If Jose Canseco snorted blow of a whore's ass and shot smack, and that helped him hit home runs, I could care less. It's his health he's ruining. Steroids are bad for you. They do strange things to the body. If someone is so braindead and desperate to use them, fuck it, why should I care? Because of the intergrity of the game? Shit, all they do is steal money from localities for their stadiums and jack up ticket prices.

As Gilliard says, Congress has many, many better things to do, but apparently would rather waste its time on grandstanding bullshit.

Bill James wrote, some years ago, a wise observation about drug use in baseball:

I know I'm probably going to get hung for saying this, but has anybody considered the possibility that cocaine and amphetamines really do enhance athletic performance in certain respects? ... I don't really believe that drugs make anybody a better ballplayer. I do believe this: that the physical and emotional construct which creates a successful athlete must be understood in its entirety, and not discussed piecemeal. That, I think, is the reason that players who go on weight-training programs or health-food kicks, or players who are helped by hypnotism or other psychological counseling, or players who make a sudden leap forward after working with a batting instructor, will almost always relapse in the next season. True excellence in any field is supported by an incredibly complex structure of habits, skills, knowledge, intelligence, confidence, courage, experience and diverse abilities. ... When a player has been using a chemical substance for years, I think it often happens that that substance becomes a part of the fabric of his life - and thus, however evil it is by itself, it becomes a part of the structure that supports his success. When it is removed, that fabric is torn, and it may be years before the tear can be stitched over.

Bill James
1985 Baseball Abstract
republished in This Time Let's Not Eat the Bones (1989)

The overall point being that baseball players aren't stand-alone entities, unaffected by what's going on around them. They fail and succeed based on their performance inside a complex system which is only in small part determined by them. Baseball owners know that offense-heavy baseball -- lots of home runs, lots of slugging -- sells better than "little ball" based on pitching, defense and station-to-station offense, and they reward those who can produce it, and that sets up the market for ballplayers to bulk up and provide the slugging that's wanted.

But that's really only the tip of the iceberg, there's a whole lot more that's under the surface that people just don't think about -- such as, for instance, the effect of nutrition.

There was a time when baseball players, almost without exception, came from the lowest levels of the working class, and from the poorest parts of the country. Understandably, nutrition for people in that siuation, in those areas, was pretty damn poor. Take you basic old-time ballplayer, turn back the clock, move him to a circumstance where he can be raised with the best nutrition possible, and he'll turn out to be a better athlete -- stronger, faster, with more stamina.

That being the case, aren't modern ballplayers, many of whom come from the middle-class, some of whom go to college, and most of whom get perfectly reasonable nutrition throughout their lives, at an unfair advantage to their compatriots from the past? Should we start talking about marking all contemporary records with an asterisk?

What about ball parks? Bill James and other sabermetricians have known for a long time how to adjust performance statistics for park effects. Shouldn't records set by players in smaller, hitter-friendly ballparks be altered to account for their advantage, or, at least, marked in some way (perhaps with an asterisk), so that people would know that their achievements aren't as impressive as others on the all-time page?

The answer, of course, is no. The playing field has never been level, not during any one time, and certainly not across time periods, but that's no reason to go screwing around with the record books.

Also -- and, believe me, this comes from a long-time hard-core baseball fan -- it's only a damn game, there are more important things to focus on.