Navigating his way through the ‘steroid era’ in Major League Baseball for the bulk of his career, Chipper Jones endeared himself to Braves fans and baseball fans across the country as one of the players that always did it the right way.
While there were countless players throughout the league who took advantage of the fact that baseball turned a blind eye to the issue of performance-enhancing drugs beginning in the late 1980s through the mid-2000s, Jones wasn’t one of them.
While expressing that he experienced a certain level of frustration when facing competition that held an unearned advantage over him, Jones told Dukes & Bell on 92.9 The Game this week that it was his relationship with his father that helped keep him on the right path.
“It's kind of hard not to figure it out,” he said when asked if he knew certain players were using PEDs. “When you’re missing out on All-Star games and Silver Sluggers and stuff like that to people that you might suspect would be doing it, yeah it's a little frustrating. But I can’t imagine being able to look at my dad in the eye if I had done that with all work and everything we put into the game and getting to the level that we got to. I wouldn’t have been able to imagine looking across the dinner table—which I do about three times a week with my parents—being able to look them in the eye knowing that I took a shortcut.”
Through it all, Jones found a way to rack up awards and accolades throughout his career including the 1999 MVP, 8 All-Star Game selections, two Silver Sluggers, and of course, he became a first-ballot Hall of Famer in 2018.
“I’m pretty happy with the way things ended up. I can’t complain, not one iota,” Jones concluded.
While Jones is forever enriched in Cooperstown, plenty of players—Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and other greats from the time—are still unable to wash away the stain of the ‘steroid era.’