Mad About Science: Steroids in baseball

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Columnist

I was an 8-year-old nerd in a class full of boys — who were primarily jocks — when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa fought an epic duel, leapfrogging one another for the most home runs in a single season. Sports weren’t really my forte, even though I lived in a household obsessed with teams moving balls around on manicured grass.

However, I’ll never forget the brutal classroom arguments that were certainly just parroted recitations of arguments happening among the adults in their lives.

“Steroids are cheating.”

“Steroids aren’t cheating, you’re just sour your guy lost!”

I’m not here to debate ethics. I’m here to discover what steroids are and find out why we aren’t all super jacked after using Flonase for a week straight.

It’s worth mentioning that the term “steroids” is a pretty broad term that covers a lot of different medications. Anti-inflammatory corticosteroids are vastly different from anabolic steroids used in sports doping.

Anabolic steroids are essentially a testosterone supplement. This sounds innocuous, but our bodies are fairly in tune with how much of a sex hormone we require regularly. Flooding our bodies with extra hormones in the form of steroids triggers a lot of unfortunate side effects, ranging from changes in cholesterol and blood pressure to permanent liver damage and thickening of the ventricles of the heart. When paired with high blood pressure and changes in cholesterol, these heart alterations can lead to cardiac arrest. Anabolic steroid use has also been linked to testicular shrinkage as one of the more common side effects.

The positive effects are enhanced injury recovery related to enhancing muscle growth. Any time we workout to increase our muscle mass, we’re creating tiny tears to the muscle fibers that swell and heal. These steroids are designed to hasten the healing process, allowing for faster recovery and expedient building of bulk to give a competitive advantage over someone who isn’t doping. This is especially noticeable in the baseball season, where players are racing a ticking clock to perform better and better in a limited window of time.

Doping in the Majors wasn’t a problem isolated to the Steroid Era of 1994-2004. The development of anabolic steroids can be traced back to at least the 1880s, when chemists would extract solutions from the testicles of live guinea pigs and dogs. This solution was called the Brown-Séquard Elixir, named after Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, who initially developed it. The elixir made its way into professional baseball in 1889.

One of the largest doping problems in baseball comes from making cocktails of drugs mixed with steroids. This was a common problem in the wake of World War II.

One of the lesser known facts about World War II was the prevalence of amphetamines — stimulants used to bolster a fighter’s ability for hours on end. Pervitin was an oral methamphetamine tablet used by German soldiers during the war to prolong their time without sleep to stay on watch and fight more aggressively. Amphetamines weren’t exclusive to the Germans, as Allied soldiers would use them for the same reasons. Methamphetamine would cause an intense crash and withdrawal when it would wear off, often counteracting the perceived usefulness of the drug. Allied soldiers brought amphetamines back with them after the war, and they began to filter into baseball.

Amphetamines in baseball were more useful to players than soldiers on the battlefield, as the crash was less consequential for the players. In an interesting historical interaction, methamphetamine was used to help returning soldiers study and play college sports, which they were more easily able to attend thanks to the G.I. Bill of 1944. From there, the drug spilled into professional sports relatively quickly, as players found amphetamines gave them an edge when they needed it and allowed them to crash when out of sight of the public. Paired with steroid use, post-war ball players were a force to be reckoned with.

Of course, there is also the argument that the large amount of smoking and drinking undertaken by players during this era may have counteracted much of the athletic benefit these players could have received from doping, but this is very difficult to prove.

Drug use during the Steroid Era of 1994-2004 was also very difficult to prove. Despite being regarded as an open secret of the Major Leagues, players were hesitant to admit doping for fear of damaging their reputations or being expelled from the league entirely. Interestingly, one could argue that the abundance of steroid use in the MLB during this period bolstered baseball with a shot in the arm, so to speak.

Due to the strike between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1994, the season concluded without a world series. Game attendance plummeted 12% in the 1995 season as fans were vocally upset with both the league and the players.

That changed by 1998, when the battle of the giants between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa made headlines and brought the Majors back to the forefront of the American mind.

The momentum carried into the 2001 season, when Barry Bonds broke the record for most home runs in a single season with 73 — a number that has yet to be broken, but will forever share a podium with an asterisk denoting the role of performance-enhancing drugs in setting the record.

The ethical debate surrounding steroid use in sports continues to this day. Humans will always seek to push the limits of the human body by any means necessary, blurring the line between human accomplishment and chemical enhancement. The truth is that some players may leave a lasting legacy, while many others may simply vanish into obscurity. Regardless, most will suffer from some kinds of medical complications for the rest of their lives and, in the end, regrets of a bygone heyday echo the loudest in the quiet hall of fame.

Stay curious, 7B.