David, you forget that steroids (and other performance enhancing drugs) are ILLEGAL. You argue that they don't hurt anyone else. But how about all the high school kids who take steroids in order to emulate their favorite players? Doesn't that hurt someone else? Major Leaguers, by taking steroids, DO hurt other people. They put their stamp of approval on an illegal drug, thus okaying it for the impressionable youths out there who don't know any better.

sabernar, I'm afraid you're missing the point. Of course steroids are illegal -- but so are greenies and narcotics. We already know their use was rampant -- what makes steroids any different?

Thanks, Brian, my point exactly.

I've written a lot about both Rose's gambling and Bonds' alleged steroid use, and I think both topics usually bring out the worst in fan hysteria and piety. But I must say, David, I think several of your arguments are seriously contorted. Just because baseball was never a pure sport doesn't mean that this latest steroid flap can't possibly hurt the integrity of the game. And just because we admire the ends (a slugger hitting a home run) doesn't mean we must therefore admire, or at least wink at, the means (anything and everything to produce that result).

When most fans talk about steroids, they're generally operating in the dark. The sad fact is that we don't know if steroids added 1, 5, 10, or 20 home runs to Bonds' yearly totals. Steroids may have even taken a few homers AWAY from Barry Bonds. But until we know more about some of this stuff, I don't think we can adequately assess the impact of steroids on the game. Which is why it seems so odd to me, David, that you blithely write it all off as no big whup.

So two wrongs make a right?

Don't forget that by Bonds cheating he's also hurting his opponents ability to perform. Think that a few Dodger and Padres pitchers wouldn't have been helped if not having to face a hulking Bonds so many times a year?

I agree with Sabernar. These arguments are completely dishonest...steroids impact the integrity of the game because, partially, they are unknown to the opposition (as opposed to laser eye surgery, which by the way, corrects flaws - it doesn't take a 20-20 vision and turn it into a superhuman 20-5 or something). And the gleeful "ends-justify-the-means" way of stating this argument completely ignores the verifiable medical problems that steroid users suffer, and, once again, the impact on the opposition.

I've been reading Baseball Musings for a while now, and no matter how many times I read David's opinion of steroids (let players take them under doctor supervision), I just can't believe it. The "drugs have been used in the past" excuse just doesn't hold water. Two (or three, or four) wrongs do NOT make a right. The "any means to an end" doesn't make sense, either. Comparing Babe Ruth's drinking to Bonds' steroid use is LUDICROUS! In case people don't know, alcohol is a depressant, which means it prevents your body from working its best. Last I checked, steroids ENHANCE the body's performance capabilities. Oh yeah, steroids are illegal, too. Allow them to use steroids so we can see more home runs hit? That's insane! Thinking that a player who takes steroids is isolated unto himself is just plain naďve. Players don't play in a vacuum, and to think that Bonds' steroid use (and other players, too) has never affected anyone seems to be a very simplistic view of the world.

about steroids -

i guess we DO know that they do increase muscle mass and strength. we do NOT know if they actually help a baseball player play baseball better. we guess. but we do not KNOW.

next, you can get a "doctor" on the internet to prescribe steroids and GH. all you have to do is apply. steroids are only illegal if a doctor didn't prescribe them. and they were NOT banned before the last CBA - so it was NOT cheating.

you can't compare players from eras with exact numbers because the balls, fields and players are all different. i don't call it cheating, but is it fair for modern player X to take the place of old player Y on a list because modern player got tendon surgery and prolonged his career? so he has 10 more wins than the guy who injuries forced out? what about the fact that humans are larger and stronger (even without drugs) and are simply better than they were 100 years ago? i don't hear about adjusting the records because of different sizes. or how about the fact that modern players are very rich and train all year long (even without drugs) and so are better? i don't hear any complaints about how the record book needs to get * for all the players who didn't have to sell shoes in the offseason and train all year long.
how about rich modern guys like mark prior? he had a professional pitching coach since he was a kid. i don't hear how we should put * by his name when we compare him to kid nichols.

times are just different. instead of greenies, and are you gonna say THEY aren't performance enhancing - it's a different drug. you throw out barry for steroid drugs, you better throw out all the records of illegal spitballers and greenie users. etc. this is all so silly.

i really think it is mostly hatred of barry himself personally. and because the record is the home run record. no one would give a rats rear end if it was ichiro's record.

and sabernar, i am a LOT more worried about the influence of major leaguers using spit tobacco than roids.

"What Rose did was wrong; he broke the rules, and he suffered the consequences. But he didn't cheat."

I know David pointed this out by saying that gambling was a form of cheating, but I say it's more than just a form of cheating. If I play a game with someone and he breaks the rules, I call him a cheater. Plus, don't be so quick to say that Pete Rose didn't break any laws. I don't claim to be an expert, but it's pretty easy to break state and federal laws when you're gambling.

Still, "illegal" vs. "legal" is just a determination that was made by some random people in the same way that some random people decided Performance Enhancers like Cortizone shots are allowed but other injections are not. Lisa makes some great points. It is a far more egregious exploitation of the bounds of human accomplishment to allow a brand new tendon in an arm, allowing it to throw when it previously could not, than it is to give a healthy, active athlete some hormones that _might_ better performance. (Or, just might result in the man growing breasts.)

I don't think that anyone is making the argument that steroids are great and that every athlete should use them. I do think, however, that it's much more feasible to debate their pros and cons in context than to make black and white determinations that, when you look at their origins, are rather arbitrary.

"Illegal" vs. "legal" is not a determination made by random people, it's a determination made by exactly the people who are empowered to make it. Bonds et al secretly put themselves on the wrong side of that determination to gain advantage over their competitors; they thereby defrauded their employers and the game. They should be thrown out of the baseball, end of story, in my opinion. Either that or admit baseball's just another version of WWF or Rollerball.

I think similarly little of Pete Rose -- not that I ever liked him much in the first place, admittedly. At any rate, I don't think it matters much whether what he did was better or worse than Bond. According to Wikipedia, he'd have broken the law if he bet against his team; he claimed he never bet on Reds games period. Even if that's true, he could have affected other teams and could have been blackmailed against his own.

Re various sci-fi scenarios: burn those bridges when we get to them. Re Schilling: it was out in the open, apparently legal. Worth a debate, perhaps, but doesn't compare to Bonds The Steroid Sneak.

"Make it legal under a doctor's supervision. Make sure they know the tradeoffs. Make sure they make an informed decision. And make sure their use is public knowledge. Then, let the fans vote with their cash on whether this is good or bad for the game."

David, if we should instate this policy at the major league level, why shouldn’t this be the policy across the board in the minor leagues, college, or high school levels in any sport?

I do agree with you on one thing, I believe players should be open and honest about cheating or using illegal substances to improve their performance for their pocket books, regardless of the game in whole. In fact, I would be perfectly fine if a few players decided to paint aluminum bats to look like wood bats and used those during games as long as they told me they were painted aluminum bats. Of course, it will take a little bit for me to get used to that familiar “ping” of the bat at the park, but it will be fun to watch Neifi Perez hit 112 home runs that season.

This "doctor's supervision" thing is hogwash. My girlfriend is a pharmacist and knows that addicts can find unethical doctors to prescribe all sorts of things for them that they don't need. What you'll end up with there is a mini-industry of doctors prescribing steroids to any athlete who wants them... at the professional, college, and high school level. All for a short-term gain and long-term harm.

And no, I don't want to watch the kind of baseball dominated by musclebound monsters crushing home runs. I want to see a mix of skills, a blending of finesse, power, and speed.

All that being said, I would NOT strike anybody's records from the books. The record books are a record of history, and when you re-write history, you're claiming to have the ability to separate baseball into good players who get to stay in the books and bad players who don't. Do we erase the records of wife-beaters? Guys who get in fights with bars? No. Even Pete Rose's hit record still stands, as it should. We can and should cast aspersions on the characters of cheaters like Bonds and Giambi, and let whatever rules baseball has deal with them, but even if they're banned for life, everything they've done to this point should and will stay in the books.

Um-- the reason to outlaw steroids is to protect the players from later life health problems brought on in the attempt to win more games. The reason to outlaw gambling is the removal of motivation to intentionally lose games. If people who clearly care about the game, such as this board's readers and writers see any grounds for debate as to which evil is worse, then I guess its not surprising our nation is questioning the importance/relevance of the Geneva Convention...

To put it another way-- nobody really thinks Pete Rose threw any games do they? Yet he drew a lifetime suspension for putting himself in a situation in which he might have been pressured to do so. We can all name a hatful of players who were caught red handed cheating to try to win-- Honeycutt, Belle, Sosa-- and I can't remember anyone suggesting that they deserved even a season's suspension. It is self-evident which is worse. The folks who bought tickets to the 1919 world series were defrauded-- and avoiding any repeat has got to be the most important issue in MLB's book of ethics.

Also-- the steroid discussion is continually cast in terms of home runs. Surely steroids help pitchers get an extra foot on the fastball, and recover better from late season starts? Surely they help shortstops and right fielders make stronger throws. Perhaps they help catchers' backs and legs, allowing them longer careers? Shouldn't we all keep in mind that it may well have had no great impact on the overall balance of competition, and may actually favor defense?

If protection of players' health were the paramount objective in banning steroids and other PEDs, then tobacco, overeating, and sexual promiscuity should be banned first. (Remember, adultery is illegal too in many jurisdictions, and STDs injure and kill with much more documented regularity than steroids.)

If removing the motivation to throw games were the only reason behind banning gambling in baseball, then one wouldn't be penalized for betting on one's team.

The trouble with betting is that, even when you bet on your team, you can't help but have that bet affect other games--games that you might not be betting on at all. For example, as a manager, you might not use your closer in a particular situation so that you know he'll be fresh for tomorrow, when you _are_ betting.

I think it does everyone a disservice to state that an ongoing debate (gambling v. 'roids) in which both sides are obviously putting forth valid ideas is pointless. The points are there, even if you happen to disagree.

A couple of points -I also don't think Rose's transgressions have had anywhere near the impact as steroids have had. I doubt that his gambling affected what other players did and I can't believe Rose ever threw a game intentionally or unintentionally.

The problem I see with steroid abuse that I haven't seen mentioned is the effects on high school players and minor leaguers who are never going to get near the majors. Some kid wrecks his kidneys on some junk because he idolizes Bonds, Giambi or Garciaparra. I'm not usually in favor of stopping people from screwing themselves up but in this case it seems like a case can be made that if it were just the big leaguers who actually do cash in it'd be OK but I don't see how anyone could make that claim.

Overeating and sexual promiscuity aren't behaviors which improve performance on the field, and tobacco use does so so marginally if at all as to be irrelevant. But teams and the league certainly do concern themselves somewhat with each-- weight clauses, AIDS awareness, the ban on smokeless in the minor leagues...

But as steroid use becomes common, players who would not normally take the associated chances start to feel pressured to juice, at which point it becomes an "unsafe work environment" issue.

If you want to stop kids from screwing themselves up, make sure your local high school football programs are clean. The "monkey-see monkey-do" effect of a Barry Bonds can't begin to compete with the double lure of approval from the coach of More Science High and a full boat from Siwash U... Plus of course gratifying daddy...

And there's a hole in the notion of "legal under the supervision of a doctor," tempting tho' it looks at first sight: assuming the Marsupials team doctor is ethical and refuses the plaid and the paste to Slammin' Sammy because they are not safe for him-- there will be a Victor Conti out there who will be happy to provide them to Samuel at a good price, and nothing much will really change. I suppose the "make it up as you go along" approach that Caminiti took to dosing himself would disappear, maybe.

There are three reasons why gambling on your own team is verboten. If Pete Rose bets on his team every day of the week except when Mario Soto starts, anyone around the transaction can draw the inference-- it amounts to inside information. Second-- if betting against your team is forbidden but betting on them isn't, evidence for the former will be very hard to find-- almost all forms of physical evidence will be ambiguous. And third-- the one which is responsive to Candi's objection-- if you bet on your team and lose, you may find yourself in a poor position to say "no" when asked to deliberately lose on behalf of someone else's bets. Baseball is the only sport whose audience _knows_ its championship was sold to gamblers once. The decision was made in 1920 to to draw the line well back from the center of the problem in order to ensure public confidence in the game. Everyone involved, including Rose, has known the line was there. Baseball reiterated its stand with Micky and Wille's suspensions during Rose's career, in case he didn't believe it was true.

I am not arguing that steroids don't matter, nor that they shouldn't be addressed. I'm suggesting that the ban on gambling protects the absolute center of a professional sport-- your and my confidence that a result we just watched wasn't prearranged. A ban on steroids happens a bit farther away from the center-- in the one case the loser is robbed, in the other he cries all the way to the bank. It seems clear to me that the Black Sox scandal--and the decade and more that preceded it-- were far darker days than this is.