the shrewdness of apes

i don't think i've ever actually posted about the NHL lockout which has now stretched past the 4-month mark and threatens to wipe out the entire season. let's set aside the fact that the owners (like their compatriots in baseball) severly overstated the financial peril that they claim makes owning a hockey team unprofitable; let's set aside the the fact that they have no one to blame but themselves for signing players to the large contracts that threaten to bankrupt them; let's set aside their compete unwillingness to bargain in good faith by making any concessions from their original hard-line positions (while the players have certainly shown a willingness to negotiate, unless you consider offering to take a 24% pay cut to be a bad faith ploy); and let's set aside that the best way to get cost certainty for your business is to control your own costs and not wait for someone else to bail you out. the thing that i'm sick of hearing constantly is that most of the owners are better off with their teams not playing because they lose less money this way. that's 100% wrong and here's why: no owner has ever sold a team for less than s/he bought it for and in most cases the value of teams has escalated at a rate that far ourstrips inflation, or interest rates or the stock market or anything else you want to compare it to (the average value of a team was 2.7 times higher in 1999 than it was in 1991 and my brief perusal of the numbers indicates another 25% jump between 1999 and 2002). by not playing, the owners are damaging the one thing they can ill afford to hurt and that is the value of their investment. a franchise valued at $150 Million has no worth when there are no tickets sold and no games played. players can go overseas and still make money, but an owner can't sell when there's nothing to sell. that the owners would know this and yet continue down the path of destruction only makes them look more foolish.

on to steroids (you didn't think i would let this go did you?). Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, blah, blah, blah. if self-righteousness was water, the entire sporting-journalisitic complex would have drowned by now, and most of the fans too. there couldn't be a bigger rush of people waiting to place blame and trying to outdo each other with "i knew McGwire was on steroids years ago..." stories. i won't re-hash things i've said numerous times before but i will urge everyone to read this free article from the gents at Baseball Prospectus which covers the Astros, Cardinals and Rangers. the piece about Tony LaRussa's managing prowess was interesting, but at the very bottom a great point was made. if you want to believe Canseco's allegations (or believe that steroids enhance performance in measurable ways) take a look at the performances of Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez and Rafael Palmeiro before and after Canseco joined the Rangers and supposedly introduced them to the juice (reproduced in the article). where is the big jump in performance that would be the smoking gun here? the careers of all of them look pretty normal for a high quality player: good numbers that get better with age, including power numbers that peak around age 26-29 and then plateau for a while before tapering off slowly into the mid-to-late 30s. just like Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth. i'll quote the very end of the article:

First, players are innocent until proven guilty. Secondly, for good or ill, steroids weren't against the rules of Major League Baseball during Canseco's career. And perhaps most importantly, there isn't any study out there that proves that steroids help players produce more offensively. That doesn't mean that steroids don't help; that means that we don't know that they do. We try to trade in data around here and not conjecture, and we're hoping that people who read Canseco's book will do the same.

also, to whichever knuckleheads were using Brady Anderson as an example of how we "know" some baseball players are juicing, would you please explain his statistics on either side of his fluke 1996 season in which he hit 50 homers. this is turning into a witch hunt and it's really pathetic. no one is saying that steroids are good, but the level of discourse here is of the "he's muscular so he must be juiced and i don't wanna hear no arguments" variety. so much so that an obvious attention-hound like Canseco gets credibility simply because people are willing to jump at anything.

if you look at a known 'roid-head like Ken Caminiti you can see the power surge that he experienced later in his career (beginning around age 31) and then use that to hypothesize about other players like Bonds, Steve Finley, McGwire, etc. but using 1 data point is what's known as a small sample size and it would be foolish to draw any conclusions without having many more players to draw from and to know when certain players started (and stopped) taking steroids so you could determine what effect it had on performance. until then, i will remain skeptical.