One of the biggest sports stories of 1998 was the pursuit of Roger Maris’s single-season home run record in baseball. To the surprise of few baseball fans, one athlete leading the hunt was Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals. McGwire has long been one of baseball’s most prolific sluggers, beginning with a rookie season in which he hit forty-nine home runs. On September 8, 1998, McGwire hit his sixty-second home run of the season, breaking Maris’s mark; he finished the year with seventy home runs.

However, McGwire’s admission in August 1998 that he had been using androstenedione, a testosterone-boosting compound, for over a year sparked a debate over the role of drugs in sports and whether McGwire’s efforts or image was cheapened by the use of the drug. Major League Baseball permits the...