I still don't really know why we even want to look. It's clear steroids became a problem... And I can't see any logical way that most Major Leaguers weren't using steroids in some capacity. It's something that baseball clearly turned a blind eye to, so shame on them. Even worse, the player's union, which is theoretically there to protect the players, had to know and did nothing. I don't get as worked up about the players, because they don't really have a choice if baseball was allowing it to go on-- it's not really cheating if everyone's getting the same edge.
It's just another era in baseball. Things change in baseball all the time... We were in the steroids era, now we're emerging from it. People talk about tainted records and what not, but Gibson's absurd 1968 season and its 1.12 ERA very obviously benefitted from the raised mound in use in the second half of the 60s. People note the ability to compare stats from different eras one of the appeals of baseball should note that statistical efforts to eliminate the trends in different years turn that ERA into a still very good, but not quite ridiculous 2.90 ERA. Anyway, that argument is basically flawed because the game has changed a lot since the 1880s, and continues to change today. It's next to impossible that anyone will win as many games over their career as Cy Young. A more recent but also probably never-to-be-eclipsed figure is Rickey Henderson's stolen base total.
Got a bit off track there, but either way, the villains, as far as I'm concerned, in the steroid era are the owners and the union (they've been villains before)... The players were just playing the game as it was played in that era. Barry Bonds was always a great player, and steroids didn't give him incredible plate discipline. They may have indeed allowed him to play much longer. A-Rod is an amazing talent, steroids or no. Everyone fixates on home runs in the roid era, but I'm much more interested in how long certain stars were able to keep it up. Randy Johnson could just be a durability freak, or he could also be a roid-enhanced freak. I don't know the answer to that, and at this point I don't really care. Clean up the game, get the roids out, and move on.