Headline to a column written in the Philadelphia Daily News: “NFL seems to have better handle on steroid problem than MLB.”
The keyword is “seems.” According to the article, steroid use was de rigueur in the NFL back in the 80s in a way that it has never been alleged to be in baseball. Ex-lineman Brian Baldinger:
“I remember the first day of training camp, going into Player X’s dorm room when the vets showed up,” says Baldinger, who played 11 NFL seasons for the Cowboys, Eagles and Indianapolis Colts. “A brown bag was dumped out on the bed full of syringes and you name it. And you just kind of grabbed what you needed.
“It wasn’t like it is now, with baseball players saying, ‘Let’s get the playing field even.’ Back then, it was understood that X-amount of players, mostly linemen, that’s what they did [use steroids]. It wasn’t looked at as a competitive advantage.”
In light of that culture the NFL, to its credit, instituted steroids testing in the 1980s. And it has had some success. According to the article, anonymous post-retirement surveys by a medical journal indicated a 20.3% rate of steroid use among respondents in the 1980s and a 12.7% rate currently. While it’s not unreasonable to assume that the actual usage rate is higher simply because human nature does not easily allow people to admit bad stuff, let’s just say that 12.7% is accurate.
So rates are lower, but is that any basis to claim -- as the people quoted in this article claim -- that the NFL’s testing regime represents success? 12.7% of current NFL rosters equals roughly 215 players. In the past four years, however, a total of 43 players have been suspended for violating the NFL’s PED policy, or about 10 a year. I’ll spare you the math, but trust me when I tell you that 10 a year is somewhat less than 12.7%.
Yet despite this -- and despite the fact that the no one has ever provided any data suggesting that as many as 12.7% of baseball players are using PEDs at any given time in the testing era -- football is held up as having its PED house in better order than baseball. And that’s before you apply the same “look how big those dudes are” logic to football that is so often applied to baseball.
I won’t claim that baseball’s testing regime is perfect -- it’s actually less comprehensive on paper than the NFL’s -- but I find it incredible that the NFL is given a virtual free pass when it comes to steroids while baseball’s drug problems are continually dragged out for public ridicule and abuse.
