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Proposed Three-Prong Anti-Steriod Strategy for Baseball

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt has a good post over on Freakonomics that discusses a plan by Aaron Zelinsky (who last week on our blog wrote a guest piece on steroids in baseball) for a three-prong anti-steroid strategy for Major League Baseball.

Here is an excerpt from Professor Levitt's post discussing Aaron's idea;

Aaron Zelinsky, a student at Yale Law School, recently proposed an interesting three-prong anti-steroid strategy for Major League Baseball:

1) An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years later using the most up-to-date technology available.

2) Player salaries are paid over a 30-year interval.

3) A player?s remaining salary would be voided entirely if a drug test ever came back positive.

I?m not sure about points 2 and 3, but there is no question that point 1 is essential to any serious attempt to combat the use of illegal performance enhancers. The state-of-the-art in performance enhancement is the best set of techniques that cannot be detected using current technology. So, by definition, the most sophisticated dopers will evade detection, unless they are unlucky or make a mistake.

For the rest of the post, click here.

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on January 23, 2008 (boomark / email).