Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  THE REAL problem, thought Bud Selig, was the union. There was only one reason negotiating a steroid policy had proven so difficult, and it was that Donald Fehr and Gene Orza, the two leaders of the Players Association, did not want one. Rob Manfred, who was now baseball’s chief negotiator, came to a similar conclusion. Each negotiating session, Manfred believed, would result in the union’s rejecting any meaningful form of testing. Manfred had heard the stories about the growing silent majority of players who wanted testing. He had heard the stories that the players were sick of being considered cheaters by the public and now understood that steroids were hurting many of them financially. The argument that a player with a certain level of talent was going to be faced with a choice of either using steroids or failing to make the big leagues, was a popular one.

  The trouble for Rob Manfred was that he didn’t completely buy it. What he saw in meetings with Fehr, Orza, and union counsel Michael Weiner was a Players Association that had no interest in dealing with the issue. The union stood in the way of every piece of meaningful dialogue. It had been that way for years. Manfred had been furious in the negotiations because neither Don Fehr nor Gene Orza spoke in concrete terms. Everything was philosophical. The union’s opposition was a fact that did not receive its fair amount of traction in the public discussion, Manfred thought. The players could say whatever they wanted about wanting to maintain their reputations, about a witch hunt or about being unfairly accused. The truth as Rob Manfred saw it was completely different: If that silent majority was not being represented at the bargaining table, they had only their union leadership to blame.

  What people needed to realize, he thought, was that the commissioner was the driving force behind any new policy. “If we were enamored with these substances in terms of growing huge people who would hit a lot of homers, why would we adopt the minor league policy we did? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense.” The issue to Rob Manfred wasn’t Bud Selig’s passion, but how much of the commissioner’s vision would be devoured by compromising with the union.

  To certain players and executives with the union, however, Bud Selig was merely posturing, attempting to win over the public during a negotiating year. Unlike Sandy Alderson, who was considered tough, pragmatic, and generally honorable even by his adversaries, Bud Selig had a difficult time gaining his opponents’ confidence. It did not help matters that years of tutelage under Marvin Miller and Donald Fehr had embedded the idea in the minds of the players that the commissioner, any commissioner, was untrustworthy. Players became particularly suspicious of the commissioner when he spoke in terms of being the great protector of the game. Selig liked to use the word “custodian.” What he was really protecting, the players believed, were the interests of the owners.

  The possibility of a strike was always very public, and a potential public relations disaster. There had already been talk that the owners were considering locking out the players to start the 2002 season, a plan that had been quashed after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Selig, having been the commissioner during the last strike and having seen the taint of steroids eat away at his renaissance, could not afford having the players walk out on him again. Players, wary of retribution, would refer to the commissioner off the record with a sarcastically toned, “Bud.” It was in the way they would say it: “Here’s another of Bud’s great ideas,” or “I don’t want to get fined because he’s still the commissioner, but do you really think Bud wants to do anything other than make the owners money?” His opponents thought Selig’s steroid position was intended to give the impression that he was putting the game first by demanding it be cleaned up. The opposite, Selig’s critics believed, was actually happening; baseball had tacitly condoned the state of the game and only now, when the owners and players were negotiating a new contract, did the commissioner attempt to seize the issue. To his detractors, Selig’s concern about steroids was really just another tactic to gain leverage in negotiations and poison the public against the players. To some club officials, Selig had as little incentive as the union to confront the problem. Buster Olney believed that while it was true that baseball was more vigilant than the union in its pursuit of a steroid policy, the game’s leadership, outside the Harvard study, had never put its money behind the rhetoric.

  ON JUNE 18, 2002, with the Caminiti allegations still fresh, Rob Manfred appeared before the Commerce Committee of the United States Senate to explain the commissioner’s position on steroid use. Normally, testifying before Congress would have made him anxious, but he believed he had become so well-versed in steroids and baseball that he stood on sure footing. The union had set an August 31 strike date, and Manfred felt the environment was right for a bold strike on the part of baseball. It was time for the union to agree to the testing program baseball had instituted in the minor leagues. But for Rob Manfred, decrying steroids was decidedly tricky and would require a great deal of savvy. Because of their damaging effects on the body and the record books and the players’ influence on the country’s youth, it was his job to convince players not to use steroids. But, he thought, players took steroids because they worked. He was caught in something of a conundrum. This would not be easy.

  His testimony to the Senate’s Commerce Committee generated hardly a ripple of news inside the baseball world at the time, yet was remarkable in its detail. He elaborated on the crucial details of Selig’s meeting with baseball’s team doctors. Manfred told the committee that in addition to echoing concerns about the effects of steroids on the health of the players and on the game’s integrity, and the effects of player use on children, the doctors were not basing their conclusions on anecdotal evidence. Instead, they told Selig that to a significant degree, steroids were hitting owners in the pocketbook, robbing fans of their favorite players and teams of their ability to play their best players. Manfred told the Senate that, at the meeting, the club physicians told Selig that the use of the disabled list was 16 percent higher in 2001 than in 1998. They told him that the roughly nine hundred players in the big leagues had used the disabled list 467 times. They told the commissioner that not only were more players injured than in the past, but they remained injured longer, averaging fifty-eight days out of action in 2001, a 20 percent increase over 1998. The doctors told Selig that the cost of payments to these injured players nearly doubled, from $129 million in 1998 to $317 million in 2001. For the owners, the final point cut both ways, for on the one hand, the Crusaders argued that steroid use existed in large part because the owners did not want to bring embarrassment to themselves or devalue the players, their multimillion-dollar assets. Now that those players were costing the owners money without being productive, however, they could be used as proof of the same damaging phenomenon no one in the game had wanted to face earlier. “While the doctors could not scientifically establish a causal connection between the increase in injuries and steroid use,” Manfred told the Senate, “there was a strong consensus that steroid use was a contributing factor.”

  It was a powerful admission. Throughout the era, one of the common threads explaining increased offense was the improved health of the players. Players ate better, trained harder and wiser, and took their work habits more seriously. It was how the players, angry at the suspicion focused on their physiques, had explained their newfound bulk. The big-money players such as Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, Derek Jeter, and Roger Clemens had hired their own personal trainers to work with them both during the season and in the winter. Other players, such as Bonds and Sheffield, and Manny Ramirez, had even hired their own personal chefs to make sure they adhered to their strict diets. Everything about the era, especially compared to the old days when 500-homer guys such as Eddie Mathews and Hank Aaron smoked in the dugout and ate steak afterward, had improved. Speaking before Congress, Manfred had indirectly raised an interesting question. If the players were bigger, faster, and stronger, if they were in better shape and had adopted better nutritional habits, why were they getting hurt more?

  Manfred cont
inued. Not only were players frequenting the disabled list more often and for longer, more expensive stays, but a pattern of injuries was developing. The doctors told Selig that the types of injuries that were becoming more common were often associated with an increase in muscle mass. To numerous retired players, Manfred’s admission to Congress was not a shock. Whereas it was not during their playing days, it was now common for players to suffer from patella tendinitis, an injury caused when the knee joint bears increased stress. It was patella tendinitis that ended Mark McGwire’s career. During the era, the doctors also noted an increase in oblique and intracostal muscle injuries, usually referred to as rib cage strains, often caused by a combination of increased strength and torque. Team trainers often described an oblique strain as the muscle literally tearing away from the bone. Older players, even the power hitters, wondered where this new injury came from. Rib cage strains had not been common in baseball in earlier years. Three weeks after Manfred’s testimony, Dr. James Andrews, who was perhaps the most respected physician in baseball, said he had never seen such a high number of muscle-tendon injuries. Inside the clubhouse, safe from the press and the scrutiny, baseball people would refer to these injuries as “steroid injuries.”

  To Rob Manfred, his congressional testimony was proof that Bud Selig was serious about confronting steroids. Otherwise it would not have been in baseball’s interest to disclose such damning information. The reason there existed such a lack of traction on the issue, Manfred thought, was that the union was opposed, if not downright hostile, to the notion of combating steroids, and also that it was impossible to hold the attention of the press on the issue. Manfred felt that the union used one straw argument after the next, from player privacy to an uncertainty about the real danger of steroids, during the negotiations to avoid a testing program. Over time, he would only grow more upset at the notion that the negotiations for a steroid policy were at all complicated. They were not. “Whatever those players may have wanted, the position their union took at the table, and you can ask anyone in the room, was that we made a proposal and the union did everything they could to weaken it,” Manfred said.

  DONALD FEHR was conflicted. To him, there was nothing going on in baseball that wasn’t occurring in the larger culture. The culture, especially post-DSHEA, had encouraged people to turn to the medicine cabinet to remedy their problems as well as improve themselves. With DSHEA, the federal government had essentially unlocked the door to the pharmacy, yet it now seemed surprised that people were walking through it. Even his rivals agreed with him. During his testimony, Rob Manfred told the Senate that baseball’s doctors told Bud Selig they felt DSHEA allowed dangerous and powerful products to skirt the Anabolic Steroid Act of 1990, even though they had been proven to possess steroidal elements. “Many of the doctors expressed the view that some nutritional supplements, particularly androstenedione, had all the properties of an anabolic steroid, yet they could be marketed without restriction,” Fehr recalled.

  The clamor about confronting steroids notwithstanding, this was a crucial point to Donald Fehr. As a result, Rob Manfred believed that the federal government, which seemed to be bearing down on baseball in a way that it had not with other sports, was to a large extent culpable for the sport’s inability to fight the union on a drug program. The reason was DSHEA. Manfred pointed to the jointly funded androstenedione study from 1998. When, in 1999, the study had revealed that andro possessed steroidal qualities, it appeared to be the perfect opportunity to ban the substance. Both sides knew andro to be a steroid, which meant that its continued presence in the game came with the knowledge of both baseball and the owners. Why andro was not immediately banned after the 1999 study results was a question easily answered, at least to Manfred: The union wouldn’t let it happen. “Part of the reason we wanted to fund the study was to show that androstenedione had been inadvertently left off of the banned substance list. There was no way the union was going to agree to ban a substance that could be purchased over the counter. I mean, come on. They knew steroids were steroids and wouldn’t ban them.”

  The Crusaders attacked Fehr for his position, especially because he had such personal ties to the United States Olympic Committee, but Fehr distrusted the Olympic model. In fact, Fehr made it a point to avoid the appearance of a conflict by abstaining from IOC votes on drug-testing issues. An Olympic athlete had to make himself available at all times to the testing authorities. That meant if he was skiing for the weekend the governing body had to know about it. If the guy was shacked up with a girl over the weekend and couldn’t be contacted, that could potentially count as a failed drug test. To Fehr, there were certain freedoms that Americans enjoyed that could not be compromised. The Crusaders championed the type of drug testing that existed at the amateur level, but that was exactly the type of invasive behavior that Fehr wanted to avoid. During the negotiations with the owners, the issue of enforcement was key. It was nice to say a tough drug policy was being implemented, but how would it work? The Olympic model worked on a partnership basis, meaning each enforcement body that was part of the World Anti-Doping Agency could test an athlete, depending on what part of the world the person happened to be in. For example, if an athlete was vacationing in Copenhagen, then Danish antidoping officials would administer the random drug test.

  Baseball had shunned the cooperation of those organizations, which created the awkward question of logistics. Would baseball fly drug testers around the country and world to test its players in the winter? Was it fair, or even possible, for the league to know the whereabouts of all of its players during the offseason, their free time? Was there an optimum period of time between tests that would discourage players from thinking they - could skirt the test by cleverly scheduling when they took steroids? These questions were not answered to Don Fehr’s satisfaction.

  Such inflexibility conflicted with Fehr’s basic beliefs about American freedoms. Though he was ridiculed as an apologist for his players, Fehr believed those freedoms demanded protection. In a particularly hypocritical moment, Fehr’s constitutional concerns suffered attack from the baseball establishment. “I hear people talk about privacy issues,” said Tony LaRussa four years after accusing Steve Wilstein of invading Mark McGwire’s privacy by looking over his shoulder into his locker. “If you want privacy then go play semipro ball. Drug use hurts baseball. Why should we pay millions of dollars to these guys and have them go on the disabled list?” It was a rich moment.

  There were other issues. Fehr and his second in command, Gene Orza, tended to be less convinced that steroids were so advantageous to baseball players. Publicly, they would set forth an argument that would infuriate their opponents, Manfred in particular. The issue was that the union leadership did not believe that policing its members for substances that were physically harmful was part of their responsibility. There was an embarrassing moment when Gene Orza said at a sports conference in Newport Beach, California, that he had “no doubt” that steroids were not more harmful than cigarettes. “Whether it’s good or bad for you, it’s a far cry to say that because it’s bad for you, you should participate in a structure which allows your employer to punish you for doing something that you shouldn’t be doing. That’s not my understanding of what unions do for their employees,” he said. While Orza’s point contained certain validities, his tone was considered arrogant, condescending, and unconcerned with the issue. Orza’s position further hardened the conviction held by some members of Congress, especially New York Republican John Sweeney, who had been working on steroid legislation, that baseball felt it was beyond the steroid discussion.

  To their detractors, this was the union at its worst. It would not acknowledge the elephant in the room. It was a brilliant legal mind using subterfuge to diminish the discussion. Manfred was particularly frustrated with Gene Orza, who in a rare moment aligned him with the Crusaders. The tobacco analogy particularly infuriated the opposition because the union leadership appeared to be so smug, so sure of their ability to frame a
nd confuse an argument. Technically, the union was right. Much more was known about cigarette use and its ramifications than about steroids. That didn’t mean, however, that steroids were less harmful to a person’s health than cigarettes. Besides, cigarettes could not increase a player’s physical gifts. It appeared once more that the union was more concerned with being obstructionist than being participatory.

  With such examples, Fehr and the union telegraphed the great distance in mind-set between the players and the owners. If ownership was convinced Fehr could be withered by public opinion, it had made a severe miscalculation.

  Fehr hated the phrase “performance-enhancing drugs.” The phrase meant nothing to him. A precise man, Fehr wanted the discussion to be framed properly. He referred to the drugs in question as “anabolic substances.” To Don Fehr, this was not a semantic quibble, for it asked the very tricky question of which substances enhanced performance, which allowed players to play with serious injuries, and which were used to gain a demonstrable advantage over one’s opponents. Where was that line drawn, when was it drawn, and who drew it? If you had a headache, ibuprofen could be considered a performance enhancer if it made the headache disappear. For years, players used substances and equipment they thought would improve their performance. Since when did this quest to better one’s chances to earn a place and remain in baseball become a code word for cheating? Was drinking Gatorade cheating? Gatorade was marketed as a sports aid that restored vital fluids to the body after it had become fatigued. It was an extreme example, but not one without merit. Didn’t a sports drink that returned an electrolyte count to the body that it couldn’t have reached naturally enhance performance? If a player had energy in the fourth quarter that he wouldn’t otherwise have had because of a juice drink, how different was that from a player who used creatine because it allowed him to recover from fatigue faster than normal? How different was creatine, which was considered in the medical community to be a performance enhancer, from cortisone, which actually was a form of steroid, though nonanabolic? Creatine allowed a player to recover from injury faster, to work out harder than normal. Cortisone allowed a player to play through injuries that might have landed him on the disabled list. Creatine was controversial, but cortisone, for nearly half a century, was the accepted lifeblood of all professional sports. As the decade continued, there was even a growing concern in baseball that a fair number of trainers were relying too heavily on cortisone.