Brevin Brisack

Mr. Fidler
Expository Piece
3/10/18
PEDs in the MLB

As America’s National Pastime, baseball holds a special place in many people’s hearts.

However, like many other elite sports, the need to find a competitive edge over an opponent

overwhelmed Major League Baseball in the late 1990s and the early 2000s in the form of

performance enhancing drugs, or PEDs (Erickson et al. 2015). Many believe that this decade

ruined baseball, hurt the legacies of many great players and led to a lot of research on the

“benefits” and dangers of these substances. PEDs are dangerous and seriously harmful and,

hopefully reading this will help keep young baseball players from cheating.

With more than 300 MLB players from 1993-2002 having admitted to using PEDs to

“even the playing field,” it was easy to forget that substance abuse was cheating (Haugen and

Musser, pp. 54-55). In a professional sport, where the difference between being an All-Star and

just another player is a handful of hits or a few more errors, it is understandable that many

athletes would be driven to unnatural resources to help them get any advantage possible, but at

the end of the day, it is still cheating. According to ​Performance Enhancing Drugs: Steroids,

Hormones, and Supplements​, people who take HGH (human growth hormones - the most

common type of PED in the MLB) can gain more than 4.6 lbs of lean muscle mass and can burn

just as much fat pg. 44). This increase in strength has led to some better statistics, but not as

many as one would think. In a 2015 study titled, “The Effect of the Steroid Era on Major League

Baseball Hitters: Did It Enhance Hitting?” researchers discovered that batting averages mostly

stayed the same, proving that hitting a baseball is still very hard (Erickson et al). However, the
study did find that the number of players with 40+ home run seasons between 1993-2002 was

much higher than the years before and after. From 1983-1992, only 2 players hit at least 40 home

runs, and only 6 players achieved it from 2003-2012. The “Steroid Era” had 11 players, almost

twice the amount from the next decade. So, while the idea was to cheat, the numbers suggest that

the players’ efforts were probably not worth it.

This fact is made even worse when the players realize that the pros do not outweigh the

cons when it comes to substance abuse. As it turns out, PEDs probably aren’t even worth the

risk. They can lead to “Liver damage, acne, sterility, hypertension, prostate problems,

gynecomastia virilization, headaches, hot flashes, tremors, anxiety, insomnia, addiction,

irritability, and vomiting” (Erickson et al. 2015). To make it worse, most athletes usually begin

to “stack,” or take more than one type of PED (Perriano pp. 27). Mixing steroids like this can

cause any or all of symptoms.

With all of this being said, we can ask: “What’s the point?” Why would anyone risk these

dangerous side effects for the small chance that you may hit 3 more home runs over a season?

Well, for a professional baseball player, even a slight chance is sometimes worth it, but this

doesn’t make it right. What about the young players looking up to these stars? What are they

supposed to think? ‘Well if A-Rod is doing it, it must be worth it!’ Over 11% of high school

students use steroids without a doctor’s consent (May 20). That’s 11% of students my age who

are willing to risk their health and their futures because a professional athlete made an illegal

substance look “cool.” Hopefully this research will help to convince you that using PEDs is

dangerous and not worth the risk.

Works Cited:

Erickson, Brandon J., et al. “The Effect of the Steroid Era on Major League Baseball

Hitters: Did it Enhance Hitting?” ​Journal of Sports Medicine & Doping Studies​, vol. 5, no. 161,

May 2015.

Haugen, David, and Susan Musser, ​Athletes and Drug Use.​ Greenhaven Press, 2013.

May, Suellen, and David J. Triggle, Ph.D. ​Understanding Drugs: Steroids, & Other

Performance Enhancing Drugs.​ Infobase Learning, 2011.

Perritano, John, and Sara Becker, Ph.D. ​Performance-Enhancing Drugs: Steroids,

Hormones, and Supplements.​ Mason Crest, 2017.