The desire for success and achievement drives all great athletes. Those desires have led to athletes seeking illegal alternatives in order to become great in their respected sports. Baseball more so than any other sport has garnered the most attention when it comes to athletes using anabolic steroids to their advantage.
Throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s steroids were used in Major League Baseball to shatter long standing records and raise player salaries to astronomical prices. Since MLB has implemented strict steroid testing over the years teams have relied more on pitching, defense, and small ball instead of home runs and high scoring affairs.
Fans often wonder why athletes would risk their reputation and public shame by using steroids. The reason being steroids have tremendous benefits including increased muscle strength, increased body size, and increased healing rates. In an interview with Jay Hoffman, a health and exercise professor from The College of New Jersey, he commented on the benefits of steroids stating, “You can have a relatively quick enhancement of muscle strength and size, even if you take steroids and don’t lift weights. But the biggest benefit from using anabolic steroids is that they allow an athlete to train harder and recover quicker.”
Hoffman has first hand knowledge of this because he used steroids more than three decades ago when he played football. The benefits of steroids are real and have a direct correlation with increased home run totals during the 1990’s and early 2000’s but the risks are sobering.
Athletes have used anabolic steroids in baseball to their advantage but have suffered tremendous consequences in the process. The consequences associated with the use of them in men include breast development, balding, infertility, shrinking of the testicles, increased chances of tendon ruptures, cardiovascular diseases, increased risks of blood clots, liver tumors, delusions, rage, aggression, and the possibility of exposure to infection and diseases because many athletes use unclean needles to inject themselves.
This is not even a complete list of all of the negative side effects that anabolic steroids may have. Along with the potential side effects above there have also been a number of suspected deaths linked to steroid abuse.
When looking at MLB there is a drastic decline in offensive production over the last decade. For example, in 2000 teams averaged 190 home runs and the average team ERA was 4.76. This past season teams averaged 140 home runs per team and the average team ERA was 3.74. Simply put, that means when comparing 2000 vs. 2014 stats teams on average hit 50 less home runs per season and give up about one run less per game.
When looking at the current trends, MLB offense has taken a back seat to pitching and defense. In fact the Baltimore Orioles were the only team in the top 5 in home runs to make it to the playoffs. This past World Series featured the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants. The Royals finished last in the league with 95 home runs and scored the fourteenth most runs in the league and the Giants finished seventeenth in the league with 132 home runs and scored only the twelfth most runs in baseball.
In today’s game there is a direct correlation between a team’s ability to pitch and play defense equating to success. Ten teams make it to the MLB Playoffs each season. In 2014 nine of those 10 playoff teams had a team ERA in the top 15.
Teams have also invested more time in trying to prevent run scoring than in previous years. Over the last few years infield shifts have become a staple in almost all MLB team’s defensive alignments. Chris Teeter of Beyond The Box Score estimated that in 2013 almost 1270 fewer runners made it on base because of the increased amount of infield shifts.
There is an art to the defensive shift that some teams have mastered. It is one thing to shift defensive alignments in baseball but it is another thing to shift at the right time. For example the two World Series teams from last year, the Royals and Giants, were the sixteenth and twenty-seventh most likely teams to shift yet they prevented the fifth most and second most hits respectively. Playoff teams have not only begun shifting more but they have learned to do so the right way and at the correct time resulting in more success.
Major League Baseball has changed greatly over the last couple of decades. It has gone from a sport where home runs and offense dominated the game to today’s style which is more of a chess match where great defense, pitching, and timely hitting results in wins. Steroids did help baseball’s popularity though when looking at television ratings. This year were the lowest ratings ever on Fox for MLB games and Game 7 of the World Series only had 23.5 million viewers. That number may seem high but when compared to Steroid Era World Series Game 7’s in 2001 and 2002 they had 39.1 million and 30.8 million respectively.
It cannot be argued that steroids increased baseball’s popularity and maybe saved it after the 1994 Strike but it was not a long-term solution. As baseball continues to settle into a more defensive and pitching focused game fans will have to learn to love baseball again for what it is now and not expect the offensive performances and outputs of the past.