Steroids in Baseball

Nick Regnier

4/24/11

ENG 101

Steroids in Baseball

Steroids are a growing industry in today’s market. The Advancements of medical capabilities allow for performance enhancing supplements to become more popular then ever before. Steroids have originally started being produced after In 1849 a man known as the father of modern-endocrinology, Arnold Adolph Berthold of Germany first removed testes from Cockerels, a species of birds and concluded the adverse effect indeed led to a loss of male characteristics common to the species. This led to a more apt understanding of the importance of the male testicles, in as they carry with them the necessitating factors that simply make men, men. To trace the true history of steroids, as they are known, first go back to 1931, to a German chemist Adolf Butenandt. By this point it was understood, largely thanks to Berthold the importance and effects of male hormones but it was Butenandt who first found a way to pin-point and purify the hormone androstenone. (Fainaru-Wada 32) he did so by extracting the hormone from a mere few liters of urine. This was a groundbreaking achievement and only the beginning of the breakthrough, as the next several years would see anabolic steroids truly evolved. It was not until much later however that steroids were brought into the game of baseball. In the early 1990’s there were several reports of players using steroids in professional baseball. In December 2007, the world of professional baseball was rocked by the Mitchell report, a 409-page document detailing allegations of performance-enhancing drug use by major league players. Which raised the Question is steroids in baseball really a bad thing?

Background on Steroids

The Mitchell report hoisted wide, severe issues that went beyond the outrage involving individual players. Reportedly the MLB had developed a persistent subculture of steroid and HGH use that was ruining the game. "The minority of players who used such [performance-enhancing]...