There’s already proper information about them and most people who use them don’t die from the drugs. The situation is exactly the same as with illegal recreational drugs. Large numbers of people take them without any great problems and there’s a lore about them that’s built up over the years with experience, as people have learned from others’ tragic mistakes (going right back to when Russia and China experimented with them on a vast scale). Of course the majority of professional athletes today take them (you only have to look at their bodies ferchrissakes), but usually under medical supervision, and naturally, it’s all sub rosa. The few people who get ill, die from the drugs, have unfortunate side-effects, etc., are often people who are both extreme in their usage, and ignorant.
Really the whole thing is a nonsense, just like with recreational drugs: yes of course there are dangers, but they’re manageable, and the moral panic is absurd.
Maybe I am naive, but I don’t think the majority of professional athletes take them. Sure some do, there always will be some who do. And it will vary widely depending upon the sport and upon the rules/enforcement against the illegal drugs in each sport. I think baseball is really trying to stop juicing, football not so much.
Professional sports are so much more competitive now than they were 20-40 years ago and players now have to maintain peak condition pretty much year round. You really are seeing athletes who have made themselves what they are, not necessarily got it out of a bottle like many of them did in the past.
I think the vast majority of athletes whose livelihoods depend on competitive performance will take every chemical they can so long as they think it will go undetected. It’s common sense. The justifications are obvious. 1: my career depends on this as I am unqualified for anything more than clerking otherwise, and maybe not that if I got through college on scholarship. The potential difference in income can be up to a thousandfold for some of these athletes. 2: Everyone else does it so if I don’t I am just screwing myself.
There is no way to stop drug use from being pervasive and endemic throughout all of sports without some kind of magic testing regime that catches everything. And most leagues and associations only test for a small fraction of all the myriad forms of enhancement drugs, and they do so irregularly, with numerous opportunities for deception, fraud, and bribery along the way. So I think it’s best to assume that all champion athletes are on drugs even if a certain modest percentage of them somehow manage to do without them.
They will just take a bunch of kids, medicate them into musclebound freaks with hyper fast reflexes, and then fill them full of stimulants, aggression enhancers, and endorphin boosters and point them at the other team.
I am not quite so cynical. I have no doubt there are abusers, but I also think that in some sports that abuse requires the “approval” of the athletes, and in some sports that has diminished. Baseball for instance I think is much cleaner than is was 10-20 years ago. Football, well there is probably a hell of a lot of HGH going on there. I think athletes in the Olympics face a different type of pressure and will probably always use.
If you’re an outfielder in A ball and you’re batting .275 with 12 home runs you are probably in trouble, right? You should be doing better than that to be promoted because the pitching isn’t all that good there. You have a high school degree because you quit your sports college as soon as you could get into the draft. If baseball doesn’t work out you’ve got nothing unless you go back to school and actually go to class this time, which you never bothered to do before. Presumably a lot of minor leaguers are in this kind of situation. Most of them will never make it to the big leagues.
So you can’t take most steroids or HGH or amphetamines because they’ll catch you. But there’s a new drug. Supposedly it will give you 30 points of batting average and another 12 home runs a year. That’s enough to make it to the pros. Who wouldn’t take it? And while you’re at it, why not some of that blood-enhancing stuff the bikers use? I mean, what the hell, endurance is good too. And yeah, you need to focus at the plate, right? Modafinil’s good for that. Maybe some adderall too, why not. Another 5 points of batting average is another 5 points of batting average, right? Maybe you’ll need them to beat out that other guy who just got in from highschool…
The need to protect elite athletes from themselves is real. In surveys administered between 1982 and 1995, half of elite athletes said they would take an undetectable PED if doing so meant they would win an Olympic gold medal, even if the drug were guaranteed to kill them within five years. When that hypothetical was posed to 250 normal Australians, less than one percent said they would take the gold-then-death drug.
So yes, athletes will dope – for glory and for money. Maybe a few of the absolute freaks like JJ Watts may decline, but most will dope if they think they will get away with it.
Thing is hitting .275 with 12 HR’s would probably get you to the bigs. Look at MLB stats in the past few years. But I think in baseball it has to do with the culture now, guys are getting caught. Mostly latins for some reason. The 30HR guy is big again. Hitting .275 was always good.
However, if you told guys they could take a drug that nobody would know about and it would guarantee them a 10 year career I have no doubt guys would take it. On ESPN I have heard so many former NFL players say exactly that. So many guys whose bodies are falling apart talking about how they would change nothing. So I get your point.
Okay, make it .240 then. Without looking at any stats whatsoever I was under the impression that averages are much higher in the minors because pitchers are typically later to develop and/or held back from hurting themselves compared to hitters. Anyway, yeah the main point this is an endemic problem because of the huge money involved, not to mention the ultracompetitive attitude all these athletes are naturally fostered on.
Well here’s the thing, that .275 may be a good average in the bigs, if that is your average in A ball it is unlikely you would do that in the bigs. You’d be someone near the Mendoza line as a regular. There is a roughly 20-30 point drop in average as you move up levels.
Take Kris Bryant for example. Last year he hit exactly .275. Yet look at his minor league stats, .350s in A, .325 in AA, .295 in his short stint at AAA, and .275 in MLB. Now as a rookie last year it is reasonable to expect gains this year, but it is unlikely he’ll ever get the .330’s-.350’s in the majors regularly.
So a player that hits .275 in A would be more comparable to a player like David Ross. You can see for his career in the majors he is a hitter that fluctuates in the .220s range. Not particularly good, and below the Mendoza line in recent years. Yet looking at A ball (before his first call up) he was in the .250 to .300 range. AA and AAA something like .250. SO a relatively decent comp for the theoretical A ball player hitting .275. So unless he is a good defensive catcher, or phenomenal defensive substitute with wheels to steal, they’d probably not get the call. David Ross only did because he was good behind the plate, good enough to offset his offensive liabilities.
So, yeah, that A ball player is going to be highly incentivized to get those stats up.
You are correct, and I was in the middle of writing up this post on that with some of those stats.
Now if Triggercut shows up he could really school you with more research than I put in, because Chris is a fount of knowledge stretching back before I was born.
We have a AAA team here that I follow some, and a guy hitting .275 is pretty common. Fact is most players mature into the game and will tend to get better over a few years before they top out. And if you check minor league stats you will find some guys hitting .350 but noyt many at any level.
But while I think the minor leaguer is trying to get to the majors he also knows he can move up simply by outperforming the players on his own team. The biggest jump is the one from AAA to the bigs though. The PCL (AAA League) had only 16 hitters hit over .300 last year. The California League (A League) had 8. Now the number of bats required and players moving may effect those numbers.
The exact number, sure, but it is absolutely accurate to state that as players move up the ranks their batting average will tend to drop off. It is far from the best stat to compare offensive performance, but it was the one brought up.
Besides vagaries of luck tend to even out over large sample sizes. Not always, but usually. And batting average still has value in player comps, just not as much as it did 20 years ago.
Which is why the best thing is to stop faffing about and just make enhancements officially allowed in all pro sports where the goal is the objective target - i.e. “fastest possible”, “strongest possible”, etc. - and allow enhancements to be monitored by doctors.
Then have separate “clean” olympics, leagues, etc., for those who want to make a point of it, where the goal is specifically to see what an un-enhanced human being can do, regardless of whether it’s “fastest”, “strongest”, etc., in an absolute sense.
i.e. separate the goals out, and the rest will fall into place naturally. Then you have goals (enhanced) and goals (unenhanced). That way everyone’s happy.
What pays better, being average to below average in the enhanced league, or being the best of the best in the unenhanced league. Because that is a very different proposition.
The other thing is that by endorsing an enhanced league there opens up the floodgates for high school and college athletes. That would be a huge problem, as the effects of performance enhancing drugs on developing bodies, not to mention the decisions made be people whose cognitive functions are still developing, would be potentially huge. That opens up a bunch of societal costs I’m pretty sure we do not want.
