7th Circuit judge/author/academic/blogger Richard Posner, in the course of a critique of the War on Drugs:
Oddly, one of the strongest cases for prohibiting drugs is the use of steroids by athletes. The reason is the arms-race character of such use, or in economic terms the existence of an externality. Ordinarily if a person uses a drug that injures his health, he bears the full costs, or at least most of the costs, of the injury. But if an athlete uses steroids to increase his competitive performance, he imposes a cost on his competitors, which in turn may induce them to follow suit and use steroids themselves, provided the expected costs, including health costs, are lower than the expected benefits of being able to compete more effectively. There is no offsetting social benefit from an across-the-board increase in athletes’ strength. Football games are no more exciting when linesmen weigh 500 pounds than when they weigh 200 pounds; and baseball would be totally unmanageable if every player could hit every other pitch 1000 feet.
(Emphasis added).
Re football – some SI writer proposed a rule change limiting substitutions to no more than 2 after any play, including change of possession to force teams to field “60 minute men”. Those 350 pound linemen would be gone from the game.
(And LT would have been a *great* running back).
Unrelatedly, the NY Times had something you might find funny – they had an article about how certain people’s names sometimes foretell their career, such as Dr. Doctor, or a lawyer named Lawyer.
For baseball, they found Cecil Fielder. Hmm, was he remembered for his glovework?