Alex Rodriguez, popularly known as A-Rod, who recently became the seventh and youngest player in Major League Baseball history to hit 600 career home runs is still crumbling under pressure to prove his critics wrong as he is always associated with anabolic steroids and performance enhancing drugs.

Rodriguez told Suzyn Waldman of WCBS Radio that he feels depressed when his name is always associated with steroids.

From NYtimes.com:

Rodriguez is part of a quartet of sluggers who carry the scarlet letter S on their broad backs. The retired stars Barry Bonds (the career leader with 762 homers), Sammy Sosa (609) and Mark McGwire (583) are all linked, to one degree or another, to performance-enhancing drugs.

They are stacked up in the stratosphere, waiting to see if the writers who vote for membership in the Hall will ultimately accept them. At the moment, there are no guarantees. McGwire, who has been eligible for four years, eked his way up to 24 percent in January, far short of the 75 percent needed for admission.

This overt withholding of honor is the legacy of a steroid era that began in the last decade, when McGwire, Sosa and Bonds all had surprisingly high home run totals at ages when most great sluggers are tailing off. Steroids were illegal by federal law and by edict of Major League Baseball, although no testing was in place during their peak years.

On his own, Rodriguez brought up his link with steroids Wednesday after the Yankees defeated Toronto, 5-1, at Yankee Stadium.

A-Rod may not find it easy to gain entry into the Hall of Fame once he becomes eligible five years after retirement due to his past links with steroids.

Tags:  A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, Anabolic steroids, Barry Bonds, Hall of Fame, Major League Baseball, Mark McGwire, performance-enhancing drugs, Sammy Sosa, steroid era, Steroids

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The game of baseball has been kept under dark clouds after Mark McGwire made a belated confession of steroid use amidst crocodile tears and disclaimers. But Bud Selig thinks that the baseball steroid era is now over, a fact suggested by test results.

Though McGwire’s confession was not able to impress the die-hard baseball fans, it saved officials and team members by putting an end to the baseball’s era of performance-enhancing drugs to offer a new start for the game.

From Bostonherald.com:

That’s pretty much what Bud Selig said after the man who wouldn’t talk about the past to Congress finally spoke about it to Bob Costas. On the day of McGwire’s mea culpa, Selig said in a statement that in 2010, the use of steroids and amphetamines in baseball is “virtually nonexistent, as our testing results have shown.”

Two things: Either the commissioner of Major League Baseball pays no attention to the nonstop cat-and-mouse game still taking place between the International Olympic Committee and its world-class athletes, or he’s back to his old car-selling ways again.

If he ever really left them.

Otherwise, he would not have followed with this: “The so-called steroid era — a reference that is resented by the many players who played in that era and never touched the substances — is clearly a thing of the past, and Mark’s admission today is another step in the right direction.”

The steroid era might be a thing of the past in baseball. But performance-enhancing drugs are an ever-evolving industry, as the IOC and its testing agents long ago discovered. Simply stated, the cycle goes as follows: You design a testing program to detect all known performance-enhancing drugs. They design a new drug that escapes that detection. After a while, you get wise, develop even more encompassing detection. They take your test, and build a new PED that avoids that detection.

Selig remarked that the use of steroids and amphetamines is no more prevalent in the world of baseball.

Tags:  amphetamines, baseball, Mark McGwire, performance-enhancing drugs, steroid era, Steroid use, Steroids

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