seekingferret | (no subject)

I'm trying to persuade myself that it's a good idea to commit to at least one baseball post a week here. My relationship with baseball has been a little awkward and strained for a couple of seasons, for no particularly good reason, and I should try to work on that.

I still love baseball passionately. Anytime I get to go to a game, I have a great time. Anytime I play hot stove league I have a good time. The cool-brewed mixture of physical competition and deep, complicated analysis that is baseball is perfectly suited to my temperament.

And I've never been the sort of hypocrite who decries modern baseball for being all about the money, the players too selfish and not respectful enough of the fans. I've never been offended by players taking steroids. It's preposterous to be a pro baseball fan and have thoughts like that. In high school I wrote an extended essay on the way 19th century baseball professionalized [Here, read it. It won an award from the Society for American Baseball Research and marked one of my earliest footprints on the internet] and studied the corruptions that are deep-rooted in the game's heritage. To love pro baseball truly is to love it flaws and all.

No, the deterioriation of my relationship with the game is much more mundane. Since the Yankees moved to YES, it's a lot more annoying to watch the games, and my love-hate relationship with John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman has swung more toward hate. As I watch less and less games, it becomes harder to maintain a connection to the team. I no longer have the Yankee roster memorized. I no longer have the ability to spout batting averages.

So I'm leaning toward buying a MLB.TV subscription so I can watch all the games, and toward committing to writing about baseball here at least once a week. And probably re-establishing my membership with SABR. Because baseball is an important part of my emotional and intellectual life and I miss having that relationship with a team.

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I've never been offended by players taking steroids. It's preposterous to be a pro baseball fan and have thoughts like that.

I am (as you know, Bob) not a pro baseball fan. Or a sports fan in general.

Can you elaborate on why players taking steroids is not something that one should be offended about? It seems like it would be - if A takes steroids and B does not, is A not deriving a disproportionate advantage in the game?

Well, sure, but to use a canonical example of a performance enhancing substance (i.e., this is a thing that was done, had a measurable impact on player performance, and was not banned)- if player A gets new contact lenses and B does not, is A not deriving a disproportionate advantage? What about getting laser eye surgery, as a number of players have availed themselves in recent years?

Where is the line between legitimate performance enhancing substances (cortisone shots to help reduce inflammation) and illegal performance enhancing substances (anabolic steroids)?

But Ferret, you say, steroids are dangerous! They have serious side effects! Players who don't take steroids are penalized on the field for acting sanely and rationally with relation to their health while players who risk their health are rewarded. Is this how we wish to balance the moral hazard? Perhaps not, but I became convinced this argument was nonsense when I read Jane Leavy's analysis of the biomechanics of Sandy Koufax's pitching motion. Leavy shows that the very act of throwing Koufax's curveball correctly doomed him to a short career and perpetual arm pain afterward. If the act of playing baseball is going to make some players severe arthritics or worse, and they willingly make the sacrifice for the money/joy of the game/etc. with nobody objecting, why are we distinguishing biomechanical injury from pharmacological injury?

But mostly, virtually any pro sports fan wants their team to do whatever it takes to win, regarding it as the job of the umpires to make sure the rules are followed. If a catcher tries to nudge the ball he catches back into the strike zone to make it look like it was a strike ( a practice called framing ), he is valorized by fans. If a runner slides high into second base on a ground ball to try to break up the double play, he is valorized. If a pitcher tries to send a message to the other team by throwing it high and tight, he is valorized. It's the job of the umpire to try to rein in these behaviors, but we encourage players to do everything they can to help win, and teams juice the incentive to use steroids by tying salaries to performance, so... it's hard to get offended or act betrayed when players use steroids, even if you think they should be against the rules.

The only objection to steroid use that I take seriously is that the fact of their use in the pros puts pressure on high school players to use steroids. With amateur high school players I draw the balance of moral hazard differently, for reasons that are pretty obvious, and I find high school steroid use a problem worth confronting.

It seems to me like the examples you are giving can be distinguished from steroids.

* Contact lenses or eye surgery are things which the individual could reasonably get outside of baseball. They are something being used to get the individual (who happens to be a baseball player) up to a vaguely defined "baseline." (If someone with healthy eyes were getting contacts to improve their vision beyond the norm, that would seem dubious to me.)
* Cortisone shots, similarly, seem like they are bringing an individual back to the baseline, rather than increasing beyond the baseline. They are being given to fix the injuries caused by playing.
* I'm willing to cede the "steroids are dangerous" argument, partially since I never brought it up in the first place. Sure, if individuals go ahead and damage their own health knowing the risks then that seems fair. (There are, of course, issues that crop up around individuals being pressured to damage their health by their associates, teammates, and bosses.)

The things that you're mentioning, like framing, seem completely alien to me. I understand what you're saying, but the idea that the culture and community of baseball not only sees these, but encourages them, just doesn't make any sense to me. It seems like it's going against cardinal rules of sportsmanship.

To address your notion of a baseline, professional athletes are defined by the fact that they exceed the baseline. Many of the best baseball players were legendary for having eyesight far superior to the baseline- for being able to see things normal people couldn't see, like, for example, the stitches moving on a fastball travelling at 90mph. So if a baseball player has baseline eyesight, and contacts or eye surgery bring them past the baseline to exceptional eyesight, it might be argued that it's identical to steroid use in unnecessarily bringing them beyond their natural abilities, or it might be argued that it's just bringing them to the baseline for a pro athlete.

Cortisone shots allow a player to play in situations when a normal human being would be in far too much pain to play. Again, it's only bringing it back to the baseline if we define the baseline abnormally. Normal human beings can't run the bases at full speed on a sprained ankle.

As to the sportsmanship argument, sportsmanship is a concept that originated in amateur sports and people have tried to hypocritically and haphazardly apply it to professional sports since their inception, but it has never made sense. The way incentives are structured in professional sports, sportsmanship can only ever be a tertiary concern. The main thesis of the paper I linked to above (which is, I warn, written by 16 year old me and isn't as good as I would write it today) is that attempts to make pro sports adhere to the standards of amateur sports are only ever going to lead to foolish idealists looking foolish, and probably tangentially break other things along the way.

Quick response: you are starting to make me shift from "professional sports are this thing that some folks like, that I don't" to "professional sports set up terrible incentives and wind up hurting people." :P

The incentives are not exclusively a terrible thing. Pro athletes are essentially given this proposition: On the plus side, you'll make six or seven figure salaries for a decade, enough to retire at 35 or 40 if you manage your finances will and live like a king for the rest of your life. Your job will only require you to work half of the year. Your job will involve playing a game you love playing, every day. You will be adored by many people, and will reap numerous unmeasurable perks as a result. On the down side, your job offers significant health risks, though it's unclear whether those health risks are more significant than, say, working as a construction worker, there is constant competition for only a few slots, and you probably have to forgo educational opportunities to pursue it.

For many pro athletes, the risk/reward analysis comes out positive. There are a lot of perks to the lifestyle.