I write about the vastly different characters of Alex Rodriguez and Lou Gehrig today, and what it tells us about our culture:

New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez may be the most hated figure in sports, but he is a man for our time.
He is a master at the insincere mea culpa, at self-involvement, at pretense and greed. Not just greed for money, but for fame and glory. If he had only disgraced himself playing for the Texas Rangers, that would be one thing, but he has done it playing for the most storied franchise in sports, whose legends are synonymous with baseball greatness.
So let’s consider the tale of two prodigiously talented Yankee corner infielders, separated by about 80 years and a vast moral chasm.

Although commenter djt rightly cautions against having an overly rosy view of bygone days:

The game of baseball brought us, in the “good old days” the corruption of the 1919 Black Sox . . . and rampant racism that only began to be addressed after World War II by finally letting Jackie Robinson play in the white man’s league (and for which he received a great deal of abuse).
The players a generation, two, three or more generations back had their own pressures to perform and if they had had access to the relatively sophisticated performance enhancing drugs of today at their disposal, many of the players of old certainly would have used them. It’s also quite likely that many star players who did have access to steroids and “horse pills” (as Mickey Mantle called them) post-war did actually use them — but we’ll never know because MLB did not perform testing.