Sosa’s decline was accelerated on June 3, 2003, when his bat shattered on a ground-out against Tampa Bay’s Jeremi Gonzalez, revealing a deposit of cork in the barrel. Sosa was suspended for eight games for the illegal bat, and the suspension served as a bold line of demarcation in his fall from grace. Already vulnerable to suspicion of steroid use, though never directly accused of anything, Sosa, like many other figures of Selig’s renaissance, had become officially tainted and forever difficult to evaluate. Sosa claimed that he had made an honest mistake, accidentally using a batting-practice bat in a game, but there was talk that as soon as he was ejected for using the illegal bat, a Cubs clubhouse official confiscated all of Sosa’s game bats and destroyed them.
The final straw for Sosa in Chicago came on the last day of the 2004 season when, after a bitter Cubs collapse in the season’s waning two weeks wrestled a sure playoff spot from their grasp, Sosa walked out before the season’s final game even began. The story became an indictment of how far detached from his teammates and the organization Sosa had become. At first, Sosa pled his case, saying he left the game against Atlanta in the seventh inning with Baker’s permission. But he was undone by the Cubs organization, which leaked surveillance footage showing Sosa leaving unannounced before game time.
Sosa had always been seen as a self-absorbed star, brilliant in the batter’s box but a poor teammate. He positioned himself above his teammates, using his star power to cement his own legacy at the expense of his fellow players, creating a wedge in the clubhouse instead of unifying it. The boom box that sat near Sosa’s locker had become a symbol for the divisiveness he engendered. Sammy was bigger than everyone. If he wanted to listen to salsa, so, too, must the entire clubhouse. There were no headphones in Sammy Sosa’s world. After the Cubs’ season ended with a 10-8 victory over the Braves, just the team’s second win in its final nine games, two Cubs players, believed to be the teams’ young ace pitchers Mark Prior and Kerry Wood, took turns smashing the stereo to pieces with a baseball bat.
A LITTLE more than a week after the Sosa trade, Jose Canseco, once the best ballplayer in the game, makes good on his promise to publish a book about his life in baseball and the steroid use that had come to define it. Three years earlier, when he announced both his retirement and his plans to write the book, Canseco was considered more joke than threat. The establishment laughed at him, an offense that struck at the heart of Canseco’s enormous pride. Nobody would publish his book, they said. Even if some disreputable publisher did, nobody would believe him anyway, or so went the thought. Besides, they reasoned, Canseco was bluffing, this was just more big talk from the big guy with the big mouth who never amounted to what he should have. A month after Canseco’s retirement in 2002, Ken Caminiti said that he believed half of baseball’s players were using steroids. Soon after, Tony Gwynn wrote an opinion piece for ESPN about his former teammate. As for the users, Gwynn said, “I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to wait for Jose Canseco’s book to find out.”
On Valentine’s Day 2005, Canseco’s book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big, hits the shelves and levels baseball. Its contents are devastating. Canseco is a zealot, weary of baseball’s hypocrisy, vindictive in his candor. He says that, during his seventeen-year career, steroids were a known fact from the commissioner all the way down to the batboys. He says he personally injected some of the game’s biggest names, from Rafael Palmeiro to Juan Gonzalez and Ivan Rodriguez, all the way up to Mark McGwire. He is the mysterious, frustrating character he was as a player: gifted, intelligent, and provocative, yet given to exaggeration, spite, and contradiction. In making his points, he violates the tenet of clubhouse secrecy that for years maintained the steroid era. He violates the trust of the players with whom he won and lost games, with whom he caroused, drank, and laughed. Canseco returns years of ridicule with a withering indictment of the sport, its racism, its double standards, and its tacit and blatant condoning of the steroids that to a large degree fueled the sport’s comeback. Scarred by the daily humiliations of being considered too unintelligent, too Latin, and too unstable to be an icon, Canseco is especially critical of McGwire, whose whiteness he views as both the source of his own discrimination and the reason for McGwire’s elevation. If the sportswriters believed they lacked the evidence to follow the rumors surrounding individual players and their drug use, Canseco presents a document upon which the entire industry will undergo a public evaluation.
The week before the book’s release, the baseball establishment mobilizes, protecting its flank, creating a cocoon around McGwire, the muscular beacon of Selig’s renaissance. The press acts as the infantry, foot soldiers in the assault on Canseco’s credibility. Tony LaRussa, who managed McGwire in both Oakland and St. Louis, defends McGwire as if he were his only son. “We detailed Mark’s workout routine—six days a week, twelve months a year—and you could see his size and weight gain come through really hard work, a disciplined regimen, and the proteins he took, all legal,” LaRussa said. “As opposed to the other guy, Jose, who would play around in the gym for ten minutes and all of a sudden, he’s bigger than anybody.” McGwire does not speak on his own behalf, releasing only a statement professing his innocence. He relies on his standing and Canseco’s infamy as the ultimate protection. “Consider the source of these allegations,” a McGwire handler says in his defense.
Battered, Jason Giambi, whom Canseco calls “the most obvious juicer in the game” in one of his chapter titles, calls Canseco “delusional.” He does this days before the book’s release in a press conference that marks his first public appearance since the San Francisco Chronicle reported his explosive court testimony in December. Humbled, embarrassed, and maddeningly evasive, Giambi tells reporters he told the truth to the BALCO grand jury, which by extension meant he used anabolic steroids and human growth hormone. He apologizes for the embarrassment he caused the Yankees and baseball, but never once uses the word “steroids.” It is a bizarre moment, rife with arrogance and intrigue. Even disgraced by his own disturbing steroid use and fearful that the Yankees will discover a way to void his contract and nullify the $82 million the team still owes him, Giambi still expects his word to be more credible than Canseco’s.
The day after Giambi’s press conference, the New York Times reports that, at the request of Giambi’s agent, Arn Tellem, the Yankees had omitted all references to steroids in the clauses concerning the potential voiding of Giambi’s contract. That Tellem would protect Giambi’s $120-million contract by deleting steroid use as a condition for terminating his contract and that the Yankees would oblige is another example of the incongruities in baseball’s story of ignorance about steroids.
A little more than a month later, Giambi’s brother Jeremy, trying to win a job with the Chicago White Sox, becomes the first active major league player to admit using anabolic steroids in an interview with the Kansas City Star. Jeremy says he made a mistake, and it was time to admit the mistake.
Tony LaRussa is angry at Canseco, and his rage becomes his undoing. In his fury, he reveals the depths to which steroid use was a known commodity in baseball, just as Canseco said and contrary to the position of the baseball hierarchy. LaRussa says Canseco bragged about how his anabolic steroids were better than any barbell in the gym. He says Canseco joked about his steroid use constantly, and that both he and Dave McKay, the Athletics’ strength coach at the time, warned Canseco about the dangerous nature of anabolic steroids.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle allow LaRussa to speak, without filter, without analysis. Canseco is a felon. He is a wife beater and he is a snitch. He lied about his own steroid use for years. The newspapers question Canseco’s credibility and assume LaRussa’s. These establishment newspapers act exactly the way Canseco believed they would, in blind protection of McGwire, the untouchable white superstar, as well as the billion-dollar industry they cover. They attempt to use their considerable public influence to destroy the book—a
nd by extension Canseco’s credibility—without reviewing its contents or its logic.
At the same time, Canseco has piqued the interest of two giants. The first is the news program 60 Minutes. It researches Canseco’s accusations and finds Canseco believable enough to anchor a two-part feature on steroids and baseball. Mike Wallace, the eighty-six-year-old television news icon who cofounded the show in 1968, does the piece. John Hamlin, the show’s producer, is nervous but has a gut feeling about Canseco. He is an unpredictable character, no doubt, but Hamlin believes him. Hamlin, meanwhile, isn’t quite so sure about baseball, which during this roiling week is by turns chaotic, combative, and scared. Hamelin is more convinced about Canseco when he receives an angry letter from the law offices of Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos. The letter threatens legal action against the program, for Angelos is concerned that one of his more marketable stars, Rafael Palmeiro, will be defamed. Palmeiro is a financial asset of the Orioles, the letter states, and all assets of the Orioles will be protected. Over the next several days, Angelos and baseball turn up the pressure on 60 Minutes. Hamlin receives daily phone calls and written correspondence warning him to think twice before trusting his career to Jose Canseco. Hamlin knows it is an intimidation tactic, but - isn’t completely sure the pressure isn’t having an effect.
At the commissioner’s office, calls are being made to find out just what’s in the piece. Journalists are questioned about the contents of the program. Some reporters are told that 60 Minutes is framing baseball to look its worst. Wallace, a longtime friend of George Steinbrenner, convinces Steinbrenner to appear on camera, but Steinbrenner’s public relations firm quashes the interview. Bud Selig has told Wallace he will not appear on camera, payback for a grievance a dozen years earlier when Wallace and his program, according to Selig, “clipped, chopped, and distorted” his comments. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I told that to Mike Wallace,” Selig says one day during the storm. Wallace, who has interviewed virtually every president and world leader over the past half century, is patently unafraid of Bud Selig or of Major League Baseball. “Jesus Christ,” he says upon hearing baseball’s contention that it is being set up. “Can’t you see what’s happening? They’re nervous. And good, they should be.”
The tide begins to turn against baseball. The 60 Minutes stories reveal the depths of baseball’s fractures. Canseco isn’t such an idiot after all, and the book is the first complete document from inside the baseball fraternity that details a steroid culture that previously existed more in anecdote than in fact. If the baseball leadership believed Canseco would be publicly skewered because of his personal problems, a remarkable reversal takes place in the days following the book’s release; the scrutiny shifts from Canseco’s credibility to baseball’s.
While Sandy Alderson says that it is “unlikely” that baseball will investigate Canseco’s claims, the press begins to revisit what it had celebrated in the 1990s. “Already, the lords of the game are cranking up a smear campaign against Canseco, calling him a creep and a liar who is hawking a dirty book,” wrote Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times.
“But tell me, who are the commissioner and owners to be debunking credibility? Having participated complicitly in the scandals by wrapping themselves in the ’90s home-run rage and looking the other way, they might have less credibility than Canseco.” David Steele, the columnist for the Baltimore Sun, wants to know why McGwire is being protected more than he is protecting himself.
Dave McKay calls Canseco’s claims “nonsense,” yet in 1990, McKay and Canseco coauthored a book called Strength Training for Baseball. Questions linger: Did Dave McKay knowingly write a book with an unapologetic steroid user? If McKay didn’t know about Canseco, even though LaRussa said in the 60 Minutes piece that “everyone knew,” then how could he be so absolutely, positively sure that Mark McGwire did not use steroids when McKay didn’t even know the workout habits of his own collaborator?
Tony LaRussa’s contradictions are a particular embarrassment to baseball, each comment proving the conspiracy of silence that Bud Selig maintained did not exist. Despite LaRussa’s knowledge of Canseco’s steroid use, he never invoked the league’s probable-cause testing policy and never told Sandy Alderson, his boss in Oakland, about Canseco’s drug use. LaRussa had the ability to have Canseco tested and chose not to, because he already knew what the result would be. Inside clubhouses around spring training, players are angry that baseball would even suggest it did not know the extent of the drug use in its clubhouses. A New York Yankees player watches the 60 Minutes piece and bristles at LaRussa’s hypocrisy. “If a player telling you he uses steroids, laughing about it, in fact, doesn’t constitute probable cause, then what does? Do you have to find a needle in the guy’s locker? They didn’t say anything because Canseco was winning ballgames for them. He was taking them to the World Series. He was hitting home runs for them. A guy turns in a superstar player like that and you know who gets blackballed? Not the superstar, but the guy who turned him in. Nobody was going to risk that, either.”
The 60 Minutes reports are especially damning to the baseball hierarchy, for they reveal the total confusion and lack of communication within baseball. The unforgiving eye of television reveals a leadership confused, unaware of what each level has said. LaRussa defended Canseco in 1988 when Tom Boswell of the Washington Post called Canseco a steroid user. “I know what’s going on in my weight rooms,” LaRussa said back then. “Jose has made some mistakes, but steroid use isn’t one of them.” Now LaRussa sits across from Mike Wallace and says everyone knew of Canseco’s steroid use. It was another damning moment, suggesting that LaRussa had covered up for Canseco seventeen years ago.
Sandy Alderson is upset. Following the conclusion of 60 Minutes, Alderson calls his former manager and the two engage in a difficult conversation. For a dozen years, Tony LaRussa worked under Sandy Alderson and kept his knowledge of steroid use in the Oakland clubhouse from his boss. It was an error in judgment that undermined any defense baseball might have had regarding its knowledge about steroids. If LaRussa did not betray Alderson, he nonetheless left him and the sport in an impossible and vulnerable position.
The day after the release of Canseco’s book, the New York Daily News uncovers Greg Stejskal, an FBI agent who claims to have warned baseball in 1995 about a burgeoning steroid problem within the sport. After the paper breaks the Stejskal allegation, a baseball official calls the Daily News and tells the reporters that “this is personal.” The official baseball position is that by running the story, the newspaper was effectively calling baseball’s leaders liars, for they denied Stejksal’s charges. Another member of the baseball inner circle calls the newspaper and tells the reporters, “You fucked us.” Later that week, Selig argues loudly with Peter Gammons, who asks him if baseball would be in this position had Fay Vincent, or Bart Giamatti, still been commissioner. This incenses Selig.
The cracks in the silence continue. Buster Olney, the determined ESPN the Magazine writer, talks to Kevin Towers, the San Diego general manager. Towers expresses grief and recrimination over the October 2004 death of Ken Caminiti, who was found in the Bronx, the victim of an apparent drug overdose. Though his drug problems were common knowledge throughout baseball, Caminiti’s death at forty-one reverberates throughout a game where world-class athletes carry an air of invincibility. Towers takes Caminiti’s death personally and it motivates his honesty when speaking to Olney. “I hate to be the one voice for the other twenty-nine GMs, but I’d have to imagine that all of them, at one point or other, had reason to think that a player on their ballclub was probably using, based on body changes and things that happened over the winter,” Towers says. “As GM, I probably get to know these guys better than my own family. And as a young GM, what Cammy did, not only for the organization but for my career. . . . If he’s not there, not only am I not wearing a ring, who knows if I’m still a general manager? Those were three of the best years we ever had. . . . Here’s a pla
yer I care about, like he’s part of my family. I knew he had a problem. But I never did anything about it, because selfishly, it helped the organization and it helped me.” Like Caminiti, his fallen star, Towers’s conscience provides another unvarnished glimpse into a closed world that now has much to answer for. Olney writes a revealing story that appears at the end of February.
WATCHING THESE events unfold is the United States government, and Representative Henry Waxman in particular. Waxman, a Democratic congressman from Southern California and member of the House Government Reform Committee, grows concerned when he hears Sandy Alderson’s comments that baseball will not investigate the alleged drug use of the previous decade. The ranking Democrat of his committee, Waxman drafts a letter to Virginia Republican Tom Davis, the committee chair. Waxman’s initial idea is to hold hearings on baseball. Waxman’s aides have told him that more than half a million high-school kids have used steroids. He himself was elected to the House in 1974 and recalled hearings with then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn about recreational drugs and baseball. Waxman and Davis were both moved by a cover story that had appeared in Newsweek in December, which told devastating stories not only of steroid use among student athletes, but of young people who took their own lives as a result of steroid withdrawal and depression. Wouldn’t it be a public service, Waxman writes to Davis, to invite the players, as well as management and union officials, to Congress to discuss, under oath, the steroid issue in general and baseball’s drug policy in particular? Davis agrees. In Boston, the Crusader Rich Melloni returns from a family trip to Florida and hears about the possibility of congressional hearings. He is filled with a feeling of vindication for his many lonely years of lab work. People are starting to listen, he tells himself.
Juicing the Game Page 47