May 12, 2014
"Track and Battlefield" by Steve Sailer and Stephen Seiler, 1997
October 24, 2012
Baseball: Is it too soon to go back in the fan pool?
August 27, 2012
Tennis Arms Race: Roger v. Serena
| Sure he may be the greatest player of all time. But Roger Federer is nowhere near the tops when it comes to arm muscles at Wimbledon this year. There are more impressive specimens to come.... |
| But really, Serena Williams takes the cake. Her arms look more muscled than Roger Federer's thighs. No wonder she has such a powerful serve. |
The other thing that I wanted to mention is the weird climate we are in where you aren't really supposed to mention that it's nice to see a champion athlete who looks like Federer -- a grown man who, for once, doesn't look like a cartoon character or a mutant. I guess that would be too offensive to all the science project athletes and their fans.
So, what other top athletes out there besides Federer are still built more like, say, Joe DiMaggio in 1941 than like Predator or Alien?
August 16, 2012
A rant
Or extremely famous people can change their shape radically and it doesn't really come up. For example, Tiger Woods became extremely muscular over a couple of years around age 30 because he was working out like crazy in case he decided to give up golf and enlist in the Navy Seals. Now, that's pretty interesting, but it's not at all clear how many golf fans consciously noticed that the most publicized golfer in history was changing shape from month to month in front of their eyes. When I wrote an article about it in 2009, I did a bunch of Googling and found a lot of pictures, but it just didn't seem to be a topic of written interest to people interested in Tiger Woods.
Or people can be famous for their shapes and it never seems to come up that there's anything doubtful about why they are shaped like that. The craziest example is that in the 2003 California gubernatorial election, the Democrats almost never got around to bringing up the fact that Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger was the world's most famous steroid user and that electing him governor of the largest state in the Union was the highest endorsement possible (Arnold being ineligible for the Presidency) to young people of society's approval of building a career on steroids.
It was hardly a secret -- Arnold admitted to steroid use in his autobiography -- and it wasn't some mistake of his foolish past -- he had just been paid $30 million to star in Terminator 3, which was released just days before he started his campaign. Heck, Arnold did a nude scene in Terminator 3 to show off his regained massiveness. I wrote an article a few months before the election pointing all this out. But the Democratic operatives instead mostly went with the sex scandal stuff that they thought would be electoral dynamite: Hollywood star likes the ladies!
This is not to say that the steroid stuff would have hurt Arnold's run for governor, either. No doubt it wouldn't have. Democratic operative Gary South had brought it up the year before. I don't know why so little attention was drawn to it in 2003, when he was obviously back on the juice for Terminator 3: perhaps it didn't poll well. Or it didn't get much traction in 2002 when South faxed around a scandal sheet of sex and steroid stuff.
What's the explanation for this weird phenomenon? I'm reminded of the scene at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Hunter S. Thompson goes to Circus Circus to buy an ape:
I found Bruce at the bar, but there was no sign of the ape. "Where is it?" I demanded. "I'm ready to write a check. I want to take the bastard back home on the plane with me. I've already reserved two first-class seats -- R. Duke and Son."
"Take him on the plane?"
"Hell yes," I said. "You think they'd say anything? Call attention to my son's infirmities?"
Still, I don't think politeness is the full explanation. Maybe if somebody is presented in a socially approving way, like on TV or in Hitler's Olympic Stadium, people naturally just say to themselves, "Well, of course, that's what people who work out look like. I could probably look like that myself with some exercise."
Also, Hunter S. Thompson was probably onto something with booking first-class seats. He and his pet ape would no doubt get thrown out of coach, but they had a shot in first-class.
Another aspect is access journalism. If you want Tiger Woods on the cover of your magazine ever again, you don't ask him questions about him lifting weights every day ... unless you have a picture of him with a waitress in a parking lot.
Finally, let me come back to my recurrent theme of the inadequacy of tacit understandings. I am constantly being informed that we don't need horrible persons like me pointing out in writing things that we all understand perfectly well on an unspoken level. But it constantly turns out that we don't understand implicit knowledge when framed in a slightly different way. The Obama staffers who can judge what's a safe enough street in gentrifying Washington within a half block just by watching pedestrians stroll by will go back to the office and sue school districts for racial disparities in suspension rates.
The reason I have a relatively good understanding of the impact of PEDs on sports and movies is because in 1996-97 I spent a huge amount of time constructing and analyzing a database of Olympic running results by sex. By the time I was done, this vague hunch I had had that the narrowing of the gender gap after some point in the 1970s was largely due to artificial male hormones having a bigger impact on women was seared into me. I think the media as a whole is slowly catching on to that, finally, but without spelling it out over and over, people don't learn lessons well enough to apply them in slightly novel settings.
Finally, what people do notice are hair cuts. You don't even have to change hair styles, just get a haircut and other people will notice. You can grow a beard for a year, shave it off one evening, then go into work the next day and maybe one person will mention it. But, get your routine haircut, and five people will mention it the next day, even though there's not a lot to be said about it: "Yeah, I uh hadn't gotten a haircut for six or seven weeks, so I uh got one."
June 11, 2011
Politicos on 'roids
I'll leave it to others to look for a picture of Dominique Strauss-Kahn with his shirt off to see if we can create a General Theory of Self-Destructing 2011 Politicians. But I wouldn't be too surprised. Run for President of France? Of course! Rape the maid? What could possibly go wrong?
July 31, 2010
The Typhoid Mary of Steroids
Learning Unethical Practices from a Co-worker:The Peer Effect of Jose Canseco
Eric D. Gould and Todd R. KaplanThis 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.
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.
December 6, 2009
Tiger Woods and Steroids
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
July 5, 2009
All-Star Break
“Sugar” is a critically acclaimed indie film about a 20-year-old Dominican pitcher’s minor league baseball season in Iowa. “Half Nelson,” the last collaboration of its married auteurs, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, brought Ryan Gosling a Best Actor nomination as a caring white liberal teacher in a Brooklyn slum school attended by African-Americans and Dominicans. Because numerous Dominican immigrants in New York City are failed minor leaguers, “Sugar” was a logical next film for the pair.
This movie is about a black Dominican, but it was very much made for white Americans. Indeed, “Sugar” exemplifies Sundance movies. It’s so sensitive, subtle, soft-spoken, averse to crowd-pleasing gimmicks, and generally beholden to the Stuff White People Like rulebook that few ballplayers of any nationality would pay to see it. Dodger slugger Manny Ramirez would snore so loudly through it that the audience couldn’t hear the soundtrack’s climactic song: Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sung in Spanish.
Boden and Fleck wanted not a tale of triumph, but a statistically representative illustration of the typical Dominican athlete’s brief career. We see the young pitcher Sugar (portrayed by Algenis Perez Soto, an amateur second baseman who visibly can’t throw his character’s supposed 95 mph fastball) at the Kansas City organization’s training academy in the baseball-mad small city of San Pedro de MacorÃs (birthplace of 73 major league players, including Sammy Sosa). We follow him to spring training in Phoenix, then to Single A ball in Iowa. There, he’s lonely because there are no Spanish-speaking girls to chat up. After an injury, he’s demoted to the bullpen. His pride too wounded to return home, he quits the team and hops a bus to the South Bronx, where he pursues a career in illegal immigration.
Although most Dominicans (such as the American-born Alex Rodriguez) are some shade of beige, San Pedro ballplayers tend to be descended from black Jamaicans brought in to chop sugar cane. Last year, the 88 Dominicans made up almost 12 percent of major league rosters, despite the Dominican Republic having only three percent of America’s population. The average major league salary is approaching $3 million, so Dominican big leaguers earn around a quarter of a billion dollars annually.
The young ballplayer claims he’s nicknamed “Sugar” because he’s “so sweet with the ladies,” but Boden and Fleck want their film’s title to convey that by signing so many Dominican teens, baseball teams are, like sugar companies, neocolonialist exploiters. To the filmmakers, American ballclubs are to blame both for exploiting Dominicans and for not exploiting African Americans. Fleck complains that the black American share “has gone down to somewhere around 8 or 9 percent now, while the Dominican population in baseball has risen dramatically. Major League Baseball has taken money out of the inner cities … and flipped it into the Dominican Republic, where they can sign players much cheaper.” In the Sundance worldview, whatever happens is white people’s fault; blacks can’t make choices for themselves.
In reality, while MLB teams would love to employ verbally charismatic African Americans instead of tongue-tied Spanish speakers, black American kids these days mostly consider baseball boring. The Dominican Republic represents one of the few sizable concentrations of fast and strong youths of West African descent who find baseball more fascinating than basketball, soccer, or cricket. (Also, steroids can be bought legally without a prescription in Dominican pharmacies.)
The real scandal is that big league baseball has facilitated the illegal immigration of tens of thousands of washed-up uneducated jocks. MLB privatizes profits and socializes costs.
The irony in this trend of dramas striving to be “more documentary-like” is that the best documentaries are far more satisfyingly dramatic than “Sugar.” For example, Werner Herzog’s popular documentary “Grizzly Man” culminates with the annoying protagonist being devoured by a bear. Documentaries that follow somebody as ho-hum as Sugar are unlikely to get widely distributed or even finished.
Boden and Fleck are garnering critical kudos for refusing to create an intriguing plot. Yet, they didn’t have to redo “Rocky” They could have, say, made the kid not a 20-year-old prospect but an 18-year-old prodigy. Once the audience is rooting for him, they could then have yanked the rug out by revealing that the phenom’s agent, like previous Dominican talent hustlers (such as, ironically enough, their own technical advisor, ex-Cincinnati Red Jose Rijo), had defrauded the Americans: the sensation’s not 18, he’s really 22, with just a journeyman’s natural talent. Now, that would be a story.
Rated R for language, some sexuality, and brief drug use.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
July 21, 2007
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
June 20, 2007
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
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
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