Steroids ruining our national pastime

This archived article was written by: David Osborne Jr.

All we ever seem to hear on ESPN anymore is that Alex Rodriguez took steroids. I am now waiting for another classy player to come out and admit that they have been enhancing their playing ability by using banned substances. We can clearly see that baseball is falling out of its once glorious spotlight and instead ending up as front-page news on every major magazine and sporting program on television. It is a disgrace that we are allowing players to ruin our national pastime, along with influencing everybody who looks up to those players.
Baseball seems to be the only sport that we, as Americans, have been able to come up with on our own. We are losing what we once held dear to our hearts because players believe they need to use enhancements to make their play better.
I started writing this article with the idea that we should allow steroids in baseball because we will never be able to catch every player that has been doing them and then, during a talk with my mom, I realized that steroids are the worst things that could have happened to baseball. Not only do they ruin the sanctity of the game, but they also give young athletes the idea that they can use steroids and get away with it.
I will admit that I find nothing more thrilling than watching a baseball get smashed over the center-field wall, in fact it may be one of the most beautiful things in the world of sports because of what must occur for that to happen. Not only does the player need to have enough strength to hit a baseball, but they also need good timing.
Although steroids don’t help athletes with their timing, they certainly help the athletes gain strength rapidly, which in turn means that the player’s stats go up. How can we sit idly by and watch some of the best athletes in the world ruin what we have created as a nation?
Athletes such as Rodriguez have soiled the good name of American baseball and I am sure that men like Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and other countless baseball gods are tossing and turning in their graves right now. Baseball will never be able to go back to its former glory.
In the glory days of baseball, players were treated as well, if not better than celebrities. Just look at who Joe DiMaggio ended up marrying (see Marilyn Monroe). Nowadays we still make our baseball players celebrities, but we do it in a different sense. We allow our baseball players to do whatever they want, including shooting up ‘roids.
If Ruth and Aaron were allowed to use steroids can you imagine what kind of records they would set? As athletes they were able to do things that people playing in this era are not able to do without the help of performance enhancers. If Ruth had used steroids to set his records they possibly never would have been broken. In this day and age we allow baseball players to cheat, essentially, so they can compete with the greats. It is depressing that many of our best baseball players have to resort to drugs and other enhancers to put up somewhat respectable numbers.
We as a society have become increasingly relaxed about holding our athletes to the standards that their predecessors were held to. This has allowed them to enhance themselves, and look better and be better than they really are. We should hold every athlete that has played our national sport to the same standard. One final proposal to keep athletes from using steroids- any athlete proved to have used steroids that ends up breaking a record should not be allowed into the record books at all. As of right now they can still get into the record book with an asterisk by their name. If we don’t allow them into the record books at all then they are more likely to be deterred from using steroids.