Told one way, the story of Major League Baseball's steroid era is a fairly simple tale: Jose Canseco and the sluggers of the 1990s ate the forbidden fruit, forcing their peers and competitors to cheat. The alternative, for anyone who wanted to make a living playing baseball, was oblivion, and the poor owners were made fools of by the evil players who dared besmirch the honor of the game by juicing.
That's an oversimplification, and it ignores the critical labor context directly preceding and setting the stage for the '90s. On this episode of Only If You Get Caught, we tell the story of the steroid era through the labor history of baseball. The 1994–95 strike set the stage for the now-shameful feats that came after, and I argue that those twinned ruptures were the products of baseball's labor and management classes' continual warfare over the preceding decades. It's a big story, and I was lucky enough to be joined by Tim Marchman, formerly our boss at Deadspin, currently Wired's director of politics, science, and security, and always a baseball knower extraordinaire.
Listen to Only If You Get Caught wherever you enjoy podcasts. The show is produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin and hosted by me. You can find the show's transcript here.
