Congress is conducting hearings on the issue of rising steroid usage in Major League Baseball (MLB). Roger Tobin, a physics professor who specializes in condensed matter physics and the physics of athletics, conducted a study last semester on the performance-enhancing effects of steroids in baseball.
I spoke this week with Tobin, who found that steroids could increase a player's home run output by as much as 100 percent.
Jamie Bologna: How did you conduct your research on steroids and baseball?
Roger Tobin: I should make clear that this was a modeling exercise: I didn't do any empirical study or a statistical analysis of actual baseball players. My paper is about ... using the constants of physics [to see] what would be likely to happen. The idea that started me off was the basic observation of the very large number of home runs hit by a few players in the late '90s and early 2000s. The record for the most home runs in a season had been almost unchanged for more than 70 years, and then all of a sudden it skyrocketed. What struck me about that was that [it] was a really huge change, and other sports haven't seen anything like that.
You don't see that in sprinting - you don't suddenly see people running 20 percent faster than they did for the last 80 years. You don't see high jumpers jumping 20 percent higher than they used to, even though it is well documented that people in these other sports have been using performance-enhancing drugs. So what got my interest was to see whether it was physically plausible that you could get an effect of that magnitude [in baseball] out of steroids.
JB: And your study found that it actually can have such an effect?
RT: Well, that it is at least plausible. The basic idea is that home runs are relatively rare events. Even the best home-run hitters [only hit about 10 to 15 percent of the balls that they put in play out of the park]. Now that's a lot, but it's still a very small minority of all the balls that they hit. If you assume that the way they hit the ball is smoothly distributed, presumably there should be a lot of balls that are almost home runs.
So if you just increase the strength of the batter by a relatively modest amount, [it] turns out that [it] has a big effect if the person is already an extremely skilled hitter. So he's already hitting a lot of balls over the fence or near the fence. A relatively small addition of strength can have a big effect on the home-run rate.
JB: So what is it about the sport of baseball that makes this possible?
RT: It isn't just the sport of baseball but the specifics of a home run. It is this binary event: it either is or it isn't [a home run]. The criterion is a very set thing. Does it go over the fence or does it not?
You see similar kinds of effects, for example, in how much the rate of obesity in the country has increased. People's average weight or even their average body mass index has increased, but not nearly as much [as the obesity rate]. That's again because the threshold for calling someone obese is a particular value of the body mass index. When you shift the distribution of people, even by a relatively modest amount, you can change the number that are over that threshold by a lot. That's analogous to the fence in baseball.
JB: So the effects of steroids wouldn't be something that would carry over to touchdowns in football.
RT: Right, or even [carry over] to batting average in baseball or how many doubles you hit.
JB: What effects do performance-enhancing drugs and steroids have on the human body?
RT: I looked into that a bit when doing my study. I tried to look into what's known about steroids. It's a complicated business. There is fairly conclusive evidence that was done with sufficient care and attention. Steroids really do build muscle mass, they really do work - providing that they're done in the right dose and over the right period of time, and with the right nutrition and the right weight training.
It is not like Popeye's spinach, where you rub something on your arm and you become a muscle man. It is a physiological process that takes time and ... other things besides just getting a shot - it's not magic. But there really does seem to be very strong evidence that it really does work.
It also can do a lot of other things, some of them bad, especially when the doses are large. [Steroid usage can] have sexual effects; it can cause liver damage; it can cause heart damage. It's a complicated physiological hormone. People looked for a long time to see if they could find something that would just build muscle and not do anything else. I don't think anyone has figured out how to do that ...
JB: What were the implications of your study for Major League Baseball?
RT: I think most people in Major League Baseball already pretty much believed that steroids could actually have an effect on baseball performance. I hadn't seen a lot of discussion about how big those effects might be; I think that was something that was new [about my study].
There is an ongoing chorus of people who want to claim that there is no effect - that the effects, if they exist at all, are negligible. After my study came out last fall, I did get a call from someone on [Congress'] Mitchell Commission, as they were looking into this issue. What he basically wanted to talk about was some stuff that had come out that argued that there was no effect, and he wanted to better understand the arguments that I was making.
That's the only contact [with the] MLB I've had. It isn't like anyone from the commissioner's office has called me. And they haven't called me down to D.C. [to testify before Congress] ... If you look at the Mitchell Report, they basically spend about a paragraph assuming that steroids and other related compounds could positively enhance performance. They just sort of take it as an assumption.
When my study first came out I got a lot of phone calls and e-mails - some of them supportive, some of them hostile. People just don't want to hear this. The basic argument that these people always make is that they sort of caricature what I say in the study. If [I] say that steroids affect home run rates, then [they suggest] that I'm saying that any weightlifter can go out there and hit 50 home runs.
Of course I'm not saying that. That would be ridiculous. Obviously, people are hitting these home runs with or without steroids; they're incredibly talented, extraordinary athletes. But that's not the point. The point is, given that you're already an extraordinary athlete, can the steroids bump it up a notch?
The reason why Barry Bonds hits maybe 15 percent of his balls over the fence and Hank Aaron never really hit more than 10 percent could just be because Barry Bonds is [a better hitter]. What my study showed is that there is good reason to believe that had Hank Aaron taken steroids, he could have been able to hit 15 percent over the fence as well. Some people just don't want to hear that.
Jamie Bologna is a senior majoring in political science and Spanish. He can be reached at James.Bologna@tufts.edu.
