Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  On a searing May afternoon in Atlanta, the guru bobs in his seat in the Turner Field dugout, looking more like a human rocking chair than the most successful pitching coach of his time. Leo Mazzone is a human study in kinetics, gum chomping, swaying pendulumlike. He is every bit a baseball man, mustachioed, moonfaced, fastidious. His navy-crowned, red-billed Braves cap protects a balding pate from an unforgiving Georgia sun. Mazzone is on a schedule this day, but is always ready to issue a favorite claim that his staff, the Atlanta Braves of the 1990s, comprised the greatest sustained pitching rotation in the history of the game. There is nothing conditional about this. Mazzone-speak is staccato. One flat fact follows another. No maybes, no supposes, no qualifications. Take any team you want, from his era, from yours or your grandfather’s, he says, and he’ll still beat you cold. Take the Palmer-McNally-Cuellar Baltimore Orioles of the late 1960s and early seventies, the Koufax-Drysdale-Osteen Dodgers of the midsixties, or the Wynn-Lemon-Garcia-Feller Indians of the 1950s. If those clubs are too distant and yellowed for the Internet age, Mazzone will give you a trio of hipsters, the Hudson-Mulder-Zito Oakland A’s of 2000-2004, the supposed heirs apparent, and still he will not blink. None of them, he says, confidently chewing and rocking, can come close to matching what Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz accomplished in Atlanta through three presidents, and a decade that represented nothing less than the greatest offensive era of the modern game.

  It wasn’t just longevity that made them great, Mazzone explains. It - wasn’t that they amassed every possible individual award a pitcher could want, not once, but multiple times. That raw data—six Cy Young awards, seven 20-win seasons, another six 18-win seasons, four ERA titles—is impressive enough, but what truly set these men apart, says Mazzone, was their greatness during the most treacherous period for pitchers in the game’s history.

  In the years that followed the 1994 strike, baseball had changed dramatically. Many inside the sport believed the game had embraced a more lively, high-scoring style of play that appealed to fans embittered by the strike. But the unacknowledged side effect of this increased offense was the ruinous effect it had on the game’s pitchers. The pitchers themselves believed that the era’s infatuation with home runs and high scores had devalued the art of pitching to such a point that it cheapened the game itself.

  To Curt Schilling, one of the premier power pitchers of his time, the change was obvious. “Just look at the game. Just look at the numbers. You don’t have to be a genius to see what’s going on.” Mike Mussina, the cerebral, obdurate ace of the New York Yankees, pointed out as evidence that in the American League in 1992, seven of the top ten leaders in earned run average owned ERAs below 3.00, while John Smiley’s 3.21 was only good for tenth. Mussina then compared that to 2000, when nine of the ten American League leaders possessed an ERA over 3.69, and David Wells’s 4.11 was sixth best in the league. Mussina himself posted a 2.54 ERA in 1992 and a 3.79 ERA in 2000; both were good for third in the American League.

  The pitchers attributed this shift to several changes in the game. They thought that baseball encouraged the construction of hitter-friendly parks. They knew that improved video technology had produced reams of DVDs and videotapes of their motions, allowing hitters to watch and rewatch their strengths and their weaknesses. They also knew that hitters were using harder bats made of maple and dipped in lacquer in place of the untreated ash bats of old.

  Most significantly, two of the tools that pitchers most needed to be effective were being taken away, piece by piece, year by year: the strike zone, which had shrunken worse than a wool sweater after a wash, and the freedom to intimidate hitters by throwing inside. The pitcher’s world was closing in on him. They were settlers being driven off their land. Hitters were now allowed to stand on top of the plate with impunity. In the old days, thought Greg Maddux, a hitter tried to take the inside side of the plate, while the pitcher controlled the outside. Now, hitters wanted it all. They were allowed to wear so much protective shoulder and elbow padding that the fear that once accompanied hitting was virtually extinct. They dared the pitcher to beat them inside while diving over the plate to drive the ball to the opposite field. All of this spelled death for pitchers, or at least for their earned run averages.

  The baseball itself was always a spirited topic of discussion. Where they were made, who controlled their consistency, and how recent events contributed to their manufacturing—or to the conspiracy theorists, their manipulation—was always at issue. Was the ball juiced in 1987, when home runs increased by 17 percent? Was it less tight the following year, when offense slipped back to the levels of 1986? Did the balls manufactured in Haiti carry better than the ones made in the Dominican Republic? And if so, was it a coincidence?

  In May 2000 Bud Selig sent Sandy Alderson to Costa Rica to investigate the baseball. Alderson left the Rawlings factory in Turrialba convinced that the ball was unchanged from the previous season. Still, Alderson believed the trip was in part fruitless; there were too many variables involved—from the actual cowhide which may have varied from year to year, to the personnel—to make an accurate assessment.

  For their part, the players, pitchers and hitters alike, remained convinced the ball was tighter. Across the game, pitchers, especially curveball pitchers, found a higher percentage of their pitches lacked their natural movement. David Wells was angered that the newly manufactured baseballs were wound so tightly that he couldn’t find the proper grip, making his trademark curveball wildly inconsistent. The ball was too smooth, Wells thought, estimating that only one in every ten balls he used during a game had seams raised high enough for him to dig his fingers into the ball to give the ball some action. Barry Zito, the great Oakland curveball specialist, believed the same. The ball was so hard that controlling it was difficult. Billy Sample, a former big league outfielder who worked with baseball’s new media division, joked that if the balls were any harder, Rawlings would have to print “Titlelist” on them, a reference to the golf ball manufacturer. As his feats continued to astound, Barry Bonds told Joe Morgan in 2003 that he believed the ball to be not only tighter than it was a decade earlier, but also smaller. Ken Macha, the manager of the Oakland A’s who had a collection of 1987 balls in his garage from his days as an Expos coach, was convinced that no part of the game had been juiced like the baseball itself.

  Then there was the issue of drugs. When Ken Caminiti charged that as many as half the players in baseball used steroids, the group of players that was least surprised was the pitchers. The hitters already had the advantages, or so the pitchers believed, but now steroids and other supplements made them more powerful than ever. Convinced that drug use was yet another factor that would lead to their demise, pitchers became some of the loudest critics of steroid use inside the game.

  If there was a feeling among some baseball men that the Players Association did not move decisively enough (or at all, some said) to protect its membership from a scandal that put into question the greatest achievements of the decade, many pitchers believed the reason was that the group leading the fight to rid the game of anabolic substances was the pitchers. Steroids would have never been allowed had pitching been the signature quality of the 1990s, went the pitchers’ argument. Had the steroid era been dominated by a generation of fireballing pitchers instead of long-ball bashers, the game’s leadership certainly would have stepped in and investigated.

  Curt Schilling was one of the more hawkish pitchers. He was convinced that steroids not only were prevalent in the game, but had undermined its balance. One of the more articulate players in the game, Schilling possessed a great deal of respect for the game’s history. Unlike most baseball players, he seemed to understand the importance of baseball’s record book and the damage a decade of suspicion over drugs could inflict on it. Schilling, along with a small community of pitchers, believed that, within the union, the steroid debate came down to the big-money hitters versus the big-money pitchers. It was a fight the
pitchers could not win, despite their protestations. “If anyone complained inside the union, it was the pitchers,” thought Bob Klapisch. “They were the ones getting killed in this new era. They were the ones who saw their livelihoods under assault every day. But they also knew that they weren’t going to get the kind of audience they wanted because no one would back them. Curt Schilling was the loudest, but no one would listen. It was a road no one wanted to go down on their behalf.” It was as if they had been pitching at a supreme disadvantage, not only on the playing field, but also in the halls of power.

  This, thought one key baseball executive, was another creative piece of fiction. If the pitchers as a group were so upset about steroids, then why - hadn’t the biggest names in pitching used their influence inside the union to fight the steroid taint? As big a name as Sammy Sosa was, he was no bigger than Roger Clemens. Alex Rodriguez was no greater a superstar than Pedro Martinez. Clearly, if the pitchers were as outraged and organized as they were purported to be, they very easily could have had a powerful voice in the discussion. Then the executive began to receive informational reports from the baseball drug czar Elliot Pellman, and he found out why the pitchers were less visible than they claimed. As it turned out, baseball had reason to suggest that pitchers were not just victims, but steroid users as well.

  If the first myth about steroids was that they did not help hitters, the second was that they did not aid pitchers. Pitchers were difficult to gauge; theirs was the most unpredictable and unique of skills. There was no physiological constant that could determine which pitcher would be able to throw ninety-seven miles per hour, but that didn’t mean that pitchers weren’t under suspicion. On the face of it, steroids would seem to help pitchers just as much as position players. Pitching stemmed first from natural velocity, but also from the strength of a pitcher’s legs, his back, and his shoulder muscles. Strengthening those muscles coupled with good mechanics could enhance a pitcher’s velocity. Or so it would seem. Some doctors believed that the muscles of the shoulder were so delicate and intricate that increasing muscle in the shoulder area could actually be detrimental to a pitcher’s career.

  Still, Schilling was sure that for all of their complaints that steroids were crushing their ability to compete, pitchers were also using steroids. Schilling cited peers who once threw in the low nineties but now could throw four to five miles per hour faster. Once, during a segment of ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, Bobby Valentine, the former manager of the Mets and Rangers, said he was amazed by the new phenomenon of pitchers’ gaining velocity. Billy Beane, the Oakland general manager, was taken by the increase in velocity of pitchers as well. Beane, always working without deep financial resources in Oakland, prided himself on being more alert and creative than his better-financed competitors. There was no way, he thought, that he could have missed out on all these hard-throwing pitchers who were filling up bullpens across the league. During the baseball season, advance scouts would remark about which pitchers saw their velocities fluctuate the most. Oftentimes, the scouts would come to the same conclusion. “He’s cycling,” they’d say, using the term for a steroid cycle, and would tip off reporters and their own clubs about the pitchers to watch. If hitters came under suspicion for unexpected career-high home run totals, opposing players constantly made mention of the pitchers, usually middle relievers who had been average for years, who suddenly threw harder and more often and with more success.

  Withal, pitchers were convinced that the historical framework of pitching during the era had been altered forever. David Wells was of the mind that at the highest levels of leadership, the game had chosen not only offense, but offense over the pitcher, and that there was no innovation in baseball in recent memory that actually helped the pitchers. In this sense, the pitchers were absolutely right. If baseball during the decade had undergone a sea change in its marketing with the wild card, interleague play, and a healthy encouragement of the long ball, then whatever pitching once was over the course of baseball history it would be no more.

  THE BIGGEST concern of all, however, was the strike zone. Leo Mazzone sensed an odd tremor in 1999 when Greg Maddux, the most precise pitcher of his time, could no longer throw strikes in the manner of the Maddux of old. Since he had elevated himself from a great pitcher into a legendary one in the early nineties, Maddux had never been hit as hard as he was in 1999, to the point that he posted his worst ERA since his rookie season with the Cubs in 1987. Tom Glavine was in the same suddenly perilous position. Having won twenty games the previous season, Glavine won only fourteen in 1999, gave up the most hits of his career, and suffered his highest ERA in nearly a decade. Something was going on. Mazzone thought about his time in Atlanta dating back to June 1990 when he and manager Bobby Cox took over a last-place Braves team and came to a concrete conclusion: The strike zone was getting smaller, with baseball’s tacit permission.

  “That was the year Maddux for the first time in his career gave up more hits than innings pitched, and I don’t think all of a sudden they were off-target,” Mazzone said. Glavine and Maddux were craftsmen. They lived on the pointy black corners of the plate. They lived on guile, on smarts, and on the strike zone being what it was supposed to be. They weren’t blazers, like Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, or Roger Clemens, men who could challenge hitters in any area of the strike zone and win through sheer power. Hard throwers lived the life. They could often beat a hitter even with bad location, their velocity being the equalizer. With Maddux and Glavine, each pitch set up the next. Location was everything. The difference, Mazzone thought, was that now they - couldn’t find the plate.

  To Greg Maddux, the differences were subtle, yet powerful. He noticed that pitchers were throwing more pitches to get out of innings. “On the days I’m not pitching, I chart missed pitches. You know, the ones where it’s strike three, right there, inning over,” Maddux said. “Now, you end up throwing ten or fifteen more pitches per inning. Multiply that a couple innings a game by thirty-two starts.”

  Mazzone cringed imagining the potential ripple effect. Glavine and Maddux were at the top of the profession, Hall of Fame-caliber pitchers who on any sliding scale received the benefit of all close pitches. If they - weren’t getting calls, what was happening all over the league to the rookies, the journeymen, the average pitchers with no reputation to rely on?

  A career baseball man, Mazzone remained politic. He didn’t want to go so far as to say that baseball, in its lust for home runs—chicks, after all, dug the long ball—had conspired against the pitcher. What he did believe, though, was that the game was moving in a direction far away from that which allowed pitchers to be at their best. David Wells was never burdened by such restraint. Wells was one of the few people willing to say what virtually everyone in baseball knew: Umpires had become drunk with power. Ken Macha believed the umpires had two different zones: The first was from innings one through seven, and the other was for the final two. “Bases loaded, two out in the ninth, and Jason Giambi up in a tie game at Yankee Stadium. Do you really think they’ll call that borderline strike to end the game? Forget it. Take your base.” Some pitchers thought it was impossible to even massage the zone with the traditional give-and-take that had characterized pitcher-umpire communication for more than a century. The ump would call what he wanted when he wanted. He chose the situation. He chose which pitchers would receive the benefit of the doubt and which would get nothing.

  “It was like ‘right down the middle, ball one,’” David Wells said one June afternoon at Fenway Park in 2004. “If you got in the umpire’s face, you were going to get less than the shit calls you were already getting. Pitchers didn’t have a chance. But that was the way they wanted it.”

  FOR YEARS, Sandy Alderson had been considered one of the smartest executives in baseball, so much a rising star that his name was often mentioned as a leading successor to Bud Selig. In 1999, after eighteen years with the Oakland A’s, Alderson joined the commissioner’s office to become a baseball vice president, Bud Selig�
��s number-three man, behind Paul Beeston, the former Toronto executive who won consecutive championships with the Blue Jays in 1992 and ’93.

  Alderson was equal parts tough and intellectual. He graduated from Dartmouth and Harvard Law, yet did eight months in Vietnam. In the late 1960s, he was featured on a recruiting poster for the Marine Corps. He was rangy, yet in shape, but with a receding hairline and small glasses that made him look bookish. In a baseball environment that tended to place a premium on outward physicality, Sandy Alderson could easily be underestimated. His style, however, was clearly one of confidence, if not in some cases outward confrontation. The reporters who covered Alderson, as well as many of the men who negotiated contracts across the bargaining table from him, often remarked about how he used his intelligence and wit to intimidate. There was something quite primitive about dealing with Alderson. He seemed not to have a great deal of respect for passivity or perceived weakness. “Everything with Sandy had an edge about it,” said one baseball official who has dealt with Alderson for years. “He wanted to know if you were up for it. If he thought you - weren’t, he’d just kill you, tear you apart. If you did not challenge him, I never met a person who could make you feel dumber, less adequate than Sandy Alderson.”

  Billy Beane called Alderson the smartest, most ethical person in baseball he’d ever been around. When the A’s looked to trade Mark McGwire at the 1997 trading deadline, the offers were weak. McGwire would be a free agent at the end of the season and few teams saw reason to unload premium prospects for a player who could be had for the right price that winter. At the time, Beane was Alderson’s assistant and was due to take over as general manager at the end of the season. As the deadline approached, the best deal was with St. Louis. It was, Beane noted, a terrible deal. “I pleaded with Sandy not to make the deal,” Beane recalled. “I told him we were better off letting McGwire walk as a free agent and taking the draft pick as compensation.” Alderson did not listen. He traded McGwire to the Cardinals for Eric Ludwick, Blake Stein, and T. J. Mathews. The fallout was terrible, and when the press excoriated the A’s for trading away the last piece of their dynasty for peanuts, Alderson sat there and took all the heat. Question after question, Sandy Alderson was battered. Beane remembered being amazed at the public flogging Alderson and the organization had just endured. In the parking lot that night, Alderson told Billy Beane why he made the deal. “I didn’t want you to have to deal with this as your first act as GM,” Alderson said. To Beane, it was the quintessential Sandy Alderson story.