From Saving Grace To Skeletons In The Closet – The MLB Should No Longer Be Ashamed Of It’s Steroid Era

Most people will agree that cheating in any sport is wrong. 

But what if you’re encouraged? 

What if league officials tell you that your cheating is the only thing keeping the sport alive? 

Is it wrong to cheat if by doing so you’re actually saving the game? This is the question that plagued every MLB player at the start of the 1996 regular season. 

Just two years earlier, the MLB had officially hit rock bottom. On August 12th 1994 MLB commissioner Bud Selig canceled the remainder of the MLB regular season and playoffs. For the first time since its introduction in 1904, no World Series Champion was crowned. 

Selig’s decision to cancel the ‘94 season came as a response to MLB’s owners and Player’s Union being unable to work out a new Collective Bargaining Agreement for the following season. Canceling the season was supposed to be Selig’s trump card, scaring players into accepting the new deal. However, Selig failed to account for how the cancellation of the ‘94 season would sit with fans. 

In 1995 attendance dropped 12% per game across the league. Not only did the MLB now have to compete with the rising popularity of the NFL and the NBA, but they also had to somehow win back their fans whose hearts they broke a year prior. 

This task looked to be impossible but in 1996 something about the overall product on the field changed. The amount of home runs started increasing at an astonishing rate. From 1973 – 1996 the average number of players to hit 40 or more home runs in a season was about 1.5. From 1996 – 2002 that number would now hover around 10. 

This jump in home runs directly correlates with the exponential increase in league revenue from the ‘95 to ‘02 seasons. 

1995’s total league revenue was $1.4 Billion. 

By the end of 2001 season, the league’s total revenue grew to $3.7 Billion, equating to an annual growth rate of 16.3%. 

The MLB had recovered from the ‘94 strike and entered a period of sustained growth. However, what these new and returning fans didn’t know was that the massive increase in home runs were directly caused by steroids. 

Some of the sport’s biggest stars were technically cheating. 

But were they? 

Although steroids were banned by the MLB in 1991, the league didn’t actually enforce this until they were mandated by Congress to start drug testing players in 2003.

Even though the league was now mandated to test its athletes, the MLB would still do everything possible to protect its top players. The league procrastinated the start of drug testing until the following 2004 season, and made the punishment for testing positive as weak as possible, only suspending players 10 games for a first time offense.

With MLB seasons being a total of 162 games, first time offenders would still be able to play 94% of the season. (current suspension for first time offenders is 80 games) 

During the mid to late 2000’s the sport had fully recovered from its loss of popularity and attendance. Fans were becoming annoyed with the juiced up bad boy roid rage that they were seeing on a daily basis. The league noticed and started to crack down harder on steroid usage.

Several more drastic steps were made to distance the MLB from steroids, like no longer protecting players from testing, and raising suspension times. The most meaningful step however, was denying steroid suspected stars entry into the MLB Hall of Fame, effectively taking away their chance at baseball immortality.

Steroid era stallworths like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriguez and other icons have been denied entry to the Hall of Fame despite them having the accolades to get in. 

Guys like Bonds and McGwire were denied entry into the Hall of Fame without ever testing positive. 

Without the rise of the home run from steroids, the majority of fans that left the sport in 1995 would not have come back. A slower paced game with no redeeming qualities would have no way of keeping up with the rising popularity and starpower of the NFL’s Cowboys and the NBA’s Michael Jordan. 

With the steroid era being directly responsible for keeping the game of baseball alive, it’s time for Major League Baseball to drag its skeletons out of the closet by acknowledging the contributions that these men made for the game by finally electing them into the Hall of Fame.