The Needle and the Damage Done:

A Six-Part Look at Steroids in Major League Baseball

by Joe Cantiello 
 

I caught you knockin' on my cellar door,
I love you, baby, could I have some more
Ohhhhhh, ohhhhhh the damage done 

I hit the city and I lost my band,
I watched the needle take another man,
Ohhhhhh, ohhhhhh the damage done 

I sing the song because I love the man,
I know that some of you don't understand
milk blood to keep from running out 

I've seen the needle and the damage done,
a little part of it in everyone,
but every junkie's like a setting sun... 

-- Neil Young 
 

PART 1: STEROIDS DEFINED AND SOME STEROID USES:
THE GOOD, THE BAD & SOMETIMES THE UGLY FACTS 
 
PART 2: BASEBALL AND STEROIDS -- FACTS & MISCONCEPTIONS:
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY 
 
PART 3: THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET:
WHO KNEW WHAT, WHEN AND WHERE 
 
PART 4: THE UNION LEADERSHIP AND THEIR COMPLICITY:
PERPETRATING THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET 
 

PART 5: THE MEDIA, BASEBALL AND STEROIDS:
HOW WE TOO OFTEN MISS THE PERSONAL STORIES 

PART 6: STEROIDS REVISITED

There are good effects and uses for steroids.  Specifically, one that is immediately apparent is in the research that has been done in the area of wasting in HIV and AIDS patients. The terrible ravage of these persons’ bodies and psychological being is a complete deterioration of their humanity. However steroids have been shown to improve muscle mass and restore a semblance of health to people who suffer from HIV and thus give them a tool to stave off the devastation of wasting. 

This does not come without side effects, and from some good does come some negatives. Among these effects are the body’s loss of the production of testosterone, but under a physician’s care -- and no steroid should be used unless under a physician’s guidance -- these effects can be monitored. Human growth hormone has also proven to be a boon to athletes in particular in speeding up the healing process. The attributes of this drug for the whole of society is appealing and also worth the time to investigate and develop. There are other benefits to steroid use under correct and managed procedures. It is a drug, a powerful drug that has possible benefits for all people, medically and psychologically, if harnessed and used correctly. 

Steroids, as I have said earlier in this series, are not the enemy when we look at the issue of steroids in baseball. Rather, it is in the context of how the steroids are utilized by people that the problem of steroid use should be understood. Steroids come with two severe warnings: 

1. they are a class three substance under the federal governments classification and without a prescription and a course of treatment under a doctor’s care they are illegal and
2. steroids have side effects and without proper monitoring of a person’s body and psyche the user of steroids may not catch certain negative processes beginning to develop that lead to many terrible consequences.

 

These effects of steroids are manifested differently in the users. And it is quite possible that what affects one user won’t ever appear in another user. This is a prime reason why amateurs should not be trying to monitor their own possible negative side effects of PED use. The effects can be unpredictable due to improper dosage or application by an inexperienced and unqualified user and, without the supervision of qualified medical personnel, the negative effects of PED use can be devastating and deadly. That is maybe the single most important of the negative side effects of steroids. 

Anabolic steroids can not only increase strength but the user of anabolic steroids may also overestimate the strength he does have. In training sessions, using weights and exercise machines, the steroid-using athlete may attempt to do more than he is capable of doing. This increases the chances for torn muscles and tendons.  Another negative effect of using steroids is the damage done to the immune system itself. There is a large amount of data indicating that steroids may have some effect on regulating the immune system. There is strong evidence that different chemical compounds produce vastly different effects on the immune system. Testosterone and certain compounds have been shown to be possibly suppressive to the immune system, while nandrolone and other steroids are possibly stimulating to the immune system. 

The purpose of the immune system is to separate the good from the bad.  A system that is functioning correctly recognizes what should be and what shouldn’t be in the body in the form of viruses, toxins, and bacteria.  Anything perceived as an attack on the body encounters a slew of white blood cells which ordinarily should halt he attack. However, if the body, due to the introduction of certain steroids, suffers from an underactive immune system, the body could be vulnerable to a litany of health crises: cancer, AIDS, flu, colds, and a host of various infections. And if the body, due to the introduction of other steroids, causes an overactive immune system, then another list of health dilemmas pops up for the user: autoimmune disorders such as asthma, diabetes, and allergies, where the immune system attacks its own body. 

More negative effects of steroid use come from the sharing of needles and the possible transmission of hepatitis B and C and of AIDS from sharing needles or even just the drugs themselves. More negative effects of steroids include the development of various cancers associated with the use of anabolic steroids. This includes, but is not limited to, cancers of the liver, cardiovascular, hormonal, and reproductive and nervous systems. 

Anabolic steroids are controlled substances and using them without a prescription is punishable by law in the United States. Period.  But there is also another side of steroids that actually doesn’t involve steroids themselves per se. Some very dishonest people go out of their way to use other chemicals that act like anabolic steroids but aren't really the same thing.  The government years ago completed a decade’s long study where they had collected more than 3,000 drug samples from the so-called black market.  The resulting tests found that many of these anabolic steroids being sold were not actually steroids at all, but other prescription drugs or veterinary medications that had the potential to be more dangerous than many of the negative side effects of steroids themselves. 

Earlier in this article was discussed the more serious bad side effects of steroids but here is a repeated general list of the negative effects ranging from minor to the most severe. The most frequently reported negative effects of steroids are listed below.  Many of these negative effects of steroids are reversible when the steroids are discontinued, but some can also be permanent or irreversible. And again, not all manifestations occur in all people and some manifestations may never appear in certain people at all. The occurrence is dependent on many variables including: potency of the steroid, the combination of different steroids taken, the regimen of the use of the steroid, the administration of the steroid taken and the predisposition to certain effects to the steroid taken. 

• Physiological Effects: Breast enlargement in men, atrophy of the testicles, decreased sperm production, accelerated baldness, decreased testosterone levels, elevation of cholesterol, liver tumors, high blood pressure, acne, greasy skin, headache, bloating associated with water retention, dizziness, chills, drowsiness, nausea, vomiting, muscle tremors and damage, fever, fast heart rate, slowed heart rate, liver dysfunction, bloody diarrhea, seizure-like movements, lowered blood pressure, breathing difficulty, breathing cessation, blood clots, cardiovascular problems, cancer, immune system problems, heart attack, stroke and the ultimate side effect... death.
• Psychological Effects: Irritability, depression, mood swings, addiction, mania, psychosis and excessive aggressiveness.

 
 

The bottom line is this: If you want to avoid the negative side effects of steroids... don't take them.  

The pressure for the athlete to perform comes from all different levels and in all different ways and has risen substantially in just the last few decades.  It has led to a mass industry of the just-discussed illegal market in performance-enhancing drugs.  It has caused problems in the arena of sports on an economic, social, ethical and moral level, and is not easily dismissed or dealt with in an effective manner.  The enabling and justification for players in major league baseball is now complete. 

By either their lack of responsibility, their abject avoidance, their looking the other way or their direct commission of a distortion of the facts that explicitly condones PED usage, the world of baseball failed to do its duty to the game of baseball and to the major league athlete. The so-called leaders have condoned and by their lack of direct intercession have become part and parcel to the great lie perpetrated upon baseball, its fans and the record book. Everything that is in the record book from the earlier established date of 1980 on forward until today is distorted if not an outright lie, including the records of the best players to the statistics of the most minor players. Nothing can be taken at its word and everything is subject to scrutiny. 

But ultimately we are all responsible for our own actions. I disdain and I hate the excuse that tries to abrogate responsibility for any person’s wrongdoing. I demand rigorous honesty from baseball.  And I certainly do not want to hear the words “But I didn’t know...” 

It should have been their job to know and it is now their job to know. With rigorous honesty comes rigorous scrutiny. There is a phrase, a concept,  in old-time twelve-step programs -- not the weak hold-your-hand groups of today but the old timers’ groups of another era -- wherein they took one another’s inventories to let each other know that if they were not rigorously honest then they damn well were going to get called on it.  It kept things interesting and it kept things straight. 

Baseball needs some inventory taking if the truth be told. If you are injected with foreign substances into your body then it is your job to know what is being injected into you. If a doctor wants to give you an injection, then ask what it is. I don’t know about anyone else but I damn well ask what the heck the doctor is injecting into me before he does the deed.  And for a professional athlete in today’s media climate to not have the good sense to question anything and everything that is injected into him, I pity the fool. If for no other reason than that injection could be  jeopardizing many hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in revenue, he should be taking responsibility for his body and what goes into it. 

I also don’t want to hear  the excuses that everybody else was doing it. Maybe they were, but I am sorry -- it is time to cross the chalk line that was drawn by the union and by the cheaters and go to whatever authorities they need to go to, so the lies and the illegal methods some players use to advance their careers are exposed. 

And finally, I do not want to hear the words, “I was desperate... I had nowhere to turn” or any other combination that is spoken in an attempt to excuse aberrant behavior. We are all desperate at times and we all need to make decisions that are hard and sometimes distasteful. For the professional athlete it is even harder at times, in the sense that their enlarged but fragile egos may be about to take a big deflation when they find out this is the end of the road. That it is over. Well tough. That’s life. It is true sometimes you can’t always get what you want. 

That is how it is in the real world. Sometimes we have to face the reality we aren’t qualified for certain jobs. Does it mean we are failures? No, it means we just can’t do certain things sometimes. As a movie hero once said, “A man has got to know his limitations.”  And it is up to all athletes to realize that there are limitations and that maybe they just aren’t good enough anymore to belong to that special fraternity that is MLB.  

And finally it is every man’s responsibility to stop feeding into the fantasy world that the professional athlete’s entourage encourages him to feed into. The athlete needs to face the fact that very few if any of these hangers-on really cares that much about how he is... they basically care only about how he is doing financially and what he can provide for them. Yes, the athlete’s family cares and some close friends might care, also, but just about everyone else could give two plug nickels for him as a personal being and see him only as a meal ticket one way or another.   
 

“(Barry) Bonds' records must remain part of baseball's history. His hits happened. Erase them and there will be discrepancies in baseball's bookkeeping about the records of the pitchers who gave them up. George Orwell said that in totalitarian societies, yesterday's weather could be changed by decree. Baseball, indeed America, is not like that. Besides, the people who care about the record book — serious fans — will know how to read it. That may be Bonds' biggest worry.”

-- George Will Townhall.com (May 12, 2006) 
 

Maybe Will is right, and maybe he isn’t. But we need a fix somehow to discern between what is real and what was established by erroneous and false methods.  To me the record book is the bible of baseball. It tells the history of the game. So in some way George Will may be correct, but I worry about the future generations and how they will envision this era then.  

The question then is: Are you upset by the issue of steroids in baseball and are you against steroids in baseball? The answer is probably an overwhelming “Yes!” The follow-up question is: Are you upset enough to stop watching the games on television, listening on the radio or going to the games in person? And if the latest numbers generated by Forbes are any indication then the answer is an overwhelming “No!”