The reality of this new world depressed Joe Morgan. Morgan had broken into the major leagues in 1963, with the Houston Colt .45s, and later fueled Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine dynasty of the 1970s. He knew that for decades the game had been played a certain way. Yet, increasingly, when he talked with players whose specialties were defense, or running, or handling the bat well, they sounded like part of a dying breed. The bottom line was always money. No one got paid to move runners over. The game did not respect their skills.
It was an especially bitter time for Morgan, who as a player prided himself on his ability to affect the outcome of the game not only by hitting the ball out of the park, but also by stealing a base, bunting, or executing the hit and run. Writing about his brilliance in the 1975 World Series, Roger Angell captured Morgan perfectly:
Morgan himself has the conviction that he should affect the outcome of every game he plays in every time he comes up to bat and - every time he gets on base. . . . A short (five foot seven) precise man, with strikingly carved features, he talks in quick, short bursts of words. “I think I can steal off any pitcher,” he said to me. “A good base stealer should make the whole infield jumpy. Whether you steal or not, you’re changing the rhythm of the game. If the pitcher is concerned about you, he’s not concentrating enough on the batter. You’re doing something without doing anything. You’re out there to make a difference.”
To Morgan, baseball fans might have enjoyed the home run, and it might have been why attendance post-1998 had finally exceeded prestrike levels in the majority of markets, but the game had suffered. It was slow, plodding, less exciting. The inner game, as he called it, was what Morgan enjoyed most about baseball, and he believed that one of the most unfortunate consequences of the new power element in baseball was that the sport seemed to be losing its intricate elegance.
FINANCIALLY, BASEBALL had never been healthier. During Bud Selig’s renaissance baseball devised new ways to generate income, topping the billion-dollar mark in revenues every year of the twenty-first century. At Fox, where years earlier there was a feeling of trepidation about investing in baseball after the CBS disaster, baseball became a staple. The baseball - people who years earlier were skeptical of Fox and its irreverent, often sophomoric approach to broadcasting baseball might have continued to shudder at the overdone graphics and incessant instant replays, but they - could not argue the success of the network’s venture. In 1995, Fox bought baseball’s broadcast rights for five years for $565 million. When their contract came up for renewal before the 2001 season, Fox bought another five years, paying $2.01 billion to broadcast the playoffs only.
The stadium-building boom continued as the infrastructure of the game was reinforced by an unprecedented era of construction. In the wake of Camden Yards fourteen teams moved into new parks in the decade between 1994 and 2004, including the expansion Arizona Diamondbacks, who had a new stadium built in Phoenix before their first season.
Meanwhile, attendance skyrocketed. Coming off their third straight World Championship, the Oakland A’s opened the 1975 season in front of 17,000 fans. For the entire decade of the 1980s, there would not be a single year in which two teams averaged more than 35,000 fans. From 1998 to 2004, however, the American League alone would see at least two teams top 40,000 per game in every single season. In 2004, the Los Angeles Dodgers led the National League in attendance, averaging 43,065 per game. Philadelphia, in a new stadium of their own, Citizens Bank Park, was second with more than 40,000 fans attending every home game. In the National League, seven teams averaged at least 35,000 fans per game. In the American League, the Yankees averaged the most fans in baseball, drawing 46,609 per game, Anaheim averaged 41,675, four teams averaged more than 35,000 fans, and one, the Boston Red Sox, sold out all eighty-one home games. Altogether, baseball set a single-season attendance record in 2004, breaking the previous high from 2000, which in turn broke the record from 1998.
Expanding their reach well beyond the ballpark, two teams, the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees, forged international name brands. The Mariners, owned by video game giant Nintendo, drew huge streams of revenue from its Japanese partners, while in 2001 the Yankees formed a potential billion-dollar partnership with English soccer powerhouse Manchester United.
The Yankees were always formidable, but the Seattle story was emblematic of why the commissioner was so satisfied with the game. In 1992, the Mariners were facing bankruptcy, and perhaps even dissolution. They could not draw flies, and had difficulty finding a buyer. Yet by the end of the 1990s, the Mariners had become baseball’s biggest financial success story. The club had still never advanced to the World Series, but by the end of 2001, a season in which they won an American League record 116 games, the Mariners were playing above the rim financially, enjoying net revenues that were in the same range as Boston and both New York clubs. The conventional wisdom that baseball could not be sustained in a market as small as Greater Seattle, the population of which barely topped 3.5 million people, had been turned into a piece of fiction.
Still, the name of the game in baseball was maximizing the local market, and the Mariners, thanks to their 1995 playoff run, the success of Safeco Field, the presence of international star Ichiro Suzuki, and at long last and above all, consistently good, pennant-contending clubs, made baseball an event people wanted to be a part of in Seattle. The Mariners were so popular that the team culled an average of $10.65 per person from local television, radio, and cable when no other team in baseball, not even the Yankees or the Red Sox, averaged double figures. It was a remarkable revenue stream that allowed a team that played in a relatively small market to compete in a game that was, financially speaking, patently unfair. By contrast, Philadelphia boasted twice the metro population of Seattle, but because the Phillies did not enjoy local contracts as lucrative as those of the Mariners, just $3.03 per person, it brought in less than half the local revenue.
Once dowdy when it came to promotion, the league created a new technologies division, MLB Advanced Media, and launched MLB.com, which hosted Internet websites for each team, staffed with reporters who were, in effect, in-house beat writers. MLB.TV, which broadcast games, highlights, and original programs on the Internet, came next.
As revenue was coming in from new sources, the owners’ lament, that their clubs were losing money, began to disappear. After all, how could they cry when, as the home runs soared, so did payrolls? From 1997 until 2001, the game saw annual double-digit percentage increases in average payroll. In 1996, the average team spent $33 million on players. That figure doubled by 2001. In 1996, the Yankees became the first team to spend $100 million on its roster. The Red Sox would follow, as would the Dodgers and Mets. The stratification between teams, once the source of the vitriol behind closed doors at Kohler, was now on naked display.
Baseball talked about a renaissance, yet fewer and fewer teams believed they could compete. Baseball, it seemed, wanted to have it both ways. Bud Selig trumpeted the game’s prosperity, yet claimed that 90 percent of the teams were losing money. He commissioned a study headed by former senate majority leader George Mitchell and Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve under Presidents Carter and Reagan, that reported that in the five years following the strike, only three teams—Cleveland, Colorado, and the New York Yankees—were profitable.
Selig was a man with deep baseball roots in the small market of Milwaukee, yet his strategy for the game’s future seemed to be to allow the lucrative, signature franchises—the Yankees and Red Sox especially—to distance themselves from the rest of the league financially. From 1995 until 1999, no team not in the top seven in payroll would win a World Series game. In 1999, the distance between the top-spending team in baseball, the Yankees, and the lowest, Montreal, was nearly $100 million. Baseball’s findings created an odd conflict: On one hand, Selig referred to baseball as a renaissance, and on the other, he claimed it to be a period of heavy losses for management.
Still, to Rob Manfred, baseball f
ans were taken by Sosa-McGwire, but they were also taken by the direction of the game. The wild card, once controversial, brought fans to the game. Interleague play, which introduced in-season play between the American and National leagues in 1997 for the first time in history, tended to captivate fans, Manfred thought. Thanks to the booming economy, Americans had money, and they didn’t just want to spend it; they wanted to spend it on baseball. The name brand of Major League Baseball, once virtually impossible to exploit because of the game’s stodginess, was now a powerful asset.
JOE MORGAN and numerous other baseball men were not merely skeptical of the soaring home run balls, but felt that the entire baseball environment seemed to have taken on the characteristics of a gold rush. To Morgan, baseball now resembled a classic boom town, a prophetic parallel to America in the late 1990s where the stock market skyrocketed on the back of the dot-com explosion and there was easy money everywhere begging to be spent. The home run, always the game’s sexiest feature, was now fueling the baseball economy.
Two months after McGwire hit number 70, baseball starting printing money. Bernie Williams re-signed with the Yankees for six years at $91 million. Mo Vaughn left Boston for Anaheim for six years, $80 million. A few weeks later, a pitcher got into the act when Los Angeles gave Kevin Brown a seven-year, $105-million deal, which was the richest in baseball. Earlier in 1998, Pedro Martinez had signed a six-year, $75-million deal with Boston, which was the previous standard, but now stood third in line. For a brief time, Vaughn had been the highest-paid position player, but that, too, changed less than a year later when the Dodgers acquired Shawn Green from Toronto and signed him to a six-year, $84-million contract. Could this be the same sport in which, three years earlier, Bud Selig was demanding cost controls and ownership, led by Jerry Reinsdorf and David Montgomery in Philadelphia, tried to implement a salary cap without the players’ consent? Was baseball in 1999 really the same sport that shut down for 232 days over economic issues?
Salaries reached a zenith in the winter of 2000 at the annual winter meetings in Dallas. By the time the executives hurried out of the Wynd-ham Anatole hotel, Manny Ramirez, who had once turned down a seven-year, $119-million contract to remain with the Indians, had signed an eight-year, $160-million deal with the Red Sox. The ultimate blow, however, had come minutes earlier, when Texas announced it had given Alex Rodriguez ten years at a breathtaking $252 million. The numbers were stunning, and reinforced to players that the sport was driven by the power game. With the exception of the Yankees’ Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter, the latter of whom would re-up with the team for ten years at $189 million, the big money went to players with the murderous home run numbers and the very few pitchers good enough to stop them.
It did not stop with the money. Teams now began to sweeten their offers with perks usually reserved for corporate executives or movie stars. When Randy Johnson signed with Arizona at the end of the 1999 season, the Diamondbacks included membership in one of the most exclusive golf courses in Arizona. When Kevin Brown signed with the Dodgers, the club included the use of a private jet to shuttle his family back and forth from Georgia to Los Angeles. In turn, the players no longer saw themselves as athletes, but as entertainers, descendants of Humphrey Bogart and Harrison Ford rather than Babe Ruth and Willie Mays. “Why do fans always complain about how much money we make?” Jason Giambi lamented in 2000. “I mean, nobody complains that Tom Hanks makes $20 million per picture. That’s all we are. We’re in the entertainment business.”
There was another superstar perk that would have seismic implications for baseball in the coming years. Players wanted teams to allow their personal trainers access to the clubhouse, the field, the weight room, and all of the club’s facilities. They also wanted the team to provide personal trainers with a seat on the team plane, as well as in some cases provide a hotel room, so the superstar could train with his exercise man on the road. Allowing a person who was generally not an employee of the club access to the team was against league rules, and the potential for trouble was clear. But the owners, sensing a way to give potential free agents star treatment without having to pay more, were all too happy to agree. In some cases, to finesse the rules, a club would hire a star’s personal trainer for a salary of one dollar.
For decades, major league rules prohibited clubhouse access for player agents, friends, wives, or any such representatives, a rule that was resurrected by the drug trials of the 1980s. The goal was to prevent the appearance or possibility of impropriety with the players when it came to gambling or affecting the game in any way. The rule also protected baseball from the potential of scandal should unsavory characters have access to the game’s players or resources. Those rules were now relaxed, and by dint of being associated with a superstar, Barry Bonds’s entourage could now potentially roam the clubhouse. Sammy Sosa’s people were given access to keep the superstar happy. People were on the team payroll for no other reason than a great player was exercising his star power.
There was a moment in 2001 that should have awoken baseball to the dangers involved, but did not. At 3:53 A.M. the night of October 6, a night manager at the Renaissance Vinoy, the Yankees’ team hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida, noticed two Yankee employees and a woman naked in the hotel pool. One of the men, Brian McNamee, was accused by the woman of forcing her to ingest gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB. GHB was better known on the street as the “date rape” drug. McNamee was Roger Clemens’s personal trainer, and the incident caused tremendous embarrassment to the Yankees. Ultimately, no charges were filed, but the McNamee affair served as a harbinger that baseball ignored. For the next two years, baseball would allow the entourages of ballplayers access to their game. It was a fateful decision that would have lasting long-term consequences.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The players called them “The Crusaders.” The name was intended as an insult, but it fit. They were an increasingly important group of professors, scientists, doctors, and antidoping executives who had begun to pressure the governing bodies of various sports to examine the larger implications and consequences of doping. These men and women of science and medicine had studied the history of testosterone and recognized the widespread use of nutritional supplements and anabolic steroids. In response, they created antidoping governing bodies such as the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its United States wing, USADA. If the sports world had been sluggish about confronting doping issues with the press as its only watchdog, it now would have to reckon with a host of accomplished medical experts committed to holding the leagues accountable as influential, publicly visible entities.
More than experts, Crusaders such as Gary Wadler, Charles Yesalis, Richard Melloni, Robert Cantu, and Don Catlin became the moral voices for an industry driven by dollars and by politics. Some of them were committed to ridding the game of cheating through chemistry. Some were infuriated by what they saw as the hypocrisy of the sports’ governing bodies. Others were driven by an emerging health crisis among America’s young people. They saw how much influence the professional sports leagues held over adolescents and believed that the ambivalence of the leagues concerning the use of these drugs was particularly dangerous. Kids idolized athletes. This was a fact that could not be denied. Nor could it be ignored. Studies had already shown that Mark McGwire’s use of androstenedione shot sales of the product upward of 500 percent to $55 million in 1998. When he later repudiated andro, the sales dropped by more than half. Some of those users were children. If the players and the leagues weren’t going to assume any responsibility for the problem, the doctors were.
The education process was a slow one, but such chances to effect change, Gary Wadler reasoned with no small measure of dread, only came along once. What you do with your place in time, he often told himself, determined a large part of the future. If that meant being one of the lone voices willing to ceaselessly attack the professional sports machine, then so be it.
For a time, Wadler could be described as a zealot, and, to the billion-do
llar world of American professional sports, a certified troublemaker. Whenever news broke on the antidoping front, Gary Wadler’s name was sure to wind up in a dozen stories. He often joked that he spent as much time doing interviews as he did on his fieldwork. Some players ridiculed him, while executives from both baseball’s Players Association and the commissioner’s office cast him as an opportunist seeking to further his own career under the guise of concern for the young.
Wadler hated the term “Crusader.” It was an insult from the players who trivialized his position and he took it as such. “I’m not a crusader. I’m very much focused on the tangible effects of performance enhancers. Do I have a rifle with sights that I’m aiming at? Absolutely not. I don’t work for anyone. I don’t get paid by anyone. What I do, I do strictly as a volunteer. I seek solutions to a very serious problem and to characterize me in any other way is to severely mischaracterize me,” he said. The way Wadler saw it, he was catapulted into the forefront of the doping story by the reluctance of the sports leagues to deal with a new, frightening issue. As the doping violations grew to be more prominent and the methods of evading various forms of testing grew more sophisticated, only the best doctors in the country possessed the expertise to explain how athletes - could alter their performance with these powerful drugs and how their handlers could teach them to thwart a drug test, and Wadler, along with Charles Yesalis at Penn State University and Don Catlin of UCLA, was one of the three most respected steroid experts in the country.
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