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Originally Posted by Left-handed Badger
Depends on when back in the day is. Amphetamines were popular in the 1960s and 1970s I'd say. I doubt steroids came into baseball much until after 1980 sometime. For a long time, "bulking up" was some what frowned on in baseball. It was considered to hurt a player if the bulked up too much and the muscles got stiff and unwieldy. Baseball players didnt even weightlift all that much.
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Amphetamines were popular in the 1950s, becoming a staple of the trainer toolkit when guys came back from World War II. And they remained a staple of MLB life until very recently, if not still.
And if you (and I mean a general "you" here) believe steroids didn't crack baseball until the 1980s, you are living a dream. I'm not convinced they were extremely widespread (not like greenies), and I'm a bit skeptical of Tom House's claims as well, but with every other major sport dealing with steroids by the late 1960s, I find it highly unlikely that baseball was a decade behind its peers...even if there was an anti-lifting culture that pervaded the game.
Enhancement is as old as sport, and baseball is not exempt. Heck, you have Pud Galvin, the nineteenth century pitcher, associated with the Brown-Sequard testosterone elixir. Legal and illegal, ridiculous and sublime, players and management will try anything, especially if it is cutting edge. Uppers, downers, the Cardinals and their vitamins during the 1940s, old Clark Griffith and his carrots, and undoubtedly steroids well before 1980.
I tend to view the problem as an extension of deeper social and cultural forces instead of one that is merely an extension of villanous cheaters trying to beat the system. And I still love baseball. And I'm not inclined to moralize too much about the bad guys or the state of the game. The picture is just so much bigger than that.
Frankly, I believe baseball's greatest drug problem for all these years - and the root of many a player turning not only to speed, but also recreational drugs - has been alcohol. But, then, baseball long ago sold its very soul to the brewing industry. The boozy lifestyle of the game, the beer-soaked broadcasts, that was
charming. And the money was critical.
Alcoholism in Major League Baseball, and the game's culture of drinking, has always been woefully under emphasized because alcohol happens to be legal.