Baseball

by George Vecsey

  Another disgrace followed. Under the new labor agreement, since more than 5 percent of the players had tested positive in 2003, public disclosure of violators and their penalties automatically went into effect.

  Things got worse late in 2003, when word came out of northern California that a federal grand jury was investigating steroid and other drug usage by many prominent athletes with links to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO). The San Francisco Chronicle later revealed that Barry Bonds had told the grand jury in 2003 that he had received a clear substance and a cream from his personal trainer, and supplied by BALCO. Bonds claimed he had believed they were a nutritional supplement, flaxseed oil, and a balm for arthritis. The newspaper also claimed that prosecutors had found Bonds's name on a BALCO list, linking him with “human growth hormone, Depo-Testosterone, undetectable steroids known as ‘the cream’ and ‘the clear,’ insulin and Clomid, a drug for female infertility sometimes used to enhance the effect of testosterone.”

  The newspaper also claimed that Jason Giambi of the Yankees had testified in December of 2003 that he had injected himself with human growth hormone and had also used steroids as early as 2001.

  These revelations put intense pressure on Donald Fehr, who had been serving as an advisor to the United States Olympic Committee while that organization was trying to combat drugs, yet at the same time Fehr had steadfastly resisted significant testing for his clients in the Players Association. As the BALCO scandal deepened, Fehr left his advisory post with the USOC.

  The embarrassment only got worse for Selig and Fehr. On March 17, 2005, a congressional subcommittee held a long day of hearings into steroid usage. After gripping testimony from several parents whose athlete sons had committed suicide during withdrawal from steroids, an international drug expert, Dr. Gary I. Wadler, described an epidemic of a million youths using steroids without medical supervision.

  Nobody came off well in the afternoon hearing. Jose Canseco, a retired slugger, reiterated charges in his book that he and several other players in the room had used steroids. Sosa said little, retreating behind the use of a translator. McGwire, badgered by legislators to discuss his possible use of bodybuilding drugs, abjectly replied he did not want to delve into the past. Curt Schilling, a pitcher who had been billed as the hearing's star critic of steroids, managed to look ridiculous by testifying that he actually did not know much at all. And Rafael Palmeiro, a hitter with Hall of Fame statistics, wagged his finger at the members of Congress and said that despite Canseco's charges, “I have never used steroids— period.”

  The mood became even more acrimonious in a late-afternoon session when members of the subcommittee ridiculed Selig and Fehr for their bland answers about drug usage. The members of Congress had started out the long day fawning over the celebrities and expressing their undying love for the national game. By the end of the day they were threatening the entire industry with an anti-steroid law if baseball did not wise up.

  The public scolding was the best thing that ever could have happened to Allan H. Selig. Over the years, management had taken a series of lickings from Miller and Fehr in private negotiations, but now the members of Congress had publicly given Selig orders to fight back. In front of a separate committee a few months later, Fightin' Bud came out firmly in favor of tougher testing and tougher penalties.

  On July 1, 2005, the finger-waving Palmeiro tested positive for stanozolol, a bodybuilding steroid that is almost always taken via injection, and not accidentally as part of a medication or vitamin supplement. Palmeiro was suspended for the maximum 10 games but his reputation was shattered, his Hall of Fame aspirations in jeopardy.

  Bonds sat out most of the 2005 season because his injured knee did not respond to surgery and rehabilitation, but he returned in 2006; although he was considerably slowed down by age and injuries, he passed Ruth's old home run record of 714 in late May and trudged after Aaron's mark of 755. Bonds soon discovered that the rules had changed.

  After the intense criticism from Congress, management and the players had accepted a three-strikes-and-out policy for 2006, with penalties of 50- and 100-game suspensions for the first two offenses, followed by a lifetime suspension for the third, bringing baseball in line with the general drug policies of most other sports, and sending the message to young people not to start using illegal drugs to bulk up. As usual, baseball had reacted to a crisis rather than anticipating it.

  With critical books and articles starting to come out about Bonds, Major League Baseball and even his own team seemed to tiptoe around him. Bonds claimed he was a victim of racial prejudice because he was African-American, insisting that baseball had shown little stomach for going after the white McGwire and the Latino Sosa during their peak years. More to the point, Bonds had the misfortune of still being active when circumstances and legal investigations caught up with baseball, and perhaps even with him.

  Selig, who had presided so happily over the home run festivals a few years earlier, was now under huge public pressure to do something. He appointed a former senator, George Mitchell, to lead an investigation into steroid usage in the sport. Facing severe penalties for testing positive, the post-2005 players seemed to get smaller before our eyes, as if magically reversing the previous generation of muscle development. Baseball had also been forced to test for amphetamines for the first time, ushering in an entirely new chemical era.

  With McGwire already retired, and with Sosa and Palmeiro unsigned in 2006, Bonds was out there by himself, while the public debated whether the four of them might lose popularity as well as votes for the Hall of Fame when they became eligible five years after their respective retirements. Some sports reporters said they might withhold votes for these sluggers as a gesture of criticism. While my employer, the New York Times, does not permit reporters to vote for any award—a sensible policy, since the Times wants us to report news, not make it—we are allowed to express our opinions. My own reaction is that the commissioner and the union ducked drug testing for a generation, making it legally impossible to penalize players who were never tested.

  The records must stand because there is no way to quantify how many home runs were hit by players who were on the stuff. Beyond the legalities, fans will always have their suspicions. Time and public opinion will judge Barry Bonds, who was a superb player as a slender youth and as a hulking elder. He will always walk under a cloud. Those suspicions seem quite enough.

  XX

  OCTOBER EXORCISMS

  Like a drunk pedestrian weaving across eight lanes of traffic and making it to the other side, baseball has survived. Somehow, people always seem to know how the team of their youth is doing, seem to know when the World Series is taking place. Like the moon, sometimes hidden behind clouds yet directing the tides, baseball ritual exerts a territorial, ancestral pull. The World Series is the equivalent of a full moon: emotions tend to run at flood tide or ebb tide.

  The game still flows the way it did for our elders, from winter gossip to spring training, mercifully in February, to warm summer night games to nippy autumn championship games. It all feels right, progressing from the familiar to the familiar, but producing gasps of surprise.

  Casey Stengel, that grand old baseball man, used to rasp his theory that “Every day in baseball you see something you never saw before.” The Old Man was right, as always. Just when it seems the owners or the players (or the fans, or the media, or the umpires) have bungled something irrevocably, the game itself surprises and delights, within the context of the old ways of doing things.

  In the quickening weather of September—time running out, nippy drizzle, men in satiny team jackets peering owlishly out of crowded dugouts—fans in the twenty-first century follow the division races, informed by genetic imprints of ancient pennant races. If only by collective memory, fans have been through this group experience of epic victories and ghastly collapses. In these new days, the fans crane their necks toward the out-of-town scoreboards, following games all over the league (when the c
ommercial-laden “message boards” bother to give scores, that is). The players claim they do not watch the scoreboard, but of course they lie.

  Pennant races once were all-or-nothing propositions, producing exactly one champion per league. That ancient process was altered by division races, starting in 1969, and then in 1995 the owners expanded to a third round, adding a wild card team to three division champions. Even with the wild card gimmick, the races are heightened by more than a century of daily action, none of this once-a-week business of football.

  Pennant races touch every team, even ones that are rarely in contention. Every franchise has a history of spoiling an entire season for some contender with hopes and dreams. That can be great fun, too.

  Teams making a late-season run are compared to the 1914 Boston Braves, who roared from last to first place in the final months, or the sad-sack 1964 Phillies, who blew a lead of 6½ games with 12 games left, or the 1978 Yankees, who overcame a 13½-game lead by the Red Sox. But the most intense race of all came in 1951 when the New York Giants came from 13½ games behind in mid-August to catch their hated rivals—and, yes, they were hated—the Brooklyn Dodgers, winning a best-of-three playoff series on Bobby Thomson's home run, still the most dramatic homer ever hit in the very long history of this sport.

  Sometimes latter-day races refer back to an epic pitching duel, like the one on October 8, 1908, when Mordecai (Three-Finger) Brown of the Cubs came out of the bullpen to beat Christy Mathewson of the Giants to decide the pennant. Decades later, weary aces like Randy Johnson of the 1995 Mariners saved an entire season with a creaky, painful, dramatic appearance in relief, evoking historical references to Three-Finger Brown, so long ago.

  Even with modern lights and drainage, threatening weather sometimes revives references to 1938, when Gabby Hartnett of the Cubs hit a home run at dusk to help win a pennant. Whenever teams are still in contention in the final weekend, somebody harks back to 1949, when the Yankees beat the Red Sox twice to reach the World Series, or 1950, when Richie Ashburn of the Phillies threw out Cal Abrams of the Dodgers at home plate, and then Dick Sisler (son of George) hit a homer to clinch the pennant for the one-shot Philadelphia Whiz Kids.

  The intra-league series that began in 1969 has produced its own genre of thrills and terror, most notably 1986, when the Red Sox came from a 3–1 deficit to beat the Angels in the American League and the Mets held off the Astros in a 16-inning sixth game to win the National League pennant. Gene Mauch, who managed the 1964 Phillies and the 1982 and 1986 Angels, had the terrible karma of faltering all three times. That would be the way he was identified in his 2005 obituaries: Manager Never Reached World Series.

  Older fans have fading memories of the World Series as a sun-dappled exercise in early October, but nowadays, the Series seems under siege, starting after eight o'clock in chilly late October, basically unavailable to children back east or even adults who fall asleep by the middle innings.

  Major League Baseball does its best to adulterate its own showcase event, lumping all statistics into “postseason records” that cut into the special quality of the World Series. Somehow the World Series survives.

  Most World Series have been memorable for one thing or the other, or just for adding more records, more depth, more history, to the century-old institution. Every fan could come up with a totally arbitrary list of great World Series:

  Mathewson's three shutouts in six days in 1905; a bad bounce over the Giants' third baseman in 1924 that gave Washington its only championship; Enos Slaughter's romp home to give the Cards a seventh-game victory over the Red Sox in 1946; Al Gionfriddo's catch on Joe DiMaggio and Cookie Lavagetto's two-out, pinch-hit, game-winning double to break up a walk-plagued no-hit effort by Bill Bevens as the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the 1947 fourth game; clutch hits by the journeyman Dusty Rhodes as the 1954 Giants swept Cleveland; the biblical Next Year that finally arrived in 1955 as Johnny Podres beat the Yanks in the Stadium, and church bells tolled all over Brooklyn; Bill Mazeroski's homer to abruptly win the 1960 Series for the Pirates; Brooks Robinson's glove at third base for the Orioles in 1970; Carlton Fisk's body-English homer to end the sixth game in damp Fenway Park, although the Reds would beat Boston in the seventh game; Reggie Jackson's bat in 1977 and 1978 (has there ever been a better nickname than Mr. October?); a two-out rally that ended with Mookie Wilson's grounder slipping through Bill Buckner's legs in 1986, before the Mets won the seventh game, too; like a throwback to Matty and Cy Young, Jack Morris pitching a 10-inning shutout as the Twins beat the Braves in 1991.

  The World Series was mourned during the 1994 labor stoppage, and the Yankees' renaissance in 1996 made it seem like the old days had returned. But in the new century, the World Series produced surprises every year.

  2001: Weeks after the terrorist attack, in a tense Yankee Stadium, President Bush jauntily jogged to the mound to throw out the first ball, with an imposing phalanx of armed troops clustered in the corridors behind the dugout. The Yankees won two games on home runs with two outs, which had never happened before in the Series, but a young franchise, Arizona, won two games at home for its first championship.

  2002: The hard-luck club that had never reached the World Series, the Angels from Orange County, California, held off the Giants for their first championship, with the snakebit former manager, Gene Mauch, in secluded attendance. Although the Disney empire now owned the Angels, Jackie Autry, the widow of the beloved former owner, Gene Autry, was allowed to accept the trophy.

  2003: A retread septuagenarian, Jack McKeon, came back to manage the Florida Marlins during the season and promptly beat the Yankees in their own stadium to win the Series. For the second time in six years, the Marlins would sell off their best players after winning a World Series.

  2004: Babe Ruth, dead since 1948, was a living presence, with Boston fans wearing Red Sox jerseys that said “RUTH 3” on the back, a total anomaly, since numbers and names had never been displayed on uniforms when the Babe played for the Sox. But never mind. A rock band in the stands blared the modern version of “Tessie,” the theme song during the Sox victory in the very first Series in 1903.

  As the Sox played the Yankees in the league series, every fan in the two historic stadiums knew the Sox had not won a Series since 1918, before Babe Ruth was given away. The fans were thoroughly familiar with the history of Joe DiMaggio, Bucky Dent, Aaron Boone, Harry Frazee, Ted Williams, Bill Buckner, and so on. When the Sox lost the first three games to the Yankees, it seemed like yet another gloomy chapter in the perhaps overwrought legend of the departed Babe, but then the Sox promptly swept the Yankees four straight, introducing uncharacteristic joy to dank old New England.

  On the day before the Red Sox were to meet the Cardinals in what was universally taken as a replay of the unforgettable 1946 Series, Johnny Pesky popped into Fenway Park to pick up his Series tickets. The shortstop who had handled the tardy relay during Country Slaughter's romp was still active as a coach-emeritus, at eighty-five, with his own uniform and his own locker in the same miserable little clubhouse where he and Williams had dressed in 1946.

  Pesky paused in front of his locker to answer a few questions about Slaughter's dash, fifty-eight years earlier. Once again, baseball's timeless detail was easily recalled from memory bank and record book. You could, as always, look it up.

  “Slaughter was always good to me,” Pesky said to a knot of reporters, some of them barely a quarter his age. “He always said he knew who was in center field”—meaning Slaughter had knowingly exploited the late-inning substitute, not Dominic DiMaggio, not Pesky.

  The old boy was chipper and optimistic. If the Sox were to win the Series, Pesky promised, “I'm gonna take off all my clothes and run around the ballpark. Then I can die happy. Not that I'm going to die. I mean, I am going to die. But not soon.”

  Be assured there is no other sport in which an eighty-five-year-old relic-coach can banter about frolicking naked. The great bond between locker room chatter and the public ear was hol
ding up. All of us standing around old Needlenose (Ted Williams's affectionate nickname for Pesky) delighted in being in the presence of so much living history, some angst but considerably more zest, from the daily ritual of this game.

  The Red Sox did win. Four straight over the Cardinals. There is no report of Johnny Pesky running naked around Fenway—thank goodness for that—but various specters (or theories about specters) went scampering toward oblivion. Maybe the ghost of the Babe had not haunted the Red Sox for all those decades, but the 2004 World Series was one heck of an exorcism, all the same.

  2005: Given the Northeast literary establishment's affection for the Red Sox, nothing could ever match the love-sonnet perfection of the Sox' reversal of misfortune. Such was the common wisdom until, in their own unlovely straightforward Midwestern way, the Chicago White Sox dealt with their own local demons the very next October.

  The White Sox are not even the cutest ball team in their own town, that honor going to the Cubbies of the North Side, proving that once again location is everything. The White Sox battled two obstacles— their base on the déclassé South Side and their having gone without a championship since the gambling scandal of 1919. Since then, the White Sox had played in exactly one World Series, 1959, rarely touching off poetic impulse or widespread cultism. With an African-American general manager out of Stanford, Ken Williams, and a bilingual Venezuelan chatterbox manager, Ozzie Guillen, the Sox were a team after the Pan-American heart, although the world was slow to grasp that. Fans barely had time to mull the sad permanent exile of Shoeless Joe Jackson that hung over the Sox before they dismantled the Houston Astros in four straight games.

  By the time the Sox were accorded a parade in Chicago, fans in other regions were just catching on to what a sweet, cathartic triumph this had been, very much like the Red Sox' sweep the year before, only with a beer toast rather than Merlot. As sport or spectacle, perhaps the 2005 Series was not compelling, but as an exorcism of yet another ghost it was sensationally appropriate. The ancient ritual of baseball had come through again.