Steroids in Baseball
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Steroids in baseball
The crack of the bat, the smell of the grass.there.s just something about baseball. Most Americans have grown up with the game, sharing a passion that spans generations, geography and social class. To many of us, baseball, especially its history, is representative of a simpler and purer world. That view has been under assault from the Steroids Era of 1994 to 2004 and its
repercussions on the game. As fans, America enjoyed the jump in offensive statistics and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.s chase of the great Roger Maris. However, the sudden offensive explosion raised questions about how these numbers were being achieved. The rumors of steroid use among players finally began to explode with the revelation in 1998 that McGwire was taking
androstenedione. As baseball finally begins to get serious about its steroid problem, congress and the commisioner began to investigate the economic motivations for steroid use in baseball and the expected effects of
different anti-doping policies and punishment regimes.
The use of performance enhancing drugs has tracked the rise and fall of mass-entertainment sports. Going back to the ancient Olympics and Roman times, athletes used performance enhancing herbs and mushrooms in order to improve their performance in competition by making them faster, stronger or braver. Use of performance enhancing drugs seems to have drastically diminished in the post-Roman, pre-modern era in Europe until the rebirth of spectator sports in the U.K. in the nineteenth century seems to suggest a correlation between the use of performance enhancing drugs in sports and the presence of commercial or other rewards. In ancient Greece, as in modern times, these rewards went to the athletes or those associated with them. If we assume that the role of the Roman circus was to distract the population from strife and bad government, then any
improvement in the production of athletes involved in the contests would serve to only enhance the entertainment and distraction. By 1928, the IAAF, track and fields international governing body, enacted the first modern anti-doping rules in modern sports
Steroids finally made it to baseball.s banned substance list in 1991, however testing for major league players did not begin until the 2003 season. Evidence of steroid use was rampant.
Offensive numbers