To Glenn Stout, that had all changed. It wasn’t just that the public thought differently about the legitimacy of its sporting events, but more critically, those sporting events did not necessarily have to be legitimate at all. To Paul DePodesta, the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the reason for watching sports was shifting. A greater number of fans did not seem to care about how these great accomplishments were achieved but rather sought only to be entertained. Not only did the drama of the game not have to be real, but neither did the people who played it. Matt Keough, the Oakland superscout who pitched nine years in the big leagues, agreed. “There was a time when baseball was a sport first and entertainment second. That day is past. It is entertainment first, and then it is a sport.” To DePodesta, this shift had potentially fatal consequences for the world of sports.
In Stout’s view, one he shared with such very different men as DePodesta, Dick Pound, Joe Torre, Sandy Alderson, and Donald Fehr, this overt cynicism and lack of accountability and consequences had been exacerbated by television. The twenty-four-hour cable-satellite-Internet entertainment cycle needed to be fed. It also needed to be watched, and in that type of environment, name recognition held immense value. It wasn’t that celebrity did not exist previously, but that this new necessity of programming created a new kind of celebrity unburdened by merit or virtue.
“Just by virtue of being on television you were considered important,” Stout said. “In the past, most of the people who were on the TV screen had been known for having accomplished something. Then, things started to change. People who once would have been exiled for having embarrassed themselves, or worse, did something illegal, now had programming value because they were familiar. That’s all you needed to be. Then, there was this other group of people, in your face all the time, and you had no idea why you were watching them. You had no idea what they did.”
To DePodesta, the cable cycle had made baseball one-dimensional. Baseball highlights were recycled literally dozens of times over a twenty-four-hour period and most of those highlights were home runs. To DePodesta, the message being sent was that the only element of the game that was to be respected was power. This message, he believed, was reinforced by baseball itself. It was reflected in player salaries, which were the ultimate barometer, and contributed to player behavior. It was much the same in basketball, the highlights of which did not feature great passes as much as they did dunks, a wholly individual act. As a result, the common lament in that sport was how selfish the game had become. In baseball, it was home runs, a similarly solitary accomplishment. If baseball’s focus on home runs was obvious to the casual fan, DePodesta thought, it practically amounted to a direct order to a high-school prospect hungry for a chance at a baseball life. It was as if even the daily marketing of the game steered it toward a certain style.
Increased offense, thought Don Fehr, had another effect on television. Indirectly, it increased the value of baseball’s television contracts, for even a team getting blown out still had a chance to win. That meant viewers - could continue watching with an expectation of suspense. The greater chance a team had to come back made it less likely that a viewer would change the channel or turn off the TV.
At the same time, another message was being sent out along the airwaves and cable wires. In 1994, at about the same time DSHEA contributed to the explosion of the supplement industry, pharmaceutical companies successfully sued the federal government to air drug commercials on television. As a result, television became littered with advertisements for drugs that could compensate for every malady and deficiency a person might have, from sexual dysfunction to obesity. Once a conversation reserved for doctors and their patients, the potential for better living through chemistry was now dancing across every television in the nation.
To Donald Fehr, the direct marketing of drugs to the public was one of the most important elements of the changing culture. People were now being told that, while one way to lose weight might be eating less and exercising, another was to take a pill.
“We’ll never be able to quantify it, but did this have an effect on the mind-set of people? Sure, it had to. Was it symptomatic of what was going on in the culture generally? Well, I think it probably was,” said a high-ranking baseball official. “Drug commercials all came down to the following: Take this, you’ll feel better, be stronger, be more healthy, and get laid a lot. That’s what they were. This is true with essentially every type of medicine. Until this changed, it was unheard of for people to go in to the doctor and say, ‘I saw X, Y, and Z on television, and I think I’m suffering from that. Can you prescribe it for me?’ You can see how this began to go and the message was if something isn’t right, take a pill.”
In a sense, this new culture seemed to fold in upon itself. Television beamed twin messages that, taken together, forged a mind-set. The first was that, as far as baseball was concerned, the players who received the most attention, the highest salaries, and the greatest adulation were the ones who hit the ball the farthest and threw the hardest. The second was that there existed a pill for everything, and that included, by extension, pills to make a person a better baseball player. In a sense, the baseball player and the average American were being barraged with the same message and seeking the same remedy for vastly different problems. The end result, however, was essentially the same: When in doubt, there was always a drug that could help.
DAVID WELLS had never heard of Charles Van Doren, or his eternal punishment. Wells began his big league career in 1987, before the juiced era began, and by 2004 had won more than two hundred big league games pitching right through the heart of it. Wells was a character. He was the free spirit whose ability to pitch compensated for a personality that challenged authority. In Toronto, he got into a fistfight with his manager, Cito Gaston. With the Yankees, he fought with a fan at a diner at 4:00 A.M., leaving a 911 report that fueled the tabloids for days. In Chicago and Toronto, he warred with the city’s top sports columnists. He was the kind of player his own teammates could only brook during the high times, the kind of guy they loved because he always won big games for them. A two-time Yankee, he loved pitching in New York and enjoyed his greatest successes there, including a perfect game in 1998. He never wanted to leave New York; he was a favorite of the fans and of George Steinbrenner, but his teammates’ support was lukewarm at best. By the end of his second tour with the Yankees his relationship with Joe Torre and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre was even cooler. The writers hated him and the feeling was mutual, but David Wells had won two World Series titles, one with Toronto and one with the 1998 Yankees, and rarely played on losing teams. The more big games he won, the longer he’d be around. The only thing David Wells knew better than his value to a team was how to pitch.
A left-handed control pitcher, Wells was one of the people most affected by the bigger-faster-stronger set. Yet he couldn’t understand why - people wasted their breath trying to reform the game. Wells was no fool. He was another prominent player who believed that the very hierarchy of baseball encouraged offense, at the expense of his livelihood. “Why do you think the fucking DH exists in the first place? You think owners want to see a 1-0 game? You know the fans sure as hell don’t.”
Wells also knew that crossing the power in the game could be expensive. In spring 2003, Wells alleged in his autobiography that nearly half the players in the big leagues were using steroids. As the backlash intensified, Wells reduced his estimate to 20 percent. Instead of investigating the issue, the Yankees fined him $100,000 for conduct detrimental to the team. That told him all he needed to know. You couldn’t reform from the outside, Wells believed, something that didn’t want to be reformed from within. Too much money was at stake. There was no way you could be a reformer when the sport’s lifeblood—the people who slapped down their $50 for a ticket—came to watch the pumped-up version of the game and didn’t care how these great feats were achieved.
Sure, Wells believed players who took steroids were cheating, but he was al
so something of a libertarian about it. He believed the players were grown men who had made a choice based on the realities of the baseball life, and baseball had made it very clear which players made the money and which ones got sent back to the bushes. He did not like the Crusaders or what they represented. “What do we need those guys for? So they can do to us what they do in the Olympics? I mean, fuck, you know what happens in the Olympics? You get a cold, you take some medicine for it, and you get banned for life.”
Cynical almost to the point of purity, Wells thought that steroid use in baseball represented nothing more than a kind of Darwinism. Each generation of Americans lived better than the previous one. Players ate better, were far more affluent, and better technology helped sharpen their skills beyond those of the previous generation. Brooks Robinson would have been a great fielder in any era, but would he have been as good if he were playing in the 1920s, when a baseball glove was slightly bigger than a fielder’s hand? To Wells, the use of an available supplement was merely an example of progress. It wasn’t his fault that certain substances weren’t available to Willie Mays a generation before. To him, it was just another example of survival in a game that ate its young.
David Wells was a product of a very different America, one that was less loyal, less inclined to be outraged by scandal, and wholly more cynical, believing that the means by which success was gained were infinitely less important than the end result. Not only did David Wells not care that players used steroids, he expected everyone who competed against him, especially considering the enormous sums of money that were on the table, to do whatever it took to get over. Wells exemplified this new American way of thinking, and it explained exactly why the fans kept coming back to the ballpark. In David Wells’s America, it was the crook who got the TV show.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Three months earlier, Dana Yates had been an intern with the San Mateo Daily Journal, a tiny newspaper in Burlingame, California, a speck of a town tucked along the forty-mile expanse of freeway and technology firms between San Francisco and San Jose about six minutes south of the San Francisco International Airport. Yates had wondered where she would wind up. She had graduated from college and, having enjoyed her time in the world of entry-level journalism, decided that, at least for the near future, making calls for the police blotter and covering city council meetings for the Daily Journal wasn’t such a bad way to go.
On the morning of September 3, 2003, Yates received a phone call. According to the caller something weird was happening in Burlingame. Federal agents had swarmed a local nutrition laboratory. The caller told Yates it was worth checking out.
When she arrived, most of the action had already occurred, but the dust had not settled. Eyewitnesses told her that the raid hadn’t been led by the local San Mateo police, but by an elite force, quite possibly the FBI.
As Yates sat down to write, she spoke with her editors about how to approach the story. Cautious, she did not want to overplay her hand. What if it was nothing? Then again, she thought, it seemed like a very big deal. “It wasn’t every day,” she later recalled, “that the federal government pulls a raid here. I mean, this is Burlingame.”
The story contained only eight paragraphs, the first four of which revealed something more than a routine sting. Yates played it straight:
A Burlingame lab that specializes in nutritional supplements and serves athletes including Barry Bonds, Marion Jones and 250 professional football players was raided yesterday afternoon by the IRS and the San Mateo County Narcotics Team.
Agents from the IRS Criminal Investigations Unit and San Mateo County Narcotic Task Force raided Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, also known as BALCO, located at 1520 Gilbreth Road. Arriving in unmarked cars, agents slipped into the low-profile building with tinted windows at 12:30 P.M. Computer technicians were seen entering the building and boxes of unknown items were removed.
“We’re limited on what can be said. All the court documents are sealed at this point,” said IRS spokesman Mark Lessler, adding that more information will be revealed today.
The IRS is the lead agency in this investigation and only a couple of county agents were on scene, said Capt. Trish Sanchez, with the San Mateo County’s Narcotics Task Force.
The rest of Yates’s story provided background that was already familiar to the Crusaders. BALCO had begun to curiously take shape as a player in the ongoing track and field doping story. A week earlier, sprinter Kelli White had tested positive for a banned substance she said was prescribed by a BALCO doctor to treat narcolepsy. The company’s founder, a shadowy musician-turned-nutritionist named Victor Conte, was linked to C. J. Hunter, ex-husband of track star Marion Jones and disgraced shot-putter who had been banned from Olympic competition for testing positive for nandrolone, another potent steroid. To insiders in the track and field world, BALCO was a company to watch.
The next day, Yates reported that federal agents then went to a gym around the corner from BALCO to interrogate Greg Anderson, a personal trainer who worked for BALCO and also happened to be one of two personal trainers for Barry Bonds. Dana Yates, all of twenty-one years old and a full-time reporter for less than ninety days, had opened the door on what would become the biggest doping scandal in American sports history. “For the rest of my career,” she said with a laugh, “I’ll be trying to top BALCO.”
The next few weeks were a heady time for Yates. The phone rang constantly. The San Diego Union-Tribune called looking for details. That paper’s investigative reporters had been on BALCO’s trail earlier in the year. So were the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She remembered having coffee with a French journalist who had flown to Northern California as part of an investigation into track and field doping. The reporter, Yates recalled, had made a to-do list for his trip and one of his top priorities was to begin collecting information on BALCO. The Feds had beaten him to it.
Two days after the original story broke, the San Francisco Chronicle credited the Daily Journal with the scoop. At first, there was nothing sexy about it. The Chronicle thought so much of the BALCO story that it ran the piece on page A-14. Glenn Schwarz, the Chronicle sports editor, had a sense that the story could be a potentially important one, if for little other reason than the names involved. In the process of raiding BALCO, the federal agents assigned to the job had stopped to admire the photos of the superstar athletes in Victor Conte’s offices. Barry Bonds was the best player in baseball. Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery were elite track stars. Sugar Shane Moseley was a boxing champion and Bill Romanowski, the linebacker, was well-known in San Francisco sports circles as a current member of the Oakland Raiders who had previously won a pair of Super Bowls with the 49ers. “There was some question about what the story was,” Schwarz recalled. “But when you saw all those names, all connected with this one little company, you had a pretty good feeling that there was something there.”
But, at least to the Chronicle, the larger import of BALCO did not immediately reveal itself. There was, to some of the editors, a decided lack of interest in the story from the paper’s top editors. It was too amorphous, too difficult to pin down. The IRS had effected an “enforcement action” against a nutritional lab. What did that have to do with sports? What did it mean, anyway? Did the IRS raid BALCO because it didn’t pay its taxes? From the beginning, BALCO sounded more like a money-laundering story than a sports one. It would make a nice piece of fiction that everyone at the Chronicle recognized the significance of the raid immediately. The truth was more complicated. To Glenn Schwarz, it was clear that the story had potential, but how to get at it was another topic altogether.
TWO YEARS earlier, fate had intervened. San Francisco journalism, considered quirky and curiously mediocre for a city as majestic as San Francisco, had been in severe transition. In a country of declining readership, few cities were legitimately two-paper towns and fewer still had an afternoon paper, which the Examiner was. The impending doom of the Examiner had been a fact of San Francisco life since
the 1960s, but the newspaper, tough and spirited, held on, routinely gaining in journalistic respect what it had lost in circulation. The Chronicle, meanwhile, had always been expected to survive, not because of its journalistic brilliance, but by the mere fact of its size.
In 2001, in a coup emblematic of the legacy of its founder, William Randolph Hearst, the Examiner purchased its larger competitor and then folded the Examiner name. The scrappy, pugnacious Examiner would absorb the slower, cumbersome Chronicle to create a so-called “super paper” in which the Examiner’s journalistic superiority would merge with the Chronicle’s reach (that the superb work the Chronicle did on the BALCO story was almost completely engineered by former Examiner reporters was not lost on members of the San Francisco journalism community and remained a source of pride for the old Ex reporters who remembered those bitter partisan battles with the haughtier Chron). As part of the negotiation of the sale, as well as to satisfy the concerns of the Justice Department, the Examiner executives agreed not to force any layoffs in taking over the Chronicle. That meant the new paper suffered from over-staffing. To Glenn Schwarz, the additional staff from the takeover provided the Chronicle with the depth that was perfect for handling big stories.
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