The Freakonomics blog links to a chart (published by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) which reports that 46 of the players named in the Mitchell Report improved their performance in one or both of the two years after they supposedly started taking steriods. There are a lot of issues that can be raised here--is the Mitchell Report correct? what if these players were taking roids before the date cited by Mitchell? wouldn't some of the players improve because they had not yet hit the peak age of 28 or so? isn't it a stretch to claim that the juice helped some players in the second year after they started using but not in the first?--but here's a more fundamental issue: The Mitchell Report named 86 players so finding 46 (a mere 54%) that improved might well nothing more than random chance. Indeed, 46 is less than one standard deviation (4.6) away from 43 for a binomial distribution with n=86 and p=.5. Could it be that the Freakonomics guys have been, ahem, fooled by randomness?