On the summer night of August 7th, 2007 San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds steps up to the plate just a homerun shy of becoming the all time career home run leader. He proceeds to blast the ball into right center field and as it landed the stadium and the baseball world were both ecstatic. However Bond’s success didn't come without controversy, Barry Bonds was frequently ridiculed for his alleged use of performance enhancing drugs.  Since the mid 20th century to current times the debate of performance enhancing drugs have been a major topic of discussion in the sports world. Many athletes have been accused of using steroids and all of them played during a generation where many records broken and players produced stat lines like never seen before. Many highly regarded athletes such as Barry Bonds, have been accused of or proved to have used steroids in order to help themselves get an edge on the competition. Performance enhancing drugs have changed the way sports have been played and have led to increased interest by the fans. However, the use of performance enhancing drugs has been condemned by almost all amateur and professional sports leagues and if an athlete is caught using performance enhancing drugs they are likely to suffer some pretty severe repercussions. The main reasons why steroids are banned from professional are due to the fear that steroids have negative health effects on the athlete, the other reason is the moral concerns about the ethical use of performance enhancing drugs to obtain an unfair advantage over their competition, and how steroids can distort the history of the game due to the inflated stats. Although performance enhancing drugs are dismissed by many people for moral and ethical reasons, performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in professional sports due to the way they can improve the quality of the game play while making the game more appealing fans and helping the athletes more than ever before.

An advantage of the use of performance enhancing drugs also improves the quality of the game by helping the athletes perform at a higher level. In Frank Frisch’s Ted Talk Frisch explains that watching a human perform to their full potential should be welcomed in the sports world instead of condemned. Frisch who is a professor of health sciences and kinesiology at Chapman University believes that we should embrace how steroids let athletes perform up to a level that is close to their genetic potential. The reason being is that if athletes are able to play at their full potential they will be able to do things never been done before “it does facilitate the very best of their genetic potential to develop huge, iconic performances,” (TedTalk 5:52) Steroids allow players to reach levels of performance that they otherwise could not reach. When a player can play at a higher level the quality of the game improves because the players are able to run faster, jump higher, push harder etc. What makes professional sports so appealing to fans is that they can watch the game be played at a high level. This is the same reason why thousands of people choose to go to professional baseball games while not even a hundred people go to little league games is because of the higher quality of play in the professional game. 

If something was available for surgeons to increase their ability to operate on patients wouldn’t everybody want them to use it? Steroids could be used to improve the game but they are banned which is unique because many industries dont bann something that helps increase performance.  In Louis Savulescu essay “Why We Should Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sport.” Savulescu who is a philosopher and professor of practical ethics at the university of Oxford explains how when we watch sports we should want athletes to play at the highest level possible because the game is more of spectacle. In his Savulescu article he compares music to sports and explains how “Classical musicians commonly used β blockers to control their stage fright. These drugs lower heart rate and blood pressure, reducing the physical effects of stress, and it has been shown that the quality of a musical performance is improved if the musician takes these drugs. Although elite classical music is arguably as competitive as elite sport, and the rewards are similar, there is no stigma attached to the use of these drugs,” (Savulescu). Musicians don’t have any oppositions to performance enhancing drugs because it makes the music sound better which in turn enhances the listener's experience. Similar to sports, when players use performance enhancing drugs they play at a higher level and fans experience a more entertaining product. Players should be allowed to use performance enhancing drugs because it increases the quality of the product for the fans.

Part of what makes sports entertaining is that the athletes have talents that are rare and intriguing to the viewer. In Chris Smith article “Why It's Time to Legalize Steroids in Professional Sports” Chris Smith mentions in his article that professional sports are entertaining because watching athletes perform at the highest level is appealing to the fan. Smith addresses the argument by stating “A huge part of watching sports is witnessing the very peak of human athletic ability, and legalizing performance enhancing drugs would help athletes climb even higher. Steroids and doping will help pitchers to throw harder, home runs to go further, cyclists to charge for longer and sprinters to test the very limits of human speed.” (Smith). People are fans of professional athletes because of their elite abilities to play a sport. What makes an athlete different than an average joe is the fact they can play sports well. If the athlete could play sports even better, they would be more attractive to the fans because what attracts fans are seeing an athlete play on the highest level.

Steroids may also help the athletes stay healthy throughout the season. It is well known that steroids have some negative health effects but maybe not as severe as a concussion or a back injury. However if athletes were stronger do steroids they could have stronger neck muscles to stabilize their neck and prevent concussions or but less stress on their back when performing strenuous movements. Getting an injury like a concussion is bad for the health of the athlete but the drugs the team doctors usually prescribe the players can have worse physical and mental health effect than steroids.In article by CNN health correspondent Nadia Kounang  “over half of all retired NFL players used narcotic painkillers during their careers, and 71% of those ended up abusing those painkillers. One in seven of those players continues to have dependency issues after playing.” (Kounang) the fact that all of those players becoming addicted or end up abusing pain killers when they retire is ridiculous. If those players used steroids they could have been stronger and could have been less hurt by the injuries. Instead they are severely hurt and start abusing narcotic painkillers. Sure steroids may have some health impacts but they are not addictive and only have some short term effects if taken correctly. If the league cared more about the players they would allow them to use steroids to mitigate injuries and reduce the need for opioids which would be beneficial for player health and safety.

Performance enhancing drugs can make the game so that the players that work the hardest get rewarded.  In Richard Posner's essay “In Defense of Prometheus: Some Ethical, Economic, and Regulatory Issues of Sports Doping.” Posner argues that steroids will reward the hard work instead of inherited gift. Posner discusses how PEDs in sports have impacts ethically, economically and how the sports industry would have to regulate performance enhancing drugs. Posner's main argument is that steroids take the “gifted” aspect of sports out of the equation. The athletes that “it challenges the natural hierarchy of the “natural talents.” It challenges giftedness in the sense in which we say that a child has a musical ‘gift’, meaning something innate rather than achieved.” (Posner), The athletes who were gifted would not benefit as much from their natural talent if performance enhancing drugs were allowed because it would even the playing field for players who don’t have as much natural skills but want to work hard to improve them. Having more players that tend to work hard and exert a lot of effort and passion into the game will improve the quality of the game because a large amount of the players would work harder which would increase the amount of passion and effort in the game.

Steroids are often criticized by the media but they do have an impact on the entertainment value of the game of baseball. The book Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru Wada and Lance Williams is about the steroid scandal that rocked baseball in the mid two-thousands. The book opens with an anecdote about Barry Bonds playing against Mark McGwire who was pursuing the single season home run record at the time that was set thirty-seven years before that date. Mark McGwire going for the Home-run record was captivating the sports world “all agreed that McGwire’s pursuit of the home run record was hugely important. It had made watching the sport of baseball enjoyable again, for the first time in quite a while.” (16) and brought back a lost interest in baseball. However later it was found that Mark McGwire was using performance enhancing drugs. The book also covers how Barry Bonds a Former 3-time MVP was struggling to reach the elite status he used to have. Bonds met with a new trainer at the end of the 1998 season and after he set the MLB home run record. Barry Bonds chase for McGwire’s home run record captivated the baseball world. Due to all of the excitement around baseball families now “had to fork over $191.37 for tickets, parking, hot dogs, scorecards, and two ball caps—all they really wanted was to see Bonds hit a ball into the San Francisco Bay” (637) which was extremely expensive compared to prices the years before. The PED use in baseball was more than a scandal, however it became a cultural phenomenon “Some argued that if a ballplayer found it necessary to turn himself into a pharmaceutical guinea pig to attain greatness, so be it, as long he was entertaining. The fans would forgive and forget, and move on.” (542), and that the steroid scandal wasn’t a totally bad thing. The steroid era sparked interest in baseball like never before and fans became more likely to got to baseball games. Fans seem to find the “home-run” extremely entertaining, that’s why ticket prices and attendance both increased. The main reason why PEDs increased fan interest in Baseball was the home run.                    

One of the most entertaining plays in baseball is the home run do to the impact it can have on the score of the game as well as the pure beauty of the ball being launched high and far and travelling over the fence. Players who are the top home run hitters are more popular and paid better than players who excel at other categories. One of the main factors why attendance spiked in the steroid era was due in part to the increase in the number of homeruns. In Joe Solbergs and Richard Ringers article “Performance-Enhancing Drug Use in Baseball: The Impact of Culture” They argue that the homerun has a large impact on the fan interest of baseball, “Bob Klapisch, a highly regarded baseball writer, believed that baseball’s leadership had decided that the offense and home runs were essential to the popularity of baseball and that fans wanted to see more 7–5 games,” fans are a large fans of home runs and high scoring games because the ball is put in play more and there are more “big plays” to keep the fans entertained throughout the game. The frequency of the homeruns increased in the mid 90s and so did attendance, “battered by the damaging strike of 1994, baseball seemed in danger of losing mainstream appeal. However, by the late 1990s, attendance reached record levels, television viewership was high, and the game itself never seemed more popular”(Solberg 96) , steroids were the catalyst that made baseball so popular in the mid 90s. “The home run chase between McGuire and Sosa was just another piece of evidence for baseball’s leadership that the popularity of the sport was driven by the prevalence of the home run” baseball fans are very fond of the home run and prefer to watch games where more home runs are being hit. That's why the attendance at baseball games increased so much in the steroid era, because more home runs were being hit. Fans prefer to watch games where more home runs are being hit, so if the MLB wanted to make the game more appealing to fans then MLB should allow players to use PEDs.

Many fans may say that they are averse to allowing professional players use Performance enhancing drugs, however when players on performance enhancing drugs or performing at a high level fans start to become more attracted to the game. In the article “Does It Pay to Be Unethical? The Case of Performance Enhancing Drugs in MLB.” By Louis Pantuosco who is an economics professor at Winthrop University notes that “recent examples reveal that fans would rather win than punish their stars. In 2009, the national economic woes and overall reductions in league attendance did not deter the Los Angeles Dodgers fans from flocking to the ball park to support Manny Ramirez and his teammates in their quest of a World Series. The Dodgers had record attendance figures for the season.” (Pantuosco). Fans tend to enjoy the game more when performance enhancing drugs are evolved because the entertainment value increase. Manny Ramirez was a PED user and he was the star player on the Dodgers. More fans than ever attended Dodgers game in 2009 and that was an effect of performance enhancing drug user Manny Ramirez.

Although performance enhancing drugs have been condemned by many people for moral and ethical reasons, performance enhancing drugs should be allowed in professional sports due to the way they can improve the quality of the game play while making the game more appealing fans and helping the athletes more than ever before. Performance enhancing drugs help player reach closer to their full potential. They also can help players reduce their risks for injury by making them stronger. Performance enhancing drugs also even the playing field for player who weren't born gifted but had the work ethic to succeed. Performance enhancing drugs also increase the amount of Homeruns that are being hit which fans enjoy. This was seen in the MLB as fans flocked to the ballpark and paid more than ever to see the likes of Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds play, the fans went because they new they would be entertained. Professional Baseball would be a much better sport if performance enhancing drugs were allowed.

    