A week after Sweeney’s legislation, Don Fehr and Bud Selig were called to Washington to testify before the Senate Commerce Committee. The reception was not particularly welcoming and the exchanges were stunning. There was no longer that country club atmosphere that often existed between powerful leaders as a telltale sign that the fix is in. The tension in Washington was palpable as an agitated Selig sat next to Fehr, listening to John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona and chairman of the committee, savage his sport and its limp steroid policy, under which a player had to get busted five times before being suspended for a full season. To the annoyance of Fehr, who happened to be good friends with McCain, McCain and other panel members wanted to know how baseball could defend a program that was so easy to circumvent. He wanted to know what baseball was going to do about it. When Fehr, secure in the validity of a drug program that was part of a labor contract, said he did not think the union would agree to changes in the policy, McCain fired back hard. He told Fehr and Selig that the sport suffered from a “legitimacy problem,” and that baseball’s reticence would force him to take measures of his own. “Your failure to commit to addressing this issue straight on and immediately will motivate this committee to search for legislative remedies,” McCain said. “The status quo is not acceptable. And we will have to act in some way unless the major league players union acts in the affirmative and rapid fashion.”
With no other option but to finally confront the problem, the baseball establishment, with the notable exception of the Players Association, seemed to be scrambling to get on the right side of history. That was the public face. Privately, the sport was cornered. If Bud Selig and baseball believed that it was the Players Association that stood in the way of meaningful drug testing, then McCain’s influence had struck a significant blow to the union. To the glee of the owners, the climate of reform had finally swallowed the union. First there were the BALCO indictments, which were followed by President Bush’s challenging the pro leagues and its athletes to confront steroids. Now here was McCain lashing out at the sport. There was nowhere else to go, and after the hearings, Bud Selig dispatched Rob Manfred to meet with the union, where a historic agreement was forged: Baseball would reopen its labor agreement, throw out the old drug agreement, and draft a new one. In New York, Marvin Miller couldn’t believe it. He kept quiet, but believed a grave mistake had been made. The commissioner’s office, for years vocal yet noncommittal when it came to drugs, now struck a crusading tone, vowing to rid baseball of steroids and other anabolic substances. Rob Manfred reminded everyone that it was the owners, and not the union or the press, that had brought a steroid-testing clause to the bargaining table way back in 1994. Because the two sides were so deadlocked on the larger economic issues, Manfred said, steroids never became the kind of front-burner issue that demanded the attention of both sides. He recalled his Senate testimony of June 2002, which followed the Canseco-Caminiti blockbusters, as proof that, had baseball gotten its way in the 1994 labor negotiations, a steroid-testing policy would have been in place. “As I sit here today, I cannot tell you whether all of the statements made by those former players are accurate,” Manfred told the Senate. “What I can tell you is that long before anyone was writing about steroids in the major leagues, our offices, at the direction of Commissioner Selig, undertook a multifaceted initiative designed to deal with the related problems of steroids and nutritional supplements.”
Bud Selig couldn’t understand how anyone could insinuate that the owners benefited from the increased offense of the 1990s, and grew angry at the idea that ownership purposely encouraged a shift toward offense, an attitude that made pitchers around the league smirk. “I’ve been in this game forty years,” Selig would say one day in February 2005. “And not a single owner has ever come up to me and said, ‘Great job, Commissioner, the balls are really flying out of the park. Keep everyone on the juice.’ I remember years earlier that everyone thought it was the baseballs and we sent poor Sandy Alderson down to Costa Rica to get to the bottom of it. I’ve dedicated the last seven years of my life to getting rid of steroids in baseball. How anyone can say I had my head in the sand is beyond me.”
Selig used the 1998 Harvard study of androstenedione, funded jointly by baseball and the union, as proof that baseball had always been vigilant, but baseball did not ban andro until five years after its study was released, when the federal government outlawed it. In the meantime, two prospects, Montreal outfielder Terrmel Sledge and Anaheim relief pitcher Derrick Turnbow, received two-year bans from international competition in 2003 for testing positive for a steroidal substance found in androstenedione. When Turnbow’s test results were announced, the Players Association fumed, even though it knew from its own study that andro contained steroidal elements. “Derrick Turnbow did not test positive for a steroid,” Gene Orza said. “He tested positive for what the IOC and others regard as a steroid, but the U.S. government does not.” Neither Sledge nor Turnbow was disciplined by Major League Baseball.
Baseball felt picked on by Congress and by the Crusaders. “Do you know what bothers me about these Crusaders?” Rob Manfred said from his New York office in the wake of BALCO. “When I look at these scandals, they aren’t my people. I see track stars and football players and boxers, and only a couple of baseball players. Yet everyone is looking at us.” The difference was that the other sports had dealt with doping, some much more clearly and proactively. The British sprinter Dwain Chambers tested positive for THG in February 2004 and received a two-year ban from competition and a lifetime ban from the Olympics. Sprinter Kelli White tested positive for THG and received a two-year ban from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. After the BALCO grand jury hearings in December 2003, the NFL negotiated with its union to retroactively retest its drug samples for THG, an unprecedented move, but one the football hierarchy believed to be necessary. Three Oakland Raiders players, Chris Cooper, Barret Robbins, and Dana Stubblefield, all tested positive and were fined three paychecks each, totaling more than $500,000.
If there was a reason why Congress, and to a lesser extent the press and public, seemed frustrated by Bud Selig’s response to the steroid problem, it was his propensity to walk right up to the point of confronting the issue without actually doing so. First he demanded a testing program, only to wind up with one considerably weaker than it needed to be. Then he acknowledged that a stricter testing policy was a mechanism baseball needed to allow the game to move forward, but would not acknowledge what it was that baseball was moving forward from. In spring 2004, Selig sent out a missive issuing a gag order throughout baseball on the subject of steroids. To the Crusaders, it was more proof that Selig was not interested in solving the problem. Steroid abuse required an education campaign, from the public to the press to the players. The people who had that expertise were trainers, and now the commissioner wouldn’t let them or anyone speak out on the subject. To Gary Wadler, it was the act of someone with something to hide.
Selig’s actions were similarly unconvincing to the considerable number of people inside baseball who, ever since he had taken over as commissioner, viewed him first and foremost as the protector of the owners’ money, but if Selig himself still did not command complete respect, the power of his office to discipline certainly did. Selig maintained a position that was buttressed to a large degree by general managers who for their own reasons feared telling the commissioner the truth. “Maybe I’m dumb or naïve,” Selig once said, “but then a lot of other general managers are in the same boat, because they’ve told me, men like Billy Beane and Brian Cashman, that they had no idea about steroids, either.” Except to the players, thousands of dollars in fines were a serious deterrent. Fear worked, and no one wanted to cross Bud Selig. “Give me a fucking break,” said one American League manager. “They knew what was going on. They saw all that money that home runs were bringing in. Now they’re going to stand up and act like they are trying to clean up the game, like it’s a big surprise that players were taking stuff? Cut it o
ut. Uh, I’m still off the record, right?”
Selig presented himself as a reformer, yet was maddeningly inconsistent. The commissioner believed his office to be the first entity to deal with steroids, yet for years did not offer a single public campaign suggesting children not use these substances. He was quick to blame the Players Association, yet no one in the game was in a better public position to take a stand. He had the moral authority and he did not use it. Nor did baseball seem particularly interested in finding out what exactly existed under the rug. Despite the tarnishing of McGwire and Sosa, the accusations of Caminiti and Canseco, the explosiveness of BALCO, the powerful denials of Bonds and Giambi, and the knowledge from their own testing program that baseball had approximately four hundred players test positive for steroids in the minor leagues and at least eighty-four in the big leagues, the sport that once spent more than $3 million to investigate Pete Rose never conducted its own independent investigation to find out the depths of the steroid problem, to finally separate the factual wheat from the anecdotal chaff. Meanwhile, baseball, its players, and its union, groused constantly about the very speculation an investigation - could have curtailed.
Suspicion existed throughout each layer of the game. During the 2002 season, a year in which he would win the American League MVP with Oakland, Miguel Tejada’s hand luggage was briefly confiscated during a routine airport security check as the A’s began a road trip to Anaheim. A security screener found a syringe in his briefcase, and asked Tejada and A’s officials for an explanation. Tejada told security that he had received a shipment of vitamins from his native Dominican Republic. What Tejada told security was confirmed by A’s medical officials. Months earlier, Tejada had received a supply of B12 vitamins, a substance popular with Latino players, who believe they provide an extra energy boost and increase stamina. The A’s had examined Tejada and determined he did not suffer from any vitamin deficiencies. Thus, they objected to his use of the B12 and refused to administer the vitamin shots to him. Tejada decided he would give himself the shots.
It was a painful moment for Tejada, who says he never used steroids. The incident was also emblematic of a sport that had become deeply suspicious of itself. “I’ve never, ever used steroids in my life. Those are vitamins. B12 vitamins,” Tejada said. “They asked me what they were and I told them. I did nothing wrong. I’m proud of everything I’ve done on a baseball field. I play every day. I never miss a game. I don’t cheat. I’ve never cheated. I don’t get hurt or have muscle pulls or any of that stuff. What I put in my body is important to me. I’m not going to hurt myself.”
Dusty Baker had been disappointed by the inexactness that came with the suspicion. Were we really, Baker asked, calling someone an illegal drug user because he looked bigger than the year before? Was steroid use the only possible way a player could develop acne on his back? To him, this was absurd. He likened it to McCarthyism.
ON JANUARY 13, 2005, during an owners’ meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, Bud Selig took the podium before a national television audience to make a remarkable announcement. The 2002 steroid agreement was dead, replaced by a tougher policy that Selig believed would eradicate the steroid problem in baseball and satisfy the critics who vilified the old policy. For the first time in the history of their labor negotiations, the players and owners had taken the unusual step of revising an existing segment of a live collective-bargaining agreement. Selig seemed to sense this moment in time would define him for generations and accordingly assumed center stage. For a moment, he was magnanimous, thanking Donald Fehr for agreeing to reopen the contract. His was not an unconvincing performance, for the commissioner now received praise where in the past he’d shouldered the weight of ridicule. Rarely charitable, the New York Times now touted his get-tough leadership.
To Bud Selig, his vigilance on steroids may have been a surprise to some, but was nothing more than a continuing of his personal evolution regarding the subject. Selig recalled a day in his Milwaukee office when he was overcome by an accumulation of factors. Steve Bechler’s death in February 2003 had hit him particularly hard. Selig said he was haunted by a recurring vision of a baseball widow admonishing him for having known that players were using steroids while he, ostensibly the leader of the sport, did nothing about it. That dream consumed him, he said, and he often wondered if it ever came true, just how he would explain his negligence. He said he would never be able to live with himself.
The commissioner believed he had amassed an impressive body of work. The minor league steroid policy, a great source of pride, was working better than ever. The number of positive tests, once 11 percent, was now close to 1 percent. Elliot Pellman, baseball’s drug adviser, routinely paid visits to each of the clubs. Pellman was held in high regard. He was the medical adviser to the NFL’s Jets and the National Hockey League’s Islanders. His connection to the NFL was helpful because, for some mysterious reason, the NFL was considered to have less of a drug problem than baseball despite deep flaws in its touted drug policy. Pellman was to embody Selig’s conscience on steroids and the doctor was often unsparing in his critiques of the daily operations in big league clubhouses. Among the trainers, Pellman was not always a welcome presence, and in some instances they were less than civil. One trainer recalled Pellman accusing the trainers of being “enablers” of the players and their drug culture. Being a trainer was difficult enough; the players were always fearful that trainers were management spies, and now Selig’s drug czar was taking his shots. It was a stinging comment, though to others it was proof that the commissioner was serious about the drug topic.
To look at Selig’s accomplishments was to conclude that he had been a strong antidrug advocate. He was the only commissioner to install and maintain a drug policy and had done more in the area of drug testing than all of his predecessors combined. He might have been ridiculed for his rhetoric, but he believed that to be uninformed criticism, for Bud Selig was proud of his resume. Before the federal government acted, Selig banned ephedra in the minor leagues. The critics said he could never convince the union to agree to steroid testing, and yet, under Selig’s leadership, a drug policy was in place. He had been ridiculed for touting a weak policy, and now he had somehow convinced the union to put the game first and strengthen the policy. What else, he asked rhetorically, was he supposed to do?
What Selig did not understand was that he was not being judged on his record, but how he presented it. Even the leadership of the Players Association did not think Bud Selig to be a malicious individual, but they disliked his vanity. To the players, Selig’s retelling of how baseball’s drug policy evolved was notable only for its one-sidedness. He blamed the Players Association for the growth of the steroid problem, yet would not give the players credit for wanting to police themselves. He chastised the writers for not having written about the story properly, yet refused to acknowledge that the San Francisco Chronicle’s BALCO coverage was a primal force. The Chronicle moved the market, yet Selig claimed that the revelations of December 2 and 3, 2004, when the Chronicle published leaked testimony from Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds, had no effect on his decision-making. Nor would he immediately cite the federal government; BALCO and Senator McCain provided a conscience and an influence that gave the steroid story the moral legitimacy it lacked. Only when pressed did Selig admit that the McCain factor was perhaps the most powerful of all.
To the players, it was typical Bud, taking credit for the sunshine but blaming the rain on everybody else. Selig wanted to sound like the leader, but a great number of players believed that his actions had always been the by-product of pressure. Mike Stanton believed it was the same when the league and the players agreed to the first steroid-testing program. Bud took credit for it, but the desire to work out a deal was a collective one. In fact, ownership only moved when the public and political pressure forced it. In 2002, Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti’s allegations about steroid use on top of Senate hearings that demanded baseball become more aggressive in adopting a steroid policy
was what motivated ownership.
It was the same thing now. It was true that Selig had hounded his trusted lieutenant Rob Manfred to get a deal done, and quickly, but the newer, tougher policy that would be announced as a breakthrough in January 2005 had actually been negotiated to a large degree nearly a year earlier. Manfred recalled 2004 as the year “the commissioner kicked my ass on this issue.” The truth was that a deal for a new policy had nearly been completed by the summer of 2004, but certain BALCO intricacies derailed the progress. It was another example of Bud Selig’s hubris that infuriated his contemporaries. He could have said the combination of player-owner cooperation and the government force from McCain provided the impetus for the new deal. The public pressed, and baseball responded. That was the story. Such blunt truths may not have done much for the commissioner in the storytelling department, but at least the credit for fixing a problem was equally divided. Selig, some players thought, wanted the world to believe that baseball’s movement toward an active drug policy was entirely his idea. It was his inability to share credit, many players thought, that was one of the commissioner’s most fatal flaws.
For a brief time following the announcement of the revised testing plan, Bud Selig was king. It would be fitting, then, that he was hurt by his hubris. He spoke with a certainty that made him sound naïve. As the scandal intensified, he talked about his testing policy being so strong, so comprehensive that it would one day rid baseball of performance-enhancing drugs. This was, thought the Crusaders, ludicrous, more proof that baseball didn’t get it. The sophistication of designer steroids, their masking agents, and the speed with which new products were developed made it impossible to suggest that any sport, never mind one as political and late to the game as baseball, could legitimately erase the existence of these powerful drugs. “Gather ’round, ladies and gentlemen for these men aren’t simply baseball leaders, they are miracle workers,” wrote Christine Brennan in USA Today. “They have discovered the Holy Grail for which international sports leaders have been searching for more than 30 years. Listen to them, hear them speak, and they will tell you that they, and they alone, have discovered the magic to clear a sport of steroids, to make them ‘virtually gone,’ if you will.” It was, thought Rich Melloni, like a police department saying it would eliminate crime completely. Moreover, it was Selig who would constantly blame the union for not having a stronger policy. There was a disconnection of logic: Selig blamed the union for not allowing him to implement a stronger policy, but why would a tougher policy be necessary if the current one would “virtually eliminate” steroids? It wasn’t possible to produce a stronger result. It was another example of baseball acting as if it were somehow different from the other sports. Everyone else might be convinced that the drug users would always be a step ahead of the drug enforcers, but baseball apparently had all the answers.
Juicing the Game Page 42