“This is what our sport is up against,” one baseball executive said to me on Friday. “We are up against the fact that the stuff we are fighting against WORKS. And when it does, the payday can be huge.”
Besides the clear knowledge inside baseball of who this executive is, the more interesting thing is that this is stated and accepted as fact. Lupica gets skeptical when he discusses the upcoming blood test for hGH, something that one of the top scientists in testing has been developing for years. In fact, there’s few people besides Dr. Olivier Rabin who I believe are even capable of coming up with such a test.
DL: A hot topic is Human Growth Hormone (HGH), which is reportedly replacing anabolic steroids in a lot of locker rooms. How effective is HGH?
AA: Conventional wisdom says that everyone is on HGH now because there’s no test to detect it, but what they don’t realize is that there’s a night and day difference between HGH and anabolic-androgenic steroids. Studies have shown that HGH supplementation will increase muscle mass; but there is little, if any, evidence of strength gains in these studies. In other words, when HGH supplementation has been studied in normal males, there are reports of small gains in muscle mass, but there seems to be no evidence from a randomized, double-blind study that you gain strength from HGH alone. If there is any effect of HGH, it is likely to be a small effect, especially compared to how anabolic steroids improve strength and baseball performance.
Here’s where the “it works” meme troubles me. If hGH “works”, but doesn’t have the strength gains expected, how is it working? We have to look no further than the scientific evidence. HGH is most commonly used in two populations: short kids and people rich enough to try and buy their way out of aging. David Segui, an admitted user, didn’t grow, so the likeliest effect of hGH is that it improves the body’s ability to stay healthy, not that it is a replacement for anabolic steroids, which clearly do have strength building properties.
The idea of hGH being in baseball isn’t new. Heck, it’s actually two, perhaps three generations back. I don’t see anyone outraged about the use of insulin, IGF-r1, MGF, or nootropics. In fact, I don’t see anyone talking about them. While people are busy raging against what was done last year or two years ago, players have moved on. The drug creators and distributors have moved on. Guys like Dr. David Black, the top tester in the world, Dr. Don Catlin, the top researcher in the world, and Rabin and his WADA crew, could use the funding not just to catch up, but to actually get in step with what’s actually happening. Mark McGwire famously said “I’m not here to talk about the past.” If you’re going to be outraged about drugs in sport and want to do more than just be outraged, if you want to have a real effect, you’d better stop talking about the past.
Prospectus Q&A: Andy Andres
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