Persuasive Speech: Steroids in MLB – Flashcards

According to Public Religion Research Institute, 6 in 10 Americans view football as the sport that they closely follow and only one third of people asked said that football is America's game. So the question to ask is what happened to baseball? Why is there a decline of World Series viewership over the past decade. The reason is that people view baseball as a slow, methodical, low scoring game. They want fast pacing action points to be scored and baseball is not that. Major league baseball has to do something to change the perception that it has, otherwise it more people won't care and spend more time watching other sports.

Baseball would become more exciting More home runs would occur According to the Huffington Post, MLB banned steroids until the 1991 season and did not start testing till 2003 Mark McGwire hit 70 Home runs and Sammy Sosa hit 61 home runs Barry Bonds hit 762 Home Runs, most HR's in history More runs being scored Between 2000-2002 the total runs was 784 Between 2011-2013 The run total was 690 Over a hundred more runs were scored in the early 2000's More hits

According to baseball.com, OPS raised from .725 to right around .800 A player with the same stats as the mvp today only finished 20th in mvp voting Still dominate pitching Greg Maddux Randy Johnson Pedro Martinez High numbers but not outrageously high numbers

Transition: In order for people to get even more interested in baseball, certain players that were just considered average would be able to put of great numbers thanks to steroids. Allows players to do better than they would otherwise Many players posted better numbers than they did without steroids Sammy Sosa According to Espn stats and info, in 1992 he had 8 HR's 1993 had 33 HR's Jumped from 36 HR's to 66 in 1997

Barry Bonds Averaged around 40 HR's per year 2001 hit 71 HR Many players declined after 2003 Steroid testing going on More players taking steroids Not everybody put up good numbers On Good Day L.A, Robert Fick admitted to using steroids Finished career in 07 with .257 Batting Average and 69 HR All kinds of players took steroids and a lot of them struggled like Fick

Transition: Putting up numbers is just one aspect of allowing players to take steroids, baseball has one of the longest seasons of the four major sports, so injuries have it often and steroids can help that. Allows players to recover faster According to Joe Posnanski of NBC sports, there is an ongoing trend that pitchers get hurt The unnatural throwing motion Pitchers given limited rest

Human Growth Hormone Speeds up the recovering process Might reduce an 2 month injury to 6 weeks According to Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley, he says the use of drugs is prevent because players want to play. Any person wants to get back to their job as soon as possible MLB player have huge salaries and teams want to get most out of their money Most players want to get back to their team

Baseball is slowly becoming the least popular of the four major sports. I believe in order to make the game more interesting is to allow players to take steroids if they wish to. It is up for debate but watching baseball in the 90's and early 2000's made it a completely more exciting sport with teams putting up more runs, players breaking, records, and player overcoming injuries. All of this was possible because steroids help players, but it wasn't the steroids that did all the work, talent was needed and it made baseball America's game. Although revenue is up for most MLB teams viewership is down, and most of the population gets bored with baseball. MLB can climb back on the horse by allowing the use of steroids.