Life & Wisdom Quote by Suzanne Fields

Fields frames the MLB steroid era as less a morality play about cheating than a parable about what we choose to normalize. The phrase "that's what...was all about" is doing a lot of rhetorical muscle work: it collapses a messy decade of labor politics, media complicity, fan appetite for spectacle, and league incentives into a single, chastening takeaway. That simplification is the point. She wants the reader to stop debating asterisks and start fearing contamination.

"Hidden harm" is the key pivot. Steroids aren’t presented as merely an unfair advantage; they become an invisible injury with a long tail: damage to bodies, to trust, to the idea of sport as meritocracy. By calling it hidden, Fields also indicts the ecosystem that kept it offstage for years. Everyone knew enough to look away, and that willful blindness becomes part of the scandal’s moral debt.

The line "sends the wrong message to the young" plants the argument in cultural custody: adults are failing as stewards. It’s a classic move for a writer working in public-morals commentary: the real victim is not the league’s record book but the kid learning that excellence is pharmaceutical, that rules are negotiable if the applause is loud enough, that success is something you can buy or inject.

Context matters: the steroid scandal erupted alongside congressional hearings, tabloid revelations, and MLB’s own halting reforms. Fields is leveraging that moment when the sport’s mythmaking cracked, insisting the story we tell about competition is as consequential as the competition itself.