As to the market comment from Sam, I'm pretty sure he was taking issue with the idea that society needs coal miners but not ballplayers. The market says otherwise. Ballplayers are remarkably well compensated while coal miners struggle to make a living.

If the market is truly a reflection of society's priorities, the market says ballplayers are more important.

Nice Walt. I'll remember that reframing of the question.

You know what would cause the PED abuse to no longer be a problem? If, in addition to the player penalties, you had club penalties as well. Say, if a player got caught who was on the 25 man roster, you lose a 1st rd draft pick. If he's on the 40 man, you lose a 2nd rd pick. If he's a minor leaguer not on the 40 man, the major league club gets hit with a stiff fine. Then there would be institutional incentives to not sign suspected users, and to more closely monitor the players you do have.

You'd get different kinds of outfielders. More Ben Reveres, fewer Josh Willinghams. That would put a damper on offense.

Maybe. What got lost in the HR bonanza of the sillyball era is that it was also an era of unprecedented levels of power and speed. Lord only knows what power-speed really measures but modern players are all over the top of that chart and not necessarily the ones you'd expect. There were 23 30/30 seasons prior to 1994 (convenient cutoff) and 20 from 95 to 02. Things aren't slowing down much as there have been 17 from 03 to 12. Four guys did it in 2011 which seems to tie the record with 1997. Looking at it from a different angle, there have been 82 seasons with 30+ HR and 15+ Rfield*. 47 of these have occurred since 1994 including 26 over the last 10 years, 3 last year and 5 in 2009.

Obviously there's still a relationship between speed/defensive range and power -- i.e. we still don't see many 30 HR SS -- but power and speed are a much more common combo now than before. Maybe fewer Willinghams but more Prados and more Reddicks.

*Rfield is not ideal here. I can't (easily) control for position (Adrian Gonzalez is not somebody you'd plunk into CF) and it's relative to average so defensive talent could be down overall but you could still have as many Rfield as Willie Mays in a season.

Oh, forgot to include my own personal view of PEDs in baseball today:

While I wish it had happened in a non-coercive environment, MLB and MLBPA have come to a negotiated agreement that PEDs are against the rules, testing will occur and penalties have been specified. I am fine with this state of affairs as long as the power balance between MLB and MLBPA is reasonably equitable. I am far from confident that the current arrangement is in the best interests of the players but they (through their union) have agreed to it and, obviously, if everybody actually stuck to the rules then there'd be zero undue health risks and players (overall but possibly distributed differently) will continue to share in that big pile of money.

You know what would cause the PED abuse to no longer be a problem? If, in addition to the player penalties, you had club penalties as well. Say, if a player got caught who was on the 25 man roster, you lose a 1st rd draft pick. If he's on the 40 man, you lose a 2nd rd pick. If he's a minor leaguer not on the 40 man, the major league club gets hit with a stiff fine. Then there would be institutional incentives to not sign suspected users, and to more closely monitor the players you do have.

This is actually pretty brilliant, to the point where 1.) I'm surprised that nobody has suggested it before; 2.) there must be some critical flaw to it that I'm missing. I suppose the idea of collective punishment is a bit Leninist, but then again it really would take the PEDs out of baseball right quick. And you didn't even mention the number one reason it would, which is social pressure from the rest of the players.

The other problem, of course, is that neither the owners nor the MLBPA would ever agree to it.

Looking over the list of 30-30 seasons, it looks like mostly perennial 30 HR guys that happened to fluctuate up to 30 SB in a particular year. Guys like Mondesi, Walker, Preston Wilson, Abreu, even David Wright. It's a lot easier for a power hitter, say Dante Bichette, to grab 30 steals than for a speedy Barry Larkin to suddenly hit 30 HR.

I'd guess 30-30 seasons probably just track pretty closely with 30 HR seasons, which obviously went way up in the 90's.

Higher league OBP could play a role too: OBP should correlate with SB as a counting stat, more times on base means more stealing opportunities.

I am far from confident that the current arrangement is in the best interests of the players

I am absolutely confident that the current arrangement is far better for the players as a whole than the old one.

In the pre-testing era, players took all of the health and legal risks, assumed the financial cost of any doping regimens, while creating no jobs in the process (and destroying the reputation of a number of union members along the way). OTOH, they did get to keep their pee to themselves.

The old system was boffo for the owners, though. They got more productive employees at no cost to themselves, as opposed to the current system where they have to absorb the cost of testing.

[56] Any sort of player-related team punishment seems like it violates boundaries between the team and the player. At my first glance, it would seem to allow individual players to damage a team in significant long-term ways.

Higher league OBP could play a role too: OBP should correlate with SB as a counting stat, more times on base means more stealing opportunities.

It also lowers the value of a stolen base, no? Not that expected value factors into every stolen base decision.

At my first glance, it would seem to allow individual players to damage a team in significant long-term ways.

That's the point. It would incentivize teams to avoid such players, and incentivize the players to avoid damaging their teams longterm. As Esoteric correctly points out, the peer pressure on the players to not screw things up for their team would be enormous.

That's the point. It would incentivize teams to avoid such players, and incentivize the players to avoid damaging their teams longterm. As Esoteric correctly points out, the peer pressure on the players to not screw things up for their team would be enormous.

Making rules that merely provide "incentives" by applying the wrong penalties to the wrong people are not the way to legislate. Unintended consequences get bigger the more indirect your rules get......

you'd be doing little more than watching a battle to see who created the better machine (which may be what future audiences enjoy, though I'm sure the clean, low-tech competition would maintain significant appeal).

Welcome to Nascar!

This is actually pretty brilliant, to the point where 1.) I'm surprised that nobody has suggested it before; 2.) there must be some critical flaw to it that I'm missing.

The other problem, of course, is that neither the owners nor the MLBPA would ever agree to it.

It has been suggested before (at least on threads I have seen at BBTF)but, as you mentioned, the primary reason it won't happen is because it takes control away from owners while giving them a portion of accountability. Not.Ever.Ever.Going.To.Happen. (Sorry, went all Taylor Swift for a moment).

As to the market comment from Sam, I'm pretty sure he was taking issue with the idea that society needs coal miners but not ballplayers. The market says otherwise. Ballplayers are remarkably well compensated while coal miners struggle to make a living.

If the market is truly a reflection of society's priorities, the market says ballplayers are more important.

Then obviously ballplayers are also more important than policemen, firemen, teachers, engineers, scientists and presidents of the United States, though admittedly they're less important than the presidents and CEOs of hedge funds.

I am absolutely confident that the current arrangement is far better for the players as a whole than the old one.

In the pre-testing era, players took all of the health and legal risks, assumed the financial cost of any doping regimens, while creating no jobs in the process (and destroying the reputation of a number of union members along the way). OTOH, they did get to keep their pee to themselves.

Which seems to be almost as sacred a right as the right to own a Bushmaster, though not quite as sacred as the right to decent health care.

The old system was boffo for the owners, though. They got more productive employees at no cost to themselves, as opposed to the current system where they have to absorb the cost of testing.

Not to mention absorbing the risk of losing some of your key players for 50 or 100 games in the middle of the season.

Which seems to be almost as sacred a right as the right to own a Bushmaster, though not quite as sacred as the right to decent health care.

Shocking how you have a right to do something for yourself, but not to compel the rest of he world to give you something for free.

What's next, the right to a 2500 sq ft house?

The right to be secure in your own pee is inherently incompatible with free and fair sporting competition. That doesn't tell you where you should come out on the issue, only that a sporting competition wherein players don't have provide their piss for testing isn't going to be fair. Its value is to be found not in sport, but in entertainment.

The MLB owners are under no obligation to provide fair and sporting baseball competition, and consumers are under no obligation to prefer fair and sporting baseball competition to baseball entertainment.

The right to be secure in your own pee is inherently incompatible with free and fair sporting competition. That doesn't tell you where you should come out on the issue, only that a sporting competition wherein players don't have provide their piss for testing isn't going to be fair. Its value is to be found not in sport, but in entertainment.

The MLB owners are under no obligation to provide fair and sporting baseball competition, and consumers are under no obligation to prefer fair and sporting baseball competition to baseball entertainment.

Correct. But most fans seem to prefer fair competition.

[68] Do they prefer "better" (better athletic performances) over "fair"er?

The old system was boffo for the owners, though. They got more productive employees at no cost to themselves, as opposed to the current system where they have to absorb the cost of testing.

I don't agree with this. If the opposing players were also more productive, then there was no gain. All you accomplished was get a whole lot of negative publicity and coax the feds into nosing into your business.

Then there would be institutional incentives to not sign suspected users, and to more closely monitor the players you do have.

This is the problem with the idea of penalizing teams. MLB and MLBPA have come to an agreement on how closely teams may monitor the drug use of the players they do have -- i.e. by the agreed testing. Any further monitoring rather obviously also has to be negotiated into the CBA, not undertaken at the whim of a team.

MLB and MLBPA have agreed on the penalty structure -- i.e. losing 50 then 100 then all games and attached monies -- for violating the drug policy. But once that penalty is served, no enduring penalty is supposed to apply -- i.e. ideally there would be NO disincentive to signing previously suspended much less suspected players.

Of course a draft pick or other team penalty could be negotiated into the next CBA I suppose but why would the MLBPA agree to a policy that will make it harder for their guys to get roster spots and/or leave them signing for less money. They surely already recognize that the Melkys of the world will always lose a lot of money/years on their next contract (i.e. that ideal world will never exist) so why would they agree to something that will take even more money out of Melky's pocket?

And boy don't I feel silly for believing that the right to privacy is more important than ridding baseball of roids.

I don't agree with this. If the opposing players were also more productive, then there was no gain. All you accomplished was get a whole lot of negative publicity and coax the feds into nosing into your business.

And what harm did the feds nosing into their business actually cause the owners? They had to strengthen the penalties in the already-enacted drug testing programs. That's it. The overwhelming brunt of the bad PR fell on the players. Attendance didn't plummet as a result. Revenues continued to rise throughout the post-testing era. So even the aftermath was OK from the perspective of the suits.

Still, there was never a good reason for the owners to want a drug-testing program, which cost them money to implement. The status quo was great for them.

As for productivity, yes, to an extent you are correct. Productivity gains are not quite as meaningful in a closed-sporting system such as baseball as they would be in a factory. But they're not completely meaningless. Steroids presumably allowed their employees to return from injury quicker (which would help the owners' bottom line, albeit modestly).

As for the players...

The hands-off policy was good for the individual player who chose to use, since he could see his performance improve* and collect the benefits that acccompany such improvement. But it was most definitely not good for the union as a whole, since any performance gain in one place was naturally offset by a performance decline somewhere else. Meanwhile the players who used took all the risks from the usage (financial, health, legal and reputation), while the players who didn't suffered the performance decline against their peers (and, in some cases, may have also suffered a hit to their reputations). No jobs were added. I don't know if overall salaries escalated above what would be expected during that time frame, though even if they did, you couldn't specifically pinpoint a juicing culture as the reason.

The absence of a policy provided only one benefit to the MLBPA - its members weren't subject to periodic piss tests.

* That's assuming they work. If they don't, they're still a losing proposition, it's just that there would be just risk and no benefit even to the individual user, while the non-users wouldn't actually be at a competitive disadvantage.

“It’s a problem of…keeping pace, reducing the incentives to use and…increasing vigilance, regulation and punishment for those who use.”

Yet, not a word of why all this is 'necessary'.

What's weird is how utterly pointless PEDs are in the context of sports. They game is not more or less interesting because athletes take them. They merely fuel an entirely arbitrary arms race.

Considering the ever quickening pace of progress 2063 will probably be more unrecognizable to people of today that 2013 is to the imaginations of 1963.

Considering the exponential change in technological advancement and the ever-nearing Singularity, unless there's a catastrophe of some kind I think we can count on it.

Consider what unregulated enhancements might be possible to recreationists. If kids of the future can put on their suits and throw a ball 120 miles an hour, and the person they throw to can hit it 600 feet, will they have any interest in watching clean and low-tech professionals compete at what will seem to be a lower level of play?

Chess after Deep Blue still draws a crowd (well, for chess) so I think the interest will be there. Still, for me, some of the magic in the deep, undiscoverable beauty that used to be chess (even though that was the function of limited brains) was lost after computer chess dwarfed human abilities.

Hey--what's going on with testosterone supplements for the general market. All of a sudden I'm seeing ads crop up everywhere, and they're trying to take it out of the realm of something for tired old men by calling it 'Low-T'.

The claims are clear: it turns back the clock. I haven't tried it, but how could anyone resist?

[74] I'm curious...once I don't need sperm, I might investigate...

What's the argument for PEDs?

It's not an argument for PEDs, it's an argument against regulating PEDs...

Surely I'm not the only one actively for PEDs (based on their benefits once they reach the general population)?

edit: @75--yikes! It that a known drawback to the low dose supplements marketed widely?

I am with you JC. Here's why.

I work in sales. There are no laws preventing other sales people from working insanely long hours and subjecting themselves to incredibly high stress levels (let's leave blowing lines of coke and taking adderall out of this for now) in order to be more successful than I am. I really like spending time with my wife and kids and have no interest in a heart attack at 50 so I keep things in balance. Would the anti-PED "for the players health" crowd also support laws that prevent my fellow salespeople from working more than 8 hours per day, including invasive in-home check-ups and email/phone monitoring to prevent them from risking their health to gain an unfair advantage over me? I personally don't care how hard they work; my health is more important to me and thus far by working "smarter" I've been able to stay competitive (I'm Frank Thomas, baby!) but every day I have to choose between reading to my kids and answering email. Does that violate the spirit of fair play that anti-PED crowd talks about?

If this isn't a valid simile/analogy/comparison, where are the flaws? As I see it, people are putting their health at risk to gain an advantage in almost every profession, forcing others in that profession to choose between taking care of their health and staying competitive. I don't think baseball players deserve any more protection from this occupational hazard than I do.

Said another way: since I don't think we can (or should) prevent players from using PEDs, we may as well help them do it more responsibly so that they can enhance performance and reduce the potential long-term health effects.

"If this isn't a valid simile/analogy/comparison, where are the flaws?"

IF PEDs shorten life expectancy, then you have a flaw imo.
It's not a great idea, healthwise, to work long hours per your example, but IF PEDs are as toxic as some claim, then that's your flaw.

Also, I suspect that the bulk of your fellow salespeople feel as you do.
If:
- you worked in a specific field where the bulk of your rivals deliberately sabotaged their health and
- you couldn't easily work in a different sales job, because your talent is based solely on selling this one product

then I think you'd have a better comparison.

- you couldn't easily work in a different sales job, because your talent is based solely on selling this one product

You move the unit that's on the shelf.

I work in sales. There are no laws preventing other sales people from working insanely long hours and subjecting themselves to incredibly high stress levels (let's leave blowing lines of coke and taking adderall out of this for now) in order to be more successful than I am. I really like spending time with my wife and kids and have no interest in a heart attack at 50 so I keep things in balance. Would the anti-PED "for the players health" crowd also support laws that prevent my fellow salespeople from working more than 8 hours per day, including invasive in-home check-ups and email/phone monitoring to prevent them from risking their health to gain an unfair advantage over me? I personally don't care how hard they work; my health is more important to me and thus far by working "smarter" I've been able to stay competitive (I'm Frank Thomas, baby!) but every day I have to choose between reading to my kids and answering email. Does that violate the spirit of fair play that anti-PED crowd talks about?

If this isn't a valid simile/analogy/comparison, where are the flaws? As I see it, people are putting their health at risk to gain an advantage in almost every profession, forcing others in that profession to choose between taking care of their health and staying competitive. I don't think baseball players deserve any more protection from this occupational hazard than I do.

I would see nothing wrong with a law that limited hours for salaried employees (or at least requiring over-time pay). They have them in Germany.

Employers today are vastly abusing employees by extracting extra hours for no extra pay, and keeping them on 24/7 call with BlackBerrys.

The world functioned fine when you couldn't reach someone outside of 8 to 6, and most white collar workers had 40 hour weeks.

What's weird is how utterly pointless PEDs are in the context of sports. They game is not more or less interesting because athletes take them.

How popular was baseball during the Sosa/McGwire home run chase?

I'm pretty sure he was taking issue with the idea that society needs coal miners but not ballplayers. The market says otherwise. Ballplayers are remarkably well compensated while coal miners struggle to make a living.

This is pretty silly. (1) baseball does not operate in anything resembling a free market; (2) baseball skills are extremely scarce in the job market, pushing the price for ballplayers up whereas individual coal miners are pretty dispensible; and (3) as #64 points out, the market does not pay salaries according to what society "needs", it pays salaries based on what an individual employer is willing to pay, which does not necessarily reflect the needs of society or the market overall.

BTF I think for the most part, takes a libertarian stance on PEDs, dismissing any negative health effects as speculative or unproven or downright false. The fact is, we probably don't know what the long-term health effects are for decades or so.

Take that in contrast with the topic of concussions in football, which I think BTF takes a much more interventionist approach, even though the data on that is still unclear (although more proven? Less proven? I'm guessing more but I don't really know) I think its an interesting contrast, and I feel its a cognitive dissonance I can't reconcile in my mind.

Maybe. What got lost in the HR bonanza of the sillyball era is that it was also an era of unprecedented levels of power and speed. Lord only knows what power-speed really measures but modern players are all over the top of that chart and not necessarily the ones you'd expect. There were 23 30/30 seasons prior to 1994 (convenient cutoff) and 20 from 95 to 02. Things aren't slowing down much as there have been 17 from 03 to 12. Four guys did it in 2011 which seems to tie the record with 1997. Looking at it from a different angle, there have been 82 seasons with 30+ HR and 15+ Rfield*. 47 of these have occurred since 1994 including 26 over the last 10 years, 3 last year and 5 in 2009.

Just because managers are more willing to allow players to steal bases than they were from the start of the Ruthian era to the Wills revolution. Willie Mays had 2 30-30 seasons. If he had wanted to, he could probably have had 7 (54-57, 59, 61, 62). Mantle had zero 30-30 years. Probably could have done it 5-7 times as well.

Among the recent players, Dante Bichette had a 30-30. We saw the results of him trying to cover a large outfield, and that was not pretty.

I made no assumption that PEDS only help power hitters. Only that with or without PEDS, a large outfield would shift the game to smaller, quicker outfielders. Put CF 500 feet away and make it 375 to the corners, and speedy outfielders may well need the Ben Johnson cocktail to cover all that ground.

You know what would cause the PED abuse to no longer be a problem? If, in addition to the player penalties, you had club penalties as well.

I agree but the penalty for cheating shouldn't be draft picks but wins. If teams had to forfeit wins when a player was caught they would be squeaky clean. Imagine if the Yankees were kept out of the playoffs because A-Rod was juiced.

You know what would cause the PED abuse to no longer be a problem? If, in addition to the player penalties, you had club penalties as well.


I agree but the penalty for cheating shouldn't be draft picks but wins. If teams had to forfeit wins when a player was caught they would be squeaky clean. Imagine if the Yankees were kept out of the playoffs because A-Rod was juiced.

Now, I disagree with these ideas for a variety of reasons, but you guys do realize that this simply would not work, right? All this would mean was that if a team became aware of one of their players using banned PEDs, they would go to great lengths to hide that use from the league.

Punishing the team also opens up opportunities for others teams to pay marginal players for sabotage. "Oh, you're getting the league minimum? We'll pay you 10X that to test positive, so we get into the playoffs."

Snapper, I would love a law like that! But I don't see how it could possibly be enforced.

That's the penalty for the Olympics. If your team cheats they forfeit.

edit: Now that I look for a source to back that up it's a bit more complicated than that but relay teams have been DQed because one member doped.

Snapper, I would love a law like that! But I don't see how it could possibly be enforced.

Well, it would not be so much a matter of active enforcement, but instead giving employees the standing to push back.

Sort of like discrimination/harassment laws. The gov't doesn't monitor behavior, but the law creates potential liability for the employer.

If an employer systematically made people work more, or fired/adversely treated those who worked only regular hours, they would open themselves to class action suits.

DL from MN Posted: January 31, 2013 at 10:42 AM (#4358896)

You know what would cause the PED abuse to no longer be a problem? If, in addition to the player penalties, you had club penalties as well.


I agree but the penalty for cheating shouldn't be draft picks but wins. If teams had to forfeit wins when a player was caught they would be squeaky clean. Imagine if the Yankees were kept out of the playoffs because A-Rod was juiced.

NO
NONONONONONO

absolutely positively NO messing with the records. what do you plan to do with all the teams who get all those extra wins, seeing as how a team forfeits 50 games? are they gonna bother to play them at all? it's going to have the overall effect of playing to lose

anyone with a positive t4est? we should just take away all their money, possessions, children, have them flogged in public, then put in maximum security prison in solitary confinement for the rest of their lives. while their wives and children are sold into slavery

If it's okay to cheat to win games and titles then why is it so awful to cheat to set individual records? I thought winning titles was supposed to be the point?

I agree that it's a terrible idea but it seems to be what the public wants. Vacate all the MLB titles from the 1990s. Positive tests means games are effectively "rained out" and not replayed. Is it about the integrity of the game or just about home run titles?

If the games were won and the championship trophy sits in the trophy case then let the players into the Hall of Fame.

You know what would cause the PED abuse to no longer be a problem? If, in addition to the player penalties, you had club penalties as well.

Why would that solve anything? Clubs don't have any powers that the league doesn't.

Why would that solve anything? Clubs don't have any powers that the league doesn't.

Because clubs would be forced to choose between either 1.) ridding themselves of a PED-using player/cracking down internally on him to make sure he ceases using; 2.) working to conceal said player's usage.

Option #2 is an course that some (e.g. Randy Jones) have suggested would be taken by FOs, but I think that fails to game out what a team's risk assessment would be in that scenario. The PR hit to a club and its FO staff if a conspiracy to conceal PED usage were to be discovered would be massive and fatal to the careers of the FO staff (probably an instant housecleaning from the GM on down). And the chances of a known juicer getting caught, while probably small (i.e. <25%) under any testing regime given the cat-and-mouse game of testers vs. masking agents, is still significant enough that you have to assume somebody will get nabbed sooner or later, regardless of how much effort a FO puts into concealing PED use.

Again, this is a purely notional thing: it would NEVER be agreed to by either the owners or players, and I don't see how MLB could impose it from above. But it would work, with brutal efficiency.

#92 You're assuming that clubs have some way of knowing who's using. I see no reason to believe that is the case.

And they *can't* crack down internally. Powers of discipline are set out in the CBA and anything relating to drug policy is explicitly reserved to the league. You can't even negotiate harsher penalties than are mandated by league policy -- an arbitrator made that clear back in the Uberroth era.

Move players that they suspect of use? Probably already happening. The penalties in place (loss of player for at least 50 games) are pretty significant. (And yes, the Giants success last year argues otherwise. Still, teams would not want to get caught holding the bag -- Cabrera situation from last year notwithstanding)

it would be REALLY easy to throw games - all someone would have to do is mix some testosterone gel in soap or even "accidentally" smear it on someone and make sure there was a tester right close to catch the guy. bingo - goodbye goes some expensive unwanted guy - goodbye FIFTY entire games for team X, goodbye any hope of teammates of reaching any sort of incentive clause, teammates lose 50 games worth of stats

no

NONONONONONO

we're getting to the - no punishment could possibly be bad enough. already you have people saying anyone who tests positive for ANYTHING be immediately banned for life

And yes, the Giants success last year argues otherwise. Still, teams would not want to get caught holding the bag -- Cabrera situation from last year notwithstanding

The Giants won last year despite losing Cabrera, not because of it.

#95 I know that, but an awful lot of people are not very good at causal links.

already you have people saying anyone who tests positive for ANYTHING be immediately banned for life

Stupid people

[76] Its one of the advertised possible side effects -- if your body is getting enough testosterone elsewhere, the testosterone-producing glands will shut down or slow down. Unfortunately, those boys are responsible for other things too. I assume this happens if the dose is too high or something, and that there's lots of variation in how individuals tolerate hormones.

As someone actively trying to conceive, that's not a risk for me right now.

@ Ron J2/93

#92 You're assuming that clubs have some way of knowing who's using. I see no reason to believe that is the case.

I recall reading about how the Dodgers' GM (DePo?) had been informed by team scouts that LoDuca had juiced for his big years and was likely to use again if traded so as to show the team up. Also, that Theo Epstein was made aware by scouts that Eric Gagne's career resurgence was a product of PED usage.

My very strong hunch is that scouts and managers, in particular, have a *very* good idea of who is using and that GM's and especially owners would really rather not know. The standard for a team penalty would have to be something connected to a very clear affirmative act of systematic doping, or something like the team hired a player/trainer/whoever for the express purpose of engaging specifically in the practice of systematic doping in violation of the CBA (basically what Jose Canseco claims the Rangers did with him. And I don't think you could have pinned that one on the Rangers, even under this basically unworkable standard.)

And what harm did the feds nosing into their business actually cause the owners? They had to strengthen the penalties in the already-enacted drug testing programs. That's it.

I think it cost the rest of us, though I'd be hard pressed to prove that. The idea that it's acceptable for government to deeply involve itself in the lives of players, and that suspicionless drug testing of an entire class of people is perfectly acceptable, because, well, we want to, seems pretty destructive to me. What's the argument for PEDs?