FOR those of us who love baseball, this has been a hard time. The Mitchell report named many players past and present it said used steroids and human growth hormone, and the news media had a field day focusing on the lying, the cheating and the betrayal of the game and its fans. Yet no one has asked a fundamental question: Do performance-enhancing drugs improve performance in professional baseball?
These drugs can cause physiological changes and lasting health problems, and they may have pronounced effects in individual sports like cycling, swimming, skiing and track, where the difference between a gold medalist and an also-ran is sometimes measured in hundredths or thousandths of a second.
But in a complex team sport like baseball, do the drugs make a difference sufficient to be detected in the players’ performance records? An examination of the data on the players featured in the Mitchell report suggests that in most cases the drugs had either little or a negative effect.
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