Baseball’s Steroid Era Was Actually A Labor Story

The simple story of the early-aughts baseball steroids scandal is that Congress caught a bunch of star players juicing. That’s mostly true, but that reading fails to properly place the scandal in the most relevant context: labor relations. You don’t get the steroid “crisis” without the 1994 strike, nor can you fully explain the insane public spectacle of congress making a show of criminalizing these guys without framing it within the past, present, and future of labor exploitation.

Episode transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10JmE5S9OfKupVjPAh_rOLCCywussI5wDr1mNqWZQq5o/edit?usp=sharing

Show Credits

Only If You Get Caught is written and hosted, by Patrick Redford. 

It’s produced by Alex Sujong Laughlin, with production support from Jae Towle Vieira. Editorial support from Tom Ley and Audrey Mardavich. Justin Ellis is Defector’s projects editor. Mixing by Samantha Gattsek  Show art by Jim Cooke. Jasper Wang and Sean Kuhn are Defector’s business guys. Thank you to the Defector staff. 

Defector Media is a collectively owned, subscriber based media company. 

Only If You Get Caught is a proud member of Radiotopia. 

If you like the show, the best way to help us is a five-star rating and review wherever you are listening right now.