Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  Baseball said no.

  The Fox people were going to do something else that was going to sting the old guard: They were going to make baseball a nighttime sport. If the postseason had moved increasingly toward night games—the last World Series game played in the afternoon was in 1983—the rhythm of the regular season hadn’t changed much at all. Night games were played during the week, but weekend games began at 1:00 P.M. The NBC Game of the Week, the old standard for baseball programming, was aired at

  1:00 P.M. on Saturday. Fox wanted to put the weekend games on at 4:00 P.M. That broke with the traditional schedule. The clubs, at the behest of the networks, were moving toward Saturday night games, a sacrilege in old-line baseball towns. It used to be that the only teams that played night games on Saturdays played in hot-weather cities such as Houston, Texas, and Atlanta, where the evenings were demonstrably cooler.

  Baseball was regularly criticized for airing the playoffs and World Series so late that the children who represented a new generation of fans were unable to see the end of many great postseason games. One baseball official complained that this criticism was unfair. His response was that nobody complained when the NBA started each finals game at 9:00 P.M. Baseball’s logic was a simple one: Everyone else was doing it. The NBA routinely broadcast prime-time games after 8:00 P.M. and, since 1984, had aired the finals at 9:00. The same was true in college basketball and even the NFL, whose rigid schedule of 1:00 P.M. and 4:00 P.M. games rivaled baseball’s. Yet, baseball officials would complain that their sport caught all the hell for veering from its tradition. To the purists, that was the problem with the baseball leadership. It should have been leading, but chose instead to follow. Just because the Lakers and Bulls finished title games at midnight didn’t mean the Yankees and Dodgers had to.

  If hockey purists were stung by Fox’s bravado, the baseball people were furious, sort of. They understood the truth that baseball needed to put some air in its tires, but Fox was so frontal, so direct, that the truth, well, the truth hurt. Bud Selig understood that baseball needed an extreme makeover and sold the changes to the owners. “We were a dinosaur, plodding,” he recalled. “Every now and then we’d turn, but baseball has always been resistant to change.” In its competition for the American entertainment dollar, more night games allowed the sport to compete with movies, dinner, music shows, everything. Tradition could still be kept intact, Selig told his owners, while simultaneously moving forward. He presented them with one fact that couldn’t be overlooked. Under the Fox contract, baseball was bringing in less than half of the annual broadcast revenues they had been making with CBS. ESPN, the cable network, had made up some of the difference, but in the mid-1990s, broadcasting a large portion of games on cable meant less potential reach. Worse than the CBS debacle was that when the Fox announcement was made, instead of being considered a bargain, the general response was that baseball was so battered that it was Fox taking a risk.

  “The fact was that we needed to look in the mirror,” Andy MacPhail recalled. “We had to do something with our game. Times were changing and we had to change with them. We couldn’t be a nineteenth-century pastoral game anymore and still expect to survive.”

  ON APRIL 11, 1996, Baltimore center fielder Brady Anderson led off the fourth inning of the Orioles’ game against the Indians with a long home run off Cleveland’s Orel Hershiser. It was not a special moment, probably forgotten as quickly as Anderson rounded the bases. The Orioles had the game well in hand; the homer had given them a 7-1 lead. Nor was it a moment of particular triumph for Anderson personally. It was the eighth game of the season, and the home run was his first of the year. In the seventh, Anderson took a pitch from reliever Eric Plunk and sent it over the fence for his second homer of the night. The Orioles won in a walk, 14-4, and their record was now 7-1. Anderson wasn’t even the only offensive star of the game. The Orioles hit six homers that night.

  Two days later, the Orioles came from five runs down to tie the Minnesota Twins at 6-6 when Anderson came to the plate with one out in the bottom of the ninth and hit a game-winning home run off Pat Mahomes. Over the next fifteen days, Brady Anderson became the biggest story in baseball. He finished the month with 10 home runs, and by the first week of May led the majors with 15 homers, three shy of his career high for an entire season.

  Baseball appeared to have grown more muscular overnight, and Baltimore was the epicenter of a revolution. If that April blowout of Cleveland did not hint at the type of year Brady Anderson was about to produce, the six home runs the Orioles hit that afternoon were just the beginning of a home run blitz that would last the whole season. Even before midseason, it became clear that the Orioles were going to threaten the great standard of team power, the mighty 1961 Yankees’ record of 240 home runs.

  On Thursday, April 18, Anderson banged a home run off Jamie Moyer to lead off what would be a 10-7 loss to Boston. The next day, he did it again, homering off Texas’ Roger Pavlik in the game’s first at-bat. He then started Saturday’s game by blasting a home run off the Rangers’ Kevin Gross, and in the final game of the series with Texas, again led off with a home run, this one off Darren Oliver. Anderson had homered to start a game four consecutive times, a feat never accomplished by even the greatest leadoff men in the game. Neither Rickey Henderson nor Lou Brock had ever homered to start four straight games. Anderson was becoming the type of player that, with the possible exception of Bobby Bonds, no one had ever seen before, a leadoff hitter with more power than his team’s cleanup man. What made Brady Anderson’s 1996 even more remarkable was it came without warning. There was no sign that alerted even the most connected baseball people to the fact that Anderson was capable of such power. Four years earlier, Anderson was a phone call away from not even being in the major leagues at all.

  IN A sense, Brady Anderson had always been governed by fear. People close to him were never sure if his insecurities stemmed from a certain desperation to succeed, or if he was being eaten alive daily by the crushing prospect of failure. During the most difficult moments, when he wasn’t quite sure how his baseball story would turn out, he used to fret that he would never be able to look at his baseball card with pride. Instead of being a source of inspiration, Anderson feared that the statistics on the back of the card would be a lasting reminder of all he was not. In 1991, a year in which Anderson hit .230 with 2 home runs in 113 games for the Orioles, his mother read him a newspaper article over the telephone and he could feel his stomach lurch as she read the phrase “has always been known as an underachiever.”

  Brady Anderson grew up in Los Angeles and was, oddly for that region, more interested in hockey than baseball, though he eventually chose the latter. When he graduated from high school, he was five-eleven and 145 pounds and went undrafted. After three years at the University of California at Irvine, the now six-foot-one Anderson was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in the tenth round of the 1985 amateur draft. He remained in the Red Sox system for the better part of three years but with mixed results. Meanwhile, the Red Sox were grooming their top outfield prospect, Ellis Burks, to be their everyday center fielder. In 1988, Anderson made the club out of spring training and went 3 for 5 in his big league debut against the Tigers, but immediately fell into a 2-for-25 slide. When the Red Sox caught fire during the summer and needed pitching, they traded Anderson and a Double-A pitcher named Curt Schilling to Baltimore for the veteran Mike Boddicker. Anderson had played forty-one games for the Red Sox and hit .230 without a home run.

  Now that he was no longer blocked by Burks, it appeared to Anderson that he would soon get his chance, but he foundered in Baltimore. He hit thirty-two points worse with the Orioles than he had in Boston and followed up a rookie season in which he hit .212 with consecutive seasons of .207, .231, and .230. Then came that steamy night in Texas in August 1991. The Orioles had beaten the Rangers, 8-6. Anderson didn’t do much in the game, coming in as a defensive replacement in the eighth inning. After the game, Johnny Oates, the Baltimore manager, told
Anderson he was being sent down to Triple-A Rochester. The manager told him he would be back as rosters expanded on September 1, but for Anderson it was still a demoralizing blow.

  Anderson considered himself a student of baseball history, and if he - didn’t know the story of Leroy Reams personally, he knew dozens like it, and they were petrifying. Reams made his major league debut on May 7, 1969, for the Philadelphia Phillies, entering the game as a pinch hitter against Houston. The Astros’ Larry Dierker struck him out on three pitches, and immediately after the game, Reams was sent back to the minors. He never returned. That was it for Leroy Reams. It was there in the record book: one at-bat, one strikeout, one career. Such stories underlined the perilous nature of baseball, and all players knew of someone who expected to get the call back up and never did. The prospect of being Leroy Reams scared the living hell out of every big league prospect.

  Anderson wasn’t Leroy Reams. He had already been in the big leagues for three years, but it was still more than enough time to know that being sent down, regardless of promise or intent, meant the possibility of never being called back. More than ever, the fear was talking to Anderson. He picked up the phone, called his agent, and told him he wanted to play in Japan. But then he decided to give the majors one last chance.

  IT WAS with those memories of 1991 that Brady Anderson entered July of 1996 leading the majors with 29 homers. In 3,271 at-bats over 945 career games before 1996, Anderson had hit just 72 home runs. Now, in just one season, he was on pace to hit 59. Everyone else may have been perplexed about how this guy, of all people, was erasing the record book for leadoff hitters, but Anderson wasn’t one of them. He knew exactly what had changed, and why.

  “WE’RE SAFE,” Frank Robinson told Claire Smith of the New York Times one day in June 1996. He was talking about himself and Carl Yastrzemski, the Hall of Fame Boston left fielder, both of whom, in Robinson’s estimation, were protected from the torrent of home runs that defined 1996. Robinson and Yastrzemski were the last two players to ever win the triple crown, nothing less than baseball’s holy grail. To lead the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in was a feat that most players only dreamed about, and even that was a bit presumptuous. Robinson did it in 1966, when he hit .316 with 49 homers and 122 RBIs on his way to winning a World Championship with the Orioles. Yastrzemski won the American League pennant nearly single-handedly for the Red Sox when he led the league with a .326 average and 121 RBIs, and shared the home run title with Minnesota’s Harmon Killebrew with 44. That was 1967, and no one had done it since.

  “But Roger,” Robinson continued, “he’s got to be sweating a little bit.”

  “Roger” was the late Roger Maris. Maris’s single-season record of 61 home runs had survived the challenge of Matt Williams, Ken Griffey, Barry Bonds, and Frank Thomas in 1994 perhaps only because the strike had wiped out the final fifty games of the season. That year and the two that followed were marked by a power surge the likes of which the game - hadn’t seen since the 1930s. By the end of June 1996, the numbers were breathtaking. Boston’s Mo Vaughn had 24 home runs, Albert Belle and Brady Anderson had 25; Ken Griffey and Sammy Sosa had 23 each. As the season continued, the home runs did as well, at a phenomenal pace. By early August, forty-five players had hit 20 or more home runs, seventeen then having exceeded their previous career highs; this, with two full months remaining in the season.

  If 61 was the number of home runs required to attain baseball immortality, then 50 homers was the plateau of the very elite. Before 1995, just eleven players in the history of the game had ever reached that magic number. Babe Ruth had been the only player to post consecutive 50 home run seasons. He had done it twice, in 1920 and 1921, and again in 1927 and 1928. Other than Ruth, only Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, and Ralph Kiner had ever hit 50 home runs in as many as two separate seasons. No two players had hit 50 home runs in the same season since 1961, when Maris hit 61 and Mickey Mantle hit 54. In the thirty-three years after Maris broke Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961, only three players—Willie Mays, George Foster, and Cecil Fielder—hit 50 in a single season. Hank Aaron, the all-time home run king, had hit 755 homers over twenty-three seasons, but never 50 in a single year. Neither had Frank Robinson, who finished his career with 586, nor Harmon Killebrew, Reggie Jackson, Mike Schmidt, Ted Williams, Ernie Banks, Eddie Mathews, or Mel Ott, all of whom had hit more than 500 homers over the course of their careers. In the American League, from 1971 until 1977, no one even hit 40 home runs. Now, 50 had been challenged for the previous three seasons. The year of the strike, Matt Williams hit 43 in 112 games. In 1995, Cleveland’s Albert Belle hit 50 homers in 143 games. In 1996, Brady Anderson, who had never before hit more than 21 in a single season, would be one of two players to reach 50 home runs, finishing the year with exactly that many. The other was Mark McGwire.

  NO PLAYER embodied baseball’s power surge more than Mark McGwire, the Oakland A’s first baseman. If Brady Anderson’s rise to a 50 home run season surprised baseball, so, too, did the return of McGwire. For the better part of three seasons, McGwire had the look of the tragic slugger. McGwire had burst into the league with 49 home runs in 1987, a rookie record. Teamed with Jose Canseco, Dave Parker, Dave Henderson, and Rickey Henderson, he was part of one of the most fearsome lineups in the game’s history during the late 1980s. Yet McGwire, a hulking mass at six-foot-five, 225 pounds, was a monster who couldn’t stay healthy. During the early 1990s, his health had deteriorated to the point where in 1993 and 1994 combined he had played in a total of just 74 games. He played in 104 in 1995, and missed the first 18 games of 1996.

  “Mark McGwire’s body,” Murray Chass wrote in August of 1996, “is the best defense Roger Maris’s single-season home run record has.”

  By May 22, 1996, McGwire had just 7 home runs. Then he went on a frightful tear. On May 24, in Baltimore, he homered off Mike Mussina to begin a barrage of 18 home runs over the next month. In an 18-2 demolition of California on June 27, McGwire blasted his 25th home run of the season. Like Matt Williams, but on a grander scale, McGwire was a true slugger. He was the hitter fans paid money to see. If hitters such as Barry Bonds, Frank Thomas, Albert Belle, and Mo Vaughn who hit for high averages while also hitting home runs were becoming more common, McGwire was definitely old school. He would go on home run binges, like the one that started July 6, when he connected off Mark Langston at the Oakland Coliseum in a 6-5 win. That began a streak of 12 home runs over the next eighteen games. By mid-August, it was McGwire who was the talk of baseball. With a little over six weeks left, McGwire had 44 home runs. Maris was in his sights. Right behind McGwire, as with Williams two years before, was Ken Griffey. Griffey and McGwire slugged home runs at a pace that began to excite not only a somewhat reluctant fan base, but the game’s executives.

  When it was over, old records littered the floor like shards of broken glass. Maris was safe for another year—Mark McGwire, limited to 130 games, hit 52 home runs, Anderson 50, Griffey 49—but his 1961 Yankees were history. The standard for power up and down the lineup, that Yankee team, led by Maris and Mantle, hit 240 home runs. The 1996 Orioles had banged 247. Seven Orioles had hit at least 20 homers, also a record. The Tigers and Twins broke the old record for most home runs allowed in a season. Thirty-nine players had hit at least 30 home runs. Fourteen players had hit 40 homers, nearly double the previous record of eight set in 1987.

  The great protectors of baseball tried to compare 1996 to 1987, which along with 1930 was one of baseball’s great anomaly seasons. In 1930, Chuck Klein of the Phillies hit .386 and drove in 170 runs, yet wasn’t even close to the RBI title. That year, Hack Wilson hit 56 home runs (after having never before hit as many as 40 in a single season) and drove in a record 191 runs. The National League hit .303 as a league in 1930, and Klein’s Philadelphia pitching staff gave up nearly eight runs a game. In 1987, Andre Dawson and Mark McGwire both hit 49 home runs, while George Bell hit 47. That year, home runs increased by 17 percen
t over the previous season, leaving baseball people convinced the ball had been juiced. Ken Macha, then a coach with the Expos, was so sure of it he grabbed a dozen 1987 baseballs and kept them in his garage as evidence for future generations. By comparison, the decrease in power the following year resembled a stock-market collapse. Home runs dropped by 29 percent in 1988, a dramatic single-season decrease.

  Those seasons came and went, but this was different. Nineteen ninety-six did not suggest an aberration as much as it did a trend. Unlike those freak seasons of 1930, 1987, or even 1968, the Year of the Pitcher when the pendulum swung all the way to the other side, a feeling existed that a new era had begun. During the second part of 1996, the question turned to why. There were numerous anecdotal arguments. The ball seemed to be tighter. Stadium construction had produced intimate little parks with short fences. The strike zone, thought Atlanta general manager John Schuerholz, was “the size of a postage stamp.” The addition of two expansion teams, the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins, in 1993 had thinned out the pitching ranks, something many old-time baseball men were embittered about, believing that there were too many pitchers with minor league talent strutting around major league clubhouses with big league attitude and big league salaries that the old-timers could never have ever imagined. There was also a feeling that players looked stronger.

  Whatever the reason, it seemed there was no turning back. Moreover, there were few people in baseball who even wanted to. Baseball was on to something that even Schuerholz, the chief architect of the most dominant pitching staff of the 1990s, understood. “Taking all those elements into consideration, do you think home runs have been viewed badly in the eyes of the public?” Schuerholz asked. “No, fans love it. I don’t think it’s all bad. I think it’s good for the fact that it’s one other element for - people to sit up and take notice of. It’s an interesting development.”