Jose Canseco was once one of the most feared players in the game, but by the mid-1990s he had lost virtually all respect for his baseball talent. With Canseco there would be an almost visceral disappointment with his decline on the part of his peers and the writers who covered him. Peter Gammons called Canseco the “biggest waste of a Hall of Fame career.” Frank Blackman, who covered him for years for the old San Francisco Examiner, would often lament the Canseco story. “He was the best player in the game, and he threw it all away.”
In 1997, Jose Canseco returned to the A’s, but the glory days were long over for both Canseco and Oakland. The A’s were in the midst of a prolonged rebuilding period, and would post their worst record in nearly twenty years. Mark McGwire was still there, but he had suffered through injuries instead of enjoying the glories that once were so plentiful. McGwire was in the last year of his contract and had made it clear he would not re-sign with the club. With the dual purposes of appeasing McGwire, who had become an untouchable fan favorite in his eleven years with the team, and making room for a young first baseman named Jason Giambi, McGwire would be traded to St. Louis for four mediocre players later in the summer.
If the A’s were hoping the boisterous and powerful Canseco would give their sagging fortunes and attendance a boost and make up for the loss of McGwire, they were horribly mistaken. The Jose Canseco who returned to Oakland was weathered, beaten, and sullen. “What I saw was a less-confident player. It was as if he’d been humbled,” Monte Poole remembered. “Before, he carried himself as a big star. He just wasn’t the same guy. You could tell he was aware that the greatness forecast for him was out of his grasp. The guy who had come up in the eighties was gone.”
Canseco’s steroid use was now a fact known to certain members of the Oakland organization. The club believed there was little it could do about it when he was away from the park, but their worst fears were realized when Canseco was caught injecting a younger player with a syringe before a game, forcing the club to take the unusual step of locking the trainer’s room during batting practice. “The point was that we didn’t want him to do what he was doing in the clubhouse,” said a person who worked with Oakland during those years. “The point was that we were trying to keep him from running his own personal clinic.” Sandy Alderson knew nothing about the incident, but recalled that the A’s often closed their clubhouse for a host of reasons, many of which were designed to keep players focused on the game. If in his first tenure with the team, Canseco had been open about using steroids, the A’s believed he was using with an even greater frequency in 1997. If it was not particularly difficult to evade the press, the public, or even teammates about drugs, it was nearly impossible to fool a trained medical staff.
Canseco spiraled downward with Oakland. Numerous people in the organization felt Canseco simply did not want to play anymore. He infuriated the organization, for it believed he refused to rehab from injuries. He was suffering from a bad back, yet was indifferent to taking his anti-inflammatory pills. “The only way you knew Jose took his antiinflammatories,” said one member of the A’s, “was if you went to his house and fed them to him yourself.” When Canseco complained it was too difficult for him to remember his physical therapy appointments, Sandy Alderson called his bluff, arranging for the physical therapist to come to his home. On the day of the first appointment, Canseco never answered the door. Once during a road trip in Boston, Canseco complained of pain and demanded to be put on the fifteen-day disabled list. Alderson told Canseco if he could wait until the A’s returned home, he would honor the request, but the A’s needed Canseco’s bat in the lineup against the powerful Red Sox and Indian teams they were scheduled to face. Canseco agreed, and when he homered in two of three games through Boston and Cleveland, it appeared that he had improved. As soon as the A’s returned home, though, Canseco repeated his demand to be put on the disabled list. For a player once considered the best in base-
CHAPTER SIX
On September 8, 1998, surrounded by a sea of maniacal fans covered in the red shirts, jackets, hats, and replica jerseys of the St. Louis Cardinals, Bud Selig shared the VIP box at Busch Stadium with Cardinal great Stan Musial, expecting history to be made. Mark McGwire had tied Roger Maris by hitting his 61st home run the day before, a point so ridiculously early in the baseball season to have amassed such a historic total that Selig, and the rest of the baseball universe for that matter, was convinced he had witnessed something truly legendary. Now, it was only a matter of time before McGwire passed Maris. With the park shaking and side by side with Musial, Selig found himself awash in the energy of the evening. There was, he later recalled, an electricity so powerful that it was impossible, even for the supposedly impartial commissioner, not to be swept up in the moment.
In the fourth inning, McGwire took a fastball from Cubs pitcher Steve Trachsel and launched it over the left-field wall for home run number 62. It was the moment baseball had waited for all season. He had broken Maris’s record, which had stood for thirty-seven years, three years longer than Babe Ruth’s record of 60 held before Maris surpassed it.
As McGwire rounded the bases, Selig thought of the war-scorched earth that preceded this moment, and could not begin to hide his satisfaction. During his two days in St. Louis, even during McGwire’s celebration, Selig could not escape the memory of the Kohler summit at which the large markets and small markets waged war and Tom Werner, a man Selig held in great esteem, was left near tears over the utter lack of respect he was shown by his fellow owners. When, during one of the caucuses, someone had asked about Werner’s small-market San Diego club, one large-market owner growled, “Fuck San Diego.” Years later, even in the wake of a strike and steroid scandal, the disharmony at Kohler would haunt the commissioner. To him, the Kohler summit was his worst three days in four decades in baseball.
But Kohler was just one in a string of events, from collusion through the strike in 1994, that set the moment in St. Louis in such sharp relief. Selig’s commissionership was still defined by the strike and the canceling of the 1994 World Series. The tens of thousands of letters from fans who blamed him personally for killing ’94 were devastating to him. What’s more, every time he tried to do something he thought would make baseball more urgent, more alive, such as realigning the divisions, adding a wild card playoff team, or adopting interleague play, he received mountains of grief. Not only were his changes met with massive revolt by the traditionalists who decried the sport’s breaking with its history, but he also came under attack because it appeared his experiments were nothing more than gimmicks, mere tricks to manipulate attendance in lieu of tackling baseball’s internal problems more directly. “Baseball was a dinosaur, moving at a notoriously slow pace,” Selig would recall. “And - every time I tried to do something to bring it along, I got pounded. So, yes, there was a great deal of satisfaction those few days in St. Louis.”
Most of all, Selig thought of the billions of times he had to take the stinging jab in the wake of Fay Vincent’s ouster that he was nothing but a puppet, the owners’ toy. Less than two years earlier, one of baseball’s owners had embarrassed Selig personally. This time, the offending owner wasn’t George Steinbrenner, who in the eighties had so often flaunted his New York cash cow by signing a marginal player to a gazillion-dollar contract, but a member of Selig’s inner circle. The White Sox’s Jerry Reinsdorf had been a hawk during the strike. Complaining bitterly that teams were bleeding money and small markets could no longer compete, he demanded that the owners remain firm in their demands for a salary cap. Selig had staked his reputation on Reinsdorf ’s position. Yet, in November 1996, before the new collective-bargaining agreement between the players and owners was even a year old, Reinsdorf shattered the peace.
Reverting to his post-Kohler promise to make only decisions that benefited his team, Reinsdorf signed the fiery free agent slugger Albert Belle to a five-year, $55-million contract. The signing prompted Selig to recall the words of former Detroit owner John Fetzer, an e
arly mentor who told him, “Your job is not to make decisions that are in the best interest of the Milwaukee Brewers, and mine isn’t to make decisions that are in the best interests of the Detroit Tigers. The job is to make decisions that are in the best interests of our game.” Reinsdorf ’s actions went against everything Selig stood for as commissioner. Ironically, had Reinsdorf and the owners implemented the salary cap they so desperately wanted, he in all likelihood would not have been able to sign Belle. It was an irony that was not lost on his furious fellow owners. In 1990, when the A’s signed Jose Canseco to a contract with an average annual salary of $4.7 million, it was the richest deal in baseball history. Less than seven years later, for all the tough talk about holding the line and proving to players that ownership’s resolve was complete, it was Reinsdorf who had crowned the first $10-million player, topping even that gaudy total by paying Belle $11 million per year.
Now, Selig believed, McGwire’s devastating assault on the single-season home run record, on top of the celebration of Cal Ripken’s streak three years earlier, would temper, if not totally erase, the bitterness of the past.
As McGwire crossed home plate, the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa raced in from right field and hugged him. Sosa had already hit 58 homers himself that season and had been waging a friendly rivalry with McGwire for the game’s most coveted record that had turned baseball into a Frank Capra movie. Over a lifetime in baseball, Selig had never seen baseball seem so vital, so immediate. Its edges, once sharp, had been so smoothed that the game seemed disarming as never before, much to the annoyance of the purists who liked baseball a little more hard-boiled. Football, basketball, and hockey combined had never captured a nation as baseball did in the summer of 1998. In virtually every way, the season had restored baseball. At one point during the euphoria, the blinding flashbulbs, and the deafening crowd, the commissioner leaned over to Stan Musial and whispered in the legend’s ear.
“This is the beginning of a renaissance,” he said.
OVER THE years, there had been challenges to Maris’s record, but they were few and far between. Sixty-one home runs was just too unimaginable, too distant to be an annual question. In 1969, Reggie Jackson had 37 home runs on July 24, but only managed 10 more for the rest of the season. Cincinnati’s George Foster hit 52 home runs in 1977, but a slow start cost him a real shot at the record. In 1990, Detroit’s Cecil Fielder had 24 home runs by June 14, but between June 18 and August 12 he hit just 10 homers, thwarting his run at history. He finished the year with 51. Beginning with Matt Williams’s 1994 campaign, however, Maris became wholly mortal. Williams had the consistent home run stroke that year but was stopped short by the strike. In 1995, Albert Belle hit 50 for Cleveland, also in a shortened season. Then came McGwire.
Mark McGwire’s pursuit of Maris in 1998 was merely the continuation of a power surge that had begun two years earlier, when he hit 52 home runs for Oakland in 1996. The next year, McGwire had 34 homers in July, but he was in the last year of his contract and the A’s knew he was not going to remain with Oakland. McGwire was traded to St. Louis in a lopsided deal for four players who would never distinguish themselves in Oakland (or anywhere else, for that matter). At first, he struggled through the transition, amassing but 3 hits and 1 home run in his first 34 at-bats. Then, McGwire caught fire. He hit 23 home runs over his final forty-one games to finish the season with 58 and a lament, for there was a strong belief in the game that McGwire would have beaten Maris had it not been for the trade-induced slump.
If there was nothing during the first few weeks of the summer of 1961 that portended destiny for Roger Maris, or in 1996 that suggested that Brady Anderson would have the most prodigious power year of any leadoff hitter in history, the opposite would be true for Mark McGwire’s 1998 season. On opening day against the Dodgers, McGwire hit a fourth-inning grand slam off Ramon Martinez. The next day, with two on and two out in the twelfth inning, McGwire hit a three-run, game-winning home run off Los Angeles rookie Frank Lankford, who appeared in twelve games that season and never reached the big leagues again, another of baseball’s Leroy Reams stories. McGwire hit another home run in the third game of the season off San Diego’s Mark Langston, and still another the next day, off a former Oakland teammate, Don Wengert. He then endured his longest homerless stretch of the season, a whole eight games. On April 14, he broke the dry spell by homering in three consecutive at-bats against Arizona. By the end of the month, McGwire had hit 12 home runs. On April 29, the New York Times had already linked McGwire to Maris. The hunt for 61 had started.
MARK MCGWIRE had always seemed destined for stardom. He was from a family of athletes. One brother was a professional weightlifter, while another, Dan, was a quarterback, a first-round draft pick of the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks. Mark, meanwhile, played baseball at the University of Southern California under legendary coach Rod Dedeaux, who was thought to have the golden touch when it came to recognizing talent. Tom Seaver, Bill Lee, Fred Lynn, and Dave Kingman were just four of the more than sixty major leaguers who played under Dedeaux during his forty-six years at USC. Dedeaux was born in 1915, and his own major league career spanned just four at-bats across two games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1935. Yet another Leroy Reams, his only hit was an RBI single. Seven years later, when Sam Barry, the coach at USC, was called to serve in World War II, Dedeaux took over, beginning a coaching career that spanned three wars and nine presidents and included ten national titles and more than thirteen hundred victories. To a kid from Southern California such as McGwire, Dedeaux’s name was mystical. In 1981, when McGwire was drafted by Montreal, the possibility of playing for Dedeaux trumped starting out in the low minors. Plus, McGwire was shrewd. The Expos had offered him a bonus of $8,500. Dedeaux’s offer of a college scholarship to USC was worth considerably more.
After three years at USC, McGwire was drafted by Oakland in the first round of the 1984 draft, and ascended quickly. Tony LaRussa and Sandy Alderson initially envisioned McGwire as a third baseman. Then he committed 47 errors in Triple-A and was moved over to first, where he was less of a danger to himself and his team.
Upon breaking into the majors, McGwire immediately became part of a frightening fraternity of hitters. When he first joined the A’s as a September call-up in 1986, Jose Canseco was in the process of winning the Rookie of the Year. USC’s Dave Kingman, one of baseball’s premier all-or-nothing sluggers, best known for his tremendous moonshots and awful personality, was in what would be his final season. The following year, Reggie Jackson, winding down a twenty-year, 563 home run career, joined the team. “Mark McGwire is for real,” Reggie Jackson said. “He’s the Harmon Killebrew type. He has a swing that drives the ball, a good full cut. His swing isn’t compact, but it’s controlled. He’s a fly ball hitter, but his balls go four hundred and ten feet. When he hits it good, they go four hundred fifty feet. When he hits ’em, you never wonder if it’s going to be a home run.”
Even as a twenty-three-year-old rookie, McGwire seemed to stalk Maris. On July 5, 1987, he homered off Oil Can Boyd in a 6-3 win over Boston. It was McGwire’s 30th homer of the season. Nine days later, the national media came to Oakland, in part for the All-Star Game, but also to see this kid McGwire. “It’ll be brutal for Mark if he gets to forty by August. If he does, I hope that George Bell and Eric Davis have that many and that Wade Boggs is hitting three-ninety,” Reggie Jackson said, speaking from experience. “That would take away some of the attention from him. The media intensity would be much worse for him than it was for Maris. Back when Maris did it, we didn’t have ESPN and CNN and USA Today and all the local media in each city that we have now.”
If ever there was a professional baseball player uncomfortable with the notion of fame, it was Mark McGwire. He may have been destined for stardom, but he never embraced the lifestyle that came with it. Jose Canseco was the sexy star of the powerhouse Oakland A’s teams that would dominate the American League in the late eighties and early nineties. McGwire was his more reserved partner in crime.
Together, Canseco and McGwire would become known as the Bash Brothers, hitting home runs that seemed to travel miles, and celebrating each blast not by shaking hands, but by banging forearms. A famous promotional poster of the two dressed in John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd Blues Brothers garb accentuated the moniker. Yet, if Canseco drew attention to himself, Billy Beane thought, McGwire sought to deflect the glare of celebrity. They may have been linked by their spots in the batting order—Canseco hit third, McGwire fourth—and their prodigious home runs, but the two were very different men. They did not hang out together. Canseco would refer to them as acquaintances. Canseco drove a Ferrari, McGwire a Nissan Maxima. Canseco wanted to be the center of attention and hungrily absorbed the excesses of being a young baseball superstar. Off the field, McGwire was self-conscious and insecure. He wore glasses, which in the arcane world of baseball was still cause for ridicule and a sign of weakness. Whereas Canseco would one day revel in being spotted with Madonna, McGwire had already married his college sweetheart, and in his rookie season, Mark and his wife, Kathy, a former batgirl at USC, were expecting their first child. To intimates, McGwire’s reticence was not seen as an act to seem humble in the world of easy money and immediate fame. Kathy McGwire believed Mark to be a homebody, a person who preferred to rent movies instead of go to them and who was genuinely uncomfortable being recognized in the street. In celebration of tying the rookie mark for homers in a season, the couple did not go to a fancy, expensive restaurant. They got Mexican takeout instead.
Earlier that season McGwire sought out Reggie Jackson, baseball’s premier authority on celebrity in the modern era. Jackson told him that his first responsibilities as a player were, in order, to his team, his manager, his owner, the fans, and finally, the media. But what Jackson didn’t tell him was how to cope with the strains of celebrity away from the ballpark, how to achieve the seemingly impossible balance between being a public person and maintaining a comfort zone of privacy. McGwire was never global, never polished, and had a lifestyle in which each move that was a public one could be humiliating for him. Once, during his summer touring with the 1984 Olympic team, the team made a stop in Cooperstown, New York, to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. McGwire, just twenty years old at the time, walked in, walked out, and looked for pizza. At the time, McGwire said, “History doesn’t turn me on.” Years later, when he broke the home run record, he was embarrassed about displaying such a lack of respect for the game that would make him a legend. “I was just a young kid, and at the time I just didn’t appreciate history,” he said.
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