What steroids taught me about baseball’s PED era

This is a story I’ve been thinking about writing for the last five years. Maybe it will resonate with some readers. Maybe it will flop. Some will agree with it; others may attack me for writing it. Why do people write, anyway? To tell a story? To entertain? To push a point of view? All of the above?

Every year, when the Hall of Fame voting process grinds forward, there is considerable gnashing of teeth over what to do with steroid users. Baseball purists want to keep them out. There’s also a sizeable contingent comfortable looking the other way and voting them in. For what it’s worth, I’m in the first group. Even though steroids were not explicitly illegal in baseball at the time, they were illegal in society. Worse, they are performance-enhancing drugs.

Steroid apologists counter with the argument that players from the 1950s through the ’70s used all kinds of illicit substances—especially amphetamines, known then as Greenies. They did. There’s no dispute about that. The difference is simple: those substances were not performance-enhancing. If anything, they were performance destroying.

Now I’m going to bare a part of my soul—which might be a mistake—but it’s relevant. I was born into a long line of Scots-Irish men with addictive personalities. Booze. Drugs. Gambling. Reckless behavior. You name it, we’ve done it. The running joke in our family is that if you can keep a Lee boy alive until he’s 25, he’ll probably live a long life. By 23 or 24, most of us had shed the worst impulses driven by our Id. We bagged it, tagged it, and moved on. That decade between 16 and 25, though—whew. A lot of days, I’m just thankful to still be alive.

As a young man, I experimented with a variety of illicit substances. I’m not proud of it, but it is what it is. For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to focus on Barry Bonds, since he’s the biggest fish still being kept out of the Hall.

First, about those speed users of the ’60s and ’70s. Having used speed during my own reckless years, I can say with confidence that it does not help you hit a baseball 500 feet. If anything, it makes it harder. If you’re exhausted and need to stay awake another 12 hours, speed will do that. If you’ve played a Saturday doubleheader in 90-degree heat and need to play again Sunday afternoon, sure—a jolt will help you get through it. But long-term use causes weight and muscle loss, which is not conducive to hitting a ball over a fence. The argument that speed is a performance enhancer is a non-starter. It isn’t.

In my early 30s, I began lifting weights regularly for the first time in my life. It was tough at first—dragging myself to the gym every other day, week after week. There was an initial bump in muscle, then a plateau. Eventually, it worked. Over a year I’d add a couple pounds of muscle. After a few years, I’d gone from 165 to 180 and felt great.

In my late 30s, I started lifting with my friend Mark, who had built a legitimate free-weight gym in his basement. With his coaching, the gains came faster. Around that time, Mark McGwire was in the headlines for hitting baseballs a long way. It was discovered he was taking androstenedione and creatine—both legal over-the-counter supplements at the time.

I wanted to bump my gains and had a strange fixation on reaching 200 pounds, as if it were some magic number. I ordered creatine and jumped in. According to the label, the dose I was taking was equivalent to eating 70 steaks. I worried about my liver, but I went ahead anyway. All I can say is: wow.

Within weeks, my numbers exploded. Bench up. Squat up. My biceps, delts, traps, and lats all swelled. It was intoxicating. The downside was severe muscle cramps, especially in my biceps and quads. “Swole” is a word I hate, but that’s what creatine did.

The real difference showed up on the softball field. Yes, I understand softball isn’t baseball, but you still have to hit the ball. At its simplest, crushing a ball is energy equals mass times speed. E=Mc2.

Our league used low-flight softballs in parks that were 225 down the lines and 275 to center. Before creatine, I rarely hit one out. Afterward, suddenly I was a poor man’s Barry Bonds. I swung the heaviest bat on the team, and my bat speed jumped.

Balls that once died quietly in the outfield were now clearing the fence—and not by a little. They sounded different coming off the bat, almost like a gunshot. Pitchers flinched. Teammates stared. I stared. I loved it. One game I smoked a line drive that hit the top of the left-center fence without ever rising more than ten feet. I was disappointed it didn’t leave the yard. My friend Wes said, “Man, you’re just hitting the ball so hard.” It was a glorious summer.

Then it ended. I aggravated an old shoulder injury and stopped lifting. I stopped the creatine too. Normalcy returned. Balls stopped flying out of the park. Shots that once cleared the fence now settled harmlessly into gloves.

This was the summer of 1998, when McGwire and Sammy Sosa captivated the nation. Baseball was cool again. Players were hitting 500-foot bombs routinely. Mike Trout’s 484-footer in 2025, the longest home run hit that summer, wouldn’t have made SportsCenter in 1998.

Sosa was lovable. The hop, the kiss, the point to the sky—America ate it up. Sadly, it was a lie. Both men were using steroids. Many others were too.

Barry Bonds’ career breaks neatly into two halves. Pre-steroid Bonds was a surefire Hall of Famer. By the end of 1999, he had nearly 104 WAR and 445 home runs. He could have retired at 34 and walked in on the first ballot. But Bonds couldn’t stomach the attention McGwire and Sosa received. He knew he was better—and the public didn’t care.

So he started using steroids.

When I read that Bonds had added 20 pounds of muscle in one offseason, alarms went off. I’d been lifting for a decade and added maybe 15 total. Then came 49 home runs at age 35. Then 73 at age 36. Then the walks. Then the MVPs.

Athletes don’t get better in their mid-to-late 30s. Except that steroid users did. They found the Fountain of Youth.

Bonds didn’t “break” the game. He warped it.

People tolerated McGwire and Sosa because they were cheerful cheats. Bonds was a surly one. Nobody likes a grump.

It’s a shame, because before steroids, Bonds was one of the greatest players ever. How many home runs did steroids give him? No one knows. I’ll guess 120.

If creatine could turn me into a home-run hitter, imagine what steroids do to a world-class athlete.

Would I have done it? Probably. With no testing and millions on the line, I understand the temptation. I even faced it myself once. In the end, I did the right thing and walked away.

Egos are funny things. They drive us to reckless stupidity and astonishing greatness. Without rules and limits, you get chaos.

That’s what baseball was during the steroid era: reckless, dangerous, remarkable chaos—all rolled into one.