Performance Enhancers In Baseball

Baseball in its history has had its fair share of cheaters. Whether that meant stealing signs, spitting on baseballs or enhancing ones physical ability to play the game. I am going to look at the last part, which has been labelled in the main stream media (MSM) as PED (Performance Enhancing Drugs).

There are some performance enhancers that are drugs (HGH, Steroids) and other performance enhancers that are not (equipment, weight training, surgeries). Technically, these are all "performance enhancers", but to give equal weight to someone who wears contact lenses to someone who takes Anabolic Steroids is misguided and dull-witted on so many levels.

I like to think of the different types of performance enhancers being laid out on a spectrum with the left side housing things like LASIK, contact lenses, cleats, eating right, arm surgeries, legal advances in equipment... with the right side littered with things like HGH, Anabolic Steroids and other muscle mass building drugs and supplements (legal and illegal). The legal muscle mass building stuff would be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

There is a good fundamental reason why LASIK (IS NOT EQUAL TO) PED and it stems from having a fair and safe playing field (competition wise). Steroids are against the rules of baseball (atleast they are now). There is a good reason for this. Steroids can be dangerous to your body. Every player would pretty much be forced to take steroids in order to have a successful major league career if they were legal. Now LASIK is legal and for good reason. LASIK (contact lenses, eye glasses) pose very little health risk to players and is easily and safely available to all players. There is a fair and safe playing field as far as vision enhancement goes. Not so for steroids and many of the PEDs that are illegal in baseball.

I am not here to draw a line in the sand and label every single item that should be considered legal and illegal for baseball players, as I am not a chemist or doping expert. But by using common sense, it is easy to know where on this spectrum to place most of the common enhancers that come up for debate and lumping the items on the far left side of the spectrum in with the items on the far right side of the spectrum is rather ridiculous. Some of the items near the middle or right leaning side of the spectrum should be open for debate - but that's it.

Expanding The NCAA Basketball Tournament

We are right in the middle of March Madness and there has been a big buzz going around regarding the possible expansion of the field from 65 to 72, 80 or even 96 teams. The two things that would need to be improved upon from such an expansion before I'd support such a move, would be that an expansion is necessary based on "fairness" and that an expansion is necessary due to the potential for the NCAA to make a lot more money.

Now, I am by no means an NCAA financial expert, so I will stick to tackling the fairness issue. An expansion of the tournament would help the so called "bubble" teams get into the tournament, but would of course create a different class of "bubble" teams. The highest seed I could imagine a "bubble" team being, if they were to replace the 65th seeded team would probably be around a 12th or 13th seed. No 12th or 13th seeded team has ever made the final four, so I don't believe we are missing out on a potential National Champion by not expanding the field.

I believe we already have expansion, and it is called the conference tournaments that pretty much each and every conference plays at the end of the regular season. The conference tournament in effect, is already an expansion of the field of 65 teams. The conference tournaments can be thought of as "play in" games for the bubble teams and the teams that have no shot at making the field of 65 based off of merit.

In conclusion, I don't believe that the NCAA Basketball Tournament should be expanded beyond the 65 (not sure why we even have a play-in game) that currently make up the field of teams. There is not a fairness issue that would be solved and with the conference tournaments, we already have a quasi-expanded field.

College Football Fallacy

As you probably know I am a a big proponent of a College Football Playoff System. You can Go Here to read more about that, but what I would like to touch on here is what I believe to be a common fallacy among proponents of the status quo, which is a single National Title BCS playoff game. What I believe to be the fallacy, which gets thrown around in the mainstream media (MSM) all the time, is that under the current BCS format the regular season games mean more than it would under an 8 team playoff (picking 8 for arguments sake).

Listening to this argument coming from the MSM got me to ponder if this was really the case. Yes, under the current system the regular season games mean more... but not for many teams. The problem is that too many teams are eliminated from serious championship contention early in the season. If a solid Division-1 team loses a game during the season, it takes a hope and a prayer and devine intervention from a computer program to get a shot at the National Title game. I remember one year, a one loss USC team had its National Title hopes resting on a meaningless WAC game at the end of the year, because their strength of schedule would look better or worse to the computer program depending on who won the game.

Under the current BCS system, as the season progresses more and more teams (often very good ones) drop out of title contention, only to have the rest of their season become meaningless as far as title hopes go. By the last two or three weeks, you only have a half a dozen teams playing meaningful games with the top two or three teams only controlling their own destiny. On the surface, there appear to be quite a few meaningless regular season games. In fact, nearly all the games are meaningless towards the last couple of weeks of the season.

Under an eight team playoff system, you would have college teams fighting for 8 spots, not 2 during the regular season. Many of these 8 spots would be up for grabs deep into a season, thus making more of the regular season games meaningful. No longer would you have a TCU or Boise State team winning every single game during the regular season and have nothing to show for it. I mean, how meaningful can the regular season be, when a good team like TCU or Boise State goes undefeated during the regular season and doesn't get a shot to play for the National Title.

The current system is unfair and it does not render the regular season more meaningful, in fact it renders it less meaningful. Below are my estimates as to how many teams left in contention for the National Title (realistically not mathematically) there are each week under both a 2 and 8 team playoff system.

Week #	BCS 2-Team	8 Team
1	200	200
2	115	140
3	70	110
4	45	90
5	30	75
6	20	62
7	15	50
8	12	40
9	10	35
10	8	30
11	7	25
12	6	20
13	5	17
14	4	15