The biggest sports story over Christmas break was hardly even news: Mark McGwire used steroids for most of his fifteen years of baseball-crushing. But the consequences of this admission are less readily apparent. McGwire had been left out of Major League Baseball’s prestigious Hall of Fame for suspected steroid use. Confirming those suspicions, logically, should do little to change his legacy. But it feels as though this painful confession—the first to come from a star athlete without any formal accusations of steroid use—might be what it takes to save not just one man’s legacy, but that of an era.
Baseball has evolved from its earliest days. Put any of “the greats” in the contemporary game and they would be hilariously outmatched. Like all sports, today’s game has maximized its use of science to ensure a higher quality of athleticism in even the worst competitors. In the late 1980s, science found a new way to help players: anabolic steroids. The league decided to ban this particular technological advancement, and smartly so—steroids aren’t good for players or the children who look up to them, and are illegal under U.S. law without a prescription.
This ban, however, was something of a farce. The league didn’t start testing for steroids until 2003. The MLB, of course, had no real reason to test—before the 1994 players’ strike, steroids didn’t seem too prevalent. Afterwards, baseball’s brass were willing to turn a blind eye to unusual statistics, if that’s what it took to regain the popularity lost since the strike.
Beyond damage to user health and well being, the main concern with steroid use seems to be what these inflated numbers mean in the context of baseball history. Can we say that Barry Bonds has the most home runs of all time? Can we say that all four thousand of Roger Clemens’s strikeouts are legitimate? Can we say that Rodriguez’s “youngest player to 500 home runs” title is correctly given? If we choose to bar Mark McGwire from the Hall of Fame, do we also need to remove any references to this World Series victory? Steroid use opens the door to a stampede of complexities leaving fans to ponder the legitimacy of their heroes’ athletic accomplishments.
Steroids’ effect on baseball is inestimable. Although there is no firm data on steroid use and baseball performance, it is safe to say that the sport was completely changed by steroids. Players were playing better than they should have been at every level and every position. As ESPN’s Tim Keown puts it: “There is a reason ballplayers … use steroids: they work.” Every measurement—from regular season team wins to World Series victories, individual home runs, and strikeouts—was immeasurably changed in the 1990s. We don’t have any way of knowing who used steroids in the decade before testing started, so we can’t even begin to parse how things would have worked out otherwise. And considering that quite a few of the players named in the Mitchell Report weren’t abnormally large, we can’t even be sure that great apparent non-users like Omar Vizquel or Pedro Martinez—players who could be touted as the “true greats” in an era of rampant rule-breaking—did in fact abstain.
Those with the power to memorialize the era, then, must choose to embrace the 1990s or ignore them entirely. By ignoring these numbers because they are impure, and then reverting to old records, we are making an implicit assumption that yesterday’s figures are completely legitimate. Considering, however, that Hank Aaron has admitted to amphetamine use to improve his game and Gaylord Perry—a renowned spitballer from pre-ban years—is revered as one of the best pitchers of all time, we cannot be entirely sure of just how pure yesterday’s game was anyway. In fact, we can be pretty sure that it was almost as impure as today’s.
Precedent isn’t always the best thing to follow—just because yesterday’s stars may have cheated doesn’t mean we should be so willing to accept today’s drug-use standards. But that might be exactly why the steroid era—and McGwire’s admission—was actually a great thing for baseball. In today’s panopticon of media coverage, some impurity or other was bound to come out. No other sport has the combination of tradition and popularity of baseball, making it uniquely ripe for this problem. McGwire’s unwarranted, sincere apology has just about closed this era by setting another precedent: the greats from my youth need to admit and apologize so that the rest of baseball can accept them and—most importantly—finally move on.
