The onetime Oakland A’s first baseman and 2000 American League Most Valuable Player testified that in 2003, when he hit 41 home runs for the Yankees, he had used several different steroids obtained from Greg Anderson, weight trainer for San Francisco Giants star Barry Bonds.
In his testimony, Giambi described how he had used syringes to inject human growth hormone into his stomach and testosterone into his buttocks. Giambi also said he had taken “undetectable” steroids known as “the clear” and “the cream”—one a liquid administered by placing a few drops under the tongue, the other a testosterone-based balm rubbed onto the body.
The 33-year-old Yankee said Anderson had provided him with all of the drugs except for human growth hormone, which he said he had obtained at a Las Vegas gym. Anderson also provided him syringes, Giambi said.
Anderson kept him supplied with drugs through the All-Star break in July 2003, Giambi said. He said he had received a second and final batch of testosterone in July but opted not to use it because he had a knee injury and “didn’t want to do any more damage.”
“Did Mr. Anderson provide you with actual injectable testosterone?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nedrow asked Giambi.
“Yes,” replied Giambi.
Nedrow then referred Giambi to an alleged calendar of drug use seized during a raid on Anderson’s home. Addressing a January 2003 entry, the prosecutor said: “OK. And this injectable T, or testosterone, is basically a steroid, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And did he talk to you about the fact it was a steroid at the time?”
“Yeah, I mean, I—I don’t know if we got into a conversation about it, but we both knew about it, yes,” Giambi told the grand jury.
Giambi said Anderson described “the cream” and “the clear” as “an alternative to steroids, but it doesn’t show on a steroid test.
“And he started talking about that it would raise your testosterone levels, you know, which would basically make it a steroid . . . or maybe he said it’s an alternative of taking an injectable steroid,” Giambi said. “That might be a better way to put it.”
Giambi also described for the grand jury how he had injected the testosterone and human growth hormone, which he said Anderson told him he could provide if Giambi couldn’t get it elsewhere.
The growth hormone was taken “subcutaneous . . . so like you would pinch the fat on your stomach” and inject the substance just below the skin, Giambi testified.
Asked whether the same were true for testosterone, Giambi told the prosecutor that it called for a regular injection.
“So, you would put it in your arm?” Nedrow asked.
“No, you wouldn’t,” Giambi said. “You’d put it in your ass.”
Giambi said he wasn’t worried about testing positive for testosterone because he had only taken the drug during the off-season, and Anderson assured him it would be out of his system before he was called for a steroid test.
When the story broke, Giambi had been at his home in Las Vegas, shooting a Nike commercial for its new line of pro apparel along with St. Louis star Albert Pujols and other professional players. That night he went to dinner at the Palm Restaurant, and then disappeared from public view. After the story, Nike pulled Giambi from the ad. The Yankees, cold and distant, began exploring options to escape from the remaining $82 million owed Giambi from the seven-year, $120-million contract he had signed at the end of the 2001 season. He had become the first casualty of the steroid era, the first player at the top of his profession to spiral into physical uncertainty and suffer irreparable damage to his reputation.
Ever since Mark McGwire had admitted using androstenedione in 1998, baseball players had met the suffocating innuendo with fierce denial. Now, there was no escape from Giambi’s crushing testimony. The tide rose. For the second consecutive year, Bud Selig had seen a postseason masterpiece upstaged by drugs. He sourly remembered the scenario that menaced the joy of 2003, the year that began with Steve Bechler’s death and ended with BALCO.
The next day, the Chronicle struck again, releasing Barry Bonds’s testimony that he, too, had used the designer steroid THG, designed by BALCO with the specific purpose of circumventing a drug test. Bonds was Bonds, not as glibly honest as Giambi, but he, too, admitted to taking steroids. The fall of the card house was complete. Unlike Giambi, Bonds said that he did not know what he was taking. He said instead of steroids he believed he was using flaxseed oil and a balm for arthritis. It was not a convincing performance. The next day, one of baseball’s leading corporate sponsors, MasterCard, which had been planning a massive promotional ad campaign in anticipation of Bonds’s breaking Henry Aaron’s career home run record, announced it was shelving the promotion.
For more than a decade, baseball had been increasingly compromised by a growing drug question, but in the short term, Bonds and Giambi became the only public faces of the era. To some of Giambi’s supporters, his downfall was a lesson in cruelty. Giambi, most likely, had not done anything worse than what was occurring around him in clubhouses around baseball, but he was going to fall harder and farther than the rest. That was how the hero game worked. He would be the example, while the status quo would likely be upheld.
To Glenn Schwarz, the Chronicle had accomplished something reserved for only the best journalism the country had to offer. It forced Major League Baseball, a massive and influential institution, to do what a diminished record book, congressional and public pressure, and a fair number of disillusioned legends could not. “Does baseball change that drug policy without our coverage?” Schwarz asked with no small degree of triumph. “No way.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
If the rising awareness of an uncontained drug problem forced baseball to confront uncomfortable truths about its business, the same was true of the baseball print media. It may always have been obvious that the level of compromise shouldered by newspaper beat writers cost their coverage a certain edge, but the enormity of the steroid story revealed crucial and fundamental defects in the newspaper coverage model. Those cracks grew larger as each revelation brought into question why so many key details had not been reported with more surety. Like the game itself, its reporters became overwhelmed by a story that overflowed the traditional boundaries of sports, spilling into the disparate, vexing corners of American life. Only when baseball became as familiar with Congress, the attorney general, the FBI, and the science lab as it was with a bases-loaded double did it become clear that the journalists most ill-equipped to handle a story of this magnitude were the reporters with the best view of the decade.
It was not a question of ability as much as it was one of structure and fear. Baseball beat writers were dependent upon access, and access often came at a price. The relationship between the press and the players was never great, but because of the sheer amount of time the two spent together daily over the six weeks of spring training and the subsequent six-month baseball season, in which off-days were rare and travel was frequent, the writers were part of the baseball fraternity, and by definition, the baseball establishment.
Baseball writers were also a part of the history and tradition of the game like no other sporting press. Only baseball writers voted for a player’s induction into the Hall of Fame. In addition, the most prestigious annual awards a baseball player could win were those voted on by the writers, including the Most Valuable Player, Cy Young, and Rookie of the Year awards. During the 1990s, as the vitriol between the two sides increased, the players attempted to bypass the writers, creating the Players Choice awards. Likewise, ESPN had its own award show, the ESPYs. Neither, however, could trump the awards given out by the Baseball Writers Association of America, and the reason was history. BBWAA secretary-treasurer Jack O’Connell recalls Gene Orza once telling him, “These other awards are nice, but they don’t carry any significance. The players want your awards. Players want to be tied to Ruth, to Aaron, to Mays. They want to win the same awards that Stan Musial and Sandy Koufax won. Only one set of awa
rds has that kind of power, and they belong to the Baseball Writers Association of America.” Because of their combined history, the players in baseball could not escape the writers.
The sports world was never a particularly clean one. Its lines were often cloudy, conflicts existed as a matter of daily practice. The writers were conflicted, but so, too, were the newspapers themselves. To a large extent, the newspaper wore two hats. Its responsibility to cover the news of a team was often complicated by its desire to reflect the passion of the local fan base. That created an odd duality. The reporters were expected to be objective, yet when the team won, the newspaper celebrated the subject of its objectivity as its own. Only in politics, when a local figure sought national office, was there a similar potential for confusion.
Sports teams were also great for business, and the newspapers were well aware that when the team won, so did the paper. In newsrooms across the country, it was a common lament that sports usually received the banner headline above the flag, teasing the previous night’s results, but in a society that read less, with fewer newspapers, sports could make the difference between a profitable and a miserable year for the entire paper. When the Red Sox and Yankees played in the 2003 American League Championship Series, newspapers from both cities profited greatly. There were full-page posters of the top stars, glossy team photos, advertisements for coffee mugs, commemorative front pages. The team was fuel for the paper’s economic engine. The conflict of interest for national networks, such as ESPN and Fox, was even worse, as those stations were billion-dollar partners with the sports they were expected to hold accountable.
Sportswriting in general was largely deferential, bordering on sycophancy. One of the great badges of honor among Yankees beat writers was for Joe Torre to call a writer by his first name. It seemed such a simple courtesy, to be called by one’s first name by a person with whom one spends two hundred days of the year. Yet, during his pregame media talk, especially before home games when the media that did not travel used its only access to the Yankees, Torre was so engulfed by the dozens of reporters that he could barely be seen sitting in the dugout, never mind heard. For him to single out one or two reporters or columnists of the forty to fifty who covered him on a given day was a mark of great distinction that did not go unnoticed by the reporters whom Torre never called by name.
Even national tragedy was unable to puncture the invisible border between the players and writers. In the days following the September 11 attacks, in addition to the details about his pitching rotation and injury updates, Torre was asked daily questions about his family, and how they were coping with the tragedy. A Brooklyn native who had managed both the Mets and the Yankees, Torre was emblematic of New York, and during those horrible days it was apparent just what a brilliant communicator he was. He spoke about his sister, a nun who was at the center of relief efforts. He was touched by the response of the victims when the Yankees visited various hospitals and relief centers. At one point, Torre and the players thought their presence to be inappropriate in the face of such a monumental disaster. They were, after all, only baseball players. But they soon realized how much they mattered to the devastated city. His success as Yankees manager had already made Joe Torre a legend in New York, and now his eloquence in handling his public role elevated him that much more.
Not once, however, did Torre address the press corps that covered him, even generically, to ask how they were surviving. It was a telling moment about the relationship between the press and the people it covered. These were writers with whom Torre had spoken every day, twice a day for years, and yet there was still a level of personal intimacy that remained closed.
When hard news broke, the seams in this already tenuous relationship fissured. Hard questions by reporters were generally met with hard feelings by the players. Beat writers would be compromised. Their choice was to either ignore the story or follow it and run the risk of losing the clubhouse and, by extension, quite possibly a job.
Some reporters were simply afraid of the players, allowing important subjects to go unreported for fear of confrontation with the ballplayers. One incident in particular underscored the price of roaming outside the fraternity. Before the 1993 season, Bob Klapisch, then a beat writer covering the New York Mets for the New York Daily News, sat down in Jeff Torborg’s office to alert the Mets’ manager to a book he had just completed about the Mets’ disastrous 1992 season. It would not be a flattering book, he told Torborg. In effect, the book covered the decline of the Mets from 1988, when the team was a World Series contender, to 1992, when the club spent an exorbitant amount of money only to wind up near the bottom of the standings.
“When the book comes out,” Klapisch told Torborg, “I don’t want you to take it personally.” Torborg told Klapisch not to worry; he’d been a big league manager before, and he understood the rules. After a season like the one the Mets had—they lost ninety games for a fifth-place finish in 1992—these things had to get written.
From the title, The Worst Team Money Could Buy, to the index, the book savaged the underachieving Mets. Before the fourth game of the season in Houston, three days before the book’s release, Klapisch walked into the Mets’ clubhouse. Bobby Bonilla, the hulking outfielder and Bronx native who had signed a monstrous contract only to struggle miserably in New York, greeted Klapsich. “Look at the motherfucker who just walked in here,” Bonilla said.
“Hey, Bob,” Bonilla said to Klapisch, loud enough for the entire clubhouse to hear, “suck my dick . . . but don’t take it personally.” Don’t take it personally. Torborg and the organization had set him up, Klapisch thought. Tempers rose, and recognizing an explosive situation, Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ PR man, immediately closed the clubhouse. When the game ended, the situation escalated. Dwight Gooden had just lost to the Astros. Klapisch and Gooden had been friends for years, and two lockers away, Bonilla continued to bait Klapisch. “Come on, Bob. Make your move. Come on. You know you want to.”
Klapisch did nothing. Bonilla continued. Gooden twitched. He had been tight with Klapisch. The two had written a book together, hung out together and been confidants. But this was the clubhouse, the ultimate arena of us (players) against them (reporters first, the rest of the world second). For Gooden to defend Klapisch, a no-good reporter, would have been to risk his standing with his teammates. Gooden, Klapisch remembered, wore a shaved head at the time, and was so nervous about the potential confrontation that he began brushing his bald head.
“You know what, Bob,” Bonilla said. “You’re nothing but a little cunt.” Klapisch, now enraged, approached Bonilla. The entire clubhouse, players, writers, clubbies, coaches, all looked on as no one was close enough to separate the two men. A local television camera, unbeknownst to Bonilla, began filming the confrontation. For Klapisch, who gave away three inches and fifty pounds to the six-foot-three, 240-pound Bonilla, there was no turning back. He couldn’t take Bonilla’s baiting, walk away, and still command any respect in the clubhouse. An athlete thrived on confrontation, and, even though he wasn’t a player, real men don’t back down from a challenge. The players would never allow Klapisch to forget that he had backed down. So he moved toward Bonilla.
“Do you want to fight me right now?” Klapisch said. It was, Klapisch later thought, half question and half challenge. When Bonilla didn’t move, Klapisch was convinced Bonilla did not want to fight that day but needed to save face. When the two were separated and the possibility for physical confrontation had passed, Bonilla exploded, Klapisch believed to look tough in front of his teammates. He then issued his famous quote. “I’ll show you the Bronx right now, Bob.”
The rest of the season did not go well for Bob Klapisch. He was, in his words, a pariah in the clubhouse. The black veterans on the team, most noticeably Eddie Murray and Vince Coleman, did not talk to him all season. Each time he walked into the clubhouse, he later remembered, there seemed to be an air of hostile confrontation, as if a fight could erupt at any moment. He and Bonilla would not reco
ncile for another six years.
“Whenever I speak to schools and the kids ask me how glamorous my job is,” Klapisch said years later, “I always tell them that story.”
AS THE steroid issue grew more pronounced and it became clear the story would not simply go away as the McGwire androstenedione controversy had, reporters now had to ask questions of players that had once been essentially verboten. To Chuck Yesalis, this was the price of a culture of deferential treatment, hero worship, and the conflicts of interest that came with being part of the establishment. The writers were insiders nearly as much as the principals themselves, Yesalis thought. The jocularity and routine deification of the athlete that permeated the sports pages made it virtually impossible for the sports department to accurately cover legitimate news angles in the game. To Yesalis, the reporters themselves often lacked the interest and the chops to shift gears from what was essentially entertainment writing to hard news. How, Yesalis often asked, could the sports media machine hold accountable the very figures they claimed daily?
The ramifications were chilling: It would mean writing without heroes, for the decade was rapidly becoming an era of baseball without heroes. Everyone had ridden along and now the culture had been exposed. Would the writers, Yesalis wondered, be bold enough to repudiate their part in it? To him, it was not only a key question to the steroid issue, but spoke to the way newspaper sports pages had done business for years. No one expected much real news from televised sports. The “E” in “ESPN,” after all, stood for “entertainment.” Most of their commentators were not journalists in the first place. Increasingly, they were ex-players. Newspapers were different. For decades, the sports page wanted both to god up the players and to be taken seriously at the same time. The steroid issue revealed this was not always possible.
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