AT SAN Diego’s old Jack Murphy Stadium a framed Sports Illustrated cover featuring Ken Caminiti loomed over the dining area, a loud, electric guitar riff of a glossy photo announcing the next great leader on the most unlikely of teams. Biceps bulging, Caminiti is the biker-as-warrior, harmlessly snarling as he relishes his newfound leadership status. It is a remnant from a time when Ken Caminiti had seemed perfect, the marketing department’s newest candidate to be the face of baseball and the Padres’ last best hope.
With his tattoos, a thick goatee, and wild eyes, Caminiti struck a chord with the game’s youth. He was the rock star as power hitter. Like Griffey, he put on home run-hitting displays in batting practice with his baseball cap backward, a small but rebellious gesture. Caminiti was white, which allowed him easier entrée to the role of being the public face of his team, and his bulldog style of play appealed to his teammates, both black and white. Caminiti also connected with the fans who so often watched him play hurt, watched him struggle to stay in the lineup. He might have been an excellent baseball player, but the game certainly did not look easy for him. Fans liked that. Few could identify with the feeling of being so gifted at anything, never mind athletics, that they - could make hard work look like eating an ice cream cone. A player such as Caminiti, who seemed determined to succeed even at the cost of being able to walk properly, proved the most sympathetic of characters.
Ironically, it was exactly that determination to succeed despite the cost that led Caminiti to steroids. He used steroids because of how much stronger they made him feel, and because of how they made the injuries that had suppressed his production for so many years begin to disappear. He had first used steroids to recover from a shoulder injury in 1995. He acquired them in Mexico, where steroids were easily obtainable. San Diego was less than an hour from Tijuana, which made access to a host of prescription and illegal drugs easy. When drug enforcement agencies attempted to crack down on drug trafficking from Mexico in the early 1990s, San Diego was of particular interest.
Caminiti’s steroid use coincided with the increasing lack of control he had over his life. His numbers were great—during the mid-1990s, he improved in virtually every statistical category—but Caminiti possessed a darker, more dangerous side that was not so marketable. He had increasing difficulty controlling his emotions. To those inside the walls of baseball, ’roid rage had never been proven, and neither had the increased likelihood of depression associated with steroids. In their eyes, such things were just another scare tactic from the doctors designed to keep players from making more money, but Caminiti suffered from both. He was also a drug addict. As one baseball insider put it, “As drugs went, steroids were the least of Ken Caminiti’s problems.” Caminiti entered a drug rehabilitation clinic in Houston twice for addiction to alcohol and painkillers, and would later be arrested for possession of crack cocaine. By 2001, he regularly sought psychiatric help.
Ravaged by abuses, Caminiti’s body began to break down once more. The steroids no longer helped. Had anyone bothered to listen, Bob Cantu could have told them that the steroids Caminiti was using were Faustian: For a time they made a player powerful. Then, at the apex of the curve, the bill came due; the same drug that once helped now tore away at a player’s vitality. That underside of steroid use was the reason Mark McGwire had always been under such suspicion. Two seasons after a 65-homer season, McGwire was gone. In 2001, Caminiti, too, retired suddenly, his body broken by too many hard slides into second, too many diving stops at third base, too many cortisone shots, too much of everything.
Caminiti’s words a year later were seismic, both for their content and because of the source. Canseco might have been telling the truth, but he was a wild card, prone to the outrageous, desperate to regain his influence, and easy to dismiss. Caminiti was different. He was a good teammate who never seemed to crave the publicity that came with being a professional baseball player. He had more recently been considered one of the elite players in the game, and along with Tony Gwynn, had been the most recognizable player on the Padres teams that made the playoffs in 1996 and the World Series in 1998. If Canseco’s assertions were considered unreliable, then Caminiti’s confirmation changed the conventional wisdom. This was no teary confession, but a chest-thumping proclamation that the juice worked. It worked exactly the way Gary Wadler and Chuck Yesalis said it did. It worked well enough, in fact, that both Caminiti and Canseco had been crowned the best players in their leagues thanks to steroids. Suspicion transformed itself into reasonable doubt. Now, virtually every homer that cleared the fence would have trouble passing the smell test. The secret was out. The Crusaders were vindicated.
Caminiti’s revelation to Sports Illustrated was one of the most important demarcating lines of the decade. The myth that elite baseball players couldn’t benefit from using steroids was dead. During the years Caminiti admitted to using steroids, his home run totals didn’t merely jump, they doubled. The collective thinking shifted. If steroids could take a very good player and make him a great one, what could those drugs do to a superbly gifted athlete? Kenny Rogers, the Rangers’ ace, said what few players would ever admit publicly: “Basically, steroids can jump you a level or two. The average player can become a star and the star player can become a superstar. And the superstar? Forget it. He can do things we’ve never seen before.”
As with Canseco, some players saw Caminiti as a colossal betrayer of the fraternal order of ballplayers, a Benedict Arnold in spikes, the same thing that Jim Bouton had been called when his own account of baseball’s trade secrets, Ball Four, was first published in 1970. Bouton revealed to the world what most everyone in baseball already knew, and what most people outside it suspected: Players took amphetamines. They cheated on their wives. They had girls in different cities. They weren’t particularly fond of management. Ball Four sold more than two million copies, but Bouton paid a price for his candor. He remembered being on the mound against Cincinnati after the book had come out, when he heard the voice of Pete Rose bellowing from the top step of the dugout, “Fuck you, Shakespeare!” He was forced into retirement the next year and, aside from a brief comeback with Ted Turner’s Atlanta Braves in 1978, never worked in baseball again.
Then something odd occurred: Instead of hollow denials, a growing number of players took the offensive. For a time, and on their terms, players were not only candid about the drug use they believed was occurring around them, but also were candid about access. Winter baseball leagues in Latin America provided great access to anabolic steroids, amphetamines, and a host of powerful pain-killing medicines. This was especially true of Mexico. Players, who were afforded elite status and thus were not always subject to the type of baggage searches that ordinary - people faced, could smuggle a year’s supply of anabolic steroids in from one season of Winter Ball. Curt Schilling knew steroid use existed on the fringes of the game, but was surprised at how fast drugs had become widespread in major league clubhouses. To this point the players had not articulated a particularly strong or even consistent position on steroids; the players’ strategy would be to avoid public discussion of steroids and to discourage anyone from broaching the subject at all. Internally, however, many players knew that the existence of steroids in the game was changing their lives.
AS MARK McGwire made history with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1998, the Oakland A’s were in the midst of their sixth consecutive losing season, but for the first time since the year of the Canseco trade, they were feeling optimistic, and A. J. Hinch was one of the main reasons why. Ever since his boyhood in Oklahoma, A. J. Hinch appeared destined to be a baseball player. While the game was never easy for him, he always succeeded. A catcher who attended prestigious Stanford University, like Bob Boone, the star catcher for the Phillies’ lone World Championship, he possessed the combination of intellect and determination that scouts and baseball - people liked and was earnest in a confident, unpretentious way. Hinch won a gold medal with the 1996 U.S. Olympic team in Atlanta, and became the third-round
pick of a rebuilding Oakland team that would give him the chance to learn at the major league level. Along with Ben Grieve, Eric Chavez, Miguel Tejada, and Jason Giambi, A. J. Hinch was to be part of a core group of young players who were expected to return the A’s to their glory days of the late 1980s.
Upon arriving in the majors, Hinch became a student of Mike Macfarlane, a veteran catcher with Oakland who was at the end of a distinguished career. Macfarlane was the ultimate professional, playing the game without excuses despite a back so painful he could barely run to first base. He taught Hinch, who was a voracious learner, the intricacies of catching. The A’s two veteran pitchers, Kenny Rogers and Tom Candiotti, both thought Hinch had exactly the right temperament to handle a pitching staff. He was a bright young kid who called a good game and he appeared to have all the tools and opportunity needed to make it in the major leagues.
Yet from the start of his rookie season, A. J. Hinch struggled at the plate. Hinch always had power, but a slow bat and poor pitch recognition hurt him early and he finished his rookie season with a .231 average. Still, he was considered to be a major part of the team’s future, so the rebuilding A’s absorbed his struggles at the plate as part of the learning process.
Hinch reminded Ken Macha, the A’s bench coach, of his own son, Eric, in that both were supreme perfectionists. In a baseball sense, this was not entirely a compliment, for Macha thought one of Hinch’s greatest troubles was his inability to release negativity from his mind. He would obsess about one bad swing in one at-bat. A good big league hitter needed to clear his mind of negative thoughts as quickly as they appeared. A. J. Hinch, his Oakland coaches thought, couldn’t do that. Hinch didn’t take bad at-bats with him just during the game, but through the next day, during breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Macha believed Hinch’s high intelligence prevented him from forgetting. People who did exceptionally well in school, Macha believed, had great difficulty with being unable to explain or let go of moments when they did poorly. Hinch was too busy analyzing, thinking about his failures instead of forgetting about them and moving on.
After three seasons, the A’s ran out of patience. Having finally returned to the playoffs with an impressive young catcher named Ramon Hernandez behind the plate, Oakland traded Hinch to Kansas City in a three-team deal that netted outfielder Johnny Damon. From that point forward Hinch would live the unglamorous, intensely difficult life of a player on the margin of the big leagues. He was close to sticking with clubs, parts of two seasons with the Royals, another with the Tigers, and later with the Phillies, but not close enough. He would grow frustrated by coaches who would offer encouraging words and then send him back to Triple-A. He had married after his rookie season, but the itinerant life of a cusp player became his life.
For A. J. Hinch, steroid use was a fact of his major league existence. The margins were so thin for players that a little more distance on a fly ball, a little more velocity on a fastball, or a bit more durability could be the difference between earning a big league salary worth several hundred thousand dollars a year and the lousy $1,200-per-month pay in the minors. That made steroid use a critical issue. In a culture obsessed with celebrity and transgression, linking steroids and a star player was always big news, but A. J. Hinch knew from his own experience that steroids had the greatest impact on the players who wouldn’t be in the big leagues without them and the men who had to fight those players for jobs.
One night in 2001, Hinch, frustrated, sat with his wife, Erin, and told her that if he decided to use anabolic steroids, there was no doubt in his mind that his modest power numbers would improve enough to make him a more attractive backup catcher, maybe even give him a chance at being a starter. Hinch was against steroids, to some degree because he believed their use to be cheating, but mostly because they scared him. During his freshman year at Stanford, his father died of a heart attack, and he did not want to risk his own health. Heart trouble threatened the Hinch men. A. J.’s father died at the age of thirty-nine. His grandfather died at fifty-five, also from heart trouble. Hinch’s family history scared him, not only from steroids, but also from the amphetamines that were part of the baseball culture. “It’s a life choice. Heart problems ran in our family and I didn’t need anything to speed up the process,” Hinch said. “I grew up idolizing the Olympic athletes. I grew up seeing Ben Johnson test positive in 1988. I remember doing a paper on steroids in college and I remember thinking there wasn’t a benefit that outweighed the cons. Are you going to threaten your future so you can hit the ball a little farther or throw a little harder? When you think about it, it is kind of ridiculous, even if it costs you salary or a position on the team.” But now he was forced to tell his wife that, by not using steroids, he might be costing their family millions of dollars in future earnings.
As a player representative for Kansas City, Hinch found out he wasn’t alone. There were dozens of players in his situation, guys who were competing against other players whose use of steroids gave them an unfair, highly lucrative advantage. Maybe it was sour grapes. Unsuccessful ballplayers, like everyone else, need to find reasons for their lack of success. Or maybe there was a great deal of truth to it. In either case, Hinch began to notice, during the negotiations with owners, that a once-silent majority among the players was beginning to rise in volume. Yet many on the outside were unconvinced that this silent majority existed. The truth was that no one was quite sure how the players felt. Even as late as 2002, when baseball was negotiating with the Players Association over the inevitability of a drug policy, there were only a few players who were vocal enough for the public to know where they stood. One of those players was Frank Thomas, the superstar first baseman of the Chicago White Sox. Thomas believed that steroids needed to be outlawed and said so frequently. As for the majority of the players, steroids were simply so taboo a subject that few were willing to put their feelings on the record.
Inside the game it was another story. Frank Menechino, a utility infielder who fought for each piece of major league turf he ever possessed, recalled strong discussion among the players whose positions in the big leagues were more tentative. Hinch was right. A growing group of players were tired of having their achievements undermined by the impression that steroids, rather than sweat, were becoming the assumed reason for a given player’s success. “After Caminiti, the silent majority gained momentum,” said Buster Olney, who covered the Yankees for the New York Times during the late 1990s. “I think the players badly wanted testing. They were tired of being smeared.”
The players knew that the difference between a 90-mile-per-hour fastball and a 95-mile-per-hour heater was also the difference between being in big league Chicago and minor league Calgary. They knew that the 6 home runs between an 8- and a 14-homer season was what separated the Park Hyatt and the $300,000 minimum salary from the Red Roof Inn and starvation pay. To A. J. Hinch, what wasn’t being discussed in enough detail was the enormous pressure that existed in the pro game. There was pressure to get to the big time. There was pressure to stay there. There was pressure to take steroids to keep up with the players who took your job by a hair. There was pressure to be durable enough to remain on the field first to perform at a high level and second to prevent management from holding a player’s lack of durability over a long season against him. The pressure was so great and the rewards so large that, unless controls came from the game’s leadership, players were likely to do anything to gain an edge.
Such desperation was not an exaggeration. Tony LaRussa sensed a similar phenomenon among younger minor leaguers, who believed they could not compete without steroids. Sometimes desperation produced horror. In the Dominican Republic, where anabolic steroids were legal but fairly expensive, aspiring baseball players often experimented with veterinary-grade steroids, such as Equipoise, a powerful steroid designed for horses, or Caballin, a bastardized black-market cousin. Others tried Diamino, another veterinary steroid. The key was not merely to emulate the superstars who came back to the island in the offsea
son rich beyond imagination, flaunting their wealth in front of impressionable kids the same way a George Bell or Pedro Guerrero did to a young Sammy Sosa, but to put themselves in the position of catching the eye of the hundreds of big league scouts that scoured the Dominican Republic for the next Miguel Tejada. Lino Ortiz, a nineteen-year-old prospect who had failed in two tryouts and saw his third, this one with Philadelphia, as a make-or-break moment, shot himself up with a substance thought to be an animal steroid. Ortiz went into shock and died.
Along the margins, the demand for change grew, incrementally at first, and then with more energy.
The change didn’t come from the stars. David Justice, an All-Star outfielder who played fourteen years in the big leagues, didn’t recall a great groundswell among the players for a strong steroid-testing policy, because it was not an issue that affected the livelihood of players of his ilk. David Justice, with or without anabolic steroids, would have been a star at the major league level. The same was true of Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi, Barry Bonds, and Ken Griffey. Steroid use was not a professional life-and-death issue for the elite players in the game.
The problem was that, in baseball, a player’s influence is measured by his batting average and his bank account. And the players who needed the steroid issue to be dealt with forcefully did not have numbers large enough in either department to command a presence at union meetings. More critically, there was a severe lack of consensus within the union. Some players, such as Frank Thomas, wanted the strictest testing possible. If that meant a loss of some personal freedoms, such as being forced to notify drug-testing officials that you were going to be out of the country on a family trip, so be it. That’s how important this issue was to them. There were others, Anaheim’s Garret Anderson, for example, who viewed testing as an invasion of privacy. Testing opened up serious questions in an industry where trust was not at a premium. What would they be testing for? How could the player be sure those tests wouldn’t be used against him, especially in a contract year? There were international questions for the Latino players. Anabolic steroids were largely legal in Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Could a player use substances that were legal in his own country, even though they were prohibited in the United States? It was the androstenedione debate all over again, but on an international scale. More basically, wasn’t the foundation of drug testing, regardless of intention, a presupposition of guilt? Anderson was particularly hawkish on the issue. This lack of agreement on testing undermined the notion of a silent majority.
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