MLB and Performance Enhancing Drugs

For decades Major League Baseball has been trying to eliminate performance enhancing drugs, but last year 13 MLB players tested positive. The issue with MLB players seems to be that the punishments they receive is not affecting their decisions on using performance enhancing drugs. MLB players using performance enhancing drugs make themselves local heroes, when they are no-good cheaters who should be banned for life. People think that increased suspensions may reduce the number of players getting caught using performance enhancing drugs, but no punishment schedule seems likely to eradicate PEDs from the game (Tygart). “Those players who have violated the program have created scurrility for vast majority of our players who play the game the right way” (Skillin). MLB players who use performance enhancing drugs should have harsher punishments before playing the game again, in order to increase a safe environment around the game of baseball.
The sport of baseball has demonstrated a bad example to those young folks in college, by giving them the idea that if one day they make it to the major leagues it is fine to use performance enhancing drugs. Baseball is a numbers game, if performance enhancing drugs are legalized, the inability to compare player’s statics from different decades of the game would hurt the principle of what baseball is, about what fans love (Caple). MLB cannot afford performance enhancing drugs going into the minor leagues therefore, MLB should make harsher punishments to stop performance enhancing drugs from spreading to the Minor Leagues. Since the outbreak of Biogenesis, “the Government is interviewing Porter Fischer and investigating whether the clinic sold performance enhancing drugs to college players” (Caple...

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...nd he is just leveling the field by helping other players cheat the system”(Porter). If performance enhancing drugs have taken over the game of baseball then it doesn’t matter who uses them anymore. Performance enhancing drugs are so common in baseball that “Steroids in sport (and drug use, more broadly) is a departure from mainstream public norms” (Durkheim). Baseball should now worry about the other problems they have leaving the PED situation alone.
In conclusion baseball players who utilize performance enhancing drugs, should be applied punishments, so they can learn their lesson before playing the game again. Performance enhancing drugs only make the game unrealistic; they attract all people around the U.S. they make companies, fans, and the players a disgrace to the game. Should baseball still be considered a sport?