How Does Mark Mcgwire Use Steroids In Major League Baseball

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STEROIDS IN BASEBALL 2
Steroids in Baseball Steroids have been used a lot longer than some may realize. Steroids have even been dated back to Ancient Greece, where Greeks used testicular and plant extracts to get an edge on their opponents (Walker,2008). Major League Baseball has been around since 1869, which is why baseball is considered America’s pastime. Recently, those players have looked for an edge on other players, and will do anything to get that edge. This is why performance-enhancing drugs became a problem in Major League Baseball. Because of this, Major League Baseball took a stand. Major League Baseball created a strict drug policy that …show more content…

The hitters had never been so powerful and records that had been standing for years began to be broken. This brought up the suspicion of some of these players using performance-enhancing drugs. This was really brought up around 1998 season. During this season Mark McGwire, prolific slugger for the St. Louis Cardinals, broke the thirty-seven year old record held by Roger Maris (Egendorf,1999). This record was the most home runs in a season, he did not just beat the record, he smashed it. McGwire recorded seventy home runs during the 1998 season, which beat the old record by nine. In the same season, Sammy Sosa cracked sixty-six home runs himself. This brought up a lot of question about these two …show more content…

After the new policy came about in 2005 that began to punish players for use of performance-enhancing drugs, the numbers dropped greatly. From 2007-2012, only 21 players had 40 home run seasons. If this stat alone does not persuade people the Steroid era is over, the average number of home runs the league leader hit in these seasons prove the same. From 1996-2001, the average number of home runs for the league leader was 61.3 home runs. From 2007-2012, the average was 48.3 home runs. These statistics are unmistakingly obvious that steroids were prevalent between the 1996-2001 seasons. After saying this, it is not that there are no steroid users anymore, because there are and a few get caught every once in a while, but the number of users has greatly decreased. This is positive in so many ways. Because of the reduced number of players using performance-enhancing drugs, Major League Baseball has gotten a lot of its integrity