As part of Charlie Sheen’s long-standing commitment to verisimilitude, the actor has admitted to Sports Illustrated that he spent much of Major League ingesting steroids in order to play a professional baseball player—a revelation that might be shocking if Major League weren’t just a movie, and Charlie Sheen didn’t routinely ingest things and then tell the press about it. Anyway, his confession was all part of Sports Illustrated’s “It’s Been 22 Years Since Major League” oral history retrospective on the comedy—a randomly timed story that may as well bear the subtitle, “And Actual Baseball Season Is Kind Of Boring So Far.”
And aside from an interesting anecdote about Jeremy Piven’s role as an asshole “bench jockey” ending up on the cutting room floor and Corbin Bernsen coming off as kind of an arrogant dick, Sheen’s quote is easily the gold here. While discussing his famous zig-zag hairstyle, Sheen says, “I didn't like the haircut because it generated so many comments in bars. I've got enough of that already. Add that to the mix and it's a recipe for a fistfight. I was already bitchy because—let's just say that I was enhancing my performance a little bit. It was the only time I ever did steroids. I did them for like six or eight weeks. You can print this, I don't give a fuck. My fastball went from 79 to like 85.” And as with all of Sheen’s best drug use, the results are right up there on the screen.