There is one issue on which virtually every member of the baseball punditry agrees: steroids ruined baseball in the 1990s. Players took the illegal drugs because they made them stronger, and this strength enabled them to hit more home runs, which in turn gave them greater leverage in contract negotiations. Major League Baseball did not regulate the issue, refusing to punish its players for steroid use, and so it is generally agreed upon that steroid use was widespread on most teams for much of the 90s and the beginning of the 21st century.

Hand in hand with this belief that steroid use was widespread is the idea that steroid use leads directly to gaudier statistics. As the above chain of logic states, take steroids and you’ll get stronger and hit more home runs–on the surface, it seems to make sense. And if one looks at the league’s statistics from the past 15 years, they seem to support this theory–the number of home runs climbed higher than anyone thought it could, a feat best personified by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s pursuit of Roger Maris’ single-season home run record of 61 in the summer of 1998. Both of those players have since been implicated in steroid rumors, although nothing has ever been proven.

So is this logic true? Does steroid use lead to better individual performance? In today’s New York Times, J.C. Bradbury, and economist and professor at Kennesaw State University, argues that the steroid explanation is faulty. His article, which can be found at the following link:

“What Really Ruined Baseball”

attributes the spike in statistics to a different factor: league expansion. Bradbury’s article alternates between dismantling the steroids explanation and supporting his own theory.

How exactly would league expansion affect individual performance? Bradbury uses a theory of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his explanation:

“…in competitive environments, as the variance of the quality of participants shrinks, opportunities for great performance diminish.”

So when MLB expanded from 26 teams to its current number, 30, over the course of five years in the 1990s, its talent pool was significantly diminished. There were more roster spots to fill, and so players, on average, became less talented. By using Gould’s hypothesis, Bradbury concludes that with less talented players (he refers to them as riffraff) populating the league, great hitters were provided with many more opportunities to have great performances.

This league-wide expansion then, and the resulting drop in talent, is the explanation for baseball’s recent statistical aberrations, according to Bradbury. It’s not just limited to hitters, though; he cites numerous figures in which the game’s other half, pitchers, have also been able to exploit less talented players–for example, a recent spike in numbers of strikeouts.

Bradbury’s explanation is essentially a tipping point–something that may seem insignificant at the time, like the expansion of an already large league by a mere four teams, can have large and unintended consequences in the future. It is interesting to consider how decisions like this could impact organizations in many different fields–these kinds of situations are not limited to baseball. Is expanding your restaurant franchise a good idea? How about building that additional wing on your church–have you considered the costs of maintaining it, especially if your membership declines?

I also enjoyed Bradbury’s explanation because it flies in the face of so much conventional wisdom regarding increases in home runs and other statistics. Baseball is, more so than any other American sport, a game of history, with its numerous instances of individual outcomes inspiring people young and old to compare players from past generations to those of today. So when that comparison becomes muddled by something like this huge increase in home runs, people search for an explanation, and many seem to have latched on to steroid use as a catch-all for the game’s current state. While I don’t agree completely with Bradbury’s column–there is no single explanation for what happened to baseball in the 1990s–I respect him for approaching the debate from a different angle and offering a convincing alternative explanation, much like Gladwell does for other situations in his book.