To Ron Washington, who had spent thirty years in baseball, amphetamines could also be considered enhancers of performance. A player, wiped out from partying or a long road trip (or both), might take a Greenie to provide a necessary boost. Washington didn’t believe it was the same. “A Greenie I don’t have a problem with. Greenies can give you a little pickup when your energy level is low,” Washington said. “But that’s about it. A Greenie doesn’t help you knock the fucking ball out of the ballpark.”
Then there was the question of cheating. Or was it gamesmanship? Gaylord Perry won 314 games and was enshrined in Cooperstown after pitching for nearly a quarter century, in which he freely admitted to throwing an illegal spitball. Perry’s admission was worth a laugh until one gave it real thought. Without that spitball, would Perry be considered one of the greatest pitchers of his time? How different was that from Brady Anderson, who admitted using creatine during his 50-homer season? Perry was met with a wink and a nudge. Anderson was viewed with scorn and suspicion, the symbol of a burgeoning culture.
To the players, whatever the rhetoric being spouted by the game’s leaders, the attitude of the players toward management was that individual teams tacitly condoned steroid use. “They never told us to go out there and do them, but the feeling was it was something you could do as long as you didn’t get caught, not unlike corking a bat or scuffing the ball,” said one player representative. “They didn’t expect it, just like we didn’t, to become the kind of issue that would get you thrown in front of Congress.”
To Fehr, who hated to simplify an argument, preferring instead that - people give more serious thought to the questions at hand, these were issues that needed response. They were part of the discussion.
To Charles Yesalis, the difference was that cortisone allowed an injured player to return to a given percentage of his natural ability. Anabolic steroids allowed a player to reach far beyond his natural ability. Yesalis considered cortisone a “performance enabler,” while anabolic steroids and their ilk were considered “performance enhancers.” Healthy players didn’t inject cortisone because they thought it made them stronger. To Yesalis, what was worth considering was the dosage and power of the substances in question. Drinking Gatorade three times a week was not going to allow a player to add the type of muscle mass that could force his joints to collapse under him. Gatorade didn’t add muscle mass at all. Steroids did, as did androstenedione. It was the same with creatine. Yesalis knew that creatine wasn’t a steroid, but it fell into the category of a performance enhancer. Creatine gave a player increased torque. It allowed players to lift more, recover faster, and work out longer. Yesalis tired when he heard the argument that because creatine was found in red meat it was somehow immune from consideration. “To get the same dosage in food you would have to eat more than twenty pounds of lean meat a day,” Yesalis said. “That’s easy for a tiger, tough for a human.” That was the difference.
To John Hoberman, baseball was reflective of a phenomenon that existed in virtually all sectors of American professional life: workplace doping. Players used substances that allowed them to combat the rigors of their jobs. How different was a player’s using amphetamines to offset a grueling travel schedule or fatigue from a truck driver’s doing the same? During the crush of product deadlines in Silicon Valley, use of amphetamines or caffeine or some form of stimulant ran rampant. “Do you think doctors who have an eighteen-hour shift are awake all that time naturally?” asked one baseball trainer. “Let’s face it. If you took away amphetamines and did not ease the travel and game schedule, the roster would be too big to fill. You wouldn’t have enough players.”
PERHAPS THE greatest divide during the negotiating session was that Don Fehr and Gene Orza simply did not feel convinced that steroids were an issue lethal to the game. To them, changes in the game were cyclical, and there was not much to them that suggested that there was great crisis in the decade. Fehr compared the sport’s attendance from thirty-five years earlier and it was no contest. Baseball was more prosperous than ever. At the millennium, baseball’s revenues had topped the $1-billion mark for the first time in the game’s history.
Where they differed was in their zeal for a policy. The owners, constantly sensitive to criticism, grew tired of hearing how weak they were, how they could not forge an agreement on testing because they did not have sufficient clout to fight the union. They were sensitive to the charge that had hounded them throughout the poststrike era: that they were equally complicit and had no real interest in finding what a strong testing program would uncover. They were especially aware of the comparisons to the NFL, whose steroid-testing program was generally lauded as the model for a pro sports league. The NFL had distinguished itself in two ways. The first was the degree of cooperation between the owners and the players. Unlike baseball, the league and its players’ union did not blame one another for the sport’s steroid problems in the 1970s and 1980s that led to the league’s first testing program in 1986. The second was that once its testing policy was in place, the NFL imposed real penalties. A first-time offender would be suspended without pay for four games, or 25 percent of the NFL season. A second offense garnered an eight-game suspension, or half of the season. Baseball, marked by infighting, had never mobilized in such a fashion, and any negative comparison to football touched a raw nerve.
None of these concerns belonged to Don Fehr. Unlike Sandy Alderson, Rob Manfred, and Bud Selig, Fehr did not point to a specific moment when he came to believe steroid use required special attention. Perhaps part of the reason was his responsibility to the players; it would have been damning for him to point to a member of the union as the demarcation line for a new and dangerous era. It may also have meant that steroids did not appear on his radar with the same type of urgency. To the argument that football exhibited the perfect marriage of the players’ and the league’s joint interest, Fehr politely demurred. Good for them, he thought. The NFL has a tough steroid policy. That might hurt the feelings of the owners or affect how they viewed themselves, but baseball wasn’t football. Baseball players didn’t smash into each other at twenty miles an hour for sixty minutes. The steroid policy in football was necessary because of the special needs of that sport.
FOR THE two sides, coming to an agreement would be difficult. History - didn’t help, for they had never done so without shutting down the game first. Throughout the negotiations there continued to exist a great disconnect between the players and owners about the severity of the drug issue. Some players did not feel that the owners were concerned enough about drugs, believing that, once again, money was the more important issue to them. After winning three straight World Series from 1998 to 2000, the Yankees had begun to use their full spending power. Once relatively in line with the rest of the clubs despite obvious regional advantages, the Yankees went on a spending spree unlike anything baseball had ever seen following their Game Seven loss to the Diamondbacks in the 2001 World Series. That winter, Steinbrenner spoke in exclamation points: Steve Karsay, four years, $22.5 million. Rondell White, two years, $10 million. The biggest bauble was Jason Giambi, seven years, $120 million. In 1996, when the Yankees won their first World Series of the nineties, the club’s payroll was $61 million. Five years later, as the 2002 season began, the Yankee payroll had ballooned to $139 million, a 128 percent increase. Never particularly popular with his fellow owners, George Steinbrenner was now the catalyst for another ownership proposal, the luxury tax, a levy for teams that spent over $130 million, a number not coincidentally similar to, and just below, the Yankees’ 2002 payroll. The question of a luxury tax was always a sticky one. Teams that did not want to be penalized by the luxury tax would be reluctant to cross the threshold. In that sense it was the same as a salary cap, only the name made it sound as if it was aimed at the owners rather than the players. Still, there was easier movement on the Yankee question than on a drug policy.
Three months before his Senate testimony, Rob Manfred sent an eleven-page drug-testing proposal t
o Don Fehr. His terms, compared to the Olympic model, which imposed a two-year ban from competition for a first offense and a lifetime ban for the second, were modest: three drug tests per year, the total banning of androstenedione and anabolic steroids, treatment for first-time offenders, increasingly harsher penalties for repeat offenders, and total confidentiality.
The union said no. The androstenedione portion was a sticking point because andro was legal. Anyone could purchase it. Concerned about the intrusion on players’ privacy as a result of a three-drug-tests-per-year provision as well as harboring deep concerns about the administration of the tests, the union rejected the plan outright.
TO BUSTER Olney, Fehr and Orza were making a colossal mistake. For the first time, Olney believed, the Players Association had failed to accurately read its membership. While the union fought with the owners about the parameters of a testing policy, Olney believed the players wanted a stronger testing program. The players had grown sick of being called cheaters by the public, the press, and their own peers. In talking to players, Olney always found them to be disappointed that their leadership had allowed them to be cast under the worst kind of suspicion. Once, during a Red Sox team meeting weeks before the Canseco and Caminiti blockbusters, Nomar Garciaparra, himself often accused of using steroids after posing shirtless and muscular on the cover of Sports Illustrated in March 2001, balked at being friendlier to both the press and the fans. “They don’t believe in us,” a person in the meeting recalled him saying. “They all think we’re a bunch of spoiled millionaires juiced up on steroids.” As the strike deadline approached and the fight for the public grew more earnest, the players became increasingly upset that they were perceived as the group obstructing a testing policy.
Six weeks after Ken Caminiti’s Sports Illustrated story broke, USA Today released the findings of a player poll it conducted in mid-June. The results were a repudiation of the union’s antitesting stance. Only 17 percent of the players were against independent steroid testing, while 79 percent were in favor. What was more damning was that 44 percent of the players surveyed said they felt pressure to use steroids or other forms of anabolic enhancements to keep up with the players already using them. While USA Today conducted its poll, Donald Fehr, the head of the Players Association, testified to the Senate, urging it not to consider unsubstantiated newspaper reports as fact, which created an odd standoff. Fehr discounted USA Today’s findings, but the union did not poll its membership about how the players felt about the issue and what they wanted to do about it. Nor did the union test the players on its own just to find out the scope of the problem. The league had no jurisdiction in the in-house matters of the Players Association, so such a test would not have endangered any of the players’ standings with their respective clubs because the club would not know the results. Such an approach gained public traction and might have satisfied the players’ concerns. The union leadership, however, found it to be highly irregular as well as completely inappropriate. The union’s position of protecting the players’ privacy was absolute, therefore even testing its own membership violated that privacy.
Yet some club trainers believed that the players’ public desire for testing was merely a public relations move; the last thing the players really wanted was a testing program. In the NFL, when a player flunked a drug test, the public knew it based on his suspension, but was left to guess which drugs he was using. A failed drug test did not automatically mean steroids. The player could have tested positive for recreational drugs such as marijuana or cocaine. The union’s protest over privacy, thought one longtime National League trainer, was a flimsy cover for the players’ fears about the ambiguity of test results that left the public to its own devices.
To Buster Olney, the reason the union did not respond to the will of its members was a simple one: The union hated the owners and would not give in to them for any reason. Plus, Donald Fehr and Gene Orza were true disciples of Marvin Miller, philosophically opposed to the idea of drug testing.
“Had the union even done some type of internal testing, they could have wiped out the problem altogether,” Olney said. “They would have known how many players in their association were using steroids. They - could have kicked those players who were using steroids out of the union if they wanted to. The bottom line is that the union did not want to deal with this issue on any level. Gene and Don have done so much for the players over the years. They’ve made a lot of players a lot of money. But on this issue, they blew it. I once wrote in a column, and I’ll say it again, that the union leadership should apologize to each and every player. The union has always been conditioned to fighting and winning. But this one wasn’t about them. They never realized how personal an issue it was to the players.”
EVERYBODY WAITED. There was a feeling in clubhouses around the league that a strike was coming. It could have been 1994 all over again. On August 31, the Yankees were in Toronto, hanging out in the hotel bar of the Park Hyatt awaiting word. Would they be on strike? Would that night’s game, Orlando Hernandez’s loss to Toronto, be the final game of the season? Mike Stanton, the Yankees’ left-handed set-up man and player rep, was alternately pessimistic and hopeful for a deal. He did not like Rob Manfred, and tended to think that ownership had spent more time trying to spin the public than negotiate a strong settlement. It particularly irked Stanton that ownership’s stance had been that the players were against testing. It was clear, Stanton thought, that Manfred did not know too many pitchers, who were being blistered night in and night out by a game built for offense.
The miracle news came around 6:00 A.M., eastern time. There would not be a strike. There would be a luxury tax on megapayrolls and, for the first time in the game’s history, there would be steroid testing at the major league level.
The season was saved, but when the terms of the testing policy were released, the triumph rapidly turned sour. The league would test its players beginning in 2003 on an informational, not punitive, basis. The players would be tested once and then again within a week of the first test. If more than 5 percent of the survey pool tested positive, then the league would move to a punitive stage in 2004 in which a first positive would result in treatment, while multiple positives would result in suspensions escalating from fifteen to twenty-five to fifty games. After the fifth positive test, a player would be suspended for a year.
The policy was unsatisfactory for virtually everyone involved. Bud Selig was defeated. He wanted the year-round testing the league had implemented in the minor leagues. He wanted a tougher penalty phase. He got neither, and was left instead to claim two victories. The first was that Selig would be the first commissioner to avert a work stoppage. That, given the history and the vitriol that existed between the two sides, was in and of itself a great feat. The second was that there existed a testing program at all. Just a few years earlier, it was considered inconceivable that the union would ever agree to test its players. Selig had brought changes.
The union, always elusive, did not seem to believe testing was necessary, but accepted the will of the players, who tended to recognize that some form of testing was required to avert a strike and as a gesture of good faith.
The league itself was vilified by the press, which employed the Crusaders to do the heavy lifting of bashing Selig, Fehr, and the players. Gary Wadler called the testing program an “IQ test instead of a drug test.” The test was so easy to circumvent that only the dumbest or most arrogant, or both, could fail. Players were essentially told when the tests would be administered. They knew when a follow-up test would be administered. They then knew that, after a follow-up test, they would not be tested for the rest of the year. Thus, they could use steroids throughout the offseason without fear of being tested. They were also allowed to leave the premises in the middle of a test, opening up the possibilities of incorporating cleansing agents or even swapping urine. Chuck Yesalis wasn’t surprised at all. The steroid policy was a facade, merely confirming his position that no sports-governing body was
serious about the ramifications of drug use. Dick Pound thought baseball to be the most arrogant of all the pro sports. “You can test positive for steroids five times, then they think of booting you out for a year?” he said. “Give me a break. The first time someone has knowingly cheated and they give you counseling? It’s a complete and utter joke.” Pound believed that the game had prostituted itself to the point where it no longer cared why its fans watched. It was like pro wrestling. Millions watched it, but no one believed in its legitimacy. It was eye candy, entertainment without depth. All that mattered was that the people paid their money. If anyone did win, it was the players, who could say they agreed to a testing policy without ever having to fear its existence.
AT A basic level, the players seemed comforted that a steroid policy was in place. So, too, were members of baseball’s upper management, who by 2003 had perfected an ambivalent strategy toward steroids. Behind closed doors, some teams began to incorporate potential use of steroids into evaluating players. Most, however, assumed the worst, and hoped for the best results, meaning that production would be high while keeping injury and scandal low. Teams routinely discussed injuries to players in trade talks—there was a simple code in baseball that went beyond caveat emptor: injuries required full disclosure—yet to one baseball official, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was the rule regarding steroids. Teams simply did not ask about a player’s suspected steroid history, nor did teams volunteer the information. In that way, the 2002 policy served at least one important purpose: There would now be the beginnings of a paper trail. After years of guess-work, the next year would begin to provide some insight, at the very least, on how drugs affected the offensive numbers that had defined the late 1990s. If anything, one prevailing attitude among players was that once and for all, steroids would be put into their proper context as a minimal part of the reason for the explosion in offense, dwarfed by larger forces set in motion during the decade.
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