Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
March 28, 2004
Steroid Testing, A Player's View

The Baseball Crank links to Jody Gerut on steroid testing. From Gerut:


MLB's drug program goes like this: last year a serious survey was done to determine if there was a problem with steroids in the game. If 5% or more of players tested positive then our drug deterrence program would be enforced and in 2004 we would have random, unannounced testing. Just over 5% of players tested positive but those test results were skewed. Problems occurred when those players who were randomly chosen to test more than once during the year and tested positive were counted twice, not once. Those players were counted as two positives not one, thus increasing the amount of overall positives and lifting the percentage of positive tests into the 5% range. Some players were mistakenly tested three times and if by chance they tested positive those were counted three times! 5% may not have been 5%.

That's not something I heard before. I'm surprised that the union would have agreed to such testing. Reading the basic agreement (page 161), I think Jody has this wrong. It says, "5% of players tested." That says to me, if you test 1000 individual players, 50 individuals have to test positive, not if you conduct 1000 tests, 50 have to be positive. I don't think the union would let management get away with that.

Update: In the comments below, Marty Cortinas of Across the Seams confirms Gerut with testimony by Donald Fehr. It seems to be that the union agreed to more stringent testing that the wording of the labor agreement would indicate.


Posted by David Pinto at 01:07 PM | Cheating | TrackBack (1)
Comments

Go read Donald Fehr's statement to the Senate committee. The testing was designed to test some players more than once. Here's a link.

Here's the pertinent part: "In essence, we proposed to break the decades old deadlock on suspicionless testing by agreeing to a triggering mechanism; an unannounced anonymous test of not simply every player in the bargaining unit, but 120% of them (i.e., 20% of the players were tested twice). A total of 1438 tests were conducted in an 1198 player group, a ratio of actual tests to the number of individuals eligible to be tested that we understand far exceeds the norm in most other testing regimes. If more than 5% of those 1438 tests came back positive, the Players Association would recede from its decades long opposition to suspicionless testing of all players, which would then begin and continue unless the number of positives fell below 2.5% over two consecutive years."

The shame is that most baseball beat reporters and columnists either are unaware of this setup or don't take care to clarify it.

Posted by: Marty at March 28, 2004 03:05 PM

Of course, that pendulum swings both ways. If a player was tested two or three times and came up negative, it would drive the numbers down.

Given that the percentage who tested positive is so low, I'd say that this testing method actually slightly repressed the numbers. Sounds like we've got something closer to 8 to 10% juicing, based on this.

Posted by: John Y. at March 28, 2004 05:32 PM

Many rumors have said that utility IF's and other "little guys" were the ones tested more than once, to keep the number low. I don't know what's true, but Gerut misses the obvious point, if you ain't using, all you have to fear is an uncomfy time frame until you have to pee. For $300K, I can tolerate that, no problem.

Posted by: Al at March 28, 2004 07:25 PM

Let's run the numbers. Of the 1438 tests, 5 to 7 percent came up positive. That's 72 to 100 positive tests. Now if you assume that every repeat test was clean and throw them out, what's the percentage of players -- 1198 of them -- that come out positive? It's 6 to 8 percent.

Posted by: Marty at March 28, 2004 09:09 PM

If they are testing middle infielders to keep the numbers down, remember that one guy caught red-handed was Manny Alexander.

Posted by: Shawn at March 29, 2004 10:52 AM

So it's 6 to 8 per cent, not 8 to 10. My point is that double-tested players are more likely to drive the number down rather than up, given how few players there are that tested positive.

If we assume they double-tested every single player who tested positive, the result is still over 4%. Granted, that's lower than the threshold, but I also think it's a ridiculous assumption given that the tests were anonymous.

Posted by: John Y. at March 29, 2004 12:59 PM

Double testing won't bias the numbers in any particular direction unless there was a specific effort to double test individuals based on their perceived use or non-use of steroids. I don't see any evidence of this. From what I can tell, the double test setup was used to further mask players' identities.

Posted by: Marty at March 29, 2004 07:04 PM