Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  STEROIDS WERE just the beginning. Thanks to Orrin Hatch and the DSHEA legislation, steroids were, in fact, secondary in the debate about the long-term health effects of performance-enhancing substances in the legal products that were available. Androstenedione, creatine, growth hormone, and ephedra, a stimulant that did not produce muscle mass but was popular with players as an energy booster, were all popular with baseball players. To Donald Fehr, DSHEA was an unacknowledged culprit. DSHEA allowed products on the market, the contents of which were known by very few people outside of their manufacturers. That added a complicated element to the discussion, for not only was the question about steroids, but over-the-counter products that contained steroidal elements. For a time, all were legal, and the answers a player received about their potential dangers depended on which expert he had spoken to. To many, the lack of consensus was proof that the cries about the dangers of a given substance were premature. How could one doctor tell a player he - couldn’t take a substance that another would say has no discernible side effects? Besides, numerous players reasoned, if andro was so bad, why - could any ordinary fifteen-year-old kid walk into any health store and buy buckets of it?

  To Gary Wadler, one of the shrewder, more misleading acts on the part of the athletic establishment was to focus on steroids by name, for several of these over-the-counter products were not anabolic steroids, obviously, but still either produced a steroidlike effect or could easily be proven to enhance performance. The confusion over what differentiated these legal supplements from illegal steroids bought players time to use them before they were banned from the market.

  For example, to some, creatine was a muscle aid no different from Ben-Gay. To others, it was another new substance that allowed players to do things they couldn’t have done in the past. To some that was cheating. To others, progress. Players could use creatine and still be truthful about having never used anabolic steroids. It was created by the body, wasn’t a steroid, yet clearly allowed a player to increase his abilities. It was not like other popular supplements, in that the Crusaders couldn’t find anything wrong with using it from a health standpoint. But creatine could be nasty. Players who did not hydrate themselves well enough suffered from cramps, muscle pulls, and diarrhea. Mo Vaughn used creatine a few times but said he didn’t like how it made him feel. Ellis Burks said the same. To the players who swore by creatine, however, the trick was simple: Drink a lot of water.

  “Creatine isn’t even mentioned,” Charles Yesalis said. “It’s a performance enhancer. We have a fair amount of solid data demonstrating that it is a performance enhancer, but it’s not on anyone’s banned list whatsoever. It’s in our food chain, so it would be impossible to test for, but that - doesn’t not make it a performance enhancer. I think it quite clearly meets the definition of doping, and it clearly enhances performance, not in - every sport or in every person, but it is a performance enhancer.”

  Androstenedione was different. Unlike creatine, andro raised the level of both male and female hormones, producing effects similar to those of a steroid. That, to the medical experts, made it a steroid. That meant Mark McGwire used a steroid when he hit 70 home runs. The NFL had banned it, citing its steroidal qualities; football players using andro would have failed the league’s drug test. The NFL also believed the medical warnings that andro reduced the cholesterol that protected the heart, otherwise known as “good cholesterol.” A lack of good cholesterol increased the risk of heart attack. Andro also raised the risk of pancreatic cancer, as well as breast enlargement. But andro was not testosterone, and thus wasn’t technically a steroid. To make the debate easier for the public and press to understand, andro was dubbed a “steroid precursor.”

  A year after the andro controversy, Mark McGwire announced he had stopped using the supplement, mainly because of a report that children were using the substance in an attempt to emulate their heroes, but baseball had still not acted on it. For a short time, McGwire felt vindicated when a White House-commissioned study concluded that andro did not increase testosterone levels or muscle mass. To Clarence Cockerell, the Oakland A’s strength coach, andro was an interesting concept, but failed in real application. “Andro, I don’t like. It was a good idea to raise testosterone levels, but it just doesn’t work.” But while Cockerell and numerous strength coaches discredited andro because of its estrogenic qualities, what few of them seemed to know was that, in a bizarre chemical twist, estrogen enhanced the potency of anabolic steroids. Therefore, while on its face, andro had little value, it could help a steroid user greatly. Had McGwire used anabolic steroids or possessed the remains of a steroid cycle in his system at any time while taking andro, the combination would have helped him greatly.

  Human growth hormone further complicated the story. If the French physiologist Brown-Séquard sought his fountain of youth in the 1800s, during the late 1990s, growth hormone exploded as the latest, greatest weapon to slow aging. The drug had originally been obtained by crushed pituitary cells in the 1950s, before synthetic methods of production were established, and was first developed as an aid to bodies that did not produce enough growth hormone naturally, such as those of dwarves. It - wasn’t long, however, before it became popular in Hollywood, as a method of increasing metabolism and reducing wrinkles, and in sports, where it possessed the effects of anabolic steroids.

  Growth hormone injections were expensive, roughly $10,000, and lasted approximately thirty days. The power of growth hormone came through injection. Human growth hormone in pill form was much less expensive and had been widely marketed, but like oral anabolic steroids, it lost much of its potency passing through the digestive tract. While that made the pill form less attractive, the dangers of injecting growth hormone were as chilling as the dangers of anabolic steroids, because of its potentcy.

  To Bob Cantu, the real horror of hGH was not in its effect on adults, but in its effect on children and teenagers, who had yet to begin or were already producing their maximum hormonal output. For adults in their thirties, growth hormone could increase sexual potency, induce better sleep, and return hormonal output to the levels of people in their twenties. To men, it was especially attractive, for a man at the age of thirty-five had already lost roughly 75 percent of his hormone production. To women, growth hormone could reduce wrinkles, increase muscle, and reduce fat. Growth hormone could, in effect, get the body working at a youthful speed again.

  In young adults, however, the side effects were lethal. Because teenagers were already producing the hormone, injecting growth hormone created the opposite effect. Instead of enhancing growth, excessive hormonal output caused height shrinkage because the body senses the presence of the injected hormone and stops producing its own. Even with adults, growth hormone could enlarge the hands, feet, tongue, jaw, and head. Users were at heightened risk for cancer, heart attack, and diabetes.

  What was truly confounding about growth hormone was that, unlike anabolic steroids, it was virtually untraceable. Once a user injected hGH, it was nearly impossible for a test to discern the difference between the injected hormones and those being naturally produced by the body. The only way to tell if a person had been injecting growth hormone was by weighing the factors of age and metabolism against their level of hormone output, which wasn’t far from guessing.

  The sophistication of these various drugs was dizzying. It was also, thought Gary Wadler, why the press and public seemed to have such a difficult time grasping their significance. To Wadler, the press especially seemed to have reached a saturation point with the performance-enhancing question. It was all too complicated.

  THERE WAS frustration on the part of the antidoping agencies on many levels, most of all over the ability of the professional leagues to continue to stonewall their attempts to clean up sports. But unlike the public and the media, the Crusaders were not so easily thrown off the scent. As a group, the antidoping forces were highly suspicious of baseball players in particular. They were not convinced that Barry Bonds could weigh 185 po
unds as a twenty-one-year-old rookie and then weigh 228 with leaner muscle mass in his midthirties without drugs. It simply wasn’t possible medically. Robert Cantu focused on Mark McGwire’s retirement, for it was common knowledge in the medical community that certain injuries, patella tendonitis, for example, were often caused by overdeveloped bodies. In effect, when the body grew too big for the frame, the frame collapsed. It was no surprise to Cantu that McGwire’s joints had betrayed him, but for all the talk and suspicion about McGwire’s steroid use, it remained just speculation. That paralyzed the reporters, who simply did not have the expertise (and some in both the medical and journalistic communities would argue the professional stamina) to continue to follow the story. What the Crusaders needed to take the baseball discussion beyond rumor was for someone inside the game to let the big secret out.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jose Canseco left Oakland broken. His back was shot, and his skills were in sharp decline. It seemed all that remained was his ability to hit home runs. In 1998, he hit 46 of them for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was a surprising comeback. Canseco played 151 games with Toronto that year, driving in 107 runs and stealing 29 bases. Each of those totals was easily his most since 1991, his last year as one of the game’s truly great players. His 46 homers were a career high. Yet he was still a shell of the complete player he once was, as he was caught 17 times on the bases, and hit just .237. Still, he had followed Reggie Jackson’s famous advice perfectly: If you’re going to hit .240, Jackson always said, make sure you hit 40 homers when you do.

  For the man once considered the best player in the game, the comeback was a bittersweet moment. Being healthy and productive after his struggles in Oakland the year before was gratifying; if there was one thing he wanted, it was to prove at least one final time that he could be a high-level major league player. Yet 1998 also presented the worst kind of mirror for Canseco as his former Bash Brother, Mark McGwire, transcended the sport. The forecast had always called for Canseco to stand where McGwire now stood, a bitter irony that was certainly not lost on Canseco. It was just one more reminder of how much he had lost during the past seven years, of everything he should have accomplished.

  Canseco had never stopped using anabolic steroids, and he continued to use them even when doing so was a violation of his probation from numerous run-ins with the law. During his last few years in the majors, he was even given the nickname “The Chemist” because of his well-known experimenting with anabolic substances. In 1999, he played for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and was again productive, but injury-prone, playing in just 113 games. The following year, he was waived by the Devil Rays, the worst team in baseball, and picked up by the Yankees, who were on their way to their third straight World Championship. But the Yankees’ baseball people did not want him. As it turned out, the only reason Canseco wound up in New York was that the Yankees had placed a waiver claim on him to block him from the rival Red Sox, with whom the Yankees were locked in a fierce battle for the American League East and with whom Canseco had hit well in a pair of injury-shortened seasons before returning to Oakland. The expectation was that the Devil Rays, being foiled in their attempts to pass Canseco through to make a trade, would pull him off waivers, as usually happened in such cases. But because Canseco was an undesirable influence on a team that was going nowhere, the Rays let him go. George Steinbrenner, who coveted stars and remembered Canseco as once the game’s brightest, was the only member of the Yankees’ front office who was pleased.

  If the Jose Canseco of the big, bad Oakland days had always used a certain brashness to hide deep insecurities, Yankee officials remember the Canseco who arrived in New York to be gracious and humble, almost embarrassed to admit his own professional decay among such a group of dedicated, championship ballplayers. On that club, he was not memorable in any way, except in that his name stood so much taller than his skills. There was a time when the Yankees’ obtaining Jose Canseco would have been the biggest of coups, another example of Yankee luck and opulence. Now, he was a guy nobody wanted, not even the team that claimed him. That the Yankees did not even place Canseco on the postseason roster for the first two rounds of the playoffs was yet another reality he swallowed with humility.

  In 2001, Canseco played seventy-six games with the White Sox after failing to make the Angels out of spring training and spending some time playing alongside his brother Ozzie with the Independent League’s Newark Bears. The next year it was the Expos who cut him in the spring, and on May 14, 2002, after hitting .172 in eighteen games for the White Sox team in Triple-A Charlotte, Canseco announced his retirement. He would make one last unsuccessful attempt at a comeback in 2004, finally and pathetically for a player who once stood on the very peak of the mountain, at an open tryout with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  Canseco had played seventeen seasons, hit 462 home runs, and would prove to be one of the most tragic and enigmatic figures of his time, a player perceived to own tremendous gifts who reached the pinnacle of his profession only to be devoured by its excesses. A Hall of Fame career had been reduced to a curiosity, a test case for a new kind of baseball observer who was, if not obsessed with statistics, certainly greatly influenced by them. Canseco had put up raw numbers worthy of Hall consideration, and future generations might very well be taken by his early dominance, longevity, and well-above-average cumulative totals. Those who saw him play knew the truth went far beyond statistics. They would judge him harshly. “If Jose Canseco is ever in the Hall of Fame,” said one Hall of Fame player, “there shouldn’t be a Hall of Fame. He wasted more ability than most of us ever had.”

  There was nothing quiet about Canseco’s departure. When he quit, he dropped a final bomb on baseball: “There would be no baseball left if they drug-tested everyone today,” he told the Associated Press the week he retired. “It’s completely restructured the game as we know it. That’s why guys are hitting fifty or sixty or seventy-five home runs.” Claiming that baseball’s drug culture was out of control, he estimated that 85 percent of major leaguers were using steroids, and threatened to one day write a book about baseball’s deep denial of its drug problems. He said he knew of high-profile players who had used steroids just as he had, and that by no means was his doping an isolated occurrence. When the time came, Canseco promised, he would name names.

  It was a staggering claim that came at a time when baseball owners and the Players Association were in tense, difficult negotiations over a new contract, one that Bud Selig insisted would not be ratified without a steroid-testing component. The union had been reticent and suddenly one of the most visible players in the game, a former MVP stopped just short of 500 home runs, had indicted every clubhouse in baseball.

  Initially, Canseco would not reveal whether he had used steroids himself, but soon spoke of his own steroid use as well as the use that existed around him. Canseco said he had used steroids with each of the seven teams for which he had played. Although many in the game believed Canseco to be a transcendent talent, he was bitterly self-critical, saying that he did not believe he would have even made the big leagues without steroids. He showed no contrition, taking everyone down with him. Baseball, he contested, was well aware of the growing use of steroids and in many ways even encouraged their use by rewarding the biggest power hitters with the highest salaries. He also believed that steroids were not the scourge of the Crusaders’ research. Those were scare tactics. Canseco believed that taken properly, anabolic steroids could actually be a benefit to one’s health. The combination of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, Canseco reasoned, could extend life rather than extinguish it.

  Canseco was the first professional baseball player to admit to using steroids, and his testimony tore through the big leagues. Inside the game, he had become a Judas. He violated the ancient baseball code that declared that what happens in the clubhouse, stays in the clubhouse. Worse, Canseco’s allegations, coming in the wake of his retirement, turned the focus away from himself toward the active players. In Phoenix, Barry
Bonds was angry. “I think it’s just sad. I don’t know what Canseco’s frustration is. I like the guy personally. I just don’t understand where he’s going with it. Players didn’t do anything to Jose Canseco. We admired him as a player. Why would a ballplayer take shots at another ballplayer? It kind of reminds me of my ex-wife. You get pissed, you want half.

  “I get upset because you’re putting false things in a lot of kids’ minds,” Bonds said. “That’s what irks me, because there’s nothing we can really do about it to defend ourselves other than suing every newspaper for - every article that comes out. That’s basically what a lot of us want to do.”

  Less than a month later, Ken Caminiti, another onetime Most Valuable Player who had retired the previous season, dropped an atom bomb that seconded Canseco’s. In a Sports Illustrated cover story, Caminiti told Tom Verducci that he had used anabolic steroids during his career and had used them when he won the MVP for San Diego in the turning-point year of 1996. Caminiti did not stop there. Players took steroids because they worked, he said. They did wonders for his performance. Not only was he unrepentant about his use of the drugs, but he told Verducci that he would do it again given the opportunity and that he believed upward of half of all major league players were using steroids as well. “I’ve made a ton of mistakes,” Caminiti told Verducci. “I don’t think using steroids is one of them. . . . It’s no secret what’s going on in baseball. At least half the guys are using steroids. They talk about it. They joke about it with each other.”