So where are you now on steroids and the Hall of Fame?

[DrungoHazewood]

Couldn't agree more. Who says guys like Reggie or Fisk or whomever didn't use the juice in the 70's?

We know with 100% certainty that major league players were using some forms of illegal drugs, some of them performance enhancing, since at least the 1950s. It's extremely likely that at least some players were using steroids as long ago as the 60s.

Here's an interesting bit of history from the wiki on anabolic steroids:

Performance enhancing substances have been used for thousands of years in traditional medicine by societies around the world, with the aim of promoting vitality and strength.[2] In particular, the use of steroid hormones pre-dates their identification and isolation: medical use of testicle extract began in the late 19th century, and its effects on strength were also studied then.[3] In 1889, the 72-year-old British neurologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard injected himself with an extract of dog and guinea pig testicles, and reported at a scientific meeting that these injections had led to a variety of beneficial effects.[4]

The development of modern pharmaceutical anabolic steroids can be traced back to 1931 when Adolf Butenandt, a chemist in Marburg, purified 15 milligrams of the male hormone androstenone from tens of thousands of liters of urine. This hormone was synthesized in 1934 by Leopold Ruzicka, a chemist in Zurich. It was already known that the testes contained a more powerful androgen than androstenone, and three groups of scientists, funded by competing pharmaceutical companies in The Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, raced to isolate it.[4][5]

This testicular hormone was first identified by Karoly Gyula David, E. Dingemanse, J. Freud and Ernst Laqueur in a May 1935 paper "On Crystalline Male Hormone from Testicles (Testosterone)."[6] They named the hormone testosterone, from the stems of testicle and sterol, and the suffix of ketone. The chemical synthesis of testosterone was achieved in August that year, when Butenandt and G. Hanisch published a paper describing "A Method for Preparing Testosterone from Cholesterol."[7] Only a week later, the third group, Ruzicka and A. Wettstein, announced a patent application in a paper "On the Artificial Preparation of the Testicular Hormone Testosterone (Androsten-3-one-17-ol)."[8] Ruzicka and Butenandt were offered the 1939 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work, but the Nazi government forced Butenandt to decline the honor.[4][5]

Clinical trials on humans, involving either oral doses of methyl testosterone or injections of testosterone propionate, began as early as 1937.[4] Testosterone propionate is mentioned in a letter to the editor of Strength and Health magazine in 1938; this is the earliest known reference to an anabolic steroid in a U.S. weightlifting or bodybuilding magazine.

During the Second World War, German scientists synthesized other anabolic steroids, and experimented on concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war in an attempt to treat chronic wasting.[4] They also experimented on German soldiers, hoping to increase their aggression. Adolf Hitler himself, according to his physician, was injected with testosterone derivatives to treat various ailments.[9] The development of muscle-building properties of testosterone was pursued in the 1940s, in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Bloc countries such as East Germany, where steroid programs were used to enhance the performance of Olympic and amateur weight lifters.[10] In response to the success of Russian weightlifters, the U.S. Olympic Team physician worked with synthetic chemists to develop an anabolic steroid for American weightlifters, resulting in the production of methandrostenolone (Dianabol).[11] Dianabol was approved for use in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration in 1958.

If Olympic programs were using steroids as early as the 1940s it seems fantastically unlikely that American professional sports avoided them until the 1980s.

[Boy Howdy]

We know with 100% certainty that major league players were using some forms of illegal drugs, some of them performance enhancing, since at least the 1950s. It's extremely likely that at least some players were using steroids as long ago as the 60s.

Here's an interesting bit of history from the wiki on anabolic steroids:

If Olympic programs were using steroids as early as the 1940s it seems fantastically unlikely that American professional sports avoided them until the 1980s.

Not sure I agree with the bolded part. No doubt it's possible, but "extremely likely" wouldn't be my words of choice.

I remember Brian Downing and Lance Parrish being identified as weightlifters throughout the early-1980's. I remember that so well because it seemed like they couldn't play a single game without the broadcasters mentioning it, largely because baseball as a whole still feared that bulking up would make your muscles too tight to perform effectively. What those two were doing was regarded as freaky & weird.

By the mid-1980's though, it was not uncommon for teams to have weight rooms in the ballpark, and I specifically remember 1986 AL home run champ Jesse Barfield crediting the weightroom with his 40-homer season. Jose Canseco was a rookie in '86 of course, and we all know what's happened since.

I don't doubt that Canseco was the guy who changed things in baseball. Baseball America profiled him in 1985 as a non-prospect who made himself into a can't miss up & comer by his devotion to pumping iron. The hype that followed Canseco all winter after his promising September callup with the 1985 A's was inescapable even 2000 miles east in Baltimore.

[DrungoHazewood]

Not sure I agree with the bolded part. No doubt it's possible, but "extremely likely" wouldn't be my words of choice.

I remember Brian Downing and Lance Parrish being identified as weightlifters throughout the early-1980's. I remember that so well because it seemed like they couldn't play a single game without the broadcasters mentioning it, largely because baseball as a whole still feared that bulking up would make your muscles too tight to perform effectively. What those two were doing was regarded as freaky & weird.

By the mid-1980's though, it was not uncommon for teams to have weight rooms in the ballpark, and I specifically remember 1986 AL home run champ Jesse Barfield crediting the weightroom with his 40-homer season. Jose Canseco was a rookie in '86 of course, and we all know what's happened since.

I don't doubt that Canseco was the guy who changed things in baseball. Baseball America profiled him in 1985 as a non-prospect who made himself into a can't miss up & comer by his devotion to pumping iron. The hype that followed Canseco all winter after his promising September callup with the 1985 A's was inescapable even 2000 miles east in Baltimore.

I don't think it was a lot of people, but there have always been baseball players who were into weightlifting and being very physically fit. Honus Wagner did work with weights more than 100 years ago. Jimmy Foxx used to have beefcake pictures taken without his shirt on to show off his ripped muscles. Admittedly most players weren't Mr. Atlas bodybuilders, but neither was Raffy, nor is Roberts.

I'd bet there were players who experimented with forms of steroids going on 50 years ago. Heck, we know that Hall of Famer Pud Galvin experimented with taking primitive testosterone extracted from bull testicles in the 1880s.