Steroids and baseball Essay

Summary

The article that I chose is Performance-Enhancing Drugs in Baseball by Paul D. Staudohar.   I found this article using EBSCO host Business Source Premier under academic journals.

This article discusses key points to why government should be involved in steroid use in professional baseball.   In today’s world getting ahead of your competitors is not easy and people are always trying to find new ways to accomplish this.   The most popular solution for baseball has been steroids, which is illegal.   With the need to be the best, players were and still are willing to find new ways to cheat in order to solidify themselves in the upper crust of the game and there were little to no stipulations for their actions.   The league did not portray a strong incentive to put a stop to the use of steroids until the government became involved.   Many believe that this it is not the governments issue to act upon, although when a problem becomes as large as mass steroid use in a professional sport it is imperative.  

The use of steroids became big in the 1990’s and was frowned upon, but the baseball corporation did not want to take action because it was too costly and they felt that it impeded on their players privacy rights.   Also the commissioner could not do much because there was not enough support from the union.   As the problem rose there were punishments by the league but they were light.   Players would only by suspended for a small portion of games and were fined very little, while other sports were suspending their players for significant periods of time.   When Jose Conseco wrote this book on steroids it opened up a hole for the government to be involved because it showed how many players were using steroids and there were not enough testing policies to catch them.   Without testing policies throughout the season it allowed for players to take cycles before and after testing with enough time to get the evidence out of their systems.   As the situation continued...