On Matt Harvey and Steroids

Steroids! They're bad, right? They're "performance-enhancing drugs," and the people who use PEDs are cheaters who should be suspended for lengthy periods of time, possibly given lifetime bans, and certainly not voted into the Hall of Fame even if they did flat-out goofy things at the plate like getting on base more than half the time over a four-year span while drawing more intentional walks than strikeouts. (Yeah.)

But... why?

Because, y'know, "performance-enhancing drug" doesn't really narrow it down. Here's a performance-enhancing drug: water. Athletes who consume H2O on a regular basis will perform considerably better than those who don't, on account of those other guys being, y'know, dead. Maybe you say water isn't a drug, but "drug" actually has a remarkably broad definition: it's basically any chemical substance that has a physiological effect on you. Water definitely has one of those! And if that seems a rather trivial example, consider something like the Gatorade found in clubhouses, which is pretty deliberately chemically engineered to enhance performance as much as possible. I'm pretty sure they advertise about that, electrolytes and such. We want our athletes consuming chemical substances that are designed to enhance their performance. They're supposed to want to be good, after all. So what demarcates a "PED" as such?

There is, of course, an answer: a PED of the sort we like to ban is bad for you. There aren't a lot of downsides to drinking water. As far as I know there aren't major downsides to the electrolytes in Gatorade. There are, however, serious downsides to anabolic steroids, and other PEDs. These sorts of drugs essentially give players the opportunity to trade their own health for a performance enhancement. Perhaps in the abstract if each individual player could make that decision in a vacuum we might, in a nice, non-paternalistic way, let them, but of course the world doesn't work like that. There's a ton of pressure on players to be the best that they can, both because they want their teams to succeed blah blah blah and because, y'know, it gets them paid. And so in a world with a whole bunch of drugs offering health/performance trade-offs, we worry, sensibly, that everyone is going to be pressured into making those trade-offs, and we don't like that. It's sort of like how each individual worker has an incentive to offer to work for less than the other guy: it's individually rational but collectively disastrous. So we have minimum wage laws and PED bans designed to prevent these pressures from forcing everyone to give away their own welfare in an effort to out-compete the other guy.

So that's it, right? Competition is all very well and good and everyone should try to be the best, but you're not allowed to trade your own physical well-being for an edge on the field?

Rubbish. Of course you are. Hell, you're supposed to. We valorize people who do this, if they do it the right way.


If they do it by running into a wall to catch a would-be extra base hit. Or by trying to turn a double play despite the runner bearing down on them. Or by blocking the plate as the would-be tying run barrels into them. (Contrary to popular belief, you can still do this! So long as the catcher gets the ball early enough to set up in front of the plate.) Or if you lean into an inside pitch, "taking one for the team" to get on base and start a rally.

Or if you work out in ways that make you the best possible baseball-playing machine but aren't actually the best for your long-term health. I don't know to what degree that's a thing, but I sure as hell know we wouldn't have a problem with it or say that the league needed to step in to prevent it.

And, of course, there's that other health-for-performance trade-off that every single one of these players is making: they play baseball. It's a dangerous game. People get hurt, even if no one does anything wrong. Center fielders wear their knees out with all that running. People tweak their hamstrings or obliques. Catchers accumulate concussions, possibly a worse "side effect" than what you get from steroids.

And pitchers, of course, grind their elbows into dust.

Which is where Matt Harvey comes in.

Because he's already been through the process of tearing his elbow apart through the simple act of pitching, and, by the miracle of modern medicine, is at it again. He had, in fact, a remarkable year just 16 months removed from Tommy John surgery, and just pitched seven-and-two-thirds dominant innings in the Mets' Game 1 win over the Cubs in the NLCS. An outing that got him up to 203 innings pitched on the season, between the regular and postseasons. Now, we really, really don't know anything about how pitchers' workloads relate to arm injuries, much, except just that pitching is arm injury, slowly but surely. But it's at least reasonable to think that throwing so much so soon might be a problem. That, in pitching as much as he has, Matt Harvey has essentially traded his own health for a very simple performance edge: the opportunity to perform at all. And that maybe that's not such a great idea.

But of course, practically no one in the broader baseball community thinks that there's anything to discuss here. Harvey, in suggesting maybe not wanting to pitch too much, is a wimp. He doesn't care about his team, he doesn't care about winning, etc. Perhaps he's not even a Real Man. Whatever. And now that he is pitching, and blowing by the supposed innings limits from the September controversies while he pitches the Mets to playoff victories, he's a hero. It's as simple as that.

Which... sort of doesn't make sense when we think back to the logic of banning steroids. What exactly is the difference between the pitcher who risks having his arm fall off in an effort to pitch his team to the championship and the guy who juices up to hit more home runs? Maybe there are some subtle ones. Harvey, for one thing, is risking his own baseball future, whereas the adverse consequences for the steroid user were less likely to prevent a possible payday. And though we talk about pitchers' arms falling off, truth be told if you have a career-ending arm injury or the like it probably doesn't really prevent you from doing very much other than throwing a baseball, whereas the problems of steroid use are much broader. But that doesn't really distinguish a center fielder getting arthritic knees before the age of 40 (Carlos Beltran) or every catcher ever running a perpetual concussion risk.

I'm not sure exactly what I'm arguing here. That we shouldn't ban steroids, or other similar PEDs? No. I have a bunch of problems with the way we go about it, but the whole "setting standards of fair competition" thing makes a ton of sense. That we should prevent someone in Matt Harvey's position from pitching if he wants to? Nope. That would be absurd. But at the very least I do think that the way we talk about the two different situations should get a little more harmonious. The basic reasons why someone like Matt Harvey would want not to pitch too much coming off of Tommy John surgery are a lot like the basic reasons why someone might want not to be pressured into taking steroids in order to keep up with the homer-happy league. We should, therefore, perhaps both show greater understanding toward Harvey, and others in his situation, and toward steroid users. We should realize, maybe, that when we, the fans, pressure Harvey into pitching despite the potential injury risk, we're doing the same thing that sucks people up into steroid use. And that, y'know, we, the fans, as well as the rest of the baseball community, had a lot to do with sucking the whole league into the steroid craze. Steroid users were, to at least a very large extent, just doing the same thing that the world demands of its sports stars: sacrificing their own health for their team's success, their own pecuniary gain, and the fans' entertainment.

They were just doing it the wrong way.