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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, we teamed up with the podcast Crushed 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, 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
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