It was NOT 'The Steroid Era'; It was 'The Better Steroids Era'

There is a misnomer out there in the media that starting in the late eighties with the Bash Brothers, baseball descended into the 'Steroid Era.' The reality is the last 20 years in baseball has just been the 'Better Steroids Era.'

Steroids were prevalent in the sixties and seventies, according to former pitcher, Tom House (pictured right), who testified to Congress in 2005. He attributed it to the general drug culture of the sixties and seventies. He also believed six to seven pitchers on every team's staff used steroids.

Do we have any reason to believe that by the early and mid eighties as drug use shot up to the point in which 'The War On Drugs' was considered a miserable failure, that somehow the baseball culture righted its own ship.

All the hair loss, balls shrinking, mood swing talk in the world was not going to stop the progression of steroids. If anything like the rest of sports medicine, we can reasonably assume that the underground multimillion dollar market had incentives to improve the products while limiting side effects. Those common side effects that we often heard in the eighties, we now barely hear peeps about them.

In his book, Canseco has estimated that 85 percent of players were using steroids. In 1995, long before the steroid scandal was in the spotlight, Tony Gwynn estimated that 30 percent of the players in the league were users.

Baseball would do nothing to investigate claims by players like Gwynn. As Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine said in a commercial, "chicks dig the long ball." Instead, MLB also juiced the balls and the bats to keep the billions rolling in.

MLB has never been pro-active to stop steroids, unless Congress was looking over its shoulder. Even when Fay Vincent added steroids to its banned substances list, it is conceivable he was acting on insider information that the Feds were onto Big Mac and Canseco.

Ten months after MLB prohibited steroid use, Curtis Wenzlaff was arrested May 7, 1992 for steroid distribution charges. Wenzlaff admitted to helping take Canseco from "novice user" to "steroid guru," but refused to discuss McGwire.

We are inclined to believe the insiders like Gwynn and Canseco over MLB's reports that 5-7 percent were users in 2003, and 1-2 percent in 2004. We wonder about leaks in testing times, let alone the truthfulness of the results. In 2004, no player was caught twice and thus under the collective bargaining agreement of that time no name was released. The storm was being weathered, even the lesser of skeptics would think.

By the 2002 season, the steroid current that had long been in baseball, was blowing too strong in the public conscious. The Senate ordered Commissioner Bud Selig and players union president, Donald Fehr to institute a "strict" drug testing program into their new collective bargaining agreement.

MLB instituted a 10-strike, random and anonymous survey style testing.

The league announced that 5 to 7 percent of the 1,438 tests were positive for steroid use, setting in motion mandatory tests for 2004. In 2004, Selig proudly announced that steroid use was down to 1 to 2 percent.

Oddly enough no player tested positive a second time, which would warrant public notoriety. Since MLB controlled the release of all results, this claim could never be independently verified. No subsequent Congressional pressure seems to have broached the oddity either.

MLB was not even giving out token suspensions until the Balco hype kept steroids in the spotlight. Of course that has spiraled into Bonds. Fair treatment required that the Feds not look the other way on Clemens.

This reminds me of a Scooby Doo episode. Someone pull the mask off Selig and you might see Bonds. Wait, pull off the mask, maybe its Alex Rodriguez? Well maybe their isn't just one villain wearing the mask. But certainly a lot of villains may be saying, 'I would of got away with it too if it weren't for those meddling IRS investigators (Balco).'

But actually, we do know that most of the culprits will get away with it. We have no way of knowing who did what fair in baseball in the last 50 years. We do not know even if guys like Reggie Jackson were on the level when he was hitting monster shots onto Detroit Stadium's roof.

We all know about Charlie Hustle's (Pete Rose) character issues. Guilty til proven innocent is for the court of law. In the court of public opinion, a guy like that won't get the benefit of the doubt.

If we want to know the truth, we need to treat this like the presidential records. Those are sealed for fifty years after a president is dead.

And why? Because their is a premium on truth in this world. We want to know history for what its worth, but nobody wants to sacrifice their current glory for it. Look at what doing that did for Rafael Palmeiro. He went from a first ballot Hall of Fame choice, to the shame of MLB,

So sit all the living baseball players in a room. Hook them up to lie detector tests and grill the hell out of them. Promise that none of the results will be released for 50 years and that'll take care of the mess. Sure we'll have to wonder our brains out in the mean time, but it wouldn't be much different from the carrots we are picking out of the huge pot of steroid stew now.

Sorry baseball fans, but your league has been conning you for years. Wake up to the reality and decide if you want the truth or to just fry a few convicts in hopes that baseball players won't cheat anymore.

Even if you are happy with that, at least demand that various independent agencies, not beholden to MLB and conspirators conduct the steroid testing. It's obvious that the almighty dollar is what counts at MLB. Collusion or corruption by omission equals billions when done right. That is a proven formula.

One thing is for sure, this is a huge cultural mess, not just some fad or even as much as an era. The clean-up effort has to to match the scope of the issues if the problems are to be eradicated.