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Broken
Records and the Steroid Era
by Jonathan
Leshanski
March 28, 2005
He was the new single season home run king.
He had accomplished what no one thought could be done breaking a
record despite the media attention and all of those rooting against
him. It was a glorious thing. There had been a lot of issues along
the way, his health was suffering, his hair had begun to fall out
due to stress, and his skin had broken out. It seemed at time no
one has wanted him to do it, after all baseball too has its legends,
and he was knocking down one of the big ones. The media seemed to
hate him, at least he saw it that way and he did his best to avoid
them lest he be driven to lose his temper and fly into a rage for
which he would be vilified by the newspapers even more.
If you think that the paragraph above was written about Barry Bonds
think again. It was written about a player named Roger Maris, the
last home run king before the “steroid era”. Maris showed
all the signs of a classic steroid user including, depressions,
rages, hair falling out, skin breaking out and a jump in home run
power which in that magical season boosted his totals by more than
a third over his career best mark. Did Maris use steroids? Probably
not, but that’s the best we can say since steroids were widely
used in medicine in that day and age.*
You see, there are things we can’t really make assumptions
about and baseball’s records might be one of them. It would
be easy to jump on the bandwagon here and say that all the “steroid
era” records should be dumped or marked with an asterik in
the same way that Maris’ home run record was marked for so
many years. If we strip a home run record from one player where
do we draw the line? Steroids have been around a lot longer than
people suspect. They were discovered in the late 1920’s-early
1930’s and among the earliest things noted about them were
their anabolic (muscle building) effects. The 1940’s and World
War II brought a lot more steroid use to the forefront, as the Nazis
used steroids on prisoners to fight malnutrition and in soldiers
to make them stronger and tougher.
By the golden age of baseball the muscle building effects of steroids
were well entrenched proven facts and they were regularly prescribed.
There is no doubt some of baseball’s greatest heroes benefited
from the drugs, which were neither illegal nor brought to the forefront
as a cheat, in fact they were often used to prevent or decrease
the effects of a hangover and for sports injuries for their anti-inflammatory
properties and they are still used that way today.
Combine those facts with the symptoms noted above about Roger Maris
and you could argue that his home run record was tainted, especially
if you throw in the fact he was dead by age 51 of cancer, another
common ailment of steroid users.
In taking on the case of Barry Bonds the evidence we have actually
seen is still mostly circumstantial. Nothing yet has been proven
though many of us believe that he has used steroids for years. Still
Barry was a great player back when he weighed 50 pounds less; he
still was a prodigious home run hitter who would easily have crossed
that magical 500 number that guarantees entry to the Hall of Fame
- that’s true even if we stripped 20 home runs a year from
him over the last 10 years.
So why are we so hard on Barry and those who have set contemporary
records? Athletes in general are bigger, stronger, better trained
than they ever have been. Parks are often smaller to promote the
long ball, considered by many to be the best moment, and certainly
the most talked about moments in baseball’s history. Even some
players believe that the way the ball is wound today improves the
power numbers of the hitters.
Yes, Barry particularly at this moment doesn’t seem to be an
ideal human being and may even end up serving some prison time for
perjury, but that doesn’t take away from what he did on the
field. Sure he used an illegal substance to improve his performance
but the Hall of Fame is littered with guys that cheated by scuffing
balls, throwing illegal pitches, using corked bats, and even sharpening
their spikes to injure opponents as well as some players that may
have even thrown games. Many of them were not ideal or PC enough
for this age, including racists, substance abusers, womanizers,
whore mongers. There are some that were convicted of crimes and
others that despised the media or the fans.
The truth is that baseball, its records and the Hall of Fame are
populated by human beings with their own self interests, their own
flaws. The standards of what we expect have changed and they keep
changing. Just three months ago, Mark McGwire was a first vote Hall
of Famer, today he might not get in. Roger Maris never did, and
yet he would have had he played in the modern age.
Yes, Big Mac, Bonds, Giambi, Sheffield and others have allegedly
cheated by using performance enhancers, but the fault lies not with
them but with Major League Baseball and the Player’s Union
that has allowed this to go on. These guys are the brains behind
the brawn of baseball, each with far more education than 99.9% of
the guys that play the game today, or played in decades past. They
have had the chance to clean up the game but have balked at it time
and time again - just like they are doing now with this most recent
sham of a drug policy.
Unfortunately for the most part the players have been the victims,
trusting that the union and the league would look out for them,
for their health, for their wallets, and their rights. They trusted
the union, the trainers, the doctors, the coaches, managers and
owners that they worked for, thinking that the steroids, the advice
and standards of playing they had to live up to were safe. It’s
easy to forgive the rank and file who weren’t smart enough
to know, because to us most of them are only men, not larger than
life heroes.
That’s why we’re hard on the Barry Bonds’, Mark McGwire’s
and Jose Canseco’s of the world. Because they aren’t the
dupes, because they appear intelligent enough to know exactly what
they were doing. Because they made themselves appear more guilty
of wrongdoing by trying to cover up their mistakes instead of coming
clean. Because they may have gotten ahead by doing something that
they knew was very wrong and they gave into the temptation of steroids
rather than having the courage to blow the whistle. It’s a
courage that we expect in heroes and we want to believe we have
in ourselves although until we are tested ourselves we’ll never
know.
A player’s morality is not the defining characteristic on the
baseball diamond; it’s what they do with the bat, ball and
the glove. It’s not our national policy to punish someone and
convict them of a crime without evidence and without a trial. That
day may come for Barry Bonds when we find that his prodigious home
runs seasons were all due to steroids, rather than the one time
he’s admitted to using a cream, but it doesn’t take away
from the raw skills he was born with, and those he worked to develop.
We may choose not to believe Bonds when he claims not to have been
juiced, but that’s a willful suspension of disbelief.
But what we believe and what we can prove are different things.
If we were to strip Bonds of the home run record without definitive
proof, we’d be doing the very fabric of our society an injustice
and just who could we call the legitimate single season home run
king? You’d have to strip that title from McGwire as well.
So do we give it to Sosa who swore under oath before Congress that
he never used, and suspend our disbelief there? Or take it back
to Maris despite evidence against him which is just as circumstantial?
Maybe all records really belong to the Babe. And perhaps that is
how it should be, history and nostalgia so rooted into the past
that we can’t remember or even challenge an assumption of innocence.
* Most Americans have probably used steroids in some form. They
are commonly found in first aid kits as hydrocortisone cream, they
are also found in many allergy and asthma medications, injections
such as cortisone shots and in some basic medical products. These
products are usually not anabolic or muscle building steroids but
are used in anti-inflammatory doses.
Share your thoughts or comments in our forums,
or e-mail Dr. Leshanski
directly. For articles on baseball and steroids visit our Steroid
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