The day after former Senator George Mitchell released his damning report on performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball last December, President George Bush, a former baseball-team owner himself, seemed to speak for many disgusted fans when he pronounced, "Steroids have sullied the game."
The Mitchell Report fingered 89 professional ball players, but many of these allegations were nothing new for baseball watchers. Game of Shadows, a 2006 exposé by a pair of investigative journalists, and Juiced, a 2005 tell-all memoir by player José Canseco, described a world of professional baseball rife with performance-enhancing drug abuse. The ongoing scandal, which first surfaced in the late 1990s, has bubbled on for a decade, leading commentators to label it the "steroids era."
With fans aware of such egregious bad behavior, why has attendance at Major League Baseball games reached record-breaking highs during that same time period? Are baseball's "consumers" impervious to the ethical lapses of their teams? No, say Wharton professors, but the case demonstrates how bias, competition and a lack of oversight worked together to create an ethically toxic atmosphere.
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