Steroids, in theory, can help an athlete in three ways:
First, they apparently aid in recovery and in maintaining health, boosting performance by allowing an athlete to spend more time on the field. In this sense, steroids are like cortisone shots (which is, in fact, a steroid) or Tylenol with the significant addition of being illegal. This is their least objectionable facet: nearly everyone of likes the idea of having the best players on the field, and a “fix” for Koufax’s elbow, Mantle’s knees, or Nomar’s wrist is something that most baseball fans would approve of.
The problem lies in the line between a “fix” and something that benefits a player. The second benefit of steroids is that they both allow players to add muscle mass more easily and to maintain facets of their athletic performance for a longer period of time. (I would guess that steroids do not benefit flexibility, coordination, or speed, but their ability to allegedly remove nagging injuries would likely do so, as anyone who has tried to run on a wonky ankle would know.) In this sense, steroids are just the poorly regarded cousin of modern medicine more generally: Mays and Aaron didn’t have the supplements, or the advances in nutrition, or the knowledge of training regimens that we have today. All of these things allow players to become “better” than a player who doesn’t use them. In basketball, advances in medicine, equipment, and nutrition have allowed KG, Kobe, and Nash to continue playing beyond the point where would have expected them to break down.
The difference between these advances is that steroids are, again, illegal. This creates three issues when comparing steroids to other advances. First, there is the moral issue involved. Theoretically, barring a player from the Hall wouldn’t be that dissimilar from banning a player for using a spitball or because he, say, whipped his kids or was violent towards his wife. Second, and more important, at least from my view, is the issue of access. Because steroids are / were illegal and expensive, only already semi-established players with the correct connections could afford and access them, giving a certain class of players concrete advantages over their competitors. Of course, this advantage is not the same as that held by whites over blacks before 1946, but that’s a slightly different issue. Third, and stemming from the limited access issue, is that most advances in sports medicine and preparation “raise all boats,” as it were: because everyone has access to the same technology, hitters and pitchers and fielders will all get better relatively equally, allowing us to compare all players from different eras because the baseline hitter in 2011, while likely better than the baseline hitter in 1946, is at the same level relative to the pitchers of 2011 as the hitter of 1946 was to the pitchers of 1946.[1]
Finally, steroids, according to some, allow players to go play above their “true” talent level. Following this idea, Barry Bond and Mark McGwire were both totally incapable of hitting over 70 home runs “legally,” even if they were totally healthy and had trained like mad in order to do so. I find this idea suspicious for a couple reasons: first, muscles are muscles. Steroids might help them develop, but they won’t replace a player’s legs with those of a cheetah or his arms with springs and steel cables. Second, I’m not sure what “true talent level” means: is Willie May’s true talent level the .345/.411/.667 that he hit in 1954, or is it his .302/.384/.557 career line? Had he hit like he did in 1954 in 1971, we would probably say that he was “over-performing” for age 40. But I’m not sure that, had Mays hit .370/.450./.700 in 1955 that we could say the same; while those numbers would have been his best ever, they wouldn’t have been so far out of line with expectations to be considered to be an “over-performance” of his peak.
