Steroids in the Hall of Fame Response 1-4

What is the writer's general subject?
The writers general subject is drug and alcohol usage in baseball, and how the view has changed as baseball itself has evolved.

What is the writer's main point?
Chafets states explicitly that: "If [baseball] surrenders to the moralists who want to turn back the clock to some imagined golden era, and excommunicates the greatest stars anyone has ever seen, it will suffer the fate of all battlefields located on the wrong side of history. Obscurity." With this statement, he drives his main point home. He wants baseball to be less about who is doing what drugs, and more about how well the game is being played.

What are the writer's key supporting points?
In paragraph 3, Chafets implies that the use of drugs helped performance by lowering stress: "...players have used whatever substances they believed would help them perform better, heal faster, or relax during a long and stressful season."
His secondary point is that "chemical enhancement won't kill the game; it is the cover-up that could be fatal"(Paragraph 10). One of his final key statements discusses that maturity. He states that "...baseball players aren't children...If they want to use anabolic steroids...it should be up to them." (Paragraph 12)

Does the writer seem to have a particular purpose in mind?
Chafets purpose is simple. He wants the cloak to be taken off, for baseball and all its players to come out from the shadows and live the life they chose. He wishes for the Baseball Hall of Fame to be more than an imagined dreamland, or a war-zone, and become an obtainable goal.

-Devon D.