Is baseball really more dangerous than football?
Informal study raises perplexing question but offers few answers
The health risks associated with playing football were more than outweighed by the benefits of being a pro athlete
On the Grantland website this month, writer Bill Barnwell published an informal study of mortality rates among professional football and baseball players. The results were surprising: among the 3,088 ex-footballers who played for parts of at least five seasons between 1959 and 1988, 12.8 per cent had died; in a sample of 1,494 baseball players active during the same era, the death rate was 15.9 per cent.
The study was meant to serve as a clarification or maybe a rebuke of a similar study published last spring. That one, conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (and then peer-reviewed), compared mortality among retired football players and non-athletes matched for age and race. It found the ex-athletes were dying about half as often as one might expect.
In other words, the health risks associated with playing football were more than outweighed by the benefits of being a pro athlete — excellent training and nutrition, a good salary, top-quality medical care and so on.
But the bigger issue for Barnwell and just about everyone else who saw those data was how they might relate to football’s concussion panic. What do the mortality numbers mean, asks Barnwell, for “the group of retired (NFL) players that had spent the past two years launching lawsuits against their former employer” — i.e., the ones who have alleged a league-wide conspiracy to conceal the long-term effects of brain damage?
If the Grantland study had shown that, comparing “apples to apples,” football players die younger than baseball players, we would all have assumed that head injuries were a major reason why. But Barnwell’s numbers went in the opposite direction and left us with a perplexing question: why might baseball, the gentleman’s game, be more deadly than football over the long term?
It could be that cumulative wearand-tear is worse for your health than acute injuries. Football players get dinged multiple times per game, but their careers tend to be quite short — 3.5 years, on average — and each season comprises just 16 to 20 games. Baseball players are less vulnerable to injuries on the field, but they’re asked to perform10 times as often, and their careers tend to last 60 per cent longer.
Or maybe the difference in mortality rates has more to do with non-athletic behaviours. A 2009 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that just 0.2 per cent of NFL athletes smoke, compared with 30.5 per cent of equivalent non-athletes. Meanwhile, a 2003 survey of Major League Baseball players found that about 36 per cent are regular users of chewing tobacco or snuff.
The difference in mortality rates could also be a result of broad demographic factors in professional sports. Across the U.S. population, for example, white males tend to live about six years longer than black males, a gap that is mitigated — but not eliminated — among paid athletes.
British researchers compared mortality rates among white and black NBA players who were active between 1946 and 2005. Overall, these athletes outlived non-athletes by about 4.5 years, but the white players lived about 1.5 years longer than their black teammates. That disparity persists even in the absence of any major wage discrimination between the two groups. But if race were the key factor, then Barnwell’s findings about baseball and football should have been reversed. According to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, 67 per cent of NFL players are black and 31 per cent are white, compared with 9 per cent and 61per cent in baseball. Other socio-economic factors could be at play. For a 2007 paper in the journal Death Studies, a pair of economists in Shippensburg, Pa., examined the longevity of MLB players of the baby-boomer generation. As a rule, the athletes in the study lived longer than equivalent non-athletes, but their life spans were strongly dependent on their level of education. Baseball players who skipped college had twice the risk of death as those who attended a four-year university. Football players do tend to have more education than baseball play- ers, but the difference is not dramatic. Among baseball draftees, between 35 and 56 per cent are selected right out of high school with no baccalaureate training at all. Meanwhile, about half of the players in the NFL arrive having completed their undergraduate degrees. Whatever the explanation, studies like this one tell us nothing about the specific impact of head injuries or whether these sports are danger- ous in absolute terms. Nor do they get at the bigger issue: is professional football, or indeed any other sport, simply too dangerous for the athletes involved? If the NFL doesn’t do more to protect its players, should we give up watching in protest?
The exact, long-term effects of head trauma are still unknown. The original National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study broke down individual causes of death for ex-NFL players, but the sample wasn’t big enough to determine whether they were at increased risk of dying from neurodegenerative disease. Taken in aggregate, however, the government data offer some degree of comfort. Considering the many dangers of the game, a man who takes a job in the NFL has a good chance of living a longer life as a result. That may be apples-to-oranges, as Barnwell points out. But for fans, it’s the stat that counts the most.