BASEBALL STEROID ERA

Baseball Steroid Era: An Argumentative Research Paper



Baseball Steroid Era: An Argumentative Research Paper

Introduction

When Kirk Radomski, a former clubhouse attendant for the New York Mets, pleaded guilty to distributing steroids in April, the feds gave the public a tantalizing look at their bounty. One page of the search warrant affidavit had a list of up to 23 players Radomski says he gave drugs to, but the names were covered by thick strokes of black magic marker. Only the feds and Radomski know who they are, but the list made one point perfectly clear: If those guys were using performance enhancers, baseball didn't catch them.

Major League Baseball hasn't caught many users, actually--only the young and inexperienced, like the numerous minor league players who have tested positive; or the inexplicably reckless, like Rafael Palmeiro. They never caught Barry Bonds, but heaven knows they tried. This paper discusses baseball's steroid era in a concise and comprehensive way.

Discussion

Two years after watching Bonds breeze past Mark McGwire's three-year-old single-season home-run record in 2001, MLB had to read about Bonds' illicit training regimen along with the rest of the world in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. When Bonds appeared before the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO) grand jury in 2003, he said he never knew the substances he took--known as "the cream" and "the clear"--were steroids. (The reds never believed him.)

The thought has been passed around MLB headquarters in New York that once Bonds finishes this season's assault on Hank Aaron's record, baseball will be able to move on, leave the "steroid era" behind for good, and pray that a more suitable home-run-hitting immortal presents himself soon (Simon, 2001).

That premise is flawed, however, because it's built on the idea that baseball has solved its steroids problem. The lords of the game say that because stiffer penalties were enacted in 2005, the sport has the best testing of any game in America. By that standard they might be right. But if you want to get a good chuckle from the world's top experts on doping, just try telling them this is baseball's "post-steroid" era. Victor Conte and Don Catlin, the little devil and the little angel hovering over the shoulders of American sports, find that idea hysterical. "There is no such thing," Conte has said (Charlie, 2000).

Conte, the founder of BALCO labs, is the man who helped make Bonds the greatest hitter in the game, and he turned track stars Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery into the fastest woman and man on the planet. Conte did four months in a federal prison for trafficking steroids and still makes millions selling legal diet supplements. Catlin, who recently left his post as the director of the UCLA Olympic testing lab, is the father of drug testing. He also led the team that decoded Conte's greatest tool, the once-undetectable steroid THG (Charlie, 2000).

What the two men agree on is that testing does not work. Sure, it may serve as a deterrent and catch the occasional ...