ESPN baseball commentator Curt Schilling, who plied his trade at the height of the so-called Steroids Era, told a Philadelphia radio station on Wednesday that offense is down around Major League Baseball because performance-enhancing drugs have been all but eradicated from the game.
“There’s a lot of good young pitchers in the game right now, but far fewer players are cheating,” Schilling said. “One of the bigger reasons they all did (steroids) was it allowed them to be April fresh in September and that helped you hit home runs. Anybody who ever says performance-enhancing drugs didn’t help players produce offensive numbers is full of crap.”
Schilling says he suspected some teammates on the 1993 Phillies were taking PEDs, but he says he never saw them using drugs or talking about them.
“It wasn’t something you would walk up to someone to talk about or ask them. You had your ideas. When guys showed up with 25 extra pounds on them after three months after you had seen them during the winter, you had an idea.”
Even though testing and the threat of stiff penalties have drastically curbed the use of PEDs, Schilling said cheaters remain.
“There isn’t a team in the last 20 years that has won clean,” he said.