Crunching The Steroids Era Numbers

A rumored list of the remaining 103 baseball players who tested positive during the 2003 season has found its way onto the internet.  You can see the full list for itself here.  Who is on the list is a moot point.  I would like to take this occasion to take a peek at the numbers, seeing if we can quantify the value of having players using steroids on your team.

To figure out the impact of steroids on team performance, I started by figuring out who played on what teams.  Although the list has 104 names, the number of positive players on rosters is 116.  This is due to positive players playing for two teams.  Dividing 116 by 30, we get an average of 3.8 players per team on steroids. 

The next step was counting out how many steroid abusers were on each team.  Here we begin to get an idea of how great an impact the juice can have for a franchise.

Rumored Steroid Users Per Team

10 -Cubs

9 - Red Sox

8 - Giants

7 - Yankees

6 - A's, Dodgers, Mariners

5 - Expos, Orioles, White Sox

4 - Angels, Mets, Padres, Pirates

3 - Blue Jays, Braves, Brewers, Diamondbacks, Indians, Phillies, Tigers

2 - Marlins, Reds, Royals

1 - Devil Rays, Rockies, Twins

0 - Astros, Cardinals

Right away, the impact is pronounced.  All four of the most juiced teams in major league baseball that season made the playoffs.  In fact, the top three (sorry, San Fran) all made the Championship series.  By the same token, the Braves, Twins and Marlins also made the playoffs, with the Fish even pulling off a miraculous run to their second title. 

So I dug a little deeper.  Using the basic formula to find a standard deviation, I was able to come up with the number 2.4.  But what does this mean?

Well, if the average number of juicers on a team is 3.8, one standard deviation above that would equal 6.2 players (the average plus one standard deviation).

Very quickly we see only four teams were more than one standard deviation ABOVE the average.  All four made the playoffs (Cubs, Red Sox, Giants and Yankees).  The A's were a shade below one standard deviation above the average, which supports the notion that steroids actually do equal winning.

What does all of this mean?  Not a whole lot.  The 2003 World Series Champions were a team with less steroid users than the average.  But the numbers pan out that if a team were, as a whole, abusing steroids far above the average, their win total was probably as inflated as a Bay Area bicep around the same time.