bernie Maddofs of the home run bubble in baseball. Put them in jail (or keep them out of the HoF), and we've gotten everything out of our system and we can move on. [We'd feel to bad coming down hard on Andy Pettite because we like him so much--so we don't.]
And I think Joe is right--this also has a deterrent effect on players. Every baseball player, I would assume, thinks that he has the talent to be a hall of fame caliber player if he catches some breaks and practices enough. So I think even borderline players would think twice about steroids if they knew it would ruin their legacy should they develop into great players. [This overconfidence among athletes is also why unions agree so readily to free agency--which disproportionately benefits great players--rather than salary scales under which most players would make more, but the superstars would make less: they all think they have it in them to become superstars.]
Is this fair to punish only a few people when we know that lots of people did "bad" things--not necessarily. Is this the best way to collectively move on--maybe.
Wouldn't it be pretty simple to test the deadened baseball theory? People all over the place have foul balls they kept as souvenirs. Find two people willing to donate theirs, one from say 2004 and the other from last season or this season, and analyze them.
ReplyDeleteCool, because a 1-0 game is more exciting than a 10-9 slugfest. Low scoring baseball is the best that sports can offer.
ReplyDelete@Brian --
ReplyDeleteWeather plays an extremely important, but usually underrated or even ignored, factor in baseball offense. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance of physics knows that changing the medium through which an object travels (in this case, the atmosphere, changed by the weather conditions) affects the path that object takes.
NMark W has provided one data point here: there were more rainouts in the International League in April 2011 than in all of 2010; I am sure even a simple check of weather patterns in MLB cities would show something similar. Clearly, we know that there has been unusual, if not even extreme, weather so far this year.
So, we have physics and some data to back up the contention that weather affects playing conditions. And your counter-argument is, so far as I can tell, you don't think so.
Sorry, but I will take reality over your opinion every time.
While HR%'s are falling back to early 1990s levels, there's been a relatively large increase in K%'s over the same period. In the early 1990s, batters struck out at about a 15% rate, whereas now they're fanning at a 18% rate. This has in truth been a very slow and steady trend going on for 30 years or longer. What I'd be interested in knowing is whether the strikeout rates of individual players are going up with time, or whether it's simply that the players who are entering the leagues are striking out more than the players who entered the leagues in years prior (hasn't there been a gradual bias over the years away from promoting and developing contact hitters?).
ReplyDeleteI'm a unidirectional ball-juicing conspiracy theorist. While I can definitely see the MLB Executive Council agreeing to liven up the ball via adjustment of manufacturing specifications, I could never see them agreeing to deaden the ball.
Player positioning can have a significant effect on offense. In watching games this season, I have heard the commentators refer to use of spray charts by teams to predict most likely batter outcomes. Because of better information available, balls in play that may have been hits in the past have become catchable, even routine plays.
ReplyDeleteHmmm ...
ReplyDeleteTiger at 35: Withdraws from TPC with injury.
Barry at 35: Bats .306/.440/.688, and has yet to hit 73 HRs in a season (that will happen at age 36).
And, just for giggles, Jeff Kent at 35: Leaves SF and bats .297/.351/.509. He will play FIVE more seasons after this.
The biggest reason to believe the juiced ball theory, in my opinion, is the jump in scoring that occurred in both leagues between 1992 and 1993/1994. To believe steroids was the major factor behind this means you have to believe that suddenly a whole slew of players started taking steroids right at that time.
ReplyDeleteIt seems impossible, but I'm not sure it is. For example, new designer steroids were being synthesized and introduced around that time. Also, Balco was founded in 1986 so they could have had an effect on steroid use in the early 90s. In 1991, The federal government placed anabolic steroids on the controlled substances list. The unintended result of this was that prohormones and prosteroids like Andro started coming on the market as over-the-counter supplements shortly thereafter. Thus, if prohormones like andro were becoming more common in over-the-counter dietary supplements during that time, the acquisition of steroids would have been simple and legal.
There was also deregulation of the supplements industry in 1994, which put the burden of safety on the manufacturers of supplements, not on the FDA. This meant a manufacturer of supplements could put a prohormone in it so long as they didn't lie about what it did and how safe it was.
Clearly outside forces related to steroids, their development, their availability and their regulation could have had a major effect on this.
I doubt MLB would want to depress hitting by deadening the ball, home runs are what brought the fans "back" according to the post-strike narrative along with Ripken's streak. If the scoring remained similar to those levels, it would make it seem that they were right not to worry about testing for steroids.
ReplyDeleteIf you are a conspiracy theorist, MLB would have deadened the ball this year to convince us steroids were gone (even though they know PEDs are still in use). I'm not sure I buy that. Attendance was pretty bad during the late sixties and seventies, and MLB is strongly motivated by money. It may be a combination of less steroid use, 12-13 man pitching staffs (which were unheard of thirty years ago), and a cycle in which many of the great hitters of the past twenty years (enhanced or not) have aged out or retired and haven't been fully replaced yet.
ReplyDeleteHafner
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