March 11, 2004
Steroids and Antitrust
In response to my post about the Senate hearings on steroids, Frank made the following comment:
I don't understand why so many of you hold such cynical views about this. Look, the MLB exists only because Congress is willing to grant it an exception from anti-trust laws. Congress does this because it believes that the benefits of baseball outweighs the evils of a monopoly, right? So what happens when baseball becomes disgraced sport played by many players who cheat by taking illegal substances?
MLB's anti-trust exception gives Congress the right and the responsibility to make sure that baseball remains a public good. That's why senators are getting involved in this controversy. Besides, isn't it possible that these senators are baseball fans who care about the game?
It's clear that the union has no desire to fix this issue and the owners are too weak to fight them on it. I think Congressional pressure is the impetus that baseball sorely needs to institute a rigorous testing regime.
MLB wouldn't exist without the antitrust exemption? If anything, Major League Baseball would be stronger without the antitrust exemption. It would have to compete against independent minor leagues. We would have seen free agency sooner without the antitrust exemption, and free agency is responsible for the growth in the game over the last 30 years. There's a high probability that if the antitrust exemption had not been in place, the players would have never formed a union to protect them from the evils of drug testing! Look at the NFL. Lousy union, tough testing rules.
Also, Congress did not grant the exemption, the Supreme Court did. When people tried to challenge the decision, the Supreme Court punted and said it was up to Congress to resind it. So Congress is now responsible for a rule that it had no hand in forming.
I don't think it's clear that the union has no desire to fix this issue. The union is run by very smart men, who I suspect understand the steroid issue much better than the Senators questioning them. They understand that tests consist of false positives and false negatives, as well as real results. That's why players are only being reprimanded after long term failures, and why the players privacy is protected. The program they put in place may not be intrusive enough for a lot of people, but I think that the fact that 5 to 7% came up positive instead of the 70% that some people speculated about means that testing may be working.
Posted by David Pinto at
07:54 AM
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Cheating
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"The union is run by very smart men, who I suspect understand the steroid issue much better than the Senators questioning them."
Isn't that the point of a Senate hearing? To get expert testimony on an issue to help the Senators better understand it?
Great point though about the anti-trust issue and how that comes into play.
I still agree with impetus of Frank's comment: Congress does have a vested interest in protecting the "national pastime" status of baseball. Perhaps they are going about it all wrong, but I won't argue that they should just ignore baseball's problems.
It would please me to no end if the anti-trust exemption went away. Baseball's doing pretty well as it is, I think with a little competition to light a fire it would get back to the popularity level the NFL currently enjoys.
Right, Dave. This is standard-issue election-year politics. McCain is desperate to displace the headline, days ago, that he would consider an offer from Kerry to be his VP. Of course that will never happen, and now he looks stupid, so it is time to trot out the bluster and revise his free media coverage while he keeps it going.
Anyone who thinks this that Bush and McCain are sticking their noses into MLB's steroids with pure and honest motives is sticking his head in the sand or worse, being a deceptive partisan. It's no accident that the MLB's player's union is being made to Look Bad much the same way that Bush's education policies are making the teacher's unions Look Bad. And the free media - look! here's a politician who will get tough on drugs! - is like crack for any politician, Republican or Democrat. Like Marion Barry, they can't resist the stuff.
1) Don't pass this off as just an election year issue. There is bi partisan support for congressional intervention. Don't believe me ask Joe Biden.
2) Just because an organization is run by smart men doesn't mean it's exempt from doing dumb things in the attempt to self preserve.
So, "bipartisan support" somehow doesn't make this an election-year issue? C'mon - the Demos have no desire to see the Republicans run away with a soft issue like this, and given the level of public hysteria associated with every aspect of the War on Drugs, I'm not surprised that Biden and other prominent Democrats are piling on.
As someone related to a a prominent House Representative (Democrat, BTW), I can tell you right now that public hearings are for show, period. Most of the real work of the committee gets done in closed briefing sessions and senior staff meetings, and the hearings are held mostly to impress the media and public with a dazzling array of witnesses and to reassure the folks back home that they have a real clever bunch representing them in DC.
Congressional pressure will accomplish very little, because everyone knows that it will only last until Election Day. Most of these guys are on multiple committees and know damn well that there are a host of other, far more serious matters to deal with right now. You may see a bill or two passed, perhaps a resolution, everyone will pay lip service to it, testing requirements may tighten up a notch, and then everyone will be busy running for re-election and they'll forget the whole thing.
As somebody who actually, like, works in the House of Representatives, with several offices and committees, Mark B. is pretty wrong about the public hearings just being for show. In certain cases that's true, but most of the time they serve any of a number of useful purposes.
Of course, some work gets done in closed-door meetings (quite a lot on some committees, like Intelligence, where information they work with is classified)
However, in the long run, I don't think the steroids thing is "standard election-year politics" (which is a misnomer anyway; on some level politicians are always running for re-election, and at the same time their work is both completely political and completely not political). Because, frankly, I don't think most of the population really cares.
Yeah. Mark B. is totally deluded. They have public hearings on less 'sexy' issues all the time on the CSPANs. The hearings are a way for congress to get the information on these issues from industry leaders while they are under oath. Most hearings are public for reasons that should be obvious -- the work of government (unless there's some competing reason) is done out in the open in a democracy. Go down to your state house some time. You're free to just walk on in (usually) and watch.
I'd take issue with the conclusion Mr. Pinto is drawing with respect to the 5-7% of players testing positive. The fact that 5-7% tested positive is hardly an indication that only 5-7% of players are on steroids given the fact that the players were well aware of precisely when the tests were taken. It's likely higher than 5-7%. And of course one would have to assume the percentage of players on HGH is even higher.
Also, with respect to the false positive/negative issue, the players are tested twice within a certain time frame. Normal rate of false postives is 1 in 200. So the chance of getting back to back false positives would be roughly 1 in 40000. Obviously that's higher than zero, but the test error issue isn't nearly the issue that the players' trade association would have you believe.
Congress does this all the time in other industries. There's a problem between two different parties that the free market just isn't solving (in their mind) so they step in and lean on both parties to make a deal and get the problem addressed.
Steroids are a controlled substance, if you recall, so when there's potentially large scale illegal use of a controlled substance in an industry, and that industry fails to adequately address the problem on its own, is it so crazy that the body that made these drugs controlled substances in the first place wants to step in and get the problem addressed?
Say, I must have forgotton, what did the previous public hearing involving Selig accomplish?
I like edw's argument that Congress has a vested interest in baseball since it's the "national pasttime." I guess Congress's next hearing will be to decide who should play quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys since they are America's team. :)
I study antitrust policy for a living. I feel pretty safe in asserting that the antitrust exemption makes basically no difference one way or another in how baseball runs. But repealing the exemption would not introduce any more competition for baseball that's not capable of existing now. If anything prevents more competition with current sports leagues, in all sports, it's government-subsidized stadiums and ballparks. If all stadiums were privately financed and run, the competitive landscape in sports would be significantly different.
But here's something that would positively impact baseball (and many other businesses): Repealing the *labor* exemption from the antitrust laws. Labor law grants unions *monopoly* bargaining power over labor agreements. Without that power, for example, individual baseball players could voluntarily submit to drug testing, because they wouldn't be legally bound to the union's position.
Of course, no congressman would ever propose repealing the labor exemption, even just for baseball, because it would provoke a mass-Jihad from the AFL-CIO.