Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  And the bubbly was flat.

  Cicotte broiled with bitterness at the unfairness of the system, and understood exactly what to do to get even with the old man. All he needed was to generate enough support for a mutiny. He gathered the ballplayers who wanted to get even and rich at the same time, and brought them to see the bookies and lowlifes, first at the Ansonia, and later at the Sin-ton, where they agreed to throw the World Series. Cicotte put his soul for sale for the bargain-basement sum of $10,000 (in advance), wagering the soul of the game in the process.

  That was a conspiracy that the general public could get its head around, but Marvin Miller knew that conspiracy existed in a larger scale. Baseball may have posited the Black Sox as the greatest threat to the game’s integrity, but Miller would always remind the so-called students of the game that no bigger affront to the record books had occurred than when baseball engineered the longest-running conspiracy in the game’s history: the conspiracy to bar nonwhite players for more than sixty years.

  “We’ll play this here game,” Cap Anson said in 1883, “but never no more with the nigger in.” Two years later, the American Association and the National League agreed to bar blacks from the professional game. A handshake agreement existed between the leagues, which solidified baseball policy, a policy baseball executives for six decades swore did not exist. It was true that there would never be a piece of paper, the smoking gun, the damning letter with every owner’s signature, topped by the John Hancock of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, which spelled it out: no blacks allowed. Yet there the document stood, every day, on the field of play, from the day Anson announced the end of the integrated game, until the fifteenth day in April, 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers opened the door, and Jackie Robinson ran through it.

  While blacks were kept out, there were enough tales of sportsmanship to keep the image of the game clean and humanize generations of ballplayers, most of whom, as products of their times, had about as much desire to see an integrated game as Judge Landis himself. Tris Speaker, the Hall of Fame outfielder who played his best years for Cleveland and Boston, was a devout member of the Ku Klux Klan, as was his teammate Smokey Joe Wood. The greatest hitter of the game’s first two decades, Ty Cobb, was a proud racist.

  Except for players such as Anson and Cobb who made their feelings clear, the players benefited from a veneer of innocence and of professionalism. Dizzy Dean and Satchel Paige made a fortune barnstorming together—as rivals, of course, never as teammates. Rube Foster, the architect and father of the Negro Leagues, supposedly taught Christy Mathewson how to throw a screwball, his love of the game overcoming his hatred of prejudice. Years later, Mathewson’s manager, the great John McGraw, told Paige he was just as good as the immortal Matty. Too bad, McGraw told Paige, he was the wrong color. Walter Johnson, the Big Train, winner of 416 big league games for the Washington Senators and a member of the original Hall of Fame class, said the same thing about the Homestead Grays’ slugger Josh Gibson, as if the game’s rules barring blacks were those of nature and not of Wrigley and Comiskey, Mack, Ruppert, Stoneham, Griffith, Briggs, Frazee, Landis, and of course, Yawkey. Johnson loved Gibson’s game, his power, his singularity. They played in the same city, but on opposite sides of the tracks. They would have made a great battery, except, Johnson told Shirley Povich of the Washington Post, Gibson was the wrong color. It was easy for John McGraw or Walter Johnson to offer up kind words, because Satchel Paige - could have beaten Johnson, Dizzy Dean, and Bob Feller on successive days without rest while barnstorming without having been a threat to take their day jobs, because of baseball’s ironclad conspiracy.

  Such stories made everyone feel good, but did nothing to break the will of ownership, of Judge Landis, or of the cabal’s conspiracy, which supposedly didn’t exist. Landis, who privately told whites the game would never be integrated under his watch, publicly stated in 1942, “There is no rule, formal or informal, no understanding, subterranean or otherwise, against hiring Negro players.” Eddie Collins, who as the second baseman on the 1919 White Sox told Comiskey about the fix, seemed unaware of the very fix he was in on himself for his whole baseball career. “I’ve been here twelve years,” Collins said of his tenure as president of the Boston Red Sox in 1944, “and never once have I received a request from a colored applicant.”

  When segregation, like the reserve clause, began to show signs of weakening, signs ignored in large part by ownership, the feelings of competition and racism roiled and the basis for the conspiracy was revealed. “Hey, Pee Wee,” said a fellow Navy enlisted man to Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese upon reading that blacks would soon be given the chance to play baseball, maybe even as soon as the end of World War II. “How would you like a nigger to take your job?”

  MARVIN MILLER believed in conspiracy because he had competed against powerful people for too much of his life. His belief would be confirmed during a meeting in Chicago in 1984, when Peter Ueberroth had an idea. Perhaps the owners, stung by the rising costs of players—costs incurred by their inability to resist offering outrageous salaries—were going about it all wrong. There was no doubt management wanted to crush free agency, but instead of sparring with the union every four years in public, Ueberroth suggested, why didn’t they just stop offering free agent contracts? The market would dry up if the owners stopped competing against each other. Players would go back to their respective teams, just like in the old days, because they had no choice.

  The plan was perfect. It was also illegal. Every owner in baseball, knowing that they would be, in effect, throwing the season by not acquiring the missing parts to a potential championship team, nonetheless agreed not to sign free agent players. Ueberroth’s plan was executed for three years before the owners finally got caught. It was the Black Sox multiplied by every team in baseball, for three years, at least, and it - couldn’t be denied.

  Walter Haas, the owner of the Oakland A’s and Sandy Alderson’s first boss in baseball, was in collusion. He was ownership’s version of Eddie Cicotte, broken by a heavy truth. Near death, he told Fay Vincent that the fix was in. “Fay, if you ever have any doubt about collusion, don’t, because I know. I was in on it. I’m sorry about it and I’m embarrassed, but it’s true.”

  Bob Klapisch, who covered baseball in New York for three papers in parts of three decades, had seen too much baseball not to arrive at the same conclusion as Chass, Jackson, and Gwynn. If it was possible in the micro sense for eight players to fix an event as unpredictable as eight baseball games, for a league to engineer the exclusion of an entire race of - people as well as act together to extinguish the free agent market, then it was entirely possible that the poststrike boom was orchestrated to a large degree. “Somewhere,” Klapisch said, “somebody decided that baseball needed more runs to satisfy the hunger of the fans, to keep their attention, to keep them coming to the ballpark and spending money, that they would rather see a 7-5 game than a 3-2 game. That decision was made at a very fundamental level, and little by little, step by step every possible measure was taken to ensure that baseball would enjoy a renaissance of offense. There are too many individual examples for it to be coincidental.”

  To Ken Macha, the entire decade was geared toward dollars, and - everybody rode along at the expense of the sport. Forces had been unleashed without much regard to their consequences, intended and unintended. The game was suddenly, Macha thought, at the mercy of market forces, and that made everything possible. Players and owners both would do anything to maximize their profits. If that didn’t amount to a stated, organized conspiracy on the scale of collusion or keeping blacks out of the majors, then so be it. The cumulative effect of far-flung, disconnected changes nevertheless was the same. The price, Ken Macha thought, was the reputation of each and every person involved with Major League Baseball, clean or dirty. It was the price of greed, he thought.

  TO GLENN Stout, the last part of the American century was marked by an ever-growing cynicism. Loss of innocence had been a constant theme in recent American h
istory, starting with the assassinations of the 1960s. In the decades that followed, beginning with Vietnam and Watergate, trust had too often resulted in disappointment and disillusionment, and hope gave way to cynicism. Now, as the new millennium began, Stout believed the country had become more cynical than ever. The belief that merit came second to manipulation and that only a sucker didn’t try to work the system had grown all too prevalent.

  This enveloping cynicism, Stout believed, was only being magnified by what was going on in baseball. It manifested itself when men such as Reggie Jackson became convinced, not without some evidence, that baseball had manipulated its game to maximize its revenues. It was apparent in the lack of interest on the part of the fans in the reports that players were using steroids. It existed in the belief among players, fans, and the press that baseball was wholly aware of its drug problem and chose to do nothing. “The bottom line,” said one American League player, “was that they didn’t want to find what they were going to find. And why look? Everybody was making too much money. Who wanted to bring the curtain down on that?”

  To Chuck Yesalis, the public’s lack of anger was only more proof of how little the public was asking of its heroes. A devout Republican, Yesalis, too, noticed the new fault line in America, focusing his attention on the moral decline of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Yet no segment of the country was clean. For every Bill Clinton, there was an Iran-Contra. For every O. J. Simpson acquittal there was a Rodney King verdict. For - every big-money merger, there were mass layoffs and a golden parachute for some big-shot CEO. In every case, the little guy never won, but the powerful always did.

  Even the watchdogs were not immune. It was with no small degree of embarrassment that while the journalism world pressured its subjects to be credible, the country’s greatest newspaper was leveled by its own ethical scandals. In 2003, Jayson Blair, a young reporter for the New York Times, was fired by the newspaper after fabricating entire stories and plagiarizing others. There is no higher crime in journalism than plagiarism, and the Times endured a humiliating self-excoriation, detailing Blair’s transgressions in a lengthy front-page examination. Weeks later, another Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg, resigned from the paper after misrepresenting his reporting methods. The scandals underscored a profound loss of public confidence in the American media.

  The Times scandal was reminiscent of another high-profile journalism scandal that occurred in 1981. In that case, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke was forced to resign after it was revealed that her Pulitzer Prize- winning profile of an eight-year-old heroin addict a year earlier had been a fabrication. When the public demanded that the fictitious boy be located, Cooke was exposed.

  The aftermath of these scandals was emblematic of the cultural shift that had occurred in the intervening years. When Cooke was unable to produce her subject, the Post, mortified, returned her Pulitzer. Cooke, destroyed by her loss of credibility, resigned and disappeared from public life, later taking a job in a Minnesota department store for $6 per hour. In the 1990s, however, everyone got a second act. After Mike Barnicle was fired by the Boston Globe for plagiarizing George Carlin, he was hired by the New York Daily News, hosted two television shows, and eventually returned to Boston as a columnist for the Boston Herald. Patricia Smith, fired by the Boston Globe a short time before Barnicle for similar offenses, later worked for PBS. Jayson Blair reportedly received a $500,000 book advance to tell his story. Stephen Glass, the New Republic reporter who fabricated a large portion of his body of work for the magazine, received not a scolding, but a movie deal. Not long after his resignation from the Times, Bragg received a $1-million book deal to tell the story of Jessica Lynch, the Army private whose story of being attacked and captured during the Iraq War in 2003 itself appeared to a large degree to be a falsification of facts by the U.S. military. Even Cooke, who for fifteen years had disappeared from the public eye, re-emerged to tell her story to GQ magazine in 1996 and sold the film rights to her story, receiving half of a $1.5-million deal.

  To Yesalis, this stood in stark contrast to the fallout from the game-show scandals of the 1950s, when it was revealed that Twenty-One contestant Charles Van Doren had been given the answers to the game’s questions before each program. The nationwide audience that had been handed a phony script instead of spontaneous drama and had watched Van Doren make extraordinary sums of money, not by his expertise, but by playing along in a hoax, was outraged. Van Doren, a college professor who had graced the cover of Time as a result of his popular run on the program, was destroyed. His reputation irreversibly sullied, he disappeared forever from public life. Rigging a game show was hardly a matter of national security, but it would be declared illegal in the wake of the scandal. The public, at least then, did not care to be entertained by prevarication.

  To some of the Crusaders, baseball’s refusal to confront its drug issue was identical to the quiz-show scandal: Baseball was willfully selling a lie to the public. The twist was that instead of responding with outrage, the public hungrily sought more. When Ben Johnson was found guilty of using steroids in winning the hundred-meter gold medal in 1988, he, like Charles Van Doren three decades before him, was essentially banished from view without parole. Why then, a decade and a half later, was there no such tangible evidence that baseball fans were willing to hold their heroes to the same standards? Mark McGwire had admitted to using a steroid during baseball’s greatest summer and the public couldn’t have been less bothered. It was too busy cheering.

  It wasn’t that the public was unwilling to believe that players would cheat, but more that the shock had been diluted by years of ethical transgression. “During the 1992 Olympics,” Yesalis recalled, “Bob Costas and colleagues really whaled on the East Germans. They said how unfair it was that all these years, these male/female-type athletes were competing against women in swimming and track and field, and these other women simply didn’t have a chance. That was when the East German female athlete dominated swimming and track and field from the sixties through the late 1980s. What was quite interesting was in the Barcelona games, only four years after Seoul and Ben Johnson, the U.S. women’s swim team broke the East German medley record, and not one journalist of which I’m aware asked the simple and I think totally obvious question of ‘how did they do that?’ Was there some major breakthrough in swimming coaching and training and technique in those four years? How did they do it?”

  Fans, Yesalis thought, did not seem to care why the home runs were traveling out of the park at a record rate. They did not care who was doing what to their bodies. They just wanted to see the show. Mike Lupica, the author and columnist for the New York Daily News, differed slightly. “I think the public cares,” Lupica said one day at Fenway Park during a Red Sox-Yankees game. “They just don’t care enough to stop going to the games.”

  Especially among the young, most people who watched the game assumed the players were using drugs in the first place. Such cynicism was echoed by Ken Macha, who tended to think that something new was being introduced into the baseball world, and solidified in the larger culture: People were surprised by those who didn’t cheat. That was the disconnect that Yesalis was suffering from. It wasn’t that people didn’t cheat back in Van Doren’s day. They did, but the public didn’t expect them to.

  It was a difficult concept to face, and one that split fans along generational lines. To Yesalis, who began watching baseball in the 1950s, baseball stood to lose more than the other professional sports as a result of such a mentality. In baseball, the numbers mattered, numbers such as 714, 61, 660, and 755. But an argument existed within the game that baseball no longer wanted to maintain its stone-tablet-passing motif. This was a new era, in which Fox didn’t want its announcers mentioning dead guys and chicks dug the long ball. In this new climate and culture, even baseball could not rely on its tradition.

  To Tom Verducci, there was no question that baseball had already lost something valuable. Once, Verducci and Ken Rosenthal, a top base
ball writer from The Sporting News, were engaged in a spirited discussion about baseball’s place in America. Rosenthal’s position was simple: To kids born in the 1970s and 1980s, baseball was just another sport. It did not carry the responsibility of the National Pastime. It was just like the rest, more popular than basketball and less so than football. It did not hold a revered place in the culture. Baseball was, Rosenthal told Verducci, just another form of entertainment. Rosenthal never forgot Verducci’s response. “That baseball is considered nothing more and nothing less than the rest,” Verducci reasoned, “is exactly proof of what’s been lost.”

  There was something else about the younger generation that startled a thirty-year baseball man such as Ken Macha and spoke directly to the cultural shift that had occured: Not only did these fans expect players to use whatever substances were available to aid their performances, but they - didn’t even consider it cheating. To Tom Gordon, the Yankees’ reliever, this was part of a new ethos. “We hear it all the time,” Gordon said. “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.”It was a new reality that conflicted with the traditional American concept of competition, of pitting one’s natural skills against those of another. Athletics, regardless of the larger questions of race, class, and background, had always not only fulfilled the nation’s desire to watch individuals or groups compete against one another in the arena of pure athletic battle, but also reflected the idea of an American meritocracy. Most of it was a myth; politics played as much of a role in making the high-school varsity team as in getting a bill passed through Congress. The myth, however, made America feel good. Hollywood may have been the nation’s top cultural export, but sports reaffirmed the nation’s sense of vitality, and possibility. This was not the Old World, where you had to be born well to live well. No resumes, no pedigrees, no coat of arms were required, just the ability to perform and produce in the tensest of moments. That’s what made individual talent so attractive. Besides, this wasn’t make-believe. Ballplayers in the late 1990s often bristled about why they were held to a different standard when Halle Berry earned $15 million per film and no one blinked. The difference was that actors played make-believe; Randy Johnson didn’t. As Jim Bouton put it, “Sports is the last unscripted form of entertainment in America.” And here was the best part: If you could throw better, hit farther, or run faster, you could actually be paid for it. You could be set for life.