The rewards are monetarily limitless in a sport like baseball where there is no salary cap. In his article, Should Baseball Give in and Allow Steroids?, Michael Hogan reminds fans that "nobody likes a cheater, unless the cheater plays for your team " (Hogan 1). All the time, catchers make balls look like strikes, infielders make missed tags looks like outs, outfielders make traps look like catches, and base-runners in double play situations aim their sliding feet at the second basemen rather than the bag. And as fans, we openly root for this type of behavior as long as it can help our favorite team to victory. But why all the outcry against steroids if all this other cheating is being condoned by not only the hierarchy of the sport, but fans as well? To say all the other stuff is just "a part of the game" is absurd when considering performance-enhancing drugs have been just as part of the game as all the other forms of cheating. Tobacco "which is known for increasing concentration "used to be chewed almost universally during games. Amphetamines and other strong hallucinogen drugs have long been rampant in baseball with Dock Ellis famously known for pitching a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. Based on these accounts, one could easily conclude that ingesting "funky chemicals " has long been a part of the game; but as fans we just have not come to accept it yet. .
I do not disregard the fact baseball players, and athletes in general, use steroids "In fact, in a perfect world, I would hope the problem would take care of itself once athletes realized the ethical ramifications of using performance-enhancers. But just as I believe that Americans will never quit smoking pot or snorting coke, I also have come to the sad reality and belief that baseball players will never stop using performance-enhancing drugs. The drug testing in baseball is just too erratic and imperfect, with "random drug testing only occurring in spring training and also the fact that the tests just cannot keep up with the creation of new chemical compounds made in HGH today (Baum 1).
