[Bette]

WHEN Brian Baldinger broke into the NFL in 1982 as an undrafted offensive lineman with the Dallas Cowboys, steroids were as prevalent in the league as six-shooters in the Wild West.
They weren't a dirty little secret back then. They were a tool of the trade. A significant percentage of the league's offensive and defensive linemen used them.
"I remember the first day of training camp, going into Player X's dorm room when the vets showed up," says Baldinger, who played 11 NFL seasons for the Cowboys, Eagles and Indianapolis Colts. "A brown bag was dumped out on the bed full of syringes and you name it. And you just kind of grabbed what you needed.
"It wasn't like it is now, with baseball players saying, 'Let's get the playing field even.' Back then, it was understood that X-amount of players, mostly linemen, that's what they did [use steroids]. It wasn't looked at as a competitive advantage."
That perspective would eventually change. As media scrutiny of steroid use in the league increased dramatically in the '80s and more and more "clean" players clamored for performance-enhancing drugs to be outlawed, the league, with the cooperation of the NFL Players Association, took action to eradicate them.
In 1987, the NFL became the first professional sports league to test its players for performance-enhancing drugs. In '89, it began suspending players based on annual testing in training camp. A year later, then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue gave the league's steroid policy real teeth when he implemented year-round random testing, as well as four-game suspensions for first-time offenders.
The percentage of steroid users dropped from 20.3 percent in the 1980s to 12.7 percent since then among retired players responding to a survey that appeared in the March edition of American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation.
"The NFL was ahead of the curve," Baldinger says. "It put a big dent in steroid use when they instituted year-round random testing. When you're testing once a year at the beginning of training camp, it's pretty easy for guys who are using to get around that. But when they started doing year-round testing, it made it a lot harder. I think it cleaned it up quite a bit."

Baseball can't make the same claim. For years, it dealt with the steroids issue by not dealing with it, until it finally was shamed into doing something about it.
Baseball began survey-testing players for steroids in 2003, but didn't start suspending violators until 2005, 16 years after the NFL. Just 22 players have been suspended in the last 4 years, which is 21 fewer than in the NFL over the same period. But baseball's PED program doesn't include nearly as much random testing as the NFL's, making it considerably easier to beat.
Baseball's agreement with its players union, which fought steroid testing for years, permits a maximum of 375 offseason random tests over 3 years. Each player also is subject to at least one random test during the season, in addition to a mandatory test at the beginning of spring training.

NFL seems to have better handle on steroid problem than MLB | Philadelphia Daily News | 06/03/2009