In the commissioner’s office, Bud Selig was in something of a panic. The great season was threatening to be undone. His response would be echoed through the corridors of virtually every office throughout Major League Baseball: What the hell was this stuff? Nobody knew, and at that moment, with baseball enjoying its biggest comeback in a generation, few were truly interested in finding out.
What occurred next was emblematic of a sport in need of a strategy. The Players Association reminded the press and public that androstenedione was perfectly legal. It was not an anabolic steroid and thus broke no laws. The commissioner’s office hurriedly concurred. Androstenedione may have been illegal in the Olympics. It may also have been illegal in the National Football League, and maybe its effects did resemble those of steroids, but andro was a legal supplement, easily purchased at a local health store.
To John Hoberman, a steroid expert at the University of Texas, the impulse on the part of the baseball leadership to immediately defend the use of a product neither it nor the game’s many, better-qualified medical experts knew much about offered a telling glimpse into how the sport was prepared to deal with the sudden, important revelation that, like the rest of the sporting world, baseball players had been exposed to the power of supplements. The press fell in line, stating carefully that there was insufficient evidence to say assuredly that the supplements that McGwire and Sosa had taken had given them an advantage of any sort. Each news story was couched in the fact that McGwire had broken no laws, nor had he violated any codes of his sport. But there was a problem: Baseball didn’t have any rules in regard to supplements or anabolic steroids to break in the first place.
The players responded with pride. McGwire’s response was innocent but candid, and enlightening for anyone interested in finding out what substances players were using. “Everyone else in the game uses the same stuff I use,” he said. Sammy Sosa said he wished the “whole thing would go away.” Chad Curtis, a Yankees outfielder, said blaming players was unfair. Cubs manager Jim Riggleman said the players were “so good” that no substances could help them, anyway. Joe Torre suggested that critics take batting practice to see just how difficult hitting a home run truly was.
To Tom Verducci, neither the country nor the league was ready to accept the first clues to a changing era. This was most apparent from one telling response: Steve Wilstein was made an outcast by the baseball establishment. The Cardinals manager, Tony LaRussa, who had privately known about Jose Canseco’s steroid use in Oakland yet kept it a secret, now chastised the Associated Press for invasion of privacy. He wanted the world’s largest news-gathering organization banned from his clubhouse for the rest of the season. “My philosophy,” LaRussa explained, “is if you slap me, I’ll slap you back. And maybe you won’t slap me as often.” The players were angry, feeling their privacy had been violated. Many writers, too, were upset, convinced that their jobs were now more difficult. Plus, a large number of writers were baseball fans and hated to see the game’s most glorious moment sullied by inappropriate behavior. For the most part, the story lasted two weeks, and then drifted away.
IN THE week between the discovery of andro in McGwire’s locker and his breaking of Maris’s record, the Yankees won their one hundredth game of the season. It was a stunning number of wins for the first week of September, one that left the rest of the league in awe, but the Yankees had not overwhelmed their opponents in amassing it. Rather they had been unrelentingly persistent, confounding their opponents with their workmanlike professionalism. To Jorge Posada, the Yankee catcher, the Yankee formula had been eerily consistent all year. They would be patient, take pitches, wear out the starting pitcher, put together a rally, and head home with a victory. “You looked at us, and you weren’t blown away,” Posada recalled, “but at the end of nine innings, we had won again.” What surprised Posada the most, he recalled, was how the Yankees always seemed to have an answer. “We always had the last rally,” Posada said. “If we were up, we found a way to stay ahead. If we were losing, we seemed to stay after our opponents with a run here, a run there, and then put them away at the end. I had never seen anything like it, to do that so often.” Perhaps bored by their own excellence, the Yankees slumped slightly in September, but still won 114 games.
Sammy Sosa passed Maris on September 12 and was relentless in the thirteen days that followed. For a few hours on September 25, he led McGwire, 66 home runs to 65, but that was where the chase ended. Sosa wouldn’t hit another home run for the rest of the season, while McGwire would tie Sosa later that night. The final weekend of the season, at Busch Stadium, represented Mark McGwire’s coronation. He hit home runs number 67 and 68 on September 26. Then another on September 27. In the fourth inning on the final day of the season, he hit his 70th home run, off a rookie pitcher named Carl Pavano, who had been traded from Boston to Montreal for Pedro Martinez.
The two sluggers had undone years of enmity, creating a positive atmosphere around baseball that would stand for years. Ed Goren, vindicated from the heartbreak of suffering along with baseball during the CBS days, could never get enough of the footage of the jubilant, unscripted McGwire on the night he broke the record, being reminded by Cardinals first base coach Dave McKay that he missed first base.
To Brian Cashman, the accomplishments of 1998 were worthy not just of a season, but of an era. Everything was big. Sosa and McGwire were not merely summer headliners the way Cecil Fielder was in 1990 or Brady Anderson in 1996, they became a phenomenon. The Yankees did not just win like the 1986 Mets or 1975 Reds, they would win 125 games (including the postseason) with an unforeseen precision and professional coolness that produced an odd reaction. The team was so respected that it became likable in every corner of the country.
Nor was 1998 just the year of the home run. There was something for - everybody. Those skeptical of the way two players had suddenly both shattered the game’s sexiest record found solace in the Yankees, who not only played excellent fundamental baseball, but did not have a single player who hit more than twenty-eight home runs. Fans weary of Yankee dominance, and by extension the growing importance of merely outspending the competition, could enjoy the Cinderella San Diego Padres, who won the National League pennant before losing four fast games to the marching Yankees in the World Series. Latino fans and players energized by the emergence of the Latin ballplayer as a force but frustrated by his lack of recognition on the national stage could applaud the magnificence of Sosa, whose journey was complete. Mark McGwire was the home run champion, but Sammy Sosa’s Cubs made the playoffs. In turn, it would be Sosa, and not McGwire, who would win the National League Most Valuable Player award.
The year was, undeniably, the ultimate triumph for Bud Selig, who in July had finally dropped the “interim commissioner” tag by placing his interest in the Brewers in a trust and handing the team over to his daughter. To Lee Garfinkel, what was most impressive about the season was that the game succeeded in cultivating fringe fans who were not diehards. The sport that once seemed to lack the ability to market itself had now become the singular sports story of the year, even dwarfing the retirement of the great Michael Jordan.
In the New York Times—in the eyes of many executives, a friend of the Players Association and foe of baseball’s leadership—were words Selig had never read before. “Somewhere, on television yesterday, football existed. But it hardly mattered. . . . The home run chase revived baseball, which is more popular than it has been in many years. Baseball, once maligned and shunned for its miserable labor relations, looks like a hot property compared to the National Basketball Association, now shuttered by a lockout and in danger of looking as stupid as baseball during the 1994-95 strike. Suddenly, the story in baseball is not about shrinking ratings.” Billy Beane likened baseball in 1998 to the theater in which a top actor performed on cue. Selig often said that there could be no more perfect script for baseball than the summer of 1998. He was especially taken by a letter he received from Goren, thanking him for a season beyond expecta
tion. He had finally erased the memory of Kohler, and the strike. It was as if everything baseball had lacked suddenly had been wished for and received. By McGwire’s public acknowledgment of the Maris family during his home run quest, even the game’s old dirty laundry—the humiliation and persecution of Maris three and half decades earlier—had been cleaned. The journey that began with such ridicule was now complete.
Even the journalists, who along with some of the older baseball people sensed a growing illegitimacy about the number of home runs being hit, did not dare to offer a prolonged dissent. To Tom Verducci, the power with which the andro story was quashed was proof of how powerful baseball had become. Questions about drugs in other sports had been increasing in recent years, and it stood to reason that baseball would soon be confronted with similar questions. The Sosa-McGwire phenomenon, however, had gained so much momentum that few reporters dared buck the tide. They saw what happened during the andro controversy when McGwire had openly admitted to using drugs to enhance his performance. Not only was there no reprimand of McGwire, but the Associated Press reporter who dared broach the subject wound up a pariah. McGwire had become untouchable, a national hero who had restored the national game even though it was clear he had helped usher the game into a murky, uncharted space. There was no money in fighting such a powerful current.
In the end, McGwire said he was “in awe of himself ” for having hit 70 home runs. Self-satisfied, and miles ahead of Maris, he was asked if he thought anyone would break his record. “No, I don’t think so,” Mark McGwire said. “I think it will stand for a while.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
To John Hoberman, the most remarkable aspect of the 1998 season was neither the staggering number of home runs produced by Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire nor the Yankees’ gaudy win total, but the manner in which the entire baseball establishment crushed the androstenedione story. By the late 1990s, virtually every sport had been faced with the reality that performance-enhancing drugs threatened their traditions, raised new ethical questions, and required a special vigilance unlike anything they had faced before. Though many team doctors in the NFL doubted Lyle Alzado’s claim that there was a direct connection between his steroid use and his brain cancer, his death in 1991 served as a sobering reminder of the influence of steroids in their sport. That same year, in the reunited Germany, a horrific and painful period of state-sponsored doping in East Germany came to an end with the sweeping trials of state sporting officials, resulting in numerous convictions. In 1998, while McGwire stroked home runs, the venerable Tour de France was rocked by a doping scandal that led to arrests and embarrassment. A decade earlier, Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids in the Seoul Summer Games, shattering the myth that the International Olympic Committee had somehow kept ahead of the drugs athletes might use to obtain an advantage. In reality, the opposite was true; newer, more sophisticated drugs were always one step ahead of the tests. There was, quite simply, no precedent for what science was making possible, and McGwire’s use of androstenedione seemed to signal that it was baseball’s turn to wrestle with these new complexities.
Yet baseball was different. It mobilized and silenced dissent almost immediately. It began with Tony LaRussa’s shifting the debate from what McGwire had used to Steve Wilstein’s violating McGwire’s privacy. Wilstein was immediately pilloried by baseball, the players, and even his fellow writers. Though no one in baseball had any real education about andro, the Cardinals organization nevertheless released a statement that absolved McGwire of any wrongdoing, a message that was buttressed by Bud Selig. “The Cardinals are a disciplined organization,” said the commissioner, “and I don’t think that anything goes on over there that - shouldn’t.” The players rushed to McGwire’s defense. “He’s not doing anything illegal,” said Yankee catcher Joe Girardi. “He’s just doing things to help his body. We all do things to help our bodies, take protein. It’s a health-conscious sport.” The reporters followed suit. “It’s no wonder players loathe the media,” wrote Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe. “In McGwire’s case, it is misleading to write that he’s using a ‘performance-enhancing drug.’ He’s a baseball player, not an Olympic sprinter. There’s nothing sold at drugstores that would help any of us hit a home run in the big leagues (unless the store has a book on hitting written by Ted Williams). Facing Randy Johnson and hitting a ball over the fence requires bravery, timing, hand-eye coordination, reflexes, leverage, and strength. Most of all, it requires practice. Meanwhile, how many other baseball players are taking the same stuff?” Each segment of the baseball establishment, Hoberman thought, had done its part to squelch an uncomfortable issue without considering the real root of the problem.
Meanwhile, Bud Selig was perplexed. He had never heard of andro, had no idea what it was or what it did. The Sunday after the story broke, Selig took a walk to his local drugstore in Milwaukee to visit the pharmacist who filled prescriptions for him and his children and grandchildren. Before he could say a word, he heard the voice of his pharmacist, who pointed to a bottle of androstenedione and said, “It’s over there, Commissioner. And it’s legal.” Selig then dispatched Rob Manfred to find out what he could about andro. Manfred learned what the Olympic people had suspected. Androstenedione was developed by the disgraced East German sports machine with the intention of providing more testosterone to its male athletes and more estrogen to its females. It was legal, but it was also a steroid. To Donald Fehr, this was one of the dangerous by-products of DSHEA. Andro built testosterone, and yet the federal government allowed it to be listed as a food supplement.
In response, baseball commissioned a group of scientists at Harvard to determine the effects of androstenedione. Internally, there was a lack of consensus about the strategy. To some members of the baseball establishment, ascertaining the legality and steroidal properties of androstenedione was a secondary concern to the growing influence of the entire array of powerful substances that existed to aid baseball players in ways never seen before. The legality of the substance was a red herring. Bob Costas, the esteemed television broadcaster, recalled a conversation with Donald Fehr. “Cork is not illegal, and neither is saliva,” Costas said. “But when used with a certain way in the context of baseball, it absolutely is illegal.” Costas’s point was that baseball, had it wanted to, could have made a perfectly legal substance such as andro illegal, just as it had numerous other legal substances that affected the balance of the game. Its failure to do so was a critical error in judgment, one that could cost baseball later. What’s more, to those outside the commissioner’s office, it was posturing. The trainers and physicians knew that andro was a steroid. Paying Harvard to study it was nothing but a public relations ploy.
The real question wasn’t whether using androstenedione was acceptable, but to what extent baseball had already been exposed to performance-enhancing drugs. If players such as McGwire were using legal steroidal substances to improve their game, the chances had to be fairly high that some of them were using illegal substances. The weightlifting culture was an addictive one. Creatine gave way to andro, which gave way to testosterone and a host of powerful anabolic substances. McGwire, for example, had been using creatine since 1995 and added andro in 1997, a fact that went largely unreported in 1998. In baseball especially, the stars set the pace. If a player of the caliber of McGwire, who hit 238 home runs before 1995, was using drugs, he was surely being mimicked by lesser players with lesser gifts. McGwire himself telegraphed as much when he defended his use of andro by saying, “Everyone in the game uses the same stuff I do.”
Merle Baker III, a Red Sox strength coach in 1998, saw the McGwire story as a warning sign that baseball should have heeded. Things were changing right in front of baseball’s eyes. “There are kids in high school using steroids just so they can get jacked and look good for girls,” Baker said. “What makes you think that grown men wouldn’t roll the dice so they could make more money?” To John Hoberman, baseball’s defense of andro in the face of its player
s’ using largely unknown, unpredictable products was an example of another sports organization blind to the larger story of doping. The substance did not matter nearly as much as the culture that created its necessity.
The reality was that baseball in 1998 was already in the grip of a full-fledged performance-enhancing drug culture that had only grown stronger during the poststrike years. Dozens of players not only used supplements, but also endorsed them. Mo Vaughn, the Boston slugger, was a pitchman for MET-Rx, a nutritional supplement maker that also manufactured androstenedione. Vaughn, who won the American League MVP in 1995, freely admitted to being a regular user of a product called pro-hGH, a pill form of growth hormone. Just like creatine and andro, pro-hGH was a legal product, and such legal supplements were merely the start of a dialogue that would eventually involve anabolic steroids. It was a conversation baseball did not want to have.
Steroids weren’t foreign to Selig, or to baseball, but during the early part of his term, the commissioner was both unsure of their importance and too preoccupied by the ouster of Vincent, Kohler, and the showdown with the players that resulted in the strike. In 1991, before the ouster of Fay Vincent, Selig had been part of an Executive Council meeting with his fellow owners about the power and future efficacy of steroids. In early 1994, as acting commissioner, Selig met with the owners about steroids. “If baseball has a problem,” Selig said at the time, “I must say candidly that we were not aware of it. It certainly hasn’t been talked about much. But should we concern ourselves as an industry? I don’t know, maybe it’s time to bring it up again.” During the 1994 labor negotiations, Richard Ravitch, baseball’s chief negotiator, asked the players for a steroid-testing program, but such a program was a minor issue in comparison to the deal-breaking economic issues that were on the table. As a result, five years after that original meeting, Selig had effectively done nothing.
Juicing the Game Page 18