The remedy, wholly unsatisfying to Chuck Yesalis, was that newspapers tended to compartmentalize the unflattering news about a player or sport within the coverage of a given sport, while maintaining a traditional approach of hero worship. That allowed newspapers to have it both ways, Yesalis thought. They could feel as if they were fulfilling their journalistic duties while remaining inoffensive to the fan bases they needed to cultivate financially. What needed to be done, he believed, was that the coverage needed to be more sober, less jingoistic. That way, the press would not seem so complicit during the worst of times. It would have kept its professional distance. Yesalis recognized that this was unrealistic. As with everything else about the sports machine, there were too many dollars at stake. To him, it was a difficult, if not impossible, dance whose awkwardness was exposed at its worst when real questions needed to be asked of professional athletes.
A MASS introspection was taking place among the country’s baseball journalists. With the world suddenly watching the biggest drug scandal in the sport’s and quite easily the country’s history, the question was whether, at its most important hour, the press had done its job. To Jon Heyman, the national writer for Newsday, the verdict was inescapable. “We flunked. We blew it,” he said. “I don’t remember writing any steroids stories in 1998. I just remember writing about a lot of home runs. It was a great story and we went with it. It would have taken a lot of guts to be the one to go in the other direction during that time, so I guess none of us had the guts.
“No one wanted to look for the facts. We’re all in the game, even if we’re not paid by the game directly. It was still a bad job on our parts,” thought Heyman. “We’ve taken to making excuses. You can say we didn’t have the expertise? Come on, we write about things we don’t have firsthand knowledge of all the time. You have to talk to people and have someone tell you ‘that guy stuck a needle in his butt.’ No one wanted to do that. No one was willing to do the extra work, and I’m talking about myself. I’m perfectly willing to give myself an ‘F’ on this one.”
In his seminal USA Today Baseball Weekly story in 1997, Pete Williams reported that more than one hundred major leaguers used creatine and that, like the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Oakland A’s and St. Louis Cardinals both purchased creatine for their players. Yet despite the evidence in his reporting, Williams still displayed the protectionism of the game and players that afflicted many baseball writers when he wrote, “None of these pills and powders, to be sure, were responsible for Caminiti winning last year’s National League Most Valuable Player Award. But there is no question that supplements and weight training have changed the face of baseball.” It was a bizarre sentence, emblematic of just how gingerly reporters handled even groundbreaking stories. Most baseball reporters did not have the background to know just how these supplements affected the body, yet most immediately rejected the idea of their potency. Still, Williams’s piece was groundbreaking, remarkable as much for the lack of traction it gained as for the details it revealed. The most remarkable aspect of the story was that quite possibly, Ken Caminiti had ingested steroids right in front of a reporter.
To Tim Kurkjian, the veteran reporter from ESPN, the media’s prime failing was that it lacked the overall expertise to discuss the steroid story with any degree of intelligence. The substances were sophisticated. The story was complicated, and most baseball writers did not have the time to cover their respective teams and remember to call the Crusaders weekly to stay current.
To Buster Olney, the baseball press simply did not want to confront the possibility that the game had been, if not completely dirty, at least complicated by the abundance of drugs, either legal or illegal. In retrospect, Olney had been bitterly self-critical about the dozens of opportunities he believed existed for him to take a more active role journalistically. Along with Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, Olney had already been one of the best reporters on the subject, breaking the story of the boycott organized by the Chicago White Sox during the survey testing in 2003. The White Sox players, angry at the weakness of the drug policy, planned not to participate, knowing that every nontest would count as a positive. By boycotting the test and raising the number of positives, the White Sox players were attempting to force the punitive testing to kick in for 2004. The moment of civil disobedience ended when Gene Orza crushed the rebellion. Jeff Kent, then with the San Francisco Giants, attempted the same. Yet these stories did not seem to gain a great deal of public attention.
Now, in the wake of BALCO, the writers, who were on hand for the entire decade and in large part responsible for elevating these players to iconic status, wrote with outrage that player greed and weak leadership had led to the greatest moral crisis in baseball since the 1919 Black Sox fix and that Jason Giambi had forever stained the unimpeachable glory of the Yankee uniform (though numerous New York writers believed steroids to be as much a part of the Yankee clubhouse as any other). The San Francisco Chronicle, which had claimed Bonds’s 73-homer season through celebratory coverage, suggested that Barry Bonds, tantalizingly close to Hank Aaron’s all-time career record of 755 home runs, should quit short of the mark, allowing the integrity of the record to survive an era that needed to be marked with an asterisk.
To Sandy Alderson, there was something deeply hypocritical about this. It was as if baseball were being abandoned at some level now that the cheering had stopped, abandoned by the very entities that had as much to answer for as the game’s leadership and its players. While Alderson did not blame the fans, the truth of the matter was that they had suddenly become critical of steroid use, but during the decade had purchased more tickets than during any ten-year period in baseball history. As much in love with the home run as the owners, fans now came to ballparks with signs criticizing players they suspected of juicing, chanted “steroids” whenever a prominent “suspect” (from the opposing team, naturally) entered the batter’s box, and participated in public opinion polls to demand the cheaters be punished. Some fans even printed T-shirts displaying the likeness of Barry Bonds and some reference to BALCO.
Alderson decided that baseball had been naïve about the size and scope of the steroid problem, yet wanted to know where the press was on the story. Selig, too, would note accurately that finding steroid-related stories before 1998 was a rarity. Wasn’t it the New York Times that wrote reams of reverential copy when Barry Bonds broke Mark McGwire’s record of 70 home runs on the final weekend of the 2001 season without mentioning the word “steroids” in any of its coverage? Wasn’t it the San Francisco Chronicle that celebrated Bonds with these words: “Can you imagine someone breaking Bob Beamon’s long-jump record 10 days after his epic leap in the ’68 Olympics? An NBA player scoring 103 points a week after Wilt Chamberlain’s 100? Ripken being followed by another iron man, only two years younger? For Bonds and his monumental record. . . . The cheering stopped much too soon.” Wasn’t it the Times that reported the day of September 8, 1998, the day Mark McGwire hit his 62nd home run to pass Roger Maris, “Mantle and Maris were in the same lineup, while McGwire and Sosa played on rival teams, giving remarkable extended performances that cannot even be partially diminished by citing friendly ballparks, expansion pitching, helpful supplements, weight machines, jet-age balls.”
Now baseball was expected to be omniscient. This bothered Alderson, who maintained that when it came to the issue of drug awareness, the decade could only be viewed in one sense, as a complete institutional failure on the part of the game, the union, and the writers. Nobody got away, but nobody took all the weight, either. In a sense, Alderson was concerned that the press would do to baseball what the players feared the baseball leadership would do to Jason Giambi: Isolate an individual or two instead of having the breadth, stamina, and courage to recognize the degrees of culpability every piece of the sport needed to share.
As the Chronicle excelled, recriminations abounded inside the baseball writing community. The story was remarkable. For years, the steroid question in baseball meandered to
a large degree, ground to a halt by a lack of real evidence. BALCO changed that. There was a connection between some of the game’s greatest players and a laboratory specializing in creating drugs that allowed a player not only to improve his performance but to circumvent the latest testing methods. Over time, BALCO became not just a fascinating display of a government sting operation, but for baseball people, something to be feared. Before BALCO, the reporting on the story tended to be cautious, deferential toward the players. The writers needed facts, and the one characteristic of the steroid debate had been its clear lack of them. To Mark Fainaru-Wada, the complaints about the press failing to cover the story were misguided. “What changed the whole story was BALCO. Without the federal grand jury, there really is no story to get.”
BALCO had proven that a clear pattern was taking place in every sport: Athletes had turned to very powerful, unpredictable, often undetectable substances to compete. The others may not have been caught in an IRS sting, but surely BALCO wasn’t the only supplements lab in the country that had the contacts with major league players. To Chuck Yesalis, the sports press was compartmentalizing the story once more. Yet the baseball press had not seemed particularly interested in the story. It was rapidly becoming a story without heroes, and the baseball media did not want to face that possibility. The press would then have to look at itself and examine its role in creating this decade, in all of its florid paragraphs, and ask why there wasn’t more scrutiny of the events as they unfolded. Sandy Alderson’s words reverberated. Where was the press on this?
BASEBALL’S LEADERSHIP may have scoffed when steroids were compared to the Black Sox scandal, but there was at least one major parallel that was completely accurate: The scandal had grown outside baseball’s tight control and had aroused the interest of the government. While it was fashionable to treat the 1919 fix as an isolated incident, the truth was that gambling was not uncommon in baseball during the first half century of its existence. Star first baseman Hal Chase had been accused of or indicted for his part in fixing games on at least a half-dozen occasions over the previous decade and had been banned by National League president John Heydler in 1919. The only difference between the Black Sox and a dozen other fixes was that the eight White Sox players who were in on the fix ended up in court, and baseball’s seamier side was exposed for the world outside the fraternity to see. In fact, the throwing of the World Series was discovered only because a Cook County grand jury had begun to investigate the possible fix of a game between the Cubs and Phillies in August 1920.
The same was true for steroids. By 2004, players had lived with steroids in their game for more than a decade. There were scores of players convinced they had either remained in the majors or lost a job due to steroids. Without the involvement of the federal government, which more than eighty years earlier had left the Black Sox to the local courts, the steroid story would have remained in the realm of innuendo, another example of the players versus the press.
Yet there were two critical differences between the steroid era and the Black Sox scandal. In 1921, the year following discovery of the fix, the game suffered a temporary dip in attendance that scared the pants off the owners. They believed they had a credibility problem. The bottom line was being affected. With steroids, however, the owners found themselves flush with profits, and thus saw no great incentive to act, which is what truly separated the steroid situation from the Black Sox. In November 1920, the office of the commissioner was created in direct response to the Black Sox scandal. Once in office, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis acted swiftly and decisively. In August 1921, the day after the eight players were acquitted in court, Landis, unwavering in his judgment, banned them from baseball for life. The act was designed to send a message that the game would not tolerate threats to its integrity.
Baseball reasserted this position in February 1986. Following the September 1985 federal district court testimony of eleven players regarding Philadelphia Phillies caterer Curtis Strong, who had supplied cocaine to several major leaguers, baseball handed eleven players suspensions ranging from sixty days to one year. Eventually, all were allowed to play, but then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth gave the players a choice. The seven players suspended for a year—Joaquin Andujar, Dale Berra, Enos Cabell, Keith Hernandez, Jeff Leonard, Dave Parker, and Lonnie Smith—would be allowed to play only if they donated 10 percent of their base salaries to drug-related community service, submitted to random drug testing, and contributed one hundred hours of drug-related community service. The four players suspended for sixty days—Al Holland, Lee Lacy, Lary Sorensen, and Claudell Washington—were allowed to play if they donated 5 percent of their base salaries and contributed fifty hours of drug-related community service.
A decade and a half later, no players had been reprimanded, fined, or suspended for their involvement with steroids. When baseball did attempt to police itself, it did so with a porous drug-testing policy, stripped of its potency by politics and negotiation. As in 1921 and 1986, it all came back to the commissioner. Increasingly, some officials in the commissioner’s office wanted Selig to act symbolically, as Landis and Ueberroth had, to send a message to baseball fans that, even if the union was lukewarm about steroids, the league was not.
In late 2004, there had been an ugly brawl between the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers. Players had rushed into the stands and fought with fans. The fight was a national disgrace, and NBA commissioner - David Stern acted decisively, suspending one player, Pacer forward Ron Artest, for the remainder of the season. There were baseball people who wanted Bud Selig to move in a similar fashion. He had information that Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield, and Barry Bonds had used steroids, even if the latter two claimed it was inadvertent. Using his broad best-interest powers, the commissioner could have disciplined them for conduct unbecoming to baseball. Sure, the union would have appealed, and perhaps some of the suspensions would have been reduced or overturned, but what was wrong with that? At the very least, the country would know that baseball’s inability to move harder on drugs was not due to a lack of passion on Selig’s part. Selig would have placed the drug issue squarely on the plate of the union, forcing it to deal with the public perception that it, and not the commissioner, was soft on drugs. Selig might well have been turned into a sympathetic figure, a man handcuffed by a union too powerful for its own good. Yet he chose not to act.
BALCO CHANGED the environment, and ironically, perhaps no one understood the power of the government less than Barry Bonds, who despite being part of a federal grand jury investigation consistently attempted to diffuse the implications of the scandal by berating the press, accusing the writers of furthering a nonissue. It was classic Bonds. Bullying reporters allowed him to avoid the seriousness of a situation that was largely self-created. It was an example of how beyond the general mores of society players believed they were. In addition to the health issues their use raised, both for the athletes and their fans, steroids were no more legal than heroin. There was no escape from that. To make this point, Joe Biden, the senator from Delaware, threatened incarceration for players using steroids. “We’re going to send them to jail,” he said. Having lawmakers involved meant anything was possible.
If it appeared to the players that the government had suddenly chosen to exploit a high-profile issue, the reality was that Washington had been sharpening its focus on athletes and performance enhancers, particularly in baseball, since Steve Bechler’s February 2003 death. On New Year’s Eve 2003, Congress banned ephedra, the stimulant linked to nearly two hundred deaths that was also considered a factor in the heatstroke that killed both Bechler and the Vikings’ Korey Stringer. Three weeks following the BALCO indictments and a week after the president’s State of the Union Address, John Sweeney, a New York Republican, introduced to the House of Representatives the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 2004, which called for a federal ban on androstenedione and other legal supplements that contained steroidal traits. By April 12, androstenedione, once available over t
he counter like ephedra, had also been declared illegal.
In the process, Sweeney began to articulate a position that would be very dangerous for Bud Selig, Don Fehr, and the baseball hierarchy: The problem was not the players’ using anabolic substances so much as it was the league’s refusal to deal with the issue. “We’re at a level now where we have to first get to the people who control and run sports,” Sweeney said. For years, the steroid discussion had always focused on players and what they were taking to perform their Herculean feats. Now Congress began to zero in on Selig’s leadership and the culpability of the union. The league’s drug-testing policy, never popular, became less so as players began to peck away in the wake of BALCO. “The more this becomes a monster, the more it plays into everybody’s mind,” Atlanta closer John Smoltz said. “There’s a way they should do tests. Do them the way they should be done—not a platform that’s just a smoke screen.” How Selig reacted to the mounting pressure in spring 2004 spoke loudly, and represented a turning point in how he would be viewed as a leader. If he wanted to be viewed as proactive, he was instead seen as resistant and, at times, even obstructionist. For the first time, Bud Selig began to appear cornered.
Rob Manfred was furious. The whole shape of the burgeoning steroid crisis, he felt, was being completely distorted, and Congress, now aroused, was a big part of the problem. He pointed back to the bicamerally unanimous passing of DSHEA in 1994. Instead of asking its own members how a steroid such as andro could fall through the cracks and end up in the stores, the politicians were now jumping down baseball’s throat for not being tough on drugs. So much of the clamor would have been avoided had the House and the Senate banned andro in the first place.
Juicing the Game Page 41