In 2005, a dozen players were caught taking steroids and suspended. After the 2005 season, the punishment was upped to fifty games for a first offense and a hundred games for a second. Amphetamines were added to the list of banned substances. Very few people outside of baseball realized it, but that would hurt the players most of all, even more than banning steroids.
In 2006, Senator George Mitchell published his report with a list of more than a hundred players’ names, including mine, supplied to him by my former partner.
I was also named as a steroid user by Kirk Radomski, the Mets’ clubhouse boy who wrote a “tell-all” book about the use of steroids by Mets players. Including me in his book was a joke. When I was with the Mets, I never took a single steroid. When I was with the Mets, I didn’t even know what a steroid was. But one thing he said was true: the coaches, managers, and owners all knew what was going on with steroids, and everyone chose to look the other way. They were making too much money not to ignore what was happening.
The bottom line is that after the 1994 strike, baseball needed to turn up the volume in a big fucking way, and with so many players taking steroids and hitting home runs, people were starting to come back to the game. Basically, it was a fireworks show every night. Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire, just to name a few, hit tape-measure shots into the stands on a nightly basis and fans flocked to the ballpark to watch. Today the moralists scream about these players, but have the owners given back any of the ticket money they reaped from the barrage of homers? Did they donate their “ill-gotten” booty to prevent steroid use in the future? Don’t hold your breath if you’re waiting for that to occur.
Naturally, there was a lot of crying from those same moralists among the powers that be to keep all those who are suspected of having taken steroids out of the Hall of Fame. It’s totally ridiculous. Like so many things in life, it’s hypocritical, too. Maybe they should have two Halls of Fame, one for the players who performed best and another for the milk drinkers who were the best citizens off the field. By the way, I’m not taking a shot at the more wholesome dudes who have played the game. They were a lot stronger than I was, but I guarantee you they didn’t have as much fucking fun as I did.
But the shit we do know about is enough to keep a lot of players out, even though a stumbling-drunk womanizer like Babe Ruth gets in? That’s okay? He gets a pass? What about Mickey Mantle, who admitted to showing up to games drunk off his ass? What about the racists like Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby? Is it okay for a guy like Hornsby, who was in the Ku Klux Klan, to be in the Hall of Fame? Where do you draw the line? What about all the players who took greenies?
Everyone admits that. Again, I ask, where do you draw the line? It either has to be what you did on the field, or what you did off the field.
My favorite sports quote of all time comes from Lance Armstrong. I could make a strong argument that he is/was the greatest athlete in the world. When the reporters kept asking him, “What are you on?” his answer was “I’m on my bike six hours a day working my ass off. What are you on?”
That motherfucker beat every rider in the world in the Tour de France seven times in the most grueling competition on the planet. He won even after he took cancer head-on!
This guy must have had an amazing constitution. He obviously put the d in discipline. And he put the d in wouldn’t be denied.
Since its inception in 1997, the LIVESTRONG Foundation (formerly known as the Lance Armstrong Foundation) has raised more than $500 million to support cancer survivors.
With that said, I don’t give a fuck what drugs he was on. How could those drugs be helping him that much? It wasn’t about strength. He didn’t look bigger and stronger. It wasn’t until I researched it that I learned that he had this doctor in Italy who performed a procedure to increase the precise amount of oxygen to his brain to optimize his performance for the race. It’s called blood doping. He was like a machine—much like the Six Million Dollar Man.
The doctor knew exactly how much to give him. That’s fucking unbelievable. That said, you don’t think the rest of the riders found out about this and did it themselves? Of course they fucking did! They were all on the same shit.
This is a guy who raised more than $300 million for cancer research. It didn’t matter. Why? The federal government came into the picture. As soon as the feds get involved, the party is over! Lance Armstrong learned how powerful our federal government is. They have so much fucking money, with unlimited resources, it’s scary. They win before the game starts or they don’t play.
And that’s true for anyone who goes up against them—including yours truly.
12
THE BIG BLIND
If you’re playing a poker game and you look around the table and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.
—PAUL NEWMAN
After the 1989 season, I returned to Jackson for the off-season. I played a ton of golf and eventually got hooked up with Herb Kelso, a cardsharp bookie who wore this god-awful cologne and had a big fucking cigar in his mouth 24/7 with a boiler to match it.
Throughout the entire off-season, which was approximately four months, the schedule never changed. Every Friday we would play golf, at which I would beat the shit out of my boy Kelso, as he was a fucking hack. Normally, when you play a round of golf with someone that horrible, it’s four hours of fucking pain. But this guy was so fucking funny, and his rap so smooth, I couldn’t wait to tee it up with him. After each round of golf, we would go back to his penthouse, which was used strictly for Friday-night poker games. He would have the best steaks catered in, prime pussy would always be within proximity, and the cocktails were flowing all night.
Over a few months’ time, I probably clipped Kelso for about $100,000 on the golf course, but it wasn’t Herb Kelso’s first rodeo—what I didn’t realize was that he wanted to lose that money to me, so he could get me to play in the big poker game each Friday night. That’s why he said he would just pay me in poker chips, instead of paying me in cash. I was a young kid and didn’t realize that those southern boys were pretty smart, too. Even though they played me like a fiddle, I didn’t give a fuck because I was having so much fun.
Herb Kelso ran the biggest poker game in the whole Mississippi Delta. We played Texas hold ’em.
In 1990, the feds sent an FBI agent over to my house to pay me a little visit. This was when I learned that I was being robbed.
The agent held in his hand a personal check. “Is this your check?” he asked.
It had been made out to “cash” for $78,000, and there was my John Hancock on the bottom of the check—I couldn’t exactly deny it.
“Look,” he said, “we have been investigating Herb Kelso for a long time, and now we are going to indict him on money-laundering. Your check was one of the pieces of evidence that proved he was not paying his taxes.”
Like I said, I was just a kid and didn’t know how those things worked. But what I did learn was that you never write a personal check to a professional gambler.
“We just need you to show up one day in federal court and point him out,” the FBI agent said. “That’s it. After that, you can leave. We don’t want to hurt your baseball career. You did nothing wrong.”
When the feds got involved, there was a pretty good chance MLB would find out and want to know what was going on. Remember, this was right after baseball’s lead investigator, John Dowd, took out Pete Rose for betting on baseball.
I would have to testify in front of a federal grand jury—which was sure to attract the wrong kind of attention from the brass in the league office. And, sure enough, right before Herb’s trial in March, I got a call from Kevin Hallinan, the man in charge of MLB security.
“Mr. Vincent wants to see you,” Hallinan informed me.
Baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti had died suddenly on September 1, 1989, and his best friend, Fay Vincent, had taken over as the new commissioner. I was very nervous and scared, as I didn’t know what to expect. I started wo
rrying they weren’t going to let me play anymore.
They flew me to New York, where I discovered that we were not meeting at headquarters. Instead we were having a hush-hush meeting in a private conference room at the top of the Helmsley Building. When I got there, Gene Orza, who was the Players Association’s second in charge behind Don Fehr, was waiting for me. He was one of those kinds of guys who thought he was smarter than everyone else. He pulled me aside and told me not to say a fucking thing, that I had rights.
Wait a minute, I thought. All I did was play poker. When I walked into the intimidating room, I saw Fay Vincent, Kevin Hallinan, and John Dowd. Now I’m really panicking, thinking to myself, What the hell is Dowd doing here? They brought in the big swinging dick just for me?
Hallinan, one of the coolest guys on the planet, pulled me aside. “Listen, we looked into everything. We know for a fact that all you did was play poker. You tell Fay the truth, and you’ll be fine. If you lie to him, then it’ll be a problem.”
When the meeting started and Fay Vincent asked me what happened, Gene Orza jumped up and got all bent out of shape.
“Don’t say anything. Don’t answer one question. You have rights,” he barked.
“Listen, man,” I said to Orza. “First of all, I don’t even know who in the fuck you are. Second, I didn’t invite you here, so shut the fuck up or leave. I got nothing to hide. I played poker. That’s it.”
I ended up only getting probation, just like Hallinan said.
Shortly after the actual grand jury hearing, when we played at Wrigley Field in Chicago, the Bleacher Bums—I used to fuck with these fans all the time—held up five large playing cards: a full house. Even though the joke was at my expense, I thought it was pretty hilarious.
But soon enough, there wasn’t much to laugh about. In early May 1991, two months after my grand jury appearance, I attended Phillies first baseman John Kruk’s bachelor party. After the party, I was driving my teammate Darren Daulton home in my brand-new Mercedes 500SL. It was pounding rain, and where we lived in suburban Philadelphia, it was dark as hell because there were no streetlights. I had been drinking, but that’s not why I crashed. Of course I take full responsibility for what happened, but I was unfamiliar with the roads, it was dark and wet, and there was a sharp left turn. All of a sudden, the car started to hydroplane like it hit a sheet of ice.
I don’t remember seeing the tree coming at me. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my seat belt on, and the next thing I remember, I was lying in the middle of the road, busted up and bleeding like hell. I should have been dead.
Then the cops came. You should have seen my car. It was smashed, totaled. The tree, which is a famous landmark now, was fucked up, too.
The police drove us to the station to go over everything. Luckily for us, they were huge Phillies fans, so they decided to let us go with just a slap on the wrist.
Until that point, we’d been holding up on adrenaline alone, but as Darren and I walked out of the police station on unsteady legs, I looked at him and said, “Dude, I don’t care whether you call me a pussy or not. I think I’m going to die. I need to go to the fucking hospital.”
He didn’t argue.
I can’t honestly remember how we got to Bryn Mawr Hospital, whether by cab, or if we got a ride, or maybe the cops took us. But it was a good thing we got there. I stayed in the hospital for three weeks, and Darren missed three weeks himself to treat a fractured eye socket. I had broken my collarbone, a bunch of ribs, and my cheekbone. I also punctured my lung, and my heart was bruised—that’s what the doctors were worried about the most. One of the doctors later told me, “If this happened to anyone else, they would have been dead.”
In a way, steroids saved my life that night. A broken heart can get you down, but a bruised heart can be fatal.
I came back to play in less than a month, and I was having another great season. That was, until August, when I ran into the center field wall in Cincinnati chasing down a fly ball and broke my collarbone again. Baseball had passed a rule stipulating that every stadium had to install padding on the walls, but Marge Schott, the owner of the Reds, was so fucking tight that she hadn’t done it yet. Marge Schott was such a cheapskate, I heard that she limited the number of bats the Reds’ players could order. She was even a cheap drunk. I was told she only drank Popov, which costs about fourteen cents a bottle.
After I snapped my collarbone, I was out the rest of the ’91 season.
When the ’92 season began, I was healthy again, and pumped and ready to go. Then on opening day at the Vet, on my very first at-bat of the season, I was facing the Chicago Cubs’ Greg Maddux. From the very beginning, Maddux and I hated each other’s guts. I had a terrible batting average against him, though I did get some key hits when he was on the mound. That day, I had an 0-2 count, and that motherfucker threw a ball right at my neck—he had such good control, I knew this wasn’t a mistake. I threw my left arm up to block it from hitting my face, and the ball shattered my wrist. I never left the game, but I knew it was broken.
I was only on the DL for fifteen days, but I really think breaking my wrist had actually helped me, because I had been overswinging during spring training. When I came back, I had a 92-game stretch where I was hitting .301, scored 52 runs, stole 30 bases, and had 39 RBI. Then I had another nasty break, literally, as I broke my hand diving into first base at Shea Stadium. Being on the DL was always frustrating, and now I had lost the rest of the season to yet another injury. But what was waiting for me the following season would end up changing my life forever.
13
BRASS BALLS
Because if you’re prepared and you know what it takes, it’s not a risk. You just have to figure out how to get there. There is always a way to get there.
—MARK CUBAN
By 1990, I understood the business of baseball from the inside out. The one thing that I realized influenced my performance more than anything else were the men in blue—the fucking umpires. It didn’t matter that I was twenty-seven years old and, with the help of my steroid regimen, in addition to working out intensely every day, I was firing on all cylinders. All that and it still wasn’t enough. The umps were the men who could either destroy me or put me in a position to make my job a hell of a lot easier.
If I wanted a monster year, I would have to eliminate the uncertainty factor controlled by the umpires and get the count in my favor. And I wanted a monster year.
But how does one get the count in one’s favor? As Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, “The most valuable commodity I know of is information.” Well, it turns out information is a valuable commodity in the world of baseball, too.
In professional baseball, the pitchers are so fucking good that practically every pitch they throw is borderline. A pitcher can put a ball on the paint and hit a gnat’s ass on the black, and the ump can call it either way, and no one can really complain.
If they call it a ball, the count is 1-0, and if you look at major league stats, it will show that a hitter with that count will hit somewhere close to .280. Whereas if the umpire calls it a strike, which means the count is 0-1, then the hitter is going to hit .220. In baseball, that is a huge fucking dip in your hitting percentage.
These are the little things that will determine if a player stays in the big leagues and makes millions of dollars a year, or gets fired and has to get a real job, taking orders from some asshole.
Let me break down what the average is for each possible pitch count so that you can better understand how much control an umpire truly has on a hitter. To come up with these results, I took all of the major league hitters with each pitch sequence, and this is what the combined average came out to be:
After 0-1 count: .221 average
After 1-1 count: .234 average
After 2-1 count: .252 average
After 3-1 count: .274 average
After 0-2 count: .166 average
After 1-2 count: .178 average
After 2-2 count: .193 average
On a 3-2 count: .216 average
After 1-0 count: .268 average
After 2-0 count: .281 average
After 3-0 count: .282 average
These numbers don’t lie, so how do I get the umpires on my good side and have them call a close pitch a ball rather than a strike?
Brass fucking balls, that’s how.
I hired a private detective agency that cost me $500,000—one paycheck from the Phillies—to have their PIs follow umpires around so I could uncover dirt that I could use against them. They shit like the rest of us. Some of them like to gamble. Some of them like to do blow. Some of them like road pussy. Some of them like dudes. I’m telling you, everyone’s got something they don’t want the world to know, and umpires are certainly no exception.
Take the case of one veteran umpire. I don’t want to name him because he’s retired and there’s no point in dragging his name through the dirt. He umpired for a long time, almost forty years. On the field, he was a miserable son of a bitch. My PI learned the guy was also a degenerate gambler, losing money hand over fist, betting on sports. After I received that juicy nugget of information, the next time I went to bat and he was behind the plate, I gave him a little grin.
“Hey, blue,” I said. “How’d you do last night?”
He did a double take. “What?”
“Sports betting is tough, man. Especially for umps,” I said. The next thing I knew, my strike zone was as big as—let’s put it this way—there was no strike zone.
One of the other umpires, my PI discovered, happened to be gay—but in the closet.
“Hey, blue, how was Rick’s last night?”
Rick’s was a notorious gay bar.
He looked at me like, What the fuck?
Yeah, it’s all about leverage and fear. Fear does a lot to a man. Fear of losing his job. Fear of being turned in. Fear of being exposed.
House of Nails Page 9