MLB: What Exactly Happened To Offense In the 1990s
Steroids/PEDs – real/fake/placebo?
Let’s start first by defining exactly what we’re talking about. What exactly is a PED?
The simplistic view is that PED=steroid, but that’s not exactly true. A steroid is a performance enhancing drug, but a single oak tree is also part of a forest, and that’s where some of the discussion begins to get lost.
Anabolic steroids were banned by major league baseball in 1991, however, due to multiple reasons there was no real testing nor punishment for any PED until 2005, allowing players nearly a 15-year window where they could really use without any repercussion, even though it was technically outlawed by the league.
Performance enhancing drugs really would be better termed as performance enhancing substances. Most view a “drug” as something taken into the body in either pill form or through an injection, but modern PEDs are introduced to the system in all sorts.
That protein powder you stir into your smoothie in the morning? By definition, that’s a PED, as it’s a chemical compound intending to give you an increased amount of a certain substance (protein/testosterone/human growth hormone/etc.) than what you can get through typical diet and body response to exercise.
However, one of the things that has been found in more and more research lately is that PEDs really are not as “enhancing” as they’re cracked up to be.
In fact, utilizing a placebo in test subjects while telling them that they’re receiving a PED will actually see their performance improve, as found in a recent study.
In my non-writing life, I’m a big fan of power lifting for health, and while the sport is rampant with performance enhancing drugs (and more frequently REAL steroids than what are referred to as “steroids” in baseball writing), I’ve found in talking with some of the best trainers and lifters in the business that guys who use often are inspired to work harder in the gym, and if they’d just have that same dedication outside of the substances, they’d often see similar gains.
Now, that doesn’t mean that all gains are placebo, but players who did make the choice to use a PED were also tied with world-class trainers and cutting-edge training methods as far as baseball is concerned. It gets a little fuzzy to separate one from the other as far as where the real gains truly came from…
So, if there were reasons other than the added substances into the players’ bodies, what else could it be?
We’ll start with expansion, four teams added in the 1990s in all:
Next: Expansion