What is the most common reaction of fans once they have heard that their favorite athlete has been using steroids? They feel like they’ve been cheated. They feel like these players are frauds, that they don’t have any talent and that the drugs gave them “super powers“. Chad Ziemendorf sheds a little light on steroid use in baseball in his article. He writes down that many players were actually pushed to use steroids. While not literally, the game itself pressures athletes to want and need to get bigger, better and stronger.
From Spartan Daily:
MLB’s 162-game schedule is too much for the average human body to handle. When playoffs and World Series games are added to the equation, a ballplayer is doing nothing but playing baseball from February, when they report for spring training, until November, when the championship is won or lost.
The body breaks down under these intense pressures. Almost all of the players seen on TV are playing at less than 100 percent.
Nagging injuries accumulate, arms get sore, and a sprain from last month never seem to heal.
In some cases, players are faced with a decision: use a substance to repair the problem or say goodbye to their baseball career.
Ziemendorf mentions that steroids or other performance enhancing drugs alone can’t explain the almost perfect hand-eye coordination of Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. His grandmother, as he pointed out, had taken steroids for 20 years and she wouldn’t be able to hit a ball as good as these two do. By saying that, he meant that some athletes have been incriminated by the public just because they had used steroids when most of these actually just have talent. That talent wasn’t caused by using anabolic steroids but came naturally.
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