ESPN has prepared an EPIC steriods-in-baseball report. Historic.

Read it.

===

Who knew? We all knew: the trainers who looked the other way as they were treating a whole new class of injuries; the players who saw teammates inject themselves but kept the clubhouse code of silence; the journalists who "buried the lead" and told jokes among themselves about the newly muscled; the GMs who wittingly acquired players on steroids; and, yes, owners and players, who openly applauded the home run boom and moved at glacial speed to address the problem that fueled the explosion.

In a way, the story of steroids in baseball is not so much about the power added to the game, but about the power that was always there. It's a power that has entranced millions for more than a hundred years, surviving game-fixing, labor strife, all sorts of drug scandals. It's a power that has both a bright and a dark side. Becoming a baseball star is a noble dream, but to do that, some players did the ignoble, ingesting and injecting dangerous and often illegal substances to enhance performance. And because the people who depend on baseball for livelihood and amusement wanted so much to believe in the essential goodness of the game and the greatness of the players, we missed or ignored the signs: the larger biceps, the back acne, the outsize statistics. (As it happened, ESPN The Magazine was born in 1998, as home run totals were exploding, and we devoted four of our early covers to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.)

Years later, we would all confront the deception. Or was it self-deception? And so The Magazine decided to go back and trace the arc of the steroids age in baseball, from introduction to proliferation to condemnation. It is a tale told through some of the principals: a trainer, a supplier, an FBI agent, a GM, a writer, a doctor and several players -- a tale of crime, corruption and complicity. Many were put in difficult positions that required choices they now regret.

Why tell the story now? Actually, with the glory of the White Sox and the beauty of baseball still fresh in our minds, this is as good a time as any to look back on what went wrong.

We tell the story now so that we won't fall into the same web of deceit again.


http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=steroids&num=1

describe why cops cover for one another, but doctors do it too, and journalists do it probably most of all.