Glad you said that. I've thought the same thing but never had the nerve to say it. I think Tommy John surgery is tantamount (in a small way) to creating a robot, and in that sense is worse than steroids.
Huh? TJ surgery involves literally taking a ligament from the subject's
own leg and wrapping it around their elbow. Similar procedures are used all the time for innocuous operations like (among other things) hair transplantation. I guess in your book liver transplants are double cheating, because they come from other players?
Everything you listed except steroids (HGH, cortisone shots, TJ surgery, Lasik) doesn't appear to confer any advantage on a healthy person. Without steroids, HGH does virtually nothing to improve a healthy baseball player's performance (not even shorten muscle recovery, really). No player would take cortisone shots unless he was in a lot of pain, because it wouldn't help and would most likely hurt him. The occasional "velocity increase" from TJ surgery is widely believed to be more due to the pitchers' abilities to rest their arms and build up their shoulders, cores, etc., rather than inherent to the surgery--if healthy, you could get roughly the same effect by just taking a year off in your early twenties. Besides, no sane major league pitcher is going to risk being part of the 10% of TJ surgeries that fail if he doesn't need it in the first place, so the "advantage" it confers can't be very great. Even Lasik, which
occasionally results in slightly better than 20/20 vision, has a small failure rate, a significant recovery time, and despite the possible advantages is not only never (AFAICT) undertaken by major leaguers with normal vision, it's often not even done by those who require vision correction, especially pitchers, due to fear that something might go wrong and the required layoff time.
So why are steroids different? Simple--unlike everything else you listed, even HGH, taking steroids can improve performance in healthy players. That means that healthy players who
aren't taking steroids (which are illegal, mind you) are put at a disadvantage vs. those who are. Now, I'm in the smallish camp that thinks they weren't primarily responsible for the '90s offensive explosion and that the impact they had on individual players' performances was greatly exaggerated. But even if their main impact was speeding recovery slightly and adding 3-5 feet to a bunch of hitters' fly balls (and maybe adding 1-2 mph to a few pitchers' fastballs while taking 3-4 years off their careers), that's more than enough to separate it (for me) from medical procedures designed to put unhealthy or injured players on an equal playing field with the healthy ones.
So to finish, here's my basic formula for, "is it cheating":
- is the act illegal (if it's not, it's obviously not cheating)
- If half of a relatively homogeneous population of healthy, uninjured players perform the act and half don't, does the first half demonstrate significantly improved performance from the second half? (this would be true of, among other things, weightlifting, cardio, taking batting practice, and attending Spring Training, but since these acts are not illegal and they are usually surrounded by phrases like "hard work" and "motivation" nobody considers them cheating. Also note that "performance" is purposefully kept ambiguous, since in the baseball world it can deal with anything from hits to strikeouts to [as in the case of the Black Sox or Pete Rose] padding one's bank account).
- For healthy players, do the perceived risks of the act outweigh its rewards? (This last one is worded kind of poorly and a little tricky to explain. Think about it this way: it's technically illegal to turn a double play without stepping on second. Players who choose to do this in the case of difficult plays generally are rewarded with more double plays. But since it's usually done to avoid injury to the player throwing from 2B and is almost never called, its perceived risks don't really outweigh its benefits and it's not considered cheating. This is also why I have a hard time calling players who took steroids from the mid-to-late '90s up until about 2001-2002 since the MLB did not even attempt to institute any sort of risk/reward structure into the game, and the health issues were [and still are to some extent] not very well-studied).
If the answer to all three of these questions is "yes," then IMO the act is definitely cheating. If not, then there may still be an
argument for the act to be considered cheating, but it is probably not a black and white issue. By these rules, anabolic steroids throughout this decade, betting on baseball, Gaylord Perry's spitballs, etc. are definitely in the "cheating category." Pete Rose's corked bat (might not have actually been terribly effective, based on what few studies there are), "greenies" back in the day when everyone did them, HGH, etc. are in the "maybe" category. TJ surgery, cortisone shots, etc. are really not.
