At least, that's what ESPN's Bill Simmons, a.k.a. The Sports Guy, seems to suggest.
In an article just released in ESPN Mag, Simmons writes about the struggles (or rather, the collapse) of Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, whose batting numbers are miles down from where they were back in 2003-2007. Simmons mentions how there has been speculation among Red Sox fans that Ortiz is struggling badly because his stats (and his body) were beefed up due to steroids. But in listing the reasons that steroids might be to blame, Simmons says this (emphasis mine):
The steroid whispers started quickly. By late April, every conversation I had with a Sox fan seemed to include a "We need to mail Papi some HGH" joke. It was an easy leap for a couple of reasons: First, his power numbers leapt like Obama's Q rating from 2003 to 2007. Second, he's Dominican, and more than a few of his brethren -- Sammy Sosa, Miguel Tejada, Guillermo Mota -- have been in the center of PED controversies. Third, they sell steroids over the counter in the DR like they're Bubblicious. And fourth, baseball has reached a depressing point in which power hitters are presumed guilty until proven innocent.
Let me say right now that normally, I like Bill Simmons. I regularly read his columns, I normally think he's a pretty funny and sharp guy, and I read his book. He is, of course, a homer for Boston teams, but I don't really fault him for that. Let me also be clear that I don't think he's a racist or even necessarily ethnocentric. But I think that highlighted statement really weakens what was otherwise a good article.
Last year, the release of the Mitchell Report confirmed what most of us sports fans already knew -- that steroids and steroid use were widely prevalent in Major League Baseball. There are, sadly, some racial disparities in drug suspensions among professional baseball players. Dominican players made up about 10% of all MLB players in 2008, yet they also made up 24% of the 157 players suspended by MLB since 2005 for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. By comparison, American-born players were still the largest geographic group suspended for steroids since 2005 (46%), but that number is significantly lower than the proportion of players on rosters in 2008 who were born in the U.S. (72.4%). Even worse is the statistic that 58.5% of players who tested positive for steroids since 2005 were Dominican.
But that's not how Simmons frames the issue. He examines Ortiz's struggles at the plate through the lens of speculative reasoning. By Simmons's logic, Ortiz was a power hitter for about 5 years, had some injuries, and lost his swing, ergo he might have been a steroid user -- and if you need a reason why this might be so, he's Dominican. Never mind that Ortiz hasn't tested positive for steroids (not yet, anyway).
Since Simmons had said that "they sell steroids over the counter in the DR like they're Bubblicious," I wish he had spent more time discussing the factors that might be responsible for steroid use among baseball prospects in the Dominican Republic, like widespread poverty, for example. There's also the reality that in 2005, employers of Dominican Summer League players were "not allowed to suspend employees who fail drug tests." But Simmons didn't mention these things. Instead, he implied that the country of Ortiz's birth is a cause of possible steroid use, listing off other famous players from his country of origin as supporting evidence. It's the same fallacious reasoning that says that homosexuality is a reason for the high prevalence of HIV/AIDS cases. According to the CDC, men who have sex with men make up about 48% of AIDS cases who have been diagnosed since 2007. But that doesn't mean that gayness is a cause of AIDS. However, factors like poverty, poor access to health care and condoms, intravenous drug use, and widespread stigmatization of the LGBT community....that's what we should be talking about.
Did Ortiz use steroids? I don't know. Maybe. The sad reality is that steroids were EVERYWHERE in baseball for years and MLB either a) didn't know or (as I suspect) b) turned a blind eye to it. But I don't think one's race or country of origin should be used as a factor in explaining whether a person violated MLB's steroid policy.
I'll give Simmons the benefit of the doubt when I say that I don't think he meant it that way. But regardless, it was a poor choice of words.
UPDATE: I should make clear, with a hat tip to Irixsh, that Simmons doesn't actually believe that Ortiz used steroids, and he attributes Ortiz's decline to old age. Still, I wish he hadn't used Ortiz's country of origin as part of the list of reasons for why Sox fans had an "easy leap" to believe that Ortiz did use steroids.