Can Game Theory Exonerate Steroid Users?
New York Yankees fans have been on watch all year as slugger Aaron Judge has smashed his way closer and closer to the franchise record for home runs in a season (61 by Roger Maris). Many fans view this to be the real home run record and would like to expunge the likes of Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa from the record books due to their use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Although Bonds was never proven to be taking banned steroids, most reasonable people assume as a fact that he was. So why would these records stand over Maris’s when they are held by cheaters? Many view steroid users such as McGuire, Bonds, Sosa, and others like ethical monsters who destroyed the integrity of sport and should be shunned from baseball’s legacy for their wrongdoing. In reality, these people were just trying to keep from falling behind in a league where everyone was doing the same. When PEDs are introduced, the game of baseball turns into a classic prisoner’s dilemma.
Major league sports are a very competitive industry where the top producing agents make a very high wage while even mid-level performers are quickly cycled out of the job. After the 1994 players strike, the MLB wanted to boost viewership and slyly decided to stop testing for PEDs for the next ten years. Given the new rules and relatively cheap drugs, each individual player was faced with a decision: cheat or don’t cheat. If nobody cheats, the game is at its usual competitive equilibrium and players may or may not stay in the league. If a player cheats and nobody else does, their performance likely improves, and they will earn a larger contract and more job stability. If everybody else in the league cheats and one player does not, he’s basically guaranteed to be played out of the league and has relatively low odds of getting a good contract. Conversely, if he chooses to cheat, the game finds a new competitive equilibrium where some will make it, some will not. In this last scenario, perhaps the league is more exciting and generates higher revenue; however, it certainly has its own costs in terms of long-term side effects from steroid use. It is clear to see that cheating is the dominant strategy as it always improves a player’s outcome regardless of which state everyone else chooses (although select athletes are interested primarily in their long-term health). There exists an enormous pressure to perform as well as possible, so it is no surprise that given this dominant strategy, many athletes chose to use steroids. One confirmed user, Josè Canseco, claimed that 80% of the league was on something or another at the time. Most other estimates lie closer to 50%. Assuming that half of the league was boosting their performance, it cannot be seen as an ethical failure for any individual to do the same. Barry Bonds was 36 years old when he set the 73 home run mark. He was at an age where he could still produce, but contract prospects were sliding away if he did not keep up with the field. In the landscape of the MLB at the time, Bonds believed that he needed to take PEDs in order to stay elite and keep his job. Clearly, he was talented enough to survive, but PED cycles typically are most intense in the off season, so he did not yet know that he was about to have an all-time season. The MLB chose not to test athletes and thus knowingly set up this prisoner’s dilemma game for the athletes. The steroid era was the league’s creation and thus should not be labeled as a failure of integrity by its participants or grounds to remove their records. Best of luck to Aaron Judge, but Barry Bonds is the Home Run King.