Pro

“Baseball fans are rightly hostile toward steroid use in the game, but there is a massive difference between using performance enhancing drugs to hit a baseball farther, and using them to heal. Anything that’s available to my grandmother to manage the aging process should be available medically to Miguel Cabrera to full recover.

Baseball is littered with great players who had a horrific injury and were never able to fully recover. How many guys can you think of where the story was, “Yeah, he got hurt and was just never the same again”? The game is full of cases like this. It’s sad…

Now, I get that this is a slippery slope and one that needs to be monitored carefully. But in this day and age there must be a happy medium between “Brady Anderson hitting 51 home runs” and “All Stars never really healing from career-altering injuries because they can’t get the right care.”

My solution: MLB should appoint a committee of respected doctors and former athletic trainers to review special cases. If players need to use a steroid to heal, they should have to apply to the committee for permission. If the doctors vote to let them use a drug that’s on the banned substance list because it’s required medically for therapy, then the player is allowed to do so without penalty. If the player is unable to persuade a super majority of the committee that this is what they need for their care, then no dice.”

June 13, 2018