Peds In Sports Essay

PEDs: The Tenth Player on The Field
Performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are classified as “any drug used by athletes to heighten their abilities in the performance of their sport” (Segen 2012). There are many types of PEDs in the athletic community but some of the most common ones are; Androstenedione which allows athletes to train harder and recover faster from extreme work outs, Human Growth Hormones which builds muscle at a high rate, and the most popular and used one being creatine that allows the muscles to release energy at a much faster rate. PEDs are banned from most professional sports leagues but with the competition of being the best, they are becoming increasingly common across all levels of athletics. In the MLB the number of players

Back in the days before the “steroid era” there was no doubt that players were taking substances that probably helped them stay on the field longer or recover from injuries faster, but whether they enhanced performance is a whole different story. The chances are most of the league was taking some sort of PED, but people only know of the big names such as Alex Rodrigues, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, they fail to look at the players who took these substances and were still average ball players or barely hanging on to a job in the major league. From this it is seen that a certain amount of skill was extremely necessary in order to excel at the professional level. People turn to Barry Bonds as the prime example of PEDs enhancing performance because of his record setting number of seventy-three homeruns in the 2001 season. What these people to fail to look at is that Bonds averaged over forty-five home runs in the eight seasons prior to that and the few years after; he was also traded to a team that played in one of the smallest fields in the country (Fosko 2009). Bonds was a great player before he took steroids and he still was after, if PEDs continuously helped Bonds hit the ball farther he would have been