Baseball Won't Fix Its PED Problem Until It Fixes the Incentives That Create It

Marlon Byrd won't be joining us for the rest of his life.

The veteran outfielder's career almost certainly ended on Wednesday when he tested positive for the growth hormone secretagogue Ipamorelin. Given that this is Byrd's second violation of Major League Baseball's Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment program—he was suspended for 50 games in 2012—the test brought down a 162-game suspension. Byrd won't be contesting the suspension, and will almost certainly choose to retire. Even if he doesn't, it's hard to imagine a 39-year-old Byrd walking into a big league job a third of the way through next season. This is almost certainly it.

Byrd's statement on the suspension and the reporting surrounding it portray a man in the end of his on-field career who made a clear-eyed, considered decision to put himself in a position in which he risked being found in violation of the league program so that he could continue playing.

Marlon Byrd's statement: — C. Trent Rosecrans (@ctrent)June 1, 2016

The "tainted supplement" concession at the end is a customary going-through of customary motions, as Byrd clearly knows. Both Tamoxifen and Ipamorelin are taken to mask the symptoms of PED use and supplement an ongoing PED regimen. It is clear what went on with Byrd, and he deserves neither praise for the "candor" in his statement nor any special plaudits for standing up and telling his teammates the score on his way out the door. Which leaves the question of what everyone else deserves.

Players took to Twitter and clubhouse media guys to grumble about Byrd the way they grumbled about Dee Gordon a month ago; Justin Verlander, the Detroit Tigers pitcher, has been prominent among them both times. Verlander's comments after Gordon's suspension were the most publicized of any player's; he said that Gordon shouldn't have been able to play while his appeal was being considered and called for even more stringent PED testing from the league. This time around, he just tweeted a simple emoji, probably recalling the home run Byrd hit off him back on April 22 of this year to break a 1-1 tie in a game the Indians would eventually go on to win.

From an unsentimental, if perhaps unfair point of view, if Verlander didn't want a 38-year-old league-average hitter to hit a home run off him in a game that was late and close, he should have made a better pitch. Marlon Byrd is not and never has been Barry Bonds. In fact, this season has been marked by PED suspensions for players who were only barely getting by at the plate. If Byrd's roster spot had been taken by some hungry up-and-comer, they would not have been appreciably slowed down by Verlander's pitch. I mean, look at it.

But it's certainly understandable that Verlander feels scorned: in his eyes, he was beaten unfairly by a guy who was cheating, in a loss that might cost his team the first (or second) Wild Card somewhere down the line. Verlander isn't alone, either; retired pitcher Dan Haren took to Twitter to ask if anyone was going to take the home runs Byrd hit off him out of the record books. The players who have to play against these cheaters have an entirely reasonable case for feeling how they do, even if it's fundamentally an emotional one. The problem lies in the jump from sympathizing with their hurt feelings to seeing a reason to legislate based on them.

Back during the Gordon news cycle, Sports on Earth's Mike Lupica called Gordon's recent career "fraud" while presuming to speak for unquoted players; just yesterday, Joel Sherman of the New York Post characterized the Byrd news with the suggested headline "Crime Pays." There is no actual case to be made that either player is guilty of criminal felony fraud, nor is it reasonable to actually respond to guys like Lupica or Sherman under the supposition that they're honestly suggesting that. The idea of fraud here is more a cultural one: that baseball players who cheat are selling someone a false bill of goods, and that those who have been thus wronged are entitled to restitution as a result. We can probably all agree on at least the first part of that.

The solutions offered are curious, however. The most common, after Gordon's suspension, involves the voiding of player contracts when a player is determined to have used PEDs; this would let the team who signed that player fully off the hook for both his salary and his roster spot, both of which are already forfeited for the duration of a suspension. And then there are the implications of statements like this, which at the very least suggests that Byrd's earnings are tainted, and at the most suggests he is not entitled to keep them:

Byrd has earned $38.M in career, per — Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal)June 1, 2016

All of this misses the key issue: Who is actually being defrauded here? Voiding contracts, never mind going beyond that, helps precisely one party, the team. But the team isn't losing out here, not in the specific ways that voiding a contract or recovering money might rectify. The team loses access to a player for a certain number of games, as they should, but they have not been injured by fraudulent a work-product. Hits that score runs for the team do not come off the scoreboard, games won by that team do not flip to losses in the standings, and lord knows tickets sold by that team will not be refunded.

The people being defrauded are the players and the fans—of the sport, not necessarily just of the team. In fact, under the usual narrative, it's the players and the fans of the opposing team who are being wronged, not the one employing the cheater. And fans are the one party whose needs modern professional sports are uniquely equipped never to serve. The fraud exists entirely apart from money; the fraud is that the game was not played in a manner that fans and players could trust. That's true regardless of whether Byrd makes $20 million, $2 million, $200,000, or $7.25 an hour.

The conversation will continue on how best to address cheating in baseball, and it will likely be fairly tiresome. Barring a major change in how pro sports do business, I think the system we have is more than adequate and the fact that Gordon will be a useful pariah the rest of his career and that Byrd's career is over seem like perfectly just punishments. Voiding contracts or worse serves no moral or pragmatic purpose. What it does—the only thing it really does—is permit teams to profit from players who cheat, and then profit again when those players get caught.

PED use in baseball is a systemic issue, and demands a systemic solution. The pressures to cheat are astronomical, and mainly economic; those hurt by cheating are never the main beneficiaries of baseball's economy. There are a number of different ways to combat PED use, ranging from the discovery-and-punishment system the league currently employs to a radical scheme that pays minor leaguers not only a living wage but a competitive one that removes the economic impetus to cheat.

Reducing the economics behind PED use in sports to "players cheat because they want to make more money" is roughly akin to reducing the public health risk of firearms to "people die because they get shot." It is a completely true and totally facile elision of the actual factors at work. To get at the heart of the matter, understand first that the revenue imbalance between team owners and their players is the highest it has been in decades, and second, that record-setting contracts are being signed each off-season, for amounts that outstrip inflation and revenue gains.

How is this possible? Not only is the total revenue pie being cut unevenly between the players and the owners; the players' slice of the pie is then itself cut unevenly amongst the players. In 2016, the 30 MLB clubs have committed some $3,960,649,025 to payroll for some 750 active roster spots; this is the minimum possible number of ways to cut the pie, and some teams are paying players not on the active roster for various reasons. Some $1,108,416,792 of that sum, which is 28 percent of total payroll, is committed to just 51 major leaguers, which is 6.6 percent of total roster spots.

In a vacuum, many of those 51 players deserve their paydays. But this does not represent meritocracy. Rather, it represents the perverse incentives of MLB's model of team control, in which a player essentially has to run a gauntlet for nearly a decade at the bottom of the pay scale before having a chance at landing among the top 150 salaries in the league, let alone the top 50. Some players cash in early, once they've navigated a sufficient portion to convince teams it's worth the risk of buying out their arbitration years, but that's not the point. The point is that the current system stratifies player salaries to the benefit of the league, enriching a few players in exchange for keeping salaries down for the rest. This is why players cheat: because once you get far enough through that maze—once you get to your late arbitration years or, god willing, your free agent years—you've ensured you'll never be like those guys making league minimum or, god forbid, still toiling away in the minors for less than a living wage. Players cheat to get there, and with good economic reason.

Once you recognize that, the question shouldn't be "How do we stop players from getting an edge in this system?" It should be "Why is such a wholly unfair system permitted to exist in the first place?" This is where the issue becomes ideological: Do you believe unfairness of outcome is a virtue in competitive sport, off the field as well as on it? Do you believe that a Hall of Famer fundamentally deserves a more secure financial future than the guy he came up with who never made it out of AA? If the answers to those questions are yes, then: Does the current system properly reward those merit-based differences, or grossly distort them? Put another way: Does the 4,089th best baseball player in America deserve to make a living wage, given that he works in an almost $10 billion industry?

Players also cheated back when ballplayers had day jobs and played part-time; cheating is a part of life. But would there be such an ingrained, systemic PED culture in baseball if salaries flattened out, players were justly given a larger piece of the overall revenue pie, and minor leaguers were paid salaries that reflected the health and wealth of the industry to which they contribute?

These are more complicated questions, and those tend toward complicated solutions even when easy answers aren't hard to find. But it bears repeating that the only parties here whose interest demands no additional consideration are the teams themselves. They created this environment, and they live in it. They benefit from the malfeasance being punished. They will turn a profit either way. They will abide. And they do not need a bigger portion of the pie.