Road Records and Drug Use Are Unrelated
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

One of the stranger things about what has so far been a strange season has been just how lousy teams have been on the road, and how much this has affected the races. Three last-place teams — Toronto, Colorado, and Cincinnati — actually have winning records at home and are in the basement entirely because of shabby road trips. Atlanta, with the second-best home record and third-best run differential in the National League, is nonetheless flailing about below .500; at one point, they were an embarrassing 7-24 away from Turner Field. The Chicago Cubs have the best record in the sport, but it’s due entirely to their unreal play at Clark and Addison; away from the North Side, they’re 16-20. In all, 26 of 30 teams are at or below .500 away from home.
Predictably, given the times in which we live, this has led to a lot of theorizing about drugs in the game. If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard or read that the cause of bad road records was baseball’s amphetamine testing program, I’d have enough to buy a can of beer at Shea Stadium. (This represents many dimes.) As the idea goes, traveling players, tuckered out from long flights and fueled by nothing stronger than espresso and Adderall, can no longer perform with the same fervor and drive they did a few years ago — or, for that matter, in Henry Aaron’s day — when drowsiness was cured with potent, high-grade methamphetamine. Hence the bad road records.
Like the beliefs that English royals are actually shape-shifting lizards or that Barack Obama is a Muslim, this is the sort of thing that people will credit whether or not it makes any sense. Still, it’s probably worth raising some obvious objections to it, if only because it’s really not good for people to credit mystical powers to greenies and other now-proscribed pep pills.
The first problem with the theory is that, while in the old days, players on the road may have been filled to the brim with speed, so too were the home team players. How exactly it’s a massive comparative disadvantage to not be using drugs other athletes aren’t using is something you’ll have a hard time explaining. (Of course it’s also hard to explain how it is that Queen Elizabeth has gotten away with being a Gila monster for so long.)
The second problem is that amphetamine testing started two years ago. Why exactly it would start showing up in road records now, rather than when it was first instituted, is an even more difficult question to answer. As with the problem of the reptilian queen, there are possible answers — perhaps all the drugs players were taking all this time only just washed out of their systems, for instance — but none are entirely persuasive.
The most convincing objection to be raised, though, is that there’s nothing at all unusual about this year’s road records. Historically, road teams play about .460 ball — sometimes a bit worse, sometimes a bit better. Through the start of yesterday’s games, road teams had a .433 winning percentage this year. At the same point in the season last year, that number was .475. The year before, it was .460. And the year before that, it was .431. Thirty years ago, it was .427 — over the course of a full year.
These last two points are the most inconvenient for anyone who wants to argue that baseball is suffering a game-wide case of the shakes this year as it comes off a decades-long drug binge. 2005, after all, was the last year in which players weren’t tested for amphetamines and their various derivatives. How is it, if the lack of these drugs is to explain bad road records, that when they were last all but legal in the game road performance was just as bad as it is this year? How is it that in 1978, when any player could take anything he wanted, road teams played much worse than they’re playing now?
As much of a comedown as it may be — I, too, would be entertained to find out that Prince Charles really has green skin and a forked tongue — the sad, boring truth is that the English royals are normal people, and teams are playing badly on the road this year just because they are. Baseball is an odd game in which odd things happen; there’s no more reason or order to be found in most of them than there is in life in general. Teams on the road generally win about 46% of their games. Sometimes they randomly do better, sometimes they randomly do worse. The upside to all of this is that it reminds us that baseball players aren’t great at what they do because of drugs, but because they’re singularly gifted and driven. When you’re not looking for reasons to look at them as hopped-up drug fiends, it’s all the easier to really appreciate just how driven and gifted they are.
tmarchman@nysun.com