After the four game sweep in the National League Championship Series it took me a little while to recover from the pain and the shock of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball season actually being over. After 169 games watching and following the Diamondbacks on a daily basis my system had gone into shock at the notion of not seeing box scores in the news paper or making plans to drive down to Chase Field for the next home stand. Although I have never smoked, I have to imagine that what I was now dealing with had to be the equivalent to when a smoker decides to quit. The only difference was that there doesn’t appear to be a patch that has been produced to help ease a baseball fan back into normal society after the season is complete. I feel as though the medical profession has seriously lapsed at this oversight and I decided to do something about it.
One of the greatest attributes of capitalism can also be one of its flaws. In an open market companies are free to develop products and services that they believe they can sell and make a profit. Consumers who vote with their checkbooks will decide if the company was correct with their assessment of marketability for a product. The first question in developing a patch for baseball fans to ease them away from their addition to the national pastime would be to see how large the market may be for such a product. According to commissioner Bud Selig attendance for Major League Baseball games reached 79.5 million fans for the 2007 season. The sport also had gross revenue of $6.075 billion (I would agree with the commissioner, that is a pretty gross number) so in my mind there is definitely an unrealized market for the baseball patch.
A potential problem for the developer of such a worthwhile drug is the timeline it takes for a new medication to go through approval by the Federal Drug Administration process. The FDA has been tasked with creating requirements that a drug must fulfill before it can be marketed. There are three phases that must be completed.
Phase 1: A small number of healthy people will be administered the drug to test dosage range and administration method. If the initial test is safe, dosage is increased to assess maximum safe dosage. I can see where this may be a problem for our baseball patch. I can’t imagine being able to find a set of healthy people from November through March that is not suffering from baseball withdrawals. If we wait to begin testing in March during Spring Training I doubt we are going to find any volunteers who would be willing to take a drug that would lessen their dependency on baseball. This is definitely going to be a problem. I can also see some potential problems with establishing proper maximum self dosage. What if the dosage is too strong and the fan comes away not caring anything about baseball? The only possible solution for that might be to send them to Miami since baseball apathy appears to be rampant there.
Phase 2: A large amount of patients with the disease are tested with a placebo control. Administers continue to look at safety precautions keeping optimum dosage in mind. And before anyone asks; yes I think baseball withdrawal could be classified as a disease. If you want proof ask my wife. When I suggested that we go to Mexico or the Caribbean this winter just to catch some winter ball games she responded by saying I must be sick in the head if I thought she would want to go to the Caribbean just to see a baseball game. This phase would be a real ethical challenge for me I think. Seeing so many suffering baseball fans and knowing that I was giving them a placebo instead of something that would help them would be disheartening. If I’m going to be that cruel I may as well tell them that the drug will make the Tampa Bay Rays post season ticket holders for the 2008 season.
Phase 3: Rigorous tests are performed on a very large pool of ill patients. I would suggest starting this phase with fans from the Washington Nationals, Milwaukee Brewers, and Kansas City Royals. These three teams have the longest post season droughts in Major League Baseball. The Nationals were last in the play-offs in 1981 while the Brewers haven’t seen post-season action since 1985 and the Royals fans last witnessed baseball past the regular season in 1985 when they were handed the championship after a blown call against the St. Louis Cardinals in the ninth inning of game 6. The patch may not actually work for Kansas City fans since I don’t think there is a drug available that can overcome bad karma.
Getting a new drug approved is a long and drawn out process. Reports have indicated that if 20 drugs are subjected to test only 13 will make it successfully through the first phase. That number will further be reduced to 9 who complete Phase 2. Of the original 20 drugs that begin testing only 1 will successfully complete all three phases. It’s an uphill battle and one that may take years to realize success but I think it would be worth it if we can ease the suffering of fans such as myself who find themselves locked out of their favorite stadium waiting for the next baseball season to begin.
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