by Bret Boone
In August, while I was on the road, Aaron signed a free agent deal for 2005. He went straight to the hospital to tell Gramps. “Grandpa couldn’t talk at all by then,” Aaron remembers. “He knew he was dying. We all knew. But he was still listening, still interested in everything we did. So that day I drove straight over to see him. I said, ‘Grandpa, I signed. I’m going to be a Cleveland Indian, like you.’ And he got it. He smiled.”
On one of my visits, I talked about the slump I was in. Two-for-25, something like that. Gramps wanted to give me advice, so he pulled my hands to his chest, moving them into position on an invisible bat. He was reminding me to stay with the grip Dad and I had worked on.
What I remember most is that chalkboard of his. If I mentioned Randy Johnson he’d write BOB FELLER. Meaning that Randy was a Pony League wuss next to Feller. I’d play along. “How hard did Feller throw? Tell me again. Eighty-five miles an hour?” He’d grab his chalk. 100+.
“He was a grumpy old dude like you,” I said. We reminisced about the time Gramps introduced me to Feller, back when I was with the Reds. I stuck out my hand, all polite, saying Mr. Feller this and Mr. Feller that, and Feller looked at me like I was a bug. “Kid,” he said, “we could show you how this game should be played.”
If Dad was with us, he’d say Steve Carlton was as good as Feller. “Carlton had the best slider ever.” If Aaron was there, too, he’d throw in another name to stir the pot. “Smoltz’s is better.” I’d say there were twenty modern guys who threw as hard as Feller or had sliders as good as Carlton’s, and start naming them. Pedro, Clemens, RJ, CC Sabathia…It was like our Thanksgiving and Christmas arguments through the years, which Gramps and Dad took more seriously than Aaron and I did. Dad would shake his head at my ignorance while Gramps wrote old-timers’ names with exclamation points.
TED WILLIAMS!!
When I was alone with him, Gramps liked for me to tell him about my games and the players I admired. Not admired as in “looked up to as a hero.” Admired as in looked up to as a hitter. For instance, you might not think much of Barry Bonds as a person. I didn’t. He was a me-first guy with a chip on his shoulder, always convinced he was better than everybody else and got treated unfairly. People believe he was performance-enhanced. That’s widely suspected even if nobody proved it about Bonds, just as it’s suspected of me and a lot of other home run hitters from our era.
But what talent! As I’ve said before, however you go about it, hitting a baseball at major-league velocities with major-league deception—curves, slurves, splitters, sinkers, cutters, scuffed balls, and beanballs—is the hardest job in sports. And Bonds made it look easy. Between the lines, he was the best I ever played against. Gramps and I loved watching Giants games on TV. I’d point at Bonds’s hands. “He’s choking up an inch!” Steroids or no steroids, Bonds was the smartest, quickest hitter I ever saw, so smart that you’d swear he could read a pitch before the pitcher threw it, and so quick he could deliver his black maple bat to the hitting zone in no time. In the three years after his 73-homer season in 2001, he averaged more than 45 homers while batting over .350—and got walked at a record-setting pace. All that time, other teams were trying to pitch around him! At one point Diamondbacks manager Buck Showalter, who’s no dummy, walked Bonds intentionally with the bases loaded. The move paid off when Arizona won 8–7.
Yes, it was the steroids era. Yes, hitting stats were up all over. But dozens of hitters were suspected of enhancing their performance. Bonds was the one who really struck fear into pitchers. In 2004 he walked a record 232 times; Sammy Sosa walked 56 times that season. Bonds walked 70 more times in 2004 than Mark McGwire did in 1998, McGwire’s 70-homer season.
Here are the four walking-est seasons in baseball history:
Barry Bonds, 2004: 232 bases on balls
Barry Bonds, 2002: 198
Barry Bonds, 2001: 177
Babe Ruth, 1923: 170
Bonds bopped 45 homers in 2004, the year they walked him 232 times (a record that will stand forever), while slashing a ridiculous .362/.609/.812. I kept telling Gramps that he could write TED all he wanted, but I’d bet Ted Williams couldn’t hit .290 in 2004. “How much better was Ted than the second-best guy? Was it DiMaggio?” I asked. I argued that Bonds was better because he played in a more athletic, competitive era. For one thing, Williams and DiMaggio were only the best white guys. Their best years came before black players like Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron were allowed on the field. Barry competed against a deeper pool of talent. “And he’s still way better than the rest of us.”
Who was the second-best player after him? Ken Griffey Jr.? A-Rod? For a little while in 2001 and again in 2003, it might have been me. But if you went back and asked every big leaguer from 1995 to 2005, “Who’s the best hitter of our time?” the answer would be unanimous. Bonds. Nobody else was close.
One night Gramps tried to whistle after Bonds knocked one over the right-field wall in San Francisco. He gave me a thumbs-up. I patted his hand. “He’s better than Ted,” I said, expecting him to disagree again. Instead he changed the subject. He reached for his chalkboard and praised a young pitcher. THIS JAKE PEAVY HAS A CHANCE TO BE PRETTY GOOD.
Then he erased that note and wrote me another: AND BY THE WAY, BONDS IS BETTER THAN TED WILLIAMS.
I couldn’t believe it. Here was my ailing, opinionated Gramps agreeing with me that baseball had evolved. Agreeing that the game was better now, or at least harder. Today’s best player was better than the heroes of the olden days. It hurt him to say it, but he was smiling. Here we were, thirty-plus years after he pitched me Wiffle balls in his yard, still sharing the family business. I was grinning, too, until I told him I loved him and busted out crying.
Yeah, the Boones get emotional. Me most of all, maybe.
That was one of my last days with Gramps.
Raymond Otis Boone died on October 17, 2004. That night his Red Sox, who hadn’t won the World Series since 1918, beat the Yankees to turn a three-games-to-none deficit in the American League Championship Series to 3–1. A token victory, it seemed like. A face-saver. Except that the Sox had done all the losing they were going to do that year. They ran off three more wins to shock the Aaron-less Yanks in the ALCS, and then swept St. Louis for their first World Series title in eighty-six years. All thanks to Gramps, who must have been keeping an eye on them.
He left this world with a lifetime batting average of .275, 151 home runs, and 737 RBIs. He never made more than $28,750 in a season. He never complained. He was my first baseball hero.
I spoke at the funeral. Not for long, maybe a minute. As you know, I tend to get emotional.
“All the stories I saw in the papers referred to Gramps as the patriarch of the Boone family,” I said, “so I looked up patriarch to see exactly what that meant. The dictionary says a patriarch is the father and ruler of a family. That was Gramps.”
Gramps’s last year was a down year for the Mariners and me. We lost 99 games while my batting average dipped from .294 in 2003 to .251. My homers and RBIs fell from 35 and 117 to 24 and 83. I was feeling every minute of my thirty-five years.
Spring training 2005 felt empty without him, but missing Gramps wasn’t my only problem. Just before spring training began, Jose Canseco released his book Juiced. The book, subtitled Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big, made steroids the number one issue of the new season. Canseco admitted being a steroid fiend. He threw his so-called friend Mark McGwire under the bus as a fellow juicer, and accused other hitters, including Rafael Palmeiro, Jason Giambi, Juan Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez, and me.
I didn’t know Canseco. I think he was dying to stay famous and trying to sell as many books as subhumanly possible. About 80 percent of his book sounded accurate to me. The rest was speculation. Everybody knew players who were bulking up, some legally and some not, but it was hard to say who was who unless you were an eyewitness. I think Jose made up about 20 percent of his book to connect the dots between hi
s stories and drum up a few more headlines. That’s why he threw me in there. Of course he had no idea that I’d changed my swing before the ’98 season. To him I was just a muscly little guy who started hitting more homers that year. A suspect.
In the bit about me, he claimed that he slid into second base during spring training in 2001, and took a look at my muscles:
“Oh my God,” I said to him. “What have you been doing?”
“Shhh,” Boone said. “Don’t tell anybody.”
Whispers like that were a sign that you were part of the club—the bond of a secret code or handshake….
That never happened. I was never in—or on—a club with Jose Canseco, and I never shook his hand.
Fortunately, there are people who check facts in books. They may not work for Jose’s publisher, but they’re out there. During his publicity tour for Juiced, Canseco went on the Today show with Matt Lauer. Lauer challenged him. “You write in the book that you discussed steroids with Bret Boone during a spring training game,” he said. “You were on second base and you noticed how big he’d gotten. You made a comment to him and he said something to the effect of, ‘Shhh, don’t tell anyone.’ Of course, baseball writers have looked at the records. And during spring training in any game between the Angels and Mariners, you never reached second base.”
Jose stammered and backtracked. “Um, I was on first base….They may have made a mistake in the actual book, but believe me, this incident did happen.”
No, it didn’t. But the story stuck. I still get asked about it, and why not? I played in the steroid era and knew guys who juiced. The number was nowhere near the 80 percent of big leaguers he claimed—it was more like 25 percent. Some were the ones you’d expect, but about half the users I suspected were pitchers. Some were skinny middle infielders. Famous skinny middle infielders. And while the whiff of suspicion hangs over guys like me and keeps deserving players out of the Hall of Fame year after year, you can bet that several major users have already been inducted into the Hall. But my guess is as good as anybody’s.
And me?
I’ve got a confession to make about juicing. I thought about it. I was always into gamesmanship, and figured that bending the rules was part of the game. Stealing signs, helping your pitcher doctor the ball, even corking a bat—as long as you get away with it, it’s fine. But if you don’t get away with it, it can stick to you forever. I was with the Reds in 1996 when Chris Sabo shattered his bat and the cork inside the bat flew all over the infield. Sabo got suspended for a week, but the incident haunted him. Twenty years later, it still does. Check out his Wikipedia page if you don’t believe me.
Look, I’m no saint. If you told me I could cork a bat and nobody would ever know, I might have done it. I’m not proud of saying that, but it’s true. And to me, performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) were in the same column. If I knew I could use steroids, and hit better, and help my team, and get away with it, I might have done it. I mean, substances have been part of baseball’s culture since the invention of the spitball. In Dad’s era some players and teams were famous for using cocaine. I’ve never tried it or even seen anyone use it except in movies. At the same time, I’m not naïve enough to think there weren’t—and aren’t—plenty of players smoking marijuana. That wasn’t my thing, but I’ll admit taking beans. For those who never heard of them, beans were what Gramps’s generation called pep pills, or “greenies.” They’ve been a part of baseball since time immemorial. Not everybody took them, but I did now and then. A baseball season wears you down. Nobody thought of beans as “uppers” or “speed.” They were basically diet pills, the sort of thing long-haul truckers pop to give them a lift at two in the morning.
Beans? Yes. If that’s a crime, my generation was guilty.
But steroids? Not me. Not because I was holier than thou, but because I was scared to get caught.
Getting exposed as a juicer would taint everything I ever did or cared about. My career. My family. My future in the game. I’d changed my swing to get better. I’d gone from a lazy occasional jogger to a fitness-crazed gym rat, and from a junk-food junkie to a nutrition nut, all to get as strong and pure as possible, to play better. Any help I’d get from steroids wasn’t worth the health risk, not to mention the embarrassment if I got caught. So I stuck to workouts and supplements.
And I took a ton of supplements. Creatine, andro, Ripped Fuel, and more. As long as they were legal, I was interested. I stopped if they got banned, and even went beyond the rules to make sure I was clean. I never understood players who tested positive for drugs and said, “Oh, I had no idea!” It’s your job to know what’s in your body. It’s your job to stay clean and test clean. That’s why I used to send my supplements to MLB for testing. That’s not routine—you have to pay for the tests. They cost me $1,200 one year, but the peace of mind was worth it, partly because there’s a permanent record of what I was taking.
And so, obviously, I’m a hero of baseball’s steroids era.
Well, not exactly. I still had my demons. In fact, I was a substance abuser. My substance was alcohol.
On April 6, 2005, my thirty-sixth birthday, I homered against the Twins and limped around the bases. You don’t need to hear about the injuries. Let’s just say it’s almost impossible to hit Clemens and Maddux and Mariano when you’re at the top of your game. When your shoulders ache and you can’t plant your front foot without getting an electric shock through your knee, you can lose the “almost.”
I’d already outlasted hundreds of teammates, thousands of contemporaries. I’d enjoyed the rock star life, shaking hands and signing autographs, kissing pretty girls and taking photos and letting everybody buy me a drink. But that life can go to your head. There were times when I let it distract me. A postgame beer became a six-pack or two. Dinner became a party at the best nightclub in whatever town I was in. Drinking eased the sting of waking up every day to the lousiest season of my life. I was hitting .231 with 7 home runs when the Mariners traded me to Minnesota for a player to be named later. Not exactly a compliment. In a month with the Twins I batted .170 with 9 hits, all singles, in 53 trips to the plate. They released me.
I needed a drink.
So I had one, and then another one. I’d polish off a six-pack of beer and reach for another six-pack. Eventually I made the mistake of switching from beer to clear—from the slow, easy buzz of Bud Light or Miller Lite to the sharper edge of Absolut and Ketel One, a bottle at a time. Sometimes it felt like going off the high dive the way I did as a kid, only this time the pool was full of alcohol. You’ve got to watch out or you might go under.
Nobody knew how much I was drinking. To the baseball men I loved and trusted, it seemed like the usual late-career crisis. I phoned Dad, Aaron, Edgar Martinez, Mike Blowers, and Walt Weiss, asking if I should retire. After fourteen years in the majors and more than 15,000 big-league innings, I felt spent. “It hurts to swing a bat,” I said. “Hell, it hurts to get up in the morning.”
Most of them said the same thing. “It’s your call. Just be sure. You don’t want to spend the next twenty years looking back, wondering if you quit too soon.”
The next day I drove past the liquor store and kept going to the gym. Three months of steamed vegetables and high-intensity workouts later, I was in my best baseball shape since 2003. The Mets flew me to their 2006 spring camp in Port St. Lucie, Florida, as a nonroster invitee. That’s ball talk for a guy nobody expects to make the club but who might be worth a roll of the dice.
I popped a few eyes in the clubhouse. Check out the old geezer with the guns and abs! But I didn’t hit. My knees got worse—not just more painful but weaker. I’d see a lamb chop of a fastball, stride, and feel my left knee buckle. Hitting without strong knees is like driving on a flat tire. I might have been the physically strongest infielder in camp that year, but there was no doubt I was one of the weakest hitters. So at the age of thirty-six years and eleven months, I called it quits. The Mets announced my retirement.
Dad cal
led a minute later. “Tell me you’re joking,” he said.
“No, it’s for real.” I felt like apologizing to him. “I can’t hit anymore.” I kept myself together till we hung up, and then cried all the way to the airport.
The next couple of years were good ones overall, thanks to my kids. Savannah was a fourth grader, sharp as a tack. Her brother Jake was the Ted Williams of San Diego–area T-ball diamonds, setting an example for the twins. Fraternal twins Isaiah and Judah, born in 2004, were as different as night and day. Isaiah was the dark-haired mischief maker, while Judah was the blond introvert, carefully planning his revenge if his twin stole a toy dinosaur. I had a blast helping Suzi wrangle the kids during the baseball season for once. Meanwhile I played golf three or four times a week, like a pitcher, and watched a few ballgames on TV, pulling for old teammates.
After a while, though, I missed the game so much it felt like I’d lost a limb. Those were the days and nights when it got easier than ever to reach for a drink. My wife said, “You’re drinking an awful lot.” My mom noticed, too. Then one day I was playing golf, driving the cart toward my ball, when I crashed the cart. That’s when you know you’re wasted, when you’re going about two miles an hour and you still crash. At that point it wasn’t funny anymore. It was embarrassing. So I checked myself into Promises, the well-known—and expensive—rehab center in Malibu. I’d often talked with other athletes who treated their stints in rehab as mini-vacations. They’d dry out for a couple of weeks and then go right back to their old ways. Not me. In my view, rehab was as serious as a heart attack. I went to every class. Educated myself on alcohol abuse the way I’d done on baseball’s labor issues. I came to believe that alcohol had drained the passion out of the end of my career. I remembered getting sick of the pregame drills I’d been doing for seventeen years, and looking forward to that first postgame beer. The biggest edge I ever had on other guys was a fierce drive to play the game I loved, but I had lost my edge. I had let injuries and alcohol steal it.