Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
January 27, 2004
Sports and Technology

Tyler Cowen at the Volokh Conspiracy gives a nice review of Transition Game, a new blog about sports and technology. Nick Schulz is the author, and to my delight he's linked to Baseball Musings. Check out this post on steroids. I'm in agreement with Nick, especially his last paragraph. And this post on uncertainty is the type of thing I like to study. Maybe we can do it with pitchers instead of tennis players.

Stop by and wish Nick good luck with his new blog.


Posted by David Pinto at 11:24 AM | Blogs | TrackBack (0)
Comments

hi david.

on uncertainty. don't catchers and pitchers review the hitters before games to decrease uncertainty of what hitters like to do in different situations and pitches? so how could you get a formula? even if a computer gave a pitcher a pre game printout of what to throw and when, it doesn't mean that the pitcher should follow it because he may not have command of a certain pitch that day, or the umpire might not call a certain pitch a strike, etc. so it night could be hard for a hitter to decrease uncertainty for the same reason.

on the steroids (testosterone-like)
nick and dayn perry assume that if a doctor prescribes these compounds to whoever wants them, things will be fine. it's not dangerous? no side effects? like, what? i don't believe it. so if i decide i want to do 50 pushups per minute and i need massive shoulders, i can trot along to my doctor and she should hand me testosterone, and i can shoot up and it won't injure any of my body parts, including ovaries, breasts and brain. let alone making me all hairy (yecccch) and stinky. and when i decide to stop, there won't be any lasting effects. i don't believe it. i'm not going to believe it has no problems associated with its "medical" use. doctors use it to treat disease and deficiency, not just to give it to someone who, if he is male, already has enough. we are just finding out that giving us grrrls all those artificial female hormones isn't exactly a good idea either. and i know if you give a grrrl artificial female hormones, it shuts her ovaries down. so why wouldn't giving her testosterone to build up her muscles not hurt, too. or if you don't want to talk about grrls, why wouldn't all this excess testosterone shut off a man's testicles, too?
if some adult person wants big muscles more than anything else and is willing to sacrifice his/her unknown future, well that's their decision. but i don't see that there is any good scientific evidence that if i shoot up with testosterone, with or without any doctor's help, that it causes no lasting harm.
i know that probably the dangers of shooting up with this stuff may be exaggerated, but it doesn't make it harmless.

Posted by: lisa gray at January 27, 2004 09:04 PM

Lisa,

Harmful is a relative term. We face risks in our lives everyday. Some are so small, like falling on the stairs, that we don't even think about them. Some are in the back of our minds, like driving cars. We know to be careful, but I don't think, "I might get killed or maimed if I get in this car." Steriods have risks, no doubt.

But in a doctor's care, where the doses are controlled and the exposure is controlled and reactions to the drugs are monitored, the risk can be greatly minimized. That situation is certainly better than a young person trying to figure out dosages on his or her own.

Artificial female hormones are a perfect example of this. When birth control pills first came out, the dosage was much higher than it is now. Higher dosages can often lead to more side effects. But the lower dose pills available today have "largely mitigated the risk of blood clots, heart attack and stroke." So sometimes it takes time and a lot of study to get these therapies right.

And that's not going to happen without scientists who are concerned about the patients being involved. That's why I'd like to see athletes taking them under doctor's care rather than unsupervised. There is less chance of long term damage if the dose is correct, and if you are being montiored for other long term effects.

Posted by: David Pinto at January 28, 2004 10:11 AM