It was one of the reasons he found the notion of a league-wide conspiracy toward offense so maddening. For him, there were just too many moving parts for it to be a conspiracy. Alderson thought the notion that the game resembled some giant marionette with the league pulling its strings and steering it in a nefarious direction was preposterous. He would listen to the insinuation that the ballparks of the 1990s were built with the intention of creating more offense and blanch. It wasn’t that he - didn’t think the parks were more offensively geared; he just didn’t believe it was organized. If anything, Alderson thought, it was more likely there was no plan in place instead of a master one. “We didn’t even have anyone checking the plans for these new stadiums in the commissioner’s office,” he recalled. “If anything, an owner would tell someone their plans and it would get rubber stamped. There wasn’t anyone with the position in the commissioner’s office to do that.” Alderson also thought about the contentious relationship the league maintained with its umpires. There was no possible way a rational person could suggest that baseball was in cahoots with the umpires. The two sides had, for years, owned a relationship as nasty and contentious as that between the players and the owners. “If we tried to influence the umpires, I don’t think,” Alderson said, “that it would be a secret for very long.”
In this regard, Alderson and Donald Fehr tended to share a similar vision. Fehr would point to the fact that the aggregate number of home runs in both leagues had increased in both 2003 and 2004, the first two years of major league drug testing. How was that possible, he would ask, if steroids were so responsible for increased offense? Fehr would look at baseball both during the poststrike era and throughout its history and see it as too dynamic to be explained with one simple hypothesis. What seemed more applicable was chaos theory. Fehr considered baseball to be a complex adaptive system in which the various parts did not subscribe to predictable patterns. X did not correspond to Y, and if it did, then it might produce a chain reaction whereby A corresponded to C instead of B. Each subtle change could have either a direct or an unintended effect on the system as a whole, or none at all, and that effect might not be understood for years to come. The variables were too many to consider.
Alderson also saw the decade in complex terms, and found himself grappling with the same questions as the players. He was convinced that baseball’s shift toward the increased drafting of offensive players was one of the great unmentioned factors of the decade. He thought about the Cuban shortstop Rey Ordonez, who was briefly a sensation for the New York Mets in the late 1990s. Before long, Ordonez was gone. “No matter how good a fielder he was,” Alderson said, “there was no place for him to play.” Terry Pendleton, who won the 1991 National League Most Valuable Player award with Atlanta, believed that technology couldn’t be underestimated, either. “When I first started playing, you couldn’t go into the clubhouse and look at video in between at-bats,” he said in 2004. “You don’t know how much that helps. It’s like being able to correct your mistakes during the game. With today’s technology, you don’t even have to wait until tomorrow to test out what you learned.” To Pendleton, that technology did not stop in the video room, but continued with better, harder bats and better coaches. The hitting coaches of today, Pendleton believed, were more specialized, their teaching tools more sophisticated. Hitting techniques and technology were now two steps ahead of the pitcher. The result was increased offensive production.
Steroids received the most attention, but the vexing question to baseball people was whether there were factors equal to or more powerful than drugs that had influenced the era. To Tony Gwynn, whose love for hitting was not unlike that of the great Ted Williams, one of the great laments was that steroids were such a toxic issue that these other forces could never be discussed properly. Placing weight and value on each of the various elements that created the hitter’s era, Gwynn believed, was a topic that should have energized people in baseball. It was, after all, their game.
The questions mounted. Did the enormous size of the modern player, due to the combination of better nutrition, year-round weightlifting, and supplement and steroid use, have more influence on the era than a decade of construction of stadiums that players believed enhanced offense? Did an increasingly minuscule strike zone contribute to huge offensive seasons more than a decade of weak pitching due to the expansion of the league from twenty-six teams to thirty? Was the use of a tighter, smoother, livelier ball more significant than the technology and new approach hitters were employing due to the increased availability of video and the increased quality of their bats?
Having concluded that, in the modern era, there had never been a prolonged period of offensive output as great as that in the years following the strike, Bill James began to deconstruct the decade’s individual components. For a time, James was convinced the ballparks were central to the change in offense in the decade. After all, most of the new parks were smaller than the old. Camden Yards was smaller than old Memorial Stadium. The introduction of major league ball in Colorado was good for increased run output because of the high altitude and thin air. Even the old ballparks that were still in use but had been renovated, such as those in Anaheim and even Oakland, tended to be more hitter-friendly. Besides, it just made sense. A new element had been introduced to the game, and it seemed to coincide with more runs being scored around the league. Plus, word of mouth, that great equalizer, gave the smaller-park theory weight. If everyone was talking about it, James said, it must be true. Then, he tested a theory:
There are so many changes taking place in the game so quickly that it is hard, if not impossible, to know how much of the net change results from each one. As to the parks . . . I used to believe that the ballparks were primarily responsible for changing the level of offense. I was forced to change this opinion (and admit that I was wrong) after studying the issue in this way:
Although the parks have changed enormously, in any five-year period you can find a good array of parks which have not been changed at all. Let’s say 1990 to 1995 . . . yes, there is a new park in Colorado (Mile High Stadium at that time), there are new parks in Baltimore, Chicago, and Cleveland, but Fenway Park didn’t change in that era, Yankee Stadium didn’t, Royals Stadium didn’t, Tiger Stadium didn’t, etc. That’s from memory, but you get my point; in any five-year period, a certain number of parks are “constants.”
You can distinguish between the changes in run scoring level resulting from the new parks and the changes resulting from other factors, then, by focusing on run scoring levels in the new parks, and run scoring levels in the old parks. In other words, suppose that in the Modern League there are 4.000 runs per game in 1990, and 4.500 in 1995. If the data is this:
Constant Parks in 1990 3.800
Constant Parks in 1995 4.300
Other Parks in 1990 4.200
Other Parks in 1995 4.700
Then you would have to conclude that the changes are not in the parks, but in something else. If, on the other hand, the data is this:
Constant Parks in 1990 4.000
Constant Parks in 1995 4.000
Other Parks in 1990 4.000
Other Parks in 1995 5.000
Then one would have to conclude that the change in runs scored is due to the new parks.
About five years ago, I did a series of studies like this, focusing on constant and changing parks, and studying the increases in runs scored in each. My conclusion was that the new parks accounted for less than 20 percent of the increase in runs scored. 80 percent or more was caused by other factors.
If James is to be believed, then the theory that smaller parks had produced greater run output had been reduced to a popular myth. Sandy Alderson questioned James’s findings, convinced the ballparks were a major part of the decade. Since 1989, nineteen new parks had been introduced to the game. Their impact may not have been felt over individual five-year periods, Alderson thought, but there had to be some cumulative effect.
If Bill James had an an
swer when asked about the influence of the ballpark boom on the game’s offensive explosion, he was unable to get a handle on the steroid question. Though he was not convinced that steroids had played a significant role in increasing offense, and tended to take the approach that the emphasis on steroids cheapened what should have been a more reasoned discussion, he was unable to back up his opinions with fact. To James only the 60-plus homer seasons of Bonds, Sosa, and McGwire could be examined, because they represented the only true anomalies. “Obviously there are substances which impact a player’s performance. But saying specifically what the effects are, in the statistics, is either a) impossible, or b) beyond me. The problem is that, with the exception of the odd case like the 65-homer players, whatever is done by one player with steroids will be done by others without them. Ken Caminiti on steroids posted the same batting numbers that Henry Aaron did without them. I don’t know how one could learn to distinguish the ‘real’ or innate ability from the juiced up numbers.”
To Reggie Jackson, this argument was pure fiction, a ruse. For Jackson, there was a clear line that could be drawn between the feats of the nineties and every other era in baseball history. To Ken Macha, who grew up in Pittsburgh and considered the great Willie Stargell a hero, Bill James missed a critical element of the discussion, cementing Macha’s belief that too much emphasis on the numbers was fatal. To Macha it wasn’t that, for the most part, the numbers being produced hadn’t been reached before; it was a question of how often they were being reached and by whom. That they put up the same numbers didn’t mean Hank Aaron and Ken Caminiti were similar ballplayers, did it?
As a general baseball rule, an elite offensive season is one in which a player hits for a .300 average with 30 home runs and 100 RBI. In the American League from 1973 to 1979 only Jim Rice and Fred Lynn had years in which they eclipsed all three figures. In both leagues combined in the twenty-one seasons between 1973 and 1993, a period that James had identified as representing a normal level of offense, the .300-30-100 mark had been eclipsed 42 times by 25 players, the overwhelming majority of whom were Hall of Fame-caliber hitters over their careers. In the nine seasons following, from 1994 to 2002, the last year before baseball adopted a comprehensive drug-testing policy, the magic barrier had been topped 127 times by 56 different players.
Pushing deeper into history, the numbers bore out Macha’s belief that only the greatest players of a given time, players who to a large degree would stand out in any era, had posted the sort of numbers that seemed to be commonplace in the poststrike era. During the first nine years of integration, from 1947 to 1955, the .300-30-100 barrier was crossed 29 times, all but 6 of them by players who would wind up in the Baseball Hall of Fame, most of them Hall of Famers of the first order such as Mays, Musial, DiMaggio, and Williams.
In the poststrike era it was becoming impossible to tell the truly elite players of a given time from their peers by statistics alone. In the old days, it was easy to tell which players soared high above their peers. That’s what made them Hall of Famers. The numbers told the story while seeing them in person only added to the legend. In the steroid era, a considerably different story took shape. The lines were so blurred that the numbers had lost much of their meaning.
Curiously, in 2001’s The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James offered a harsh assessment of Colorado right fielder Larry Walker that leaned closer to Macha’s interpretation of the era. Having hit .350 in three straight seasons, Walker had entered into the space of legends. Only six other players had accomplished the feat in the history of the game, and all—Al Simmons, Joe Medwick, Rod Carew, Tony Gwynn, Wade Boggs, and Joe DiMaggio—were either in Cooperstown or speeding toward it. It was an indisputable fact that the altitude in Colorado inflated the offensive numbers of those who played there, but instead of isolating Colorado as a special circumstance, James offered a withering indictment of the era:
The last player to hit .363 or better three years in a row was Al Simmons, 1929-31 (.365, .381, .390). Neither Musial nor Ted Williams hit .350 three straight years as a regular. Neither did Gehrig or Ruth, although their career averages were 30 points higher than Walker’s, and they had many seasons when they hit over .350.
It will be interesting to see, as time goes by, how well the Hall of Fame voters can see through the phony batting stats of the 1994-
2000 era, and pick out the genuinely great players from those who piled up numbers because of the unusual conditions in which they played.
James stopped curiously short of broaching the topic of drug use when mentioning “unusual conditions,” but it was clear that he was not talking only about the Rocky Mountain atmosphere.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The commissioner was frustrated. Bud Selig had his epiphany at the landmark Milwaukee meeting with the team doctors in 2000. Steroids were a scourge that had to be eliminated in baseball. He had put his foot down with his fellow owners. Andy MacPhail of the Cubs provided strong support, as did Peter Angelos of Baltimore. Selig felt so strongly about implementing a drug policy when the collective-bargaining agreement expired in 2002 that he was willing to allow the players to strike without one.
For a person always perceived as meandering, this was strong stuff. A year earlier, at the start of the 2001 season, Selig had initiated a comprehensive steroid-testing policy in the minor leagues. The policy calls for unlimited year-round testing with a fifteen-game suspension for the first offense and a lifetime ban on the fifth offense. For the first time, the umbrella of baseball had created a uniform policy for all of its far-flung junior leagues. That meant it didn’t make a difference if a player suited up in the Sally League or the International League or the Texas League. He was going to be tested for steroids. He was going to be tested during the season and in the offseason. There would be no escape for steroid users in the minor leagues.
What Selig found after the first year of minor league testing was that baseball was suffering from a steroid epidemic. Even with a testing program in place, even being told in advance that testing was to take place in 2001, 11 percent of baseball’s nearly 2,000 minor league players tested positive for anabolic steroids. To one American League trainer that 11 percent figure was disastrous for baseball. “They say eleven percent in the minor leagues, but where do you think that eleven percent ended up playing? A lot of them ended up in the big leagues.” Worse yet, without a major league testing program, those players who tested positive in the minors - could continue to use steroids in the majors without fear of being tested. Eleven percent meant that more than 360 players in the minors were using steroids. That did not even count the number of players who played in the minors but were on big league forty-man rosters and thus were not subject to drug testing because they were protected by the major league collective-bargaining agreement. That meant that on a minor league team, half the roster was subject to steroid testing while the other was not. The result was a group of minor leaguers playing under two separate sets of rules, opening up the possibility of severely unfair competition between those minor league players who could use steroids and those who couldn’t.
Yet Selig was confounded about why he was still being ridiculed as being soft on drugs. “I realize the commissioner is a lightning rod,” Selig said in the summer of 2002. “Am I sometimes disappointed and saddened? I am. But I’ve got a job to do.”
The reason for the criticism was that Selig had those disturbing minor league numbers, and hoarded them. He received the numbers in late 2001 but would not release the results for more than three years. Only when another, unavoidable wave of congressional pressure arose did Selig announce the results of the minor league policy. To certain members of Congress, it was proof that baseball had no intention of being honest about the depths of its steroid problem. To Bud Selig, it was the union’s fault. Rob Manfred believed that had Selig made a public show that three hundred-plus minor leaguers had tested positive for steriods, it would have made negotiating a drug policy for the majors all the mo
re difficult.
Peter Angelos was particularly vigilant. During one negotiating session, Angelos, a high-powered Washington attorney like Edward Bennett Williams before him, engaged in a heated argument with Gene Orza, berating Orza for the union’s flexibility on steroids. Orza held to the union’s position. Testing was a matter of privacy. No organization had the right to test without cause. To Gene Orza, baseball had already instituted a steroid-testing program with the probable-cause policy. It wasn’t his fault that no baseball owner had ever invoked the clause. Besides, random steroid testing represented an automatic assumption of guilt.
Angelos was furious. Steroids, he believed, should have been the one issue both sides could agree upon. The union, he said, should immediately adopt the same steroid-testing policy that the league had implemented in the minor leagues. The union wouldn’t budge. The two shouted across the room at each other, tensions inflamed. When it was over, Bud Selig received a phone call from Andy MacPhail, who detailed the viciousness of the exchanges between Orza and Angelos. “It was worth the price of admission,” MacPhail told Selig.
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