Steroids: It’s Time to Move On

Performance: enhanced. Awesomeness: all natural.

There is wide disagreement about how to put The Steroid Era into context. Unless opinions change drastically over the next few years, Mark McGwire will not get into the Hall of Fame. It is difficult to imagine voters letting in Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens, either. Meanwhile, Bonds’ home runs are “tainted,” and with Alex Rodriguez an admitted user, there appears to be no hope for “clean” records in the near future. But, though steroid use in sports has been well known and undisputed at least since the 1980s, baseball ignored it until the second half of this decade. Nobody knows for sure who used or what effects steroids had on their accomplishments. Nobody knows how far back steroid use goes. And players have been cheating in all kinds of other ways for 100 years. It is time to move on. It is time to accept that steroids happened, to accept that many, most, or all players were juiced, and to celebrate the accomplishments from The Steroid Era for what they were: great performances against the norms of the period, with no cherry-picking and no asterisks.

Exactly when The Steroid Era started is debatable. When Ken Caminiti admitted in 2002 that he had used steroids, he said he started after a 1996 injury. Jose Canseco claims that he was using them in the 1980s. McGwire admitted that he used steroids at least as early as 1991. Although it is possible and even likely that steroid use started years or decades earlier, home run totals did not explode until the 1990s. Since the rancor about steroid use is inextricably linked to home runs, it is convenient to define The Steroid Era as approximately 1990 to 2005, when the league put into place a testing system with penalties. It is also convenient to refer to all muscle-based drugs simply as “steroids,” and to differentiate between particular drugs only when necessary. While this is not technically correct, the meaning is clear and the alternatives are unpalatable. I despise the fact that we now have an acronym, PED, for Performance Enhancing Drugs. Every part of an athlete’s training and just about every substance a modern athlete consumes is performance enhancing.

Was the ’stache a performance enhancer? If not, please explain the 286 career saves.

Given the approach that baseball took to steroid use in the 1990s and early 2000s, it does not make sense to label it as true cheating. The commissioner first banned steroids in 1991, but until 2005 they were against the rules in name only. There was no testing. There was no enforcement. In fact, it is probable that many of the people who now show the most indignation about steroids—the commissioner, the writers, and some former players—knew exactly what was going on and chose not to stop it. We now know that Major League Baseball learned of Mark McGwire’s steroid use in 1993, when the FBI contacted the league’s security department. It was the common belief that steroids helped players hit home runs, and in the late 1990s, after the strike, home runs saved baseball and enriched everyone involved. As long as fans were not upset, the incentive was not to stop steroid use, but to allow and even encourage it. This created an environment where users faced no threat of consequences and had an ingrained belief that success was directly linked to rule breaking. Tom Tango has called steroid use a workplace environment issue in his posts on the issue.

In addition to the league bosses, many writers probably knew about steroid use. Perhaps they were afraid at the time to alienate their sources by calling them out. Now that it is public knowledge and they have the support of angry fans, they feel comfortable spewing self-righteous hyperbole about “cheating the game” and “tainting the record books.” Many of the former players who have recently railed on their peers probably knew as well but did not feel able to go public with the information—imagine walking into a locker room after ratting on members of the brotherhood. This is speculation of course, but it is hard to imagine that writers and “clean” players—people who were in the locker room every day, who talked to steroid users about baseball every day, who saw up close how bodies were changing—had no inkling of what was going on. At my workplace, it is difficult to keep even a single, minor transgression secret. This was scandalous behavior by perhaps more than half of all employees, and that it was a secret for so long is amazing.

“My only true fault is that I try too hard.”

That many knew about steroids at the time and failed to speak out makes the current outrage on the issue sound flat and hypocritical. The home run party was good for everyone involved in the sport, but it is the players, the ones who damaged their bodies, who now endure the public circus of guilt, penance, and redemption. The players are the ones on television apologizing, weeping, and accepting the shame, humiliation, and grudging forgiveness (as long as they did not break a home run record). We, as fans, are complicit in the entire cycle. We suspend our disbelief while records fall, hoping that we are witnessing miracles and canonizing the heroes that perform them. Deep down we doubt, and when we learn the truth we feel outrage at being duped. It all satisfies our craving for the spectacle of meteoric rise and devastating fall.

Aside from the issue of whether it was truly cheating, nobody knows who did use steroids and who did not. Nobody knows how far back steroid use goes in baseball. Thus, passing judgment on who is “tainted” and who is “clean” is arbitrary. There even seem to be different standards of punishment for different classes of users. Take McGwire and Bonds versus Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, and Manny Ramirez, for example. Giambi and Rodriguez admitted that they used, and Ramirez tested positive and received a 50-game ban. They are all superstars, but none of the latter three faced anywhere near the level of outrage that Bonds and McGwire have endured. Bonds and McGwire broke home run records. Giambi, Rodriguez, and Ramirez have not.

“It helps me hit better if I do this first.”

As for Ramirez, common wisdom was once that he was too much of a goofball to do steroids. Who could imagine Manny taking the time to inject himself, to follow a calendar, to go through the hassle of researching and acquiring drugs? Manny could barely get himself to the ballpark on time, keep track of how many outs there were in an inning, or remember which part of his body was hurting when he asked for a night off. Then Manny tested positive, offering proof of the danger of trusting intuition and unscientific beliefs about the effects of drugs. The assumptions continue. When Mark Grace and Kenny Lofton speak out about how their accomplishments mean more because they never used steroids, writers take their statements at face value. Their bodies and statistics did not fit the accepted steroid-user profile. Meanwhile, an old slugger who hits a few more home runs than normal suddenly becomes suspect for the first time in his career. Trusting appearances and assumptions to determine guilt without actual evidence is arbitrary and reckless. Players have no real opportunity to defend themselves. Once the suggestion that a player’s muscles and home runs are not natural is out there, he picks up the “whiff of scandal,” which puts a permanent mental asterisk next to his accomplishments and, by current standards of voting, disqualifies him from the Hall of Fame.

As last year’s reaction to Raul Ibanez’s great season demonstrated, there is also a generally accepted view of how steroids affect statistics which leads to arbitrary, unsupported judgment, not only of players, but also of certain accomplishments. The most famous example is Brady Anderson’s 50 home run season in 1996. He topped 20 homers in only two other seasons, he played in The Steroid Era, and everybody knows that steroids help players hit home runs. Therefore, the logic goes, he must have been using steroids that year. But there have been similar examples of outlier performances in the past. Roger Maris, who held the single-season record of 61 home runs for almost 40 years, never reached 40 homers before or after he set the record, and topped 30 only two other times in his career. Davey Johnson had an amazing 1973 season in which he hit 43 homers at the age of 30. His next highest single-season totals: 18, 15, 10. These seemingly abberational performances are actually normal in a system like baseball where there is so much variance in performance and such an enormous sample of events. Instead of being great accomplishments, performances like Anderson’s are now proof that the player cheated.

He really did have tree trunks for arms.

So far, I have referred several times to the common belief that steroids cause players to hit more home runs. This belief is important due only to the influence it has on the behavior of players, writers, and fans. It is not rooted in actual scientific knowledge. In fact, we do not have direct evidence that steroids have any effect on baseball players’ skills. There is no scientific evidence that steroids cause batters to hit more home runs. There is no scientific evidence that steroids cause pitchers to throw harder or fielders to display better reflexes. And there is no way to do a methodical study of the actual effects, as such a study would require, at least, precise knowledge of who was using how much of which drugs. Thus, our knowledge of the link between steroids and performance is speculation, and speculation has a great ability to distort and exaggerate actual effects, especially when there is no hard evidence. As for the ironclad circumstantial factors—the mid-1990s home run spike coinciding with the generally accepted start of The Steroid Era and the muscular bulking up that we saw with our own eyes—correlation is not causation. In fact, there are several other factors that explain the increase in home run totals. Joe Posnanski listed and explored them in depth.

Not only did using steroids miss the bar as true cheating prior to the implementation of a drug testing policy, and not only do we have little knowledge of how long players have used steroids, who used, or how much the drugs helped, but the use of steroids is far from the first type of cheating to happen in baseball. Since the dawn of the sport, there have been spitballs, corked bats, stolen signs, doctored baseballs, and countless other borderline ways of trying to gain an edge over the competition. Some cite the illegal status of steroids to separate their users into a special class, but there are holes in this distinction as well. Players used amphetamines, which have been illegal since 1971, for decades before Canseco or McGwire took the field. Mike Schmidt, an admitted amphetamine user—a cheater who used illegal drugs, by the standards of the steroid police—is in the Hall of Fame. He enjoys the company of Gaylord Perry, Whitey Ford, and many others.

Wait, Canadians throw 98 now? Hmm. Maybe I should be pissed about steroids.

Baseball has been around for over 100 years. It has changed radically, sometimes from decade to decade. Imbalances and distortions have affected every period in the sport’s history, and thus different eras have different norms. When Babe Ruth set his versions of the home run records, he did it without having to face the great black pitchers of the time, like Bullet Rogan, Bill Foster, and Satchel Paige. For decades, pitchers threw complete games every four days. A .400 single-season batting average, once a semi-regular occurrence, has not happened for nearly 70 years. We now have the tools to put great past performances into context, and when we evaluate The Steroid Era, we must contextualize its performances with the help of these tools. We must also accept the records, as they are and without asterisks, regardless of the norms of the era during which they occurred.

The ERA record is 1.12, and Bob Gibson set it pitching from mounds that were five inches higher than they are today, against batters who, as a league, could muster only a .300 on base percentage. The home run records are 73 and 762, and Barry Bonds set them when sluggers looked like action figures, Canadians threw 98 miles per hour, and fly balls did not let the door hit them on the way out of the park. Bob Gibson is in the Hall of Fame. Barry Bonds and the best of rest from The Steroid Era should join him.