Baseball & PEDs

As I tuned into Sportscenter the other day and saw highlights of MLB spring training, it suddenly hit me: another season of baseball is around the corner.

To be completely honest and forthcoming, I have never really cared for baseball. Though I’ve never minded playing the sport all that much, I’ve always likened watching it on television to sitting down on your front porch and watching the grass grow. It simply wasn’t my thing.

However, I cannot ignore the important place holds not only in sports, but also in American society as a whole. After all, it is America’s pastime.

Unfortunately with every new season of Major League Baseball, comes yet another batch of performance-enhancing rumors and accusations. Aside from cycling, which is slowly recovering from the Lance Armstrong confessional, no other sport has been as tainted by the dark cloud of performance-enhancing drugs as baseball.

The Biogenesis clinic scandal is just one of the many instances over the past decade in which prominent baseball players have been publicly outed for using banned substances. This all comes after the revelations of the Mitchell Report, BALCO trial, as well as multiple congressional hearings involving commissioner Bud Selig and some very prominent players.

This new Biogenesis scandal clearly demonstrates that the issue of PEDs is still a very relevant one as it shows that players could very well still be doping in order to gain an advantage. Players like Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun were two of the names involved in this recent scandal, despite the fact that they were both very recently in hot water over PED use.

Ultimately, PED use and doping in general has been a part of baseball for decades and will still be apart of it for years to come. No other sport has had to endure the amount of public scrutiny like baseball has been over the past decade or so and that apparently hasn’t deterred players from continuing to use banned substances and I don’t think it will anytime soon.