Performance Enhancing Drugs in Baseball Essay

I. Introduction

Breaking a record in baseball once signaled something close to mythological achievement. Fans assumed the record-breaker possessed rare physical gifts — a stronger arm, quicker reflexes, or a sharper eye than any competitor who had come before. That assumption has been badly eroded. Today, when a player shatters a longstanding mark, the immediate public reaction is as likely to be suspicion as celebration. The steroid era has done that to the sport, and the damage is not simply a matter of bruised nostalgia. Performance-enhancing drug use in baseball creates two distinct and mutually reinforcing crises: the medical and legal dangers the drugs pose to the athletes who use them, and the reputational damage inflicted on the sport — and on individual players — when that use is exposed.A1 Understanding either crisis in isolation produces only a partial diagnosis. A serious response to the problem must address both simultaneously.

The pressure to use banned substances does not begin in the Major Leagues. It reaches into college programs and even high school dugouts, where young athletes first confront the gap between their current ability and the level they believe they need to reach to compete. Whether the suggestion comes from a coach, a veteran teammate, or the simple arithmetic of a roster cut, many players encounter performance-enhancing drugs long before they sign a professional contract. This essay examines how that pressure operates, what the evidence shows about its consequences, and why baseball's institutional response — however well-intentioned — has not yet been sufficient.

II. Background

The desire to perform at the highest possible level is not a modern invention, and neither is the temptation to seek a pharmacological shortcut. The modern chapter of that story opened in 1956, when Russian athletes used anabolic steroids at the World Games, alerting coaches and athletes in other countries to a new competitive frontier (Diacin, Parks, & Allison, 2003). In the decades that followed, steroid use migrated from international track-and-field competitions into professional team sports, and baseball proved no more resistant than any other.

Athletes pursue performance-enhancing drugs primarily because those drugs work: they accelerate muscle recovery, increase strength, and allow players to train harder and longer than their bodies would otherwise permit (Diacin, Parks, & Allison, 2003). The cost, however, is substantial — documented effects include cardiovascular damage, severe mood dysregulation, and organ failure (Johnson, 1990), alongside the reputational and legal consequences that follow discovery.A2 Players such as Alex Sanchez, Jorge Piedra, and Carlos Almanzar were among those suspended in the mid-2000s alone, illustrating that the problem was neither isolated nor confined to a single era (Players, 2006).

Drug testing has been the most frequently proposed remedy. Mandatory testing deters use by raising the probability that a violation will be detected and punished. Critics of testing programs, however, raise two serious objections: first, that mandatory biological screening violates athletes' reasonable expectation of privacy; and second — more practically — that players who know when tests will occur will simply time their use to fall outside the testing window, gaming the system rather than abandoning it (McCabe & Ricciardelli, 2001). These objections have real force, but they do not ultimately outweigh the alternative.A3 Without any testing regime, drug use continues unchecked, the playing field remains tilted toward those willing to cheat, and the physical harm to athletes accumulates in silence. Imperfect deterrence is not the same as no deterrence.

III. The Mitchell Report

The most consequential single document in the history of this debate is the Mitchell Report, released in December 2007 after twenty-one months of independent investigation. Running to 409 pages, the report named eighty-nine players alleged to have used steroids or other performance-enhancing substances (Mitchell, 2007). Beyond the names, it offered a systemic critique: baseball as an institution had failed to recognize and address the problem at an early enough stage to prevent widespread normalization of drug use.A4

The report's recommendations were pointed. It called for more rigorous testing covering a broader range of prohibited substances, and it argued explicitly against the temptation to pursue retroactive punishment of every player identified as a past user. The priority, the report concluded, should be eliminating the culture of use going forward rather than relitigating a history that could not be undone (Mitchell, 2007). That is a defensible position. Retroactive investigations tend to consume institutional energy while producing little practical change. The report's value lay not in assigning blame to individuals but in establishing a clear record that the problem was structural — embedded in the sport's incentives — and that structural solutions were therefore required.

The immediate public response to the report was notable. High-profile players, most visibly Mark McGwire, came forward to acknowledge their use publicly and to apologize. That wave of contrition did not last. By 2013, six years after the report's release, the dominant response among suspended players had shifted toward silence or denial rather than accountability — a pattern suggesting that the moral reckoning the report hoped to trigger had been largely absorbed and then set aside.A5 Whether this reflects a broader cultural shift in how public figures respond to scandal, or simply the diminishing shock value of drug suspensions as they became routine, the practical effect was the same: the sport continued to produce new cases each season.

IV. Analysis

Two conclusions emerge from the evidence examined here. First, performance-enhancing drug use in baseball did not recede meaningfully after the Mitchell Report, despite the institutional attention it generated. Second, the reputational damage to the sport is ongoing and has measurable consequences that extend beyond the symbolic. Fans who disengage from baseball because of its drug culture do not merely stop attending games; they stop buying merchandise, following standings, and passing the sport on to younger family members. The revenue consequences of a sustained credibility deficit are not trivial, even if they are difficult to isolate from other factors affecting attendance and viewership.

Sociological strain theory, developed by Émile Durkheim and elaborated by Robert Agnew, offers a useful explanatory lens here. The theory holds that social structures can pressure otherwise law-abiding individuals into criminal or rule-breaking behavior when legitimate means of achieving culturally valued goals are perceived as insufficient (Agnew, 1992). Applied to baseball, the logic is straightforward: when a player believes — correctly or not — that his competitors are using banned substances and that his own performance without those substances will not keep him in the game, the structural pressure toward use becomes intense enough to override both legal and ethical objections.A6

Strain theory also helps explain why individual moral condemnation, while warranted, is insufficient as a response. If the pressure to use is structural — built into the incentive architecture of the sport — then demanding that individual players simply resist it places an unreasonable burden on personal virtue while leaving the underlying conditions unchanged. Testing regimes, transparent enforcement, and the elimination of financial rewards for inflated statistics all address the structure; public shaming addresses only the individual.

It would be an overstatement, however, to argue that every player who uses banned substances is acting solely in response to systemic pressure. Individual choices, personal ethics, and the influence of specific agents, coaches, or training staff all play roles that strain theory does not fully capture.A7 The explanatory framework is useful precisely because it identifies a cause that policy can address; it is not useful as an excuse that absolves individual actors of responsibility for the harms they cause — to their own bodies, to clean competitors they displace, and to the young players who model their behavior on professional athletes they admire.

That last harm deserves particular emphasis. The players most immediately affected by steroid culture in the Major Leagues are not the veterans already in the game. They are the high school and college athletes deciding right now how far they are willing to go to compete at the next level. When professional athletes normalize drug use — whether through active advocacy or simple silence in the face of suspension — they send a signal to younger players that the cost of using is manageable and the cost of not using may be a shortened career. Some talented players who refuse to enter that calculus will leave the sport entirely, depriving teams of ability that steroids were supposed to supply.

V. Conclusion

Baseball occupies a particular place in American culture — it is the sport most readily invoked as a metaphor for national character, for the relationship between individual effort and collective success. That symbolic weight makes the steroid era not merely a sports-administration problem but a question about what the sport is willing to say it stands for. The dual crises examined in this essay — the medical harm to athletes and the erosion of institutional credibility — will not be resolved by any single report, however thorough, or any single wave of public apologies, however sincere. They require sustained structural commitment: testing programs rigorous enough to deter use even by those inclined to game the system, incentive structures that do not reward inflated late-career statistics above the long-term health of the player, and a culture of accountability that begins in youth leagues rather than arriving only at the moment of a federal investigation.A8

The Mitchell Report established, beyond reasonable dispute, that the problem was systemic. What remains is the harder work of building the systemic response. Until baseball addresses the structural pressures that make steroid use a rational choice for players who want to survive in the sport, each new suspension will be less a scandal than a confirmation — evidence that the conditions producing the behavior have not changed.