Baseball

by George Vecsey

  For nearly six years, Allan H. (Bud) Selig, a former automobile dealer and the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, served as interim commissioner. It was impossible to miss Selig's love for the game as he talked about how his mother had taken him from Milwaukee to New York on pilgrimages to Ebbets Field or Yankee Stadium. As commissioner, he was faced with contemporary problems like labor negotiations, shaky franchises, drug and steroid issues, and the imbalance of cable television revenues, praised by many fellow owners as a problem-solver but perceived by press and public as somewhat of a ditherer.

  In 1994, the owners vowed they would never again be beaten in contract negotiations. Selig wrung his hands and professed sadness at the work stoppage that summer but Donald Fehr, the head of the Players Association, skipped the niceties and said baseball would be back when the players were satisfied. For the first time since 1904, when McGraw had refused to play nicely with the American League, there was no World Series, leaving a terrible gap in the hearts of hard-core fans.

  The players gained another contractual victory in the spring of 1995, and went back to work in a slightly shortened season. On July 9, 1998, Selig was officially named commissioner. He did not have an easy task. While attendance had tripled from 1964 to 2000, baseball was losing public attention to football, basketball, golf, and NASCAR. Children were playing soccer in youth leagues or skateboarding, and then going home to huddle over computer games. Some owners began paying for a portion of their new palaces, but other towns could not arrange financing for stadiums. Montreal, once a vibrant baseball city, lost its Expos to Washington in 2005.

  Selig delivered a mixed message, raving about high attendance but talking about eliminating two or four teams, using the ominous word “contracting,” which sounded like something out of The Sopranos. (“Hey, Bud, you want us to contract the Twins or the Devil Rays?”) For all of Selig's fretting, the value of clubs continued to rise, even after factoring in inflation. For example: the small-market Kansas City Royals had been worth an entry fee of $5.35 million in the expansion draft of 1968 but were sold for $96 million in 2000.

  Even the Los Angeles Dodgers were sold. Walter O'Malley had bought out Branch Rickey's one-quarter share in Brooklyn in 1950 for $1.05 million. In 1998, his son Peter sold the franchise, for estate-planning purposes, to Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born news baron, for $311 million. The Murdochites made a mess of the gloried Dodgers, and the team was sold again, still worth a fortune because of Walter O'Malley's land deals in the 1950s.

  The commissioner's job seemed to be to plead poverty, while presiding over expensive transfers of owners, some of whom had cable money to spend. The owners did slap luxury taxes on their highest spenders and distributed the money to poorer clubs in a primitive attempt to stop the worst recidivists among themselves from spending so much money. Yet spend they did.

  The world had grown complicated. Like all commissioners, Selig was overshadowed by the Landis Syndrome, the national anticipation that a commissioner would come stalking into his box seat wearing a black jurist's robe, shaking a magisterial mane, pounding a gavel, shouting, “Off with their heads!” The eighty-year chasm between high expectations of commissioners and the dysfunction of the owners would soon lead to highly public embarrassment.

  XIX

  FOUR SCANDALS

  The funniest thing I ever saw in baseball was Pete Rose's greenies kicking in during a rain delay,” a former teammate once said, evoking a vision of Rose's stocky body bouncing off the clubhouse walls, with no outlet for his chemically induced energy.

  As a young reporter, I encountered players unaccountably jabbering in the minutes before a game. One of the most competitive players I ever met used to excuse himself before the game so he could drink “a major-league cup of coffee,” which, I have since come to understand, refers to a mixture of black coffee and greenies, or amphetamines. Eventually, the clubhouse doors were closed an hour before game time, so players could have time to, as the saying goes, “prepare.”

  And then there was a night exhibition in Florida a long time ago, when I watched a pitcher who was trying to hang on in the majors, lurching around the mound, like a sailor in a hurricane. He fired so many wild pitches in the general vicinity of home plate that the crusty old manager had to trudge out to the mound and remove him from the game. Later that night I asked the pitcher what the problem had been, and he made a flicking motion with his hand, like a man tossing pills down his gullet. Some hyper people are just not cut out for greenies.

  Since I did not report this little scene back then—the pitcher was a friend of mine—it is probably unfair to say the commissioner of the day should have done something about it. It is safe to say there is a long tradition of stimulants in major league clubhouses, and that nobody wanted to know.

  By the early 1980s, the dysfunction in management and the standoff with the Players Association would lead to four scandals, all of them comparable to the disaster of 1919, when the Black Sox were throwing the World Series but owners and officials were powerless to intervene.

  The first scandal was the prevalence of so-called recreational drugs among the players, whose salaries had leaped to unimaginable heights. Baseball still lagged far behind many American industries in the treatment of chemical and alcohol addiction. It was not until 1980 that players like Darrell Porter and Bob Welch talked openly about having gone through rehabilitation centers. One of the problems was that baseball people tended to regard chemical addiction as outright subversive while alcohol was regarded as a traditional way of relaxing. “Heck, he can have a beer or two,” one prominent manager insisted about a player of his who had acknowledged being an alcoholic.

  Drugs were, of course, against the law. In 1983, twenty major league players were named in a drug case in Kansas City, Missouri, in which four Royals went to jail: Willie Wilson, Willie Aikens, Jerry Martin, and Vida Blue. For a brief time under Kuhn, there was an agreement that clubs could request testing for cocaine, but marijuana, amphetamines, and alcohol were not included. That policy expired in October of 1985.

  The plague of drugs stopped being funny when players began losing their skills at an early age, right in front of our eyes. Every team seemed to have somebody with marvelous skills who suddenly turned into a clumsy and inarticulate hulk, no longer able to find first base without a Boy Scout guide.

  Marvin Miller, the longtime leader of the Players Association, once described uppers and downers laid out “like jelly beans” in clubhouses.

  “Who supplied them?” Miller asked rhetorically in an interview in the New York Times. “Certainly not the players union. We didn't make much progress in the early 1980s because it wasn't seen as an issue. The owners definitely weren't pushing it.”

  In 1984, Peter Ueberroth came over from the Olympic movement, in which athletes faced regular testing and were banned for one positive drug test. He arrived just in time for a number of major-leaguers to be implicated in another drug case, this one in Pittsburgh. Keith Hernandez, who had been hastily traded to the Mets in 1983, testified in court that he had used cocaine while a member of the Cardinals, describing a widespread “romance” between players and drugs. “It was like a demon in me,” Hernandez said.

  Other players said they had easily obtained illegal drugs in the clubhouse in Pittsburgh. Two regulars on San Diego's 1984 league champions, Alan Wiggins and Eric Show, developed addictions and died young. Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry helped the Mets win the World Series in 1986 but never fulfilled their Hall of Fame potential because of chemical and legal problems. When Olympic sports began random testing for drugs, Ueberroth called for mandatory testing starting in 1986, but Donald Fehr filed a grievance, citing the civil liberties of his clients, and the owners showed no stomach for that fight.

  —

  Ueberroth was present during another scandal involving the owners and the players, this one over the owners' limiting players' salaries. This practice was specifically banned by the 1985 Collective Bargaining Agr
eement, which included a provision that players “would not act collectively in any salary negotiation—and neither would the clubs.” Ueberroth frequently lectured the owners not to spend wildly on free agents, but he always made sure to remind the owners to stay within the legal boundaries of the agreement.

  Lee MacPhail, one of the solid figures in baseball and an advisor to Ueberroth, said, “We must rely on the unilateral, self-imposed restraints of each individual club to do what experience and reasonable expectations indicate is in its own best interest.”

  The owners, for once, took the advice more uniformly than anybody could have predicted. The most blatant example was Andre Dawson, a star in Montreal, who was eligible for free agency but could not get an offer until he agreed to sign a blank contract with the Cubs in 1987. Playing for an unreasonably low base salary of $500,000, Dawson hit 49 home runs and drove in 137 runs, although he did make extra money via incentive bonuses driving his earnings up to a still-ludicrous $700,000.

  That was not good enough for the Players Association. Fehr and the players say they spent $4.6 million in legal costs to charge all the owners with illegally contriving to hold down salaries. The free agency era had demonstrated that baseball would not fall apart if the players moved to the highest bidder, and now the players had legal backup. After arbitration went against them, the owners agreed to a negotiated settlement of $280 million to the players, including Dawson, and free-agency prices promptly took off again. In 1998 President Clinton signed the Curt Flood Act, which gave players the same protection under antitrust laws that all other athletes enjoyed. This legislation revoked the old antitrust exemption only for labor relations but did not affect the owners' broad powers regarding relocation, expansion, or the minor leagues.

  —

  It was impossible to miss the insatiable self-involvement of Pete Rose, the chesty hometown hero of the Cincinnati Reds, who had willed himself to the record for base hits, held by Tyrus Raymond Cobb. (In his second marriage, Rose would name a son “Tyler” in homage to the ornery star he would surpass.)

  For a very long time, Rose was “good for the game,” a precious quality indeed. As millionaire players hid behind designer sunglasses, headsets, and protective agents, Rose was a gregarious presence at the ballpark, signing autographs for the fans, gossiping with the writers. Pete had an opinion about everything.

  It was quite evident that Rose had a lusty appetite for various pleasures and diversions, including gambling. At the Florida racetracks and greyhound courses and jai-alai frontons, one could only wonder if there were three Peter Edward Roses, with his Prince Valiant haircut bobbing as he hustled between the seller's window and, occasionally, the cashier's window.

  Management overlooked Rose's habits until very late in his career, when he came home as the Reds' player-manager. There were concerns that he was involved with steroid suppliers and bookmakers, betting on sports, maybe even his own, which was specifically banned, according to regulations printed in English and Spanish (and now in Japanese as well) on every clubhouse door.

  Ueberroth hauled him in for a meeting, only to have Rose assure him he was not betting on baseball, absolutely not. Pete Rose would never do such a thing. When Ueberroth departed, Rose became the problem of Bart Giamatti, who regarded gambling, particularly government-operated lotteries, as a moral flaw. After investigators compiled a dossier on Rose, he stonewalled them in private confrontations.

  Ultimately, in 1989, Giamatti and his lawyers persuaded Rose's lawyers to make Rose accept a lifetime ban from the game, with the written promise that he could reapply after one year. Perhaps Rose believed this scenario but, when his ban was announced in a major press conference, Giamatti, in response to a question, said he had “concluded” that Rose had bet on baseball, including the Reds. This public judgment was not part of the deal Rose had anticipated. Rose quickly realized he had been given the bum's rush out of the game.

  Anybody who has ever dealt with addictive behavior could detect the blatant denial in Rose, but Giamatti seemed to take Rose's bluster personally, dismissing him in a fury. Giamatti went on vacation in New England and died of a heart attack eight days later, at the age of fifty-one. Rose was not always good at reading the racing charts but he could figure out there was only one way Giamatti's death was going to play out: Pete Killed Bart.

  The next two commissioners, Fay Vincent and Bud Selig, remained staunchly in favor of a lifetime ban, at least unless Rose repented. Rose did not help himself through a decade of further denial and his five months in prison for tax evasion. He emerged as the star attraction at autograph shows, signing memorabilia, showing up in Cooperstown during the annual Hall of Fame bash, a seedy ghost who would not go away.

  Rose haunted the game in 1999 when fans were asked to punch out computer cards to select a best-of-the-century team, in a promotion by a credit card company. To the chagrin of Selig, and just about everybody else, Rose was voted onto the team by a nation hooked on Las Vegas, office pools, and lotteries. When the thirty-man team was introduced during the World Series in Atlanta, Rose hustled in, appropriately enough, from Atlantic City, straight from an autograph bazaar, and immediately made a belligerent appearance on national television.

  “Charles Manson can get a hearing,” Rose told NBC reporter Jim Gray. “I hope they don't wait till 2060 to review my case.” Charlie Hustle even upstaged the ailing Ted Williams during the introductions.

  Years later, while promoting his book, Rose admitted he had bet on baseball, but by then even tolerant fans had lost sympathy with him. The public did not have any moral problem with his gambling, apparently, but now found him a bore. He realized he was facing a very long wait before any commissioner would ever reinstate him. Rose had wanted to become Ty Cobb. Instead he had become Shoeless Joe Jackson.

  —

  Head in the sand, baseball contributed to the drug epidemic, the collusion penalties, and the festering Rose problem. For a long time, the fourth scandal did not seem like a crisis at all, but rather a jubilee, a Fourth of July fireworks display, an exploding score-board's worth of home runs.

  The owners did not want to know. Starting in the early 1990s, players became noticeably thicker in the shoulders, forearms, and necks. A willowy player could bid farewell to teammates at the end of the season and reappear the following spring with a physique most approximating the main character of the television series The Incredible Hulk, with mood swings to match. Facial bone structure seemed to change overnight, with jaws protruding to Cro-Magnon dimensions. Players coming out of the clubhouse shower would inadvertently display a raging case of acne on their backs, a telltale sign of steroid usage. But there was no testing for bodybuilding drugs, and everybody went along.

  Many players openly used creatine, a bodybuilding substance not banned by baseball. I can still see a certain owner distributing creatine shakes to players in the center of the clubhouse during spring training. It was baseball's version of the Gold Rush.

  The facile explanation is that management was looking for a quick fix of home runs after the labor stoppage of 1994–95, but just like the folk legend that baseballs were knowingly juiced up after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, the explanation is more complicated. By the 1990s, the Silly Boys on the television sports shows were hung up on showing endless clips of home runs. The players were no fools. They wanted to be on the highlight films. You didn't get time on ESPN by dropping a perfect bunt.

  Management was thrilled at the perfect antidote for the labor blues. In 1998, two sluggers, Mark McGwire of St. Louis and Sammy Sosa of the Cubs, chased the home run records of Babe Ruth and Roger Maris. Both were appealing in their own way, with McGwire somewhat intense and private and Sosa more gregarious, frequently waving to the fans.

  One day, Steve Wilstein of the Associated Press was waiting to interview McGwire in front of his locker, a totally normal process in a sport that provides daily access before and after every game. Wilstein idly noticed a package labeled “androstenedione” in
plain view on McGwire's shelf, and later he discovered this was a steroid-like substance that increased body mass and could be bought over the counter, and was not banned by baseball, but was outlawed in most Olympic sports.

  After diligent reporting, Wilstein wrote about the stuff in McGwire's locker, prompting a furor. McGwire did not deny using andro, as it is known, but he did claim Wilstein had intruded on his privacy. McGwire wound up breaking the record and finishing the season with 70 home runs while Sosa hit 66, and both were given credit for “saving” baseball after the labor dispute. In fact, attendance had already surged upward after the stoppage.

  Faced with public concern, McGwire soon announced he would no longer use androstenedione because it set a bad example to the youth of America, who were bulking up for sports and self-esteem but later facing emotional and physical dangers. His body no longer able to ward off injuries, McGwire retired after the 2001 season, but by that time he no longer held the home run record. Barry Bonds, son of a major-leaguer, hit 73 home runs that year, with his compact swing and marvelous discipline and a body that seemed vastly more muscular than the whippet-like frame of his early days.

  With suspicion growing about Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa, Major League Baseball and the Players Association agreed to the first mandatory testing of drugs in the history of collective bargaining, but the testing was widely criticized for its limitations.

  The association was forced on the defensive in spring training of 2003, when a young pitcher for Baltimore, Steve Bechler, died of heatstroke after a workout. It was later determined that Bechler, concerned about being overweight, had been taking an over-the-counter supplement that contained ephedrine, a diuretic used for weight loss. Ephedrine was already banned in college sports, the Olympics, and the National Football League. Congress quickly banned ephedrine, forcing management and the union to amend their agreement to include ephedrine, a highly unusual concession by the players.