Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

by L. Jon Wertheim

  At this writing, the change will be implemented only for playoff games, when a winner must be determined. During the regular season, teams that are tied at the end of regulation time will continue to toss a coin to see who receives the ball in overtime, and the team that is luckier probably will walk off the field victorious.

  WHAT ISN’T IN THE MITCHELL REPORT?

  Why Dominican baseball players are more likely to use steroids—and American players are more likely to smoke weed

  On January 11, 2010, Mark McGwire, the former St. Louis Cardinals slugger, attended confession. He sat across from Bob Costas on an MLB Network set made to look like a cozy living room—replete with lamps, urns, and a faux fireplace—to talk, finally, about the past. He looked noticeably less bulked up than the behemoth who’d captivated the country during his 1998 pursuit of Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. His familiar red hair now salted with gray, McGwire stifled tears and looked shamefaced as he confirmed what most baseball fans had long suspected. Yes, he admitted, he had used performance-enhancing drugs, or PEDs. He then asked for forgiveness.

  As apologies go, McGwire’s did not exactly set a new benchmark for sackcloth-and-ashes contrition. His mea culpa had been orchestrated by Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s first White House press secretary, now a sports consultant and crisis manager. In the weeks leading up to the interview, Fleischer prepped McGwire on every conceivable question he might face. “It was just like batting practice,” explained McGwire. “[The] attitude was: You’re not going to get blindsided.”

  McGwire’s confession coincided with an offer to become the St. Louis Cardinals’ hitting coach. (Was his admission a crisis of conscience or a condition for a new job?) Interspersed among the pleas of penance, McGwire lamented, “I wish I had never played in the steroid era,” as if he’d had no say in the decision to juice up and had simply, by accident of birth, had the misfortune of playing at the wrong time. He also echoed the increasingly familiar explanation of countless other athletes caught in the steroids web: “The only reason that I took steroids was for my health purposes. I did not take steroids to get any gain for any strength purposes.”

  Although McGwire later reflected that his confession “went wonderfully,” public opinion was split. In the minds of most fans, there is enough circumstantial evidence to convict Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa of steroid use, too. McGwire was the first from that group to come forward voluntarily and make an outright admission of guilt. Good for him. But McGwire’s insistence that he’d used the drugs only for recovery from an injury rang hollow. Steroids are a performance-enhancing drug, and it is no coincidence that McGwire’s biggest years in terms of home run production coincided with the period in which he now admits he juiced up. If McGwire had used the drugs only for convalescence and not for strength, why had he felt compelled to apologize to the Maris family? McGwire’s critics, unmoved by his apology, contended that he’d become the face of the steroids era in baseball.

  For most baseball fans, steroids are commonly associated with Major League stars like McGwire, José Canseco, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, and Manny Ramirez: sluggers with chests and arms as disproportionately large as their home run totals, ageless pitchers throwing heat into their forties, and utility infielders suddenly jacking 30 home runs in a season. Those were the cheaters who distorted the competition and tainted baseball’s hallowed statistics, who made it into former U.S. senator George Mitchell’s report.* Those were the players who made steroids such a cause célèbre.

  But that picture is inaccurate. Most of the steroids in baseball were purchased and consumed by players whose names won’t be familiar to even the most die-hard fans and who are not listed in the Mitchell Report. Among the 274 professional players who tested positive for steroids and other banned performance-enhancing drugs between 2005 and the fall of 2010, 249, the overwhelming majority, were minor league players whose faces never made it onto the front of a baseball card.

  The true face of the steroid era? It might look a lot like the smiling mug of Welington Dotel. An irrepressible outfielder with a lively bat and an arm so powerful that it should require a license, Dotel grew up in Neiba, Dominican Republic, a fairly nondescript town in the southwestern quadrant of the island, not far from the border of Haiti. Welington was the oldest of five children born to parents who kept the family afloat by doing a series of odd jobs: working in restaurants, working on roads, teaching. According to Welington, “It changed with the season, but they did many things.”

  The family struggled in a region where average annual household income was less than $9,000. “We were not rich,” Welington says, laughing. Yet he was better off than some of his friends and neighbors, who played baseball with milk cartons for gloves and sticks for bats. As with so many boys on the island, he fell hard for baseball. The game fed something inside him. But it was also a way, he dreamed, to deliver his family from poverty.

  Genial and outgoing, Welington makes friends easily. His formal education ended before high school, when, like most Dominican prospects, he dropped out to pursue a career on the ball field. Asked what he’d be doing were it not for baseball, he pauses. “Maybe teaching baseball,” he says. “Something with baseball because it’s my passion. Maybe even more than my passion. It’s everything to me.”

  A late bloomer, Welington was 18 when he was signed as a free agent by the Seattle Mariners organization. His signing bonus, he says, was $160,000. “It was unbelievable,” he says. “They told me and I was like, ‘Sure, I sign that!’ ” He bought his mom a new home, financed a new car, and acquired some of the other material possessions no one in his family had ever owned.

  When Dotel reported to the Mariners, it marked the first time he’d left the Caribbean. He staved off homesickness by remembering just how lucky he was to have the opportunity. His professional career started auspiciously enough. He returned to his island in 2005 and played for the Mariners team in the Dominican Summer League, hitting .373 in 69 games. But in his first year of Rookie ball, his career stalled a bit. Playing in Peoria, Arizona, 2,500 miles (and immeasurable cultural miles) from home, Dotel hit .261 with seven home runs. Not terrible at age 20 but not the kind of numbers that impress the franchise gatekeepers.

  Then, toward the end of the 2006 season, he tested positive for an undisclosed banned performance-enhancing substance. He was issued a 50-game suspension, which he served the next spring. It is, understandably, not his favorite topic of conversation. He’d rather not discuss, for instance, whether he thought the testing procedure was fair or how long he had used the banned substance. “We make mistakes when we’re young, and we try to learn from it,” he says.

  When asked who “we” are, he replied, “Young players. Young players like me.”

  Ozzie Guillen, the famously candid Chicago White Sox manager and a native of Venezuela, echoed this sentiment in 2010 when he told reporters: “It’s somebody behind the scene making money off those kids and telling them to take something they’re not supposed to. If you tell me, you take this and you’re going to be Vladimir Guerrero or you’re going to be Miguel Cabrera, I’ll do it. Why? Because I have seven younger brothers that sleep in one bed in the same room. I have to take care of my mother, my dad.” Then Guillen added: “No, no dad. Two guys got dad.” (In other words, another common trait among these Latin players is that they have absentee fathers or are in single-parent families.)

  Though the gears of globalization are unmistakably rotating, America’s pastime is still populated mostly by Americans. Of the nearly 1,600 players on Major League rosters between 2005 and 2010, nearly three out of four were from the United States. But when we constructed a database for baseball players who had been suspended for PEDs, we noticed there was only one player with the surname Smith and seven with the surname Rodriguez.

  It turns out that although American players account for 73.6 percent of those in the Major Leagues, they represent just 40 percent of suspended drug offenders—about
half as many as one would expect if drug suspensions were simply proportional to demographic representation. In contrast, Dominicans represent barely 10 percent of Major League players but account for 28 percent of the drug suspensions—more than two and a half times more than their representation would indicate. Venezuelans account for about 6 percent of all Major League players but more than 12 percent of those suspended for drugs. In other words, the numbers suggest that a Dominican or Venezuelan player is about four times more likely to face suspension for using PEDs than his U.S. counterpart.

  The disparity is even more pronounced in the minor leagues. Among all 8,569 minor league baseball players in the United States from 2005 to 2009,* American-born players are less than half as likely to test positive as their numbers would have indicated. And once again, Dominican and Venezuelan players are two to three times more likely to appear on the drug suspension list than their proportion of the total population of minor league players. Overall, players from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela are more than four times more likely to test positive for banned performance-enhancing drugs than their U.S. counterparts in the minor leagues. Players born in Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico are overrepresented, and players from Australia, Canada, and Japan and Taiwan are similarly underrepresented.

  The graph below summarizes the data on PED use in baseball by country of origin. The vertical line shows the baseline, with positive tests being perfectly proportional to players from that country. Countries whose numbers go beyond the line are overrepresented, and those with numbers short of the line are underrepresented.

  PERCENTAGE OF PED SUSPENSIONS RELATIVE TO PERCENTAGE OF PLAYERS IN MAJOR AND MINOR LEAGUES BY COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

  Why this huge disparity? There are a host of plausible explanations for this complex and thorny issue, touching on everything from culture to education, and we don’t discount any of them. Perhaps American players are just as likely to cheat but lack access to steroids, which are legal in some countries. Maybe American players use steroids just as frequently but are less likely to get caught because they are more adept at masking their use or cycling off their regimens before testing. American players might be better educated about the health and psychological risks, the baseball drug regulations, and the nuances of the testing protocol. More cynically, perhaps Dominicans, Cubans, and Venezuelans are targeted more by the drug testers and are therefore more likely to be caught.

  One could also argue that comparing Latin players to American players is an inherently flawed exercise, since the ways they come to baseball bear little resemblance. At the moment (though this is likely to change in the near future, in large part to address the corruption), Dominican and Venezuelan players aren’t subject to the Major League draft. Instead, they are independent free agents who are signed by teams through recruitment. Bright prospects are often pulled out of school at age 13 or 14 and groomed at a baseball academy until they’re 16, old enough to be signed professionally. Most are represented by a buscon, a local middleman who can range from a trusted adviser to a glorified pimp. There is little infrastructure and less regulation. It’s easy to see how deception—from fraudulent birth certificates to the use of performance-enhancing drugs—can run rampant.

  But ultimately, we’re convinced that simple economics does the best job of explaining why players from well-off countries are five times less likely to test positive for PEDs than players from impoverished countries.

  When players cheat or deceive or circumvent rules, they consider a trade-off between risk and reward, balancing the potential advantage of the gain against the possibility and cost of getting caught and the punishment they would face, whether money, guilt, or condemnation by peers. This balancing is true of all of us. Every decision involves considering two kinds of cost—the cost of taking an action versus the cost of not taking action—an “opportunity cost.” We might be disinclined to blow through a stop sign in the middle of the day when other cars are at the intersection and a traffic cop might be stationed nearby. In the middle of the night with no one else in sight, we might arrive at a different decision. We might park illegally if the penalty is a $50 ticket. We’re less likely to do so when the ticket will cost us $500. Simple risk-reward analysis doesn’t explain all of our actions—after all, rich people steal, too—but it explains a lot.

  Under baseball’s old testing program, the incentives to cheat were high for virtually all players, but they were particularly extreme for Dominicans and Venezuelans. Never mind the lure of a guaranteed Major League contract, which could ensure generational wealth. Consider Welington Dotel and his $160,000 Major League signing bonus. That is as much as his parents might make in decades of working. For many Dominican players, just making it to a national baseball academy that provided three square meals a day and a decent place to sleep represented a vast upgrade in their standard of living.

  The risk of getting caught and failing a drug test was low. The punishment was low, as well. Under the old testing protocol, initial suspensions were only 15 games. As baseball cracked down on PED use after 2004, bowing to popular (and congressional) pressure, in a worst-case scenario, a positive test would trigger a 50-game suspension, still less than two months of the season. There was a huge upside and not too grave a downside. In economic terms, to dust off a tired sports cliché, players had little to lose and everything to gain. “You hate to even admit this,” says one former National League scout. “But when you see how some of these kids grew up, part of you thinks they’d be nuts not to do everything they possibly could to make it, even if that means steroids.”

  And many do just that. To see the relationship between economic incentives and PED use among athletes, we plotted the likelihood of a player failing a drug test relative to the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of his country of origin. The graph below shows that the probability of steroid use lines up almost perfectly with the wealth of the country. Players from Canada, Australia, and Japan are underrepresented as PED users, whereas players born in Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Puerto Rico are overrepresented.

  LIKELIHOOD OF USING PED IN U.S. MINOR LEAGUES BY COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

  Of course, the wealth of countries as measured by GDP per capita not only captures the economic opportunities for its citizens but also is an indicator of a country’s infrastructure, education, health, and many other factors that may influence an athlete’s decision to improve his quality of life by boosting his career with performance-enhancing drugs. But virtually the same pattern occurs when we look at other measures of “opportunity,” such as health, infant mortality, life expectancy, unemployment rates, literacy rates, schooling, access to clean water, percentage of population below the poverty line, and percentage of the population making less than $2 per day. In short, players from countries with lower standards of living and more limited opportunities are much more likely to use performance-enhancing drugs.

  If economics are motivating drug use, a player from a poor country should be more likely to cheat from the very onset of his career. From day one, he is desperate to make it in baseball in light of the scarcity of other opportunities and the immediate financial impact of even that first signing bonus (all the more so if he owes a debt to his buscon). A player from a wealthier country probably wouldn’t have the same economic incentive to use PEDs as a teenager: Hey, if I’m not drafted so high, I have other options, like a college scholarship. With athletes from wealthier countries, the economic incentive to do drugs would kick in later in a player’s career. A Triple-A player facing his last chance to make it to the Majors, where the per diem alone would rival his current salary—that guy has an incentive to cheat. The thirtysomething Major League veteran looking for one last big-money contract? He, too, has an incentive to cheat. (Just note how many players cited in the Mitchell Report were veterans in the autumn of their careers.)

  Sure enough, when we look by country of origin at the average age of players at the time they are caught using performance-enhancing drugs,
we find a pattern that is consistent with economic incentives. The average age of players from the Dominican Republic and Venezuela caught using PEDs is 20 to 21. The average age of players from the United States who are caught is 27. (For players from Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and Canada, the average age is close to 30; for those from Mexico and Puerto Rico, it’s 25.) The ages of those caught line up exactly with the wealth of their countries.

  Could players from Venezuela and the Dominican Republic simply be younger on average than the U.S. players? Controlling for the average age of players from each country, we still find that steroid use among Venezuelan and Dominican athletes occurs much earlier than it does with their U.S. counterparts.

  Here’s still another indication of how economics underpin steroid use: Athletes more desperate to succeed will not only try to enhance performance from the very beginning of their careers but continue to use PEDs even if they’ve been caught. When we look at repeat offenders, we find that Venezuelans and Dominicans are vastly overrepresented.

  Of course, the United States and other countries differ in many more ways than economic opportunities. Could cultural, educational, and moral issues play a role here? How do we know it isn’t other differences, rather than economics, driving these findings? One way to answer this question is to look only at U.S.-born ballplayers. When we examined the hometowns and neighborhoods of American players who had failed a drug test,* we found that PED use is more prevalent among players who came from areas with lower average income, lower high school and college graduation rates, and higher unemployment—the same patterns we found across countries. Differences in culture, institutions, and governments are muted when we look only within the United States, but the economic motive remains.