Stop Acting So Surprised

You can add another name to list of convicted steroid abusers in the MLB: Sammy Sosa. The New York Times reported yesterday that Sosa had tested positive as part of an anonymous 2003 test. Yes, that list: the one that stained A-Rod’s reputation when his positive test was revealed by SI's Selena Roberts last February. I don’t know who’s to blame for the supposedly anonymous test becoming not-so-anonymous, but that’s beside the point. Many Hall of Fame voters have said that they will not vote for anyone that they suspect of steroid abuse. Last year, Mark McGuire received 118 votes, 287 shy of the 405 needed to be inducted. I think it’s fair to say that Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGuire will never make it to the Hall of Fame. But steroids didn’t come out of nowhere in the mid 90s; they had been around long before then. The first anabolic steroid was marketed in the US in 1956, and was designed for Olympic weightlifters. But before long, athletes in other sports noticed the advantage they could obtain by taking the drug. In the 70s and 80s, steroid use was prevalent in the Olympics (19 athletes were disqualified from the 1983 Olympics for juicing), as well as in sports from the college level and up. A drug testing policy was not instituted in the Major Leagues until 2003. Are we to believe that prior to the beginning of testing, no one in baseball used steroids? Of the three players who hit 230 HRs in the decade from 1985 to 1995, two are known steroid users, Jose Canseco and Mark McGuire. The use of drugs to get an advantage over your opponents is nothing new. I mean, baseball players since the 1900s have been chewing tobacco to keep themselves from losing their mental focus. In football, former Broncos defensive lineman Lyle Alzado, a star of the late 70s, said that “I started taking anabolic steroids in 1969 and never stopped…ninety percent of the athletes I know are on the stuff”. Former NFL linebacker and coach, Jim Haslett, was quoted as saying that, during the 1980s, half of the players in the league used performance enhancing drugs, as did all defensive linemen. If anything close to these numbers is accurate, we have barely scratched the surface of how prevalent drug abuse is in professional sports. But back to baseball, I wouldn’t be surprised if some 1980s journeyman came out, and in a Canseco-type fashion, rattled off the names of Kent Hrbek, Dale Murphy, Kirby Puckett, and other stars of that generation, as being steroid users. What happens then? What if this Steroid Era of baseball has a past that we know nothing about? If a Hall of Famer like Kirby Puckett was discovered to have used steroids during his baseball career, do we remove him from the Hall of Fame? I don’t know the answer to these questions; what I do know, is that we need to stop acting so surprised when yet another star gets the steroid label tattooed to his oversized biceps.