As a preface to this argument, I'd like to mention I've spent the past week at the Institute for Humane Studies' summer seminar on Liberty & Society. While there, I learned a great deal of economic and political theory that has been burrowing its way into my brain and worldview over the past several days. This essay is an attempt to synthesize some of those concepts with a familiar topic. Feel free to punch holes anywhere you see fit. Boy, the justice system just can't catch a break this month, can it? First,
we let a clearly-guilty murderer off the hook for the death of her infant daughter, and just a few weeks later federal prosecutors gloriously blunder the perjury case of Roger Clemens. We're talking
Mike McDermott after 48 hours on a poker run-levels of incompetency. Howard Bryant, of ESPN.com,
reports an attorney familiar with the workings of the federal court and judge who presided over the case called the mistake of producing disallowed evidence "a colossal" and "total screw-up." Like Barry Bonds,
Clemens' numbers post-40 defy description. A record of 61-33, ERA totals routinely hovering around 3.00 (including a mind-numbing 1.87 in 2005 with Houston), and a K/BB ratio (around 3.00 as well) that makes
Luke Hochevar (1.50 this year) look like a
straight-out-of-penal-league Rich Vaughn. If anybody could be proved to be juicing, it had to be Clemens, right?
So thought the government. The Congressional hearing on steroids in baseball in 2005 was ostensibly conducted (as Rep. Henry Waxman suggested)
to address the public health concern of America's children using steroids. By publicizing the proceedings and subpoenaing the biggest names in the sport, the committee and the media instead sensationalized the issue to construct a kind of kangaroo court against baseball, with several big-name players being brought before the committee and
ducking questions by invoking their Constitutional rights (or, in the case of Rafael Palmeiro,
offering themselves as sacrifices to the Ironic gods). George Mitchell's 2007 report to Congress was requested by baseball commissioner Bud Selig after the release of
Game of Shadows, an investigative look at steroid use in baseball in the late 90s and early 2000s, was published in 2006 by Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada. In effect, Selig "passed the buck" on his obligation to keep baseball clean to the federal government, allowing political agents to use the platform to further their interests (and attain fame) and spend taxpayer dollars in the defense of what became a kind of public good in the aftermath of the scandal.
The government's involvement, as requested by Selig, was based on several assumptions. The first is the aforementioned link between steroid use by professionals and among the nation's children. The reasoning, of course, was that America's youth baseball players would need to begin using human growth hormone to keep up with their peers early on. This approach assumes a public smear campaign of baseball's venerated stars would be more effective in limiting steroid use than policies of individual athletic associations and schools. The government, in this instance, becomes the whistle-blower. I do not argue that perhaps a whistle-blower was necessary in the issue of drug use among the nation's young athletes. What I am arguing is that perhaps the federal government was not the most effective agent in doing so. Certainly, this appears to be the case in the bungling of the federal perjury cases against Bonds and Clemens, which have resulted in merely one minor conviction against Bonds despite the exorbitant amounts of taxpayer money spent in trying the cases.
Second, the government's involvement as a protectionist agency indicates that the American people wanted baseball to be clean. Such an argument is based on the moral presumption that our athletes and athletic contests should somehow uphold the values we would like to see reflected in society: honesty, integrity and fairness. In actuality, sports are a product served to a consumer base that generally acts with little (if any) of these ideals in mind. Tavi Sojo's Bleacher Report study "
The Effects of the Steroid Era on the 2008 Baseball Season" comes to the conclusion that the fans simply didn't care about truth and fairness, as long as balls were flying out of the park. In 2003, the BALCO controversy broke and so began the now 8-year period of steroid skepticism that lingers in almost all media coverage of baseball (just
ask Jose Bautista). Yet, fan attendance from 2004-2007 continued a climb to unprecedented levels. However, policies instituted by the findings of the Mitchell Report drove home runs down and pitching and defensive statistical categories up in 2008, according to Sojo's numbers research. As a result of these developments, average attendance dropped for the first time in five years.
That trend has continued through 2010, though of course it's important to remember that the recent economic downturn has probably also impacted attendance figures. Having said that, it doesn't appear as though "making the game clean" has had any significant impact on the number of people coming out to the park each night, and potentially drove away fans looking to see the long ball more often.
This, of course, gets at the heart of the third and most important assumption from an economics standpoint that led to government intervention in rules-making in Major League Baseball: that fans simply do not act rationally, and that in their love of offense they were driving players to harm themselves through the use of banned substances. The government, in this scenario, had to step in to protect the players from themselves and the voracious demands of power from growing numbers of baseball enthusiasts. I will refer to this presumption as "The WWE Effect." Quite simply, the fear follows the line that, if players continued to respond to the desires of fans who want to see 600-foot home runs, they were going to wind up looking like Triple H or Mr. Perfect instead of, say,
this. In effect, government intervention becomes a safeguard against an arms race or, say, housing bubble in which the human cost would be seen in debilitating physical handicaps for players later in life who used PEDs during their playing days. Government, it could be argued, would speed up the process of demonstrating the dangers of these drugs by dragging the names of the players using through the mud and encouraging fans that they were "harming the game" to save themselves from physical issues later in life.
Warning: "Aviator" reference- "Way of the future..."?
But was the government campaign even necessary? Before charges were even brought against Barry Bonds, his appearance in
Game of Shadows led to
massive protests against his campaign to break the all-time home run record. When Bonds did eventually break the home run record, it was
under a cloud of suspicion that dwarfed the achievement compared to the
euphoria that ensued when Hank Aaron topped Ruth's record. Perhaps as many people attended the Bond's home run game as Aaron's, and certainly the amount of money Bonds made in his playing career towers over Aaron's career earnings. But baseball has a traditional element to its marketplace that could have just as easily attained the same (or better) outcomes preventing youth usage of steroids as government involvement. Fans may act irrationally with their money, returning to a sport as a method of release after, say, a protracted strike (or lockout) that resembles, to them, an
argument between millionaires and billionaires. But the dependency of sport on the fan encourages minor rule changes, better television deals and increased levels of comfort at modern stadiums. The sports we watch today are better covered, more competitive, and provide higher levels of entertainment than the sports of fifty years ago. The same will be true in another fifty years, as long as government gets out of the way. Perhaps the most recent governmental blunder in the handling of the Roger Clemens' perjury case will make fans realize we don't need the federal government to install order in the games we are passionate about-we can do it ourselves.
