Unwittingly, Washington had revealed the central problem of baseball’s thinking. Players who used steroids were still, in Washington’s terms, “busting their asses,” but they also happened to be using steroids during all of their hard work. That was the nature of performance-enhancing substances. It was not an either/or proposition. Anabolic substances did not mitigate supreme dedication and hard work. Too many people in baseball thought steroid users sat on the couch eating donuts while letting science improve their bodies. That wasn’t true. Most likely, the players who took that approach rarely saw great benefit from steroids.
Many people in key positions possessed beliefs about steroids that were demonstrably stronger than the game’s official response. The real issue, thought some major league executives, was one of assessing blame for what hadn’t been done years earlier. The commissioner knew there was no going back. The question was how far baseball would go in facing the music.
If the charge could be levied that baseball turned its back on steroids, Sandy Alderson later thought, then the game’s leadership could not be the only entity isolated. If anything, Alderson thought the lack of appreciation for the damage the anabolic substance issue could inflict on the game represented an institution-wide failure. That failure included ownership, players, and writers. Nobody took the issue seriously. It got in the way of the fun, and now everyone was paying the price. To say the baseball leadership was the only entity in the game reluctant to confront steroids, Alderson thought, was patently untrue.
Still, to Bob Watson leadership’s inability to articulate a satisfactory position on drugs created the worst possible scenario: Fans, media, players, and executives were left to come to their own conclusions. Human nature being what it was, Watson believed most people tended to think the worst.
Tony Gwynn did not believe baseball was in crisis, but thought the decade of offense had to some degree been engineered by design. The strike had forced the game’s hand, Gwynn believed. Piece by piece, from the gradual institution of a tighter strike zone, to the manipulation of the baseball, to the construction of home run-friendly parks, and ultimately to allowing players’ growth in size to go unchecked and largely unquestioned, baseball had manipulated its product toward greater offensive production. It was a stunning consideration.
“Take into account us trying to regain and recapture the American public’s imagination and the hitter’s realizing if he got bigger and stronger he could hit the ball out the other way,” Tony Gwynn said. “And it all manifested itself into a product people liked. And now it’s too late to go back. It’s too late and you can’t go back.”
To men such as Gwynn, Reggie Jackson, and Mike Mussina, it was a cop-out to blame the changes in the game on a coincidental confluence of unrelated causes. To them, many of those forces were either guided by baseball or tacitly allowed to exist by inaction and an appreciation for the healthy profits the offensive boom afforded. It was a charge that gained momentum not on the fringes of the game, but in the clubhouses, in the press boxes, and in the front offices around the league. It was one thing for men such as Gary Wadler or Dick Pound to criticize the game. For the game’s elite players to articulate an industry-wide manipulation of the sport was quite another.
REGGIE JACKSON and Tony Gwynn were in agreement, especially in the area of steroids. They believed that the players were using steroids. They also believed that the teams and owners knew about it, and having pushed the game so deeply toward offense, not only refused to confront the problem, but in a way couldn’t. To confront the issue of offense was to confront the issues of drugs. Nobody wanted to do that. Not even the press.
Publicly, Jackson was gracious, even conciliatory toward the modern sluggers. During Barry Bonds’s historic 2001 season, Jackson said he was rooting for Bonds, the same way he rooted for his old teammate McGwire back in 1987. Privately, his conviction grew that the staggering feats of this new generation were not exactly legitimate. “It was a little scratched, a little staticky. It didn’t play right,” Jackson thought. “There’s something about this whole thing that’s a little off. It just doesn’t pass the test.”
Jackson’s suspicion intensified as Bonds streaked past McGwire as if he were a pair of shoes. The media attention given to Bonds when he broke the game’s most hallowed record was paltry compared to the focus on McGwire and Sosa in 1998. Jackson believed he knew why. The September 11 tragedy played a role, as did Bonds’s brusque personality, but Jackson believed the biggest reason Barry Bonds’s 73-homer season lacked the pageantry and nationwide appeal of 1998 was that the public was completely desensitized to the home run. It was the law of diminishing returns in action on the baseball field: The more home runs were hit, the less exciting each one became. Baseball’s most thrilling play had lost its punch. To Jackson, it was a sign that baseball would pay a heavy price for failing to act earlier.
Jackson was also taken by the fact that Bonds was not publicly hounded with questions about his suspected steroid use. While a feeling did exist that Bonds’s accomplishments were the product of performance enhancements, he was generally given the benefit of the doubt by the reporters who covered the game. Few stories celebrating his 73-homer season, either in the local or national press, even mentioned steroids or any anabolic substances. This deepened Jackson’s conviction that he should not go away quietly on the topic. He engaged reporters to collect information on a decade that was increasing his skepticism. “Talk to Bench. Talk to Aaron. Talk to Mays,” Jackson implored reporters one day at Yankee Stadium. “It just doesn’t fit. You think we didn’t have strong guys back then? What’s the difference now?”
Jackson was bitter in his criticism, and it stood to reason that a star of his magnitude expressing such candor would have garnered the nation’s attention. Yet a curious phenomenon took place: No one listened to him. The press corps was sympathetic to Jackson’s logic, but not particularly hungry to follow the trail. So one day in San Diego, immediately after the Caminiti eruption, with the cool of the grass under his feet, the legendary Mr. October responded to the fire with some of his own. “Why - isn’t anyone doing anything about this?” he asked two reporters he trusted. “You’ve got guys admitting they’re on the stuff. Everyone knows what’s happening. Everyone knows what’s going on. You know what’s going to happen? The guys like me, Frank Robinson, Killebrew; we’re nothing compared to the shit that’s going on now. Ten years from now, I’ll be fifty-sixth on the home run list, because of the juice. The integrity of the game is at stake, why is the media so afraid to tackle this story? You guys always say you want a great story. Well, do you? Here is one right here, right in front of your faces.”
Jackson would be vilified for his views on Caminiti, Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa in that most traditional of baseball ways: behind his back. To many ex-players, he was merely incapable of confronting the fact that his time was over and a new era of stars had captured the imagination of the public as he once did. To them Jackson was just another ballplayer frustrated that his own accomplishments were drifting inexorably deeper into the past.
Part of the negative reaction to Jackson’s comments stemmed from - people’s attitudes toward the messenger, not the message. Jackson was a take-it-or-leave-it personality. Always engaging, he could be hilarious, fascinating, and intelligent, but also cruel. Jackson was a legend, and he knew it. He wasn’t afraid to rub it in the faces of the average Joes, reporters, and fellow players that only he would decide if you were worthy of his attention. He could talk with the inspiration of a great leader, and minutes later tell someone he was “too big” to conduct an interview. He - could be passionate about the scourge of steroid use in the game, then spend the next twenty minutes explaining how his legacy was at stake, while barely mentioning the game.
Had he been Dave Winfield or George Brett, Hall of Famers in their own right, not given to such public self-indulgence, Jackson’s views might have gained more traction. But because it was Jackson, the reaction was cooler. It was
just Reggie being Reggie, popping off again. He didn’t care about the game, said one player who played during Reggie’s time. He just cared about Reggie.
JACKSON’S FRIEND Joe Torre was a very different story. An honorable baseball man caught in a moral vise, Torre was somewhat conflicted about the state of the game. He was a man of two wholly different, sometimes competing generations. He was a borderline Hall of Fame player of the 1960s and ’70s, a teammate of Bob Gibson, Eddie Mathews, and Hank Aaron, and the winner of the 1971 National League Most Valuable Player award. He was also a sure Hall of Fame manager of the 1990s with the Yankees. For Torre, commenting on the new era required a special level of skill. Perhaps the most thoughtful and articulate manager in the game, Torre talked about baseball’s being larger than its individual parts. On the topic of steroids, Torre usually would first discuss the potential health concerns for the players who might be using drugs. He would then ask for caution on the part of the players, advising them to be mindful of their individual places in baseball and the state in which they would leave the game once they were gone. “This game doesn’t belong to us,” Torre would often say. “It really is something you borrow for your short time in it.” It seemed to be Joe Torre’s way of reminding the players that despite the money, the adulation, and their seeming invincibility, the players were part of a larger, more valuable asset.
The players, however, were duplicitous. Only a handful of them, men of higher character and independence such as Gwynn, Frank Thomas, John Smoltz, and Tom Glavine, were willing to put steroids in their proper context as a powerful element in the game that was obviously altering the product and could potentially destroy the image of the industry. The rest either avoided the topic, as if it were Kryptonite, or expressed outrage that it was even being discussed. To them, it was another example of how the media distorted a player’s image. The press, went the reasoning, was embittered by the success and enormous wealth of the modern ballplayer and simply could not resist any story that made players look bad. Wasn’t it just possible that these players hadn’t done anything wrong? Many players were indignant with the press about steroids, denying that they were used to any significant degree. “Anyone who knows me,” Jason Giambi said one fateful February day in 2003, “knows that the only thing I’ve done is work my butt off.”
Privately, inside their ironclad fraternity, the conversation about steroids took on a decidedly different tone. Behind closed doors, many of those same players laughed about which players’ bodies had changed from one season to the next, which pitchers were throwing harder than ever, and which players suffered from back acne, one telltale symptom of steroid use. Players ridiculed suspects, such as Gabe Kapler, a journeyman outfielder known for his chiseled physique and interest in bodybuilding. Yet for all their private candor, the players, as much as the owners, had interests to protect. It was professional suicide to openly admit to and espouse the virtues of supplement use, either legal or illegal. The result was an unsatisfying, maddening dance with the media and public.
AS THE question of culpability grew louder, even the ballparks, the jewels of baseball’s economic resurgence, came under fire. If, over the last years of the 1990s and into the millennium, a new conventional wisdom took over that the new ballparks were too small, now the prevailing attitude went one step further: They were purposely built that way to promote offense.
The worst example was in Houston, where in 2000 the new Enron Field replaced the Houston Astrodome, for years one of the biggest parks in the game. Enron was built in the Camden Yards tradition, cozy and modern, adding the now-popular feature of a retractable roof, but there was one big problem. The left-field fence was a stone’s throw from home plate. Every right-handed hitter, especially those who wore an Astros uniform, salivated at the chance to clear the fence. The results were immediate and dramatic. Playing their home games in the Astrodome in 1999, the Astros averaged 5.08 runs per game. The next year, their first at Enron Field, the Astros averaged 5.79 runs per game. In 1992 and 1993, the last two seasons before the strike, the Astros averaged 3.75 runs per game and 4.42, respectively.
Those who believed the new parks were designed to increase offense pointed to Camden Yards, Brady Anderson’s 50 home runs in 1996, and Rafael Palmeiro’s annual 40-homer seasons. It was as if baseball had turned itself on its head. The commodities once credited for the game’s revival were now the prime culprits for all the trouble. People loved the home run, and now the home run was a sign that the game had turned gluttonous. Everyone wanted a new ballpark, and now the ballparks were too small. “If you want fewer home runs,” Jason Giambi once said, “then build real ballparks.”
Larry Lucchino was livid. Lucchino didn’t care too much about the home run discussion. What frosted his cookies was the sudden revision that Camden Yards, his greatest accomplishment, was not only an egregious hitter’s park, but was intentionally designed for more offense.
Lucchino recalled the first week the park opened in 1992. The first three games at Camden Yards were shutouts. On opening day, Rick Sutcliffe beat Cleveland’s Chuck Nagy, 2-0. In the next game, Cleveland returned the favor, blanking the Orioles, 4-0. The very next day, Ben McDonald struck out nine in a complete-game, 2-0 shutout. Within a week of Camden Yards’ opening, Cal Ripken caught up to Lucchino and Charles Steinberg to offer a bitter assessment of his new home. “This is a pitcher’s park,” Ripken said.
Now the players and general punditry were disparaging Camden Yards as a bandbox, a homer heaven in the mold of Fenway Park and Wrigley. “That is completely and totally ridiculous,” Lucchino said. “All we wanted was a ballpark that played. That’s it. I remember that first week and in one of the games I was sitting with our architect on the project, Janet Marie Smith, and I remember us saying, ‘It plays! It plays!’ There was no secret agenda whatsoever. To attach a motive to how the park was built, quite frankly, is insulting.”
To Glenn Stout, the crumbling of the 1998 monument resembled nothing less than a classic morality tale. It wasn’t just the players, and it - wasn’t just drug use, Stout thought, but the entire baseball institution that was under indictment. Baseball needed to recover from the strike, and found itself seduced by a culture of uncontrolled accumulation. Every segment of the game was culpable. It was the players who used whatever substances were available to maximize their achievements, and in turn their earnings, at the expense of their credibility. It was the fans who did not care that the game was being made less legitimate as long as they were treated to a more exciting product. It was the press and broadcast media that chose to reap the added profits and increased exposure that came during this boom time instead of employing the stamina and scrutiny required to confront a spiraling baseball culture. Finally, Stout thought, it was the owners that profited from drug use and ran from the responsibility until there was nowhere else to go.
CONSPIRACY WAS a question of mind-set. To Murray Chass, the Hall of Fame writer for the New York Times, it was difficult for people to comprehend that an organizing body would act collectively to undermine a single individual, never mind an entire industry. Few people wanted to believe that people are that conniving, that determined, that ruthless, or, for that matter, that organized. When the facts become too clear to ignore, the nonbelievers resort to sarcasm. “How could they keep a secret so big,” they would say, “when they can’t even keep a press release from leaking out?” Marvin Miller saw this kind of rhetoric every day when he headed the Major League Baseball Players Association. Listening to that kind of nonsense at least in part explained why Miller smoked three packs of cigarettes a day.
When baseball people thought about conspiracy, they thought about 1919, about the Hotel Ansonia, and about knuckleballer Eddie Cicotte. They thought about the Black Sox. After a year of being haunted by the World Series fix Cicotte probably could have recited Section 46 of the Illinois Criminal Code himself:If any two or more persons conspire or agree together . . . with the fraudulent or malicious intent wrongfully and w
ickedly to injure the person, the character, business or employment or property of another, or to obtain money or other property by false pretenses, they shall be deemed guilty of conspiracy.
It wasn’t just the action that was important, but the reason behind it—to exact a certain measure of revenge, to make someone pay.
Cicotte had a gripe, and so did the seven other players who fixed the World Series with him. They were the best team in baseball and had won the World Championship two years earlier. However, they had been famously underpaid by their penurious boss, Chicago White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey. Shoeless Joe Jackson, who was maybe the most complete player of his time, was surely one of the worst paid. Jackson earned $6,000 in 1919, the league average. A year later, Babe Ruth earned $20,000. Comiskey, it seemed, would stop at nothing to save a buck at his players’ expense. Cicotte had once been bilked out of a bonus by being purposely benched just long enough so he wouldn’t earn his incentives. 1 Comiskey, meanwhile, told his club big bonuses were coming their way if they won the pennant. After the clinch, the players saw their bonus sitting in the middle of the clubhouse. It was a case of champagne.
Juicing the Game Page 36