In the early 2000s, an unforgettable scandal rocked sports.

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In the early 2000s, an unforgettable scandal rocked sports: A reporter found steroids in the locker of baseball’s home-run hitter Mark McGwire. The national pastime would never be the same.

For this week’s episode ([link removed]) , we teamed up with the podcast Crushed ([link removed]) to look back on how rampant steroid use across Major League Baseball became the biggest scandal in the sport’s history.

Joan Niesen, a sportswriter and baseball fan, takes us on a deep dive into an era that began by turning baseball’s record book on its head and ended with the dethroning of a generation of superstars. She starts during the 1998 Major League Baseball season, when superstar sluggers McGwire and Sammy Sosa went head-to-head trying to set what had seemed like an unbreakable milestone: the single-season home run record. At the time, McGwire was portrayed as the hero baseball needed: part humble, wholesome, working man and part action hero, with his brawny build and enormous biceps. When the steroid scandal unraveled, Joan says, fans didn’t want to hear the difficult truth about their heroes – and the league didn’t want to intervene and clean up a mess it helped make.

Crushed is a seven-part podcast that is diving deep into the story. The Reveal episode is an edited compilation of several of those episodes. It’s produced by Religion of Sports ([link removed]) , a sports media company co-founded by football greats Tom Brady and Michael Strahan.

The Crush team prepared a Q&A with Joan that we wanted to share with you:

This scandal unfolded from the ‘90s into the early 2000s. Why tell this story now?

I think it's really relevant today just in the sense of questioning authority and questioning institutions and governing bodies. That’s something we think about a lot in 2021. As you listen, I think you'll realize that maybe the villain in the story isn't one man or a few men or an athlete at all. Maybe it's the system that created a world in which guys thought they could take steroids without any repercussions. And then it begs the question, what does that mean?

What surprised you most while reporting the series?

I don't want to spoil anything, but I think the medical elements were really surprising. It was very interesting to unpack some of the rhetoric that we heard in the late ‘90s and early 2000s about what steroids do to people and why they’re so dangerous. And I'm not telling anyone that you should go out and take the amount of anabolic steroids that baseball players were taking in the late 90s—that’s not good for you. But I did learn a lot about the health consequences of steroid use that really changed my views about steroids in sports and baseball’s steroid era. The message of this podcast isn’t that everyone should go take steroids, or that steroids are a great thing. But I hope the podcasts leads people to think a little more critically about them, their downsides and why so many athletes have decided to risk so much to use them.

What makes this story bigger than baseball—and maybe even bigger than sports?

We subconsciously expect our heroes to be doing the right thing—whether our hero is an athlete or a nuclear physicist. This is true across the board, even if you're not a sports fan. You have idols, and you have people who you want to be when you grow up or who you think are just the coolest people in the world. And then you see that no one's perfect, and I think that exploration of hero-worship will really resonate with people who maybe aren't dedicated baseball fans like I am.

Listen to the episode: Baseball strikes out ([link removed])
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Illustration by Maxwell Erwin


** Vaccine misinformation is a major threat to public health
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About one-third of adults in the U.S. are still completely unvaccinated and last week the U.S. surgeon general called out a major reason why: vaccine misinformation. On Thursday, Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory ([link removed]) describing the urgent threat posed by the rise of rumors, myths, and conspiracy theories around COVID-19. The advisory noted that governments can fight misinformation by “modernizing public health communications” and increasing technical assistance to state and local public health agencies.

When Reveal senior reporter and producer Ike Sriskandarajah investigated how vaccine conspiracy theories spread ([link removed]) , he found some alarming realities. Polling from March found that 42% of respondents in the United States believed at least one COVID-19 conspiracy theory. One doctor in Brooklyn told Sriskandarajah that of the hundreds of people he was giving COVID tests to every day, about 1 in 5 asked about there being a microchip on the end of the nasal testing swab. “I would just look at them like, ‘This is not the time to play,’ ” the doctor said.

New York City has a team that tracks vaccine rumors in order to inform its educational messaging. But when Sriskandarajah went to the State Department of Health webpage dedicated to combating vaccine misinformation, he found nothing had been added to the site in a while—the state’s page was last updated in January 2012.
Read the story: Where did the microchip vaccine conspiracy theory come from anyway? ([link removed])

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This newsletter is written by Sarah Mirk. Drop her a line (mailto:[email protected]?subject=weekly%20reveal%20feedback) with feedback and ideas!

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