The next time Barry Bonds surfaces, he appears beaten and despondent. Bonds is wearing a blue form-fitting T-shirt and a visage that alternates between scowl, disdain, and fatigue. He announces he underwent another surgery on his knee and will miss at least the first half of the 2005 season and possibly all of it. He is impotent, a man cornered by a reality not to his liking. Kimberly Bell has already spoken to the Feds. Greg Anderson’s BALCO trial is set to begin in the summer. Lost, Bonds swings at the press. “You wanted me to jump off the bridge. I finally jumped,” Bond says. “You wanted to bring me down. You finally have brought me and my family down. You’ve finally done it, everybody, all of you. So now go pick a different person. I’m done. I’ll do the best I can.
“I’m tired. I don’t really have much to say anymore. My son and I are just going to enjoy our lives. My family is tired. I’m tired. You guys wanted to hurt me bad enough. You finally got there. Me and my son, we’re going to try and enjoy each other. That’s all we’ve got. Everybody else has tried to destroy everything that’s supposedly been positive or good. I’ll try to enjoy my family now, take care of my knee the best I can and spend time with my son, my kids, and my wife.”
The interview is convoluted. He doesn’t talk about his injury as much as he attacks the press for driving him from the game. The next day, Bonds, caught between Hank Aaron’s record and an IRS investigation, leaves the Giants’ spring training facility in Scottsdale and returns to San Francisco.
IN ROOM 2154 of the Rayburn Building in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2005, a palpable electricity exists. The subpoenas issued, the rhetoric diffused, the Steroids in Baseball Hearings commence. The Independent representative from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, is fascinated and more than a little dismayed by the overflow of writers and photographers who have suddenly taken an interest in the business of government. “Maybe we need to invite baseball players to our meetings on health care to get people to take this kind of interest,” he says. Taped to chairs in the front row are eight-and-a-half-by-eleven white sheets of paper, each containing a formidable name: Bud Selig, Robert DuPuy, Robert Manfred, and Sandy Alderson. They are the names of the most powerful men in baseball. Near them are Donald Fehr and his brother Steve.
For the next eleven and a half hours, Major League Baseball and its Players Association are savaged by an unrelenting and fierce House Committee on Government Reform. Going back three decades, Henry Waxman begins with a scathing chronology of baseball’s struggle and ultimate inability to confront drugs. Within the first five minutes, the first assault on Bud Selig’s renaissance is launched. Jim Bunning, the Kentucky senator who won 224 games in the big leagues and had his ticket punched to the Hall of Fame in 1996, tells the committee that all records tainted by steroids should be wiped out. Bud Selig fidgets. He whispers constantly in the ear of his number-two man, DuPuy, disputing the early tone of a hearing that will only get worse. To DuPuy, who looks ahead stoically for much of the morning, it is clear he has been invited to an ambush.
There are tears when Denise Garibaldi details how her son Rob dreamed of being a big league player but, from his college coaches at the University of Southern California to the pro scouts who evaluated him, was constantly given the same message: Get bigger. There is anger from Donald Hooton, who wants to know how kids who play sports can believe in players who are not honest and leagues that do not ask for accountability from their players or from themselves.
It is a morning of heroes and villains. The committee intends to make baseball pay for forcing it to use its subpoena power. The first major casualty is Elliot Pellman, baseball’s drug czar, who takes the fall for the drug policy that just two months earlier Bud Selig held up as a breakthrough. At one point, listening to example after example deconstruct his testing program, Selig places both hands completely over his face and holds them there, as if providing a temporary shield. He then gets up and walks out of the room.
The cameras click and whirr and the photographers stir when the players arrive. Before appearing, Canseco is separated from his former brethren and placed in his own anteroom. He is nervous, anxious. He tells the committee that he is on parole, and is disappointed that he was not given immunity for his testimony. For days leading up to the hearings, Jose Canseco could not sleep. He is convinced that without immunity he will incriminate himself and be arrested. Certain handlers have told him as much will happen, that without immunity he will leave the hearing room in shackles. The result is a shaky Canseco, unfocused, confused. He has lost his message that, taken properly, anabolic steroids will prolong life. A little more than a month earlier, he enjoyed a light moment on the 60 Minutes set with Mike Wallace. Wallace, the Massachusetts native who graduated from Brookline High in 1935, interviewed Canseco at length about steroids. Canseco told Wallace he should use steroids, too. “Mike, what are you, eighty-six or eighty-seven? I could put you on a program and you could live to a hundred and twenty.”
That Canseco does not testify this day. He speaks his conscience, that being in the same room with parents of dead children has moved him. He veers from his prosteroid message and reverses himself. He had never advocated steroids for young people, but now denounces steroid use completely, except in the extreme case of injury. He is still an elusive figure, the wrong messenger yet still alluring, and compared to the ballplayers who sit to his left, impressive.
In front of the nation, and under oath, the rest of the players are reduced to scared little boys, wayward but generally good kids being kept after school to remind them how to distinguish right from wrong. Having received federal subpoenas, they are now just ballplayers, utterly lost outside the protected cocoon in which they have always been in control, in which someone else always carries the luggage and they can turn their backs on anyone at any time. They are out of their element. They all tell the committee that drug use is bad. They tell the committee they are committed to using their blinding star power for good. They are faced with either protecting the baseball fraternity or telling the truth to Congress. Telling the truth means betraying the code. They answer questions cautiously. The arrogance, the tough talk has disappeared, replaced by humility and discomfort. Curt Schilling, once outspoken about steroid use, now retreats. He is articulate, but his tone is reduced. He says he “grossly overstated” the steroid problem. Rafael Palmeiro, defiant about his desire not to appear, points a finger at the committee members, intensely denying Canseco’s claim he used steroids. Sammy Sosa barely speaks. For the first time for virtually all of them, they are not in control. They are not bullying reporters or being stroked for their singular athletic skills. They are being asked real questions about real subjects with real consequences by people a thousand times more powerful than they. None of them knows what to do.
A NATIONAL television audience witnesses the end of Mark McGwire as an American icon. During his opening statement to the committee, he nearly collapses in tears. His face is drawn, thinner than when he retired in 2001, yet he still is a big man. He is wearing a dark suit with a shiny green tie, rimless rectangular glasses, his once-menacing goatee trimmed short and graying. In Montreal, Dick Pound is watching McGwire and sees a man weighted by truth, wracked with guilt. The eyes of the Garibaldis, the Hootons, and every child who wore his jersey upon him, McGwire slowly sips a plastic bottle of Deer Park water. His voice cracks as he continues. His fall from grace can be charted by the second. In Jupiter, Florida, Tony LaRussa is watching. He sees his former player standing in front of America with the ultimate chance for redemption, to announce his innocence as he had so many times in the past, except this time, under oath, McGwire won’t do it. McGwire intimates that he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. McGwire sobs and Rafael Palmeiro wraps a supportive arm around him. Dick Pound believes he is witnessing a confession.
It is a riveting moment. Bud Selig, Rob Manfred, and Bob DuPuy are watching. The committee takes a recess, during which Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat, is unmoved, totally
unimpressed by players who pledged their support yet refused to appear without being forced by the government. Cummings is particularly unsympathetic to McGwire. “I sat there and listened to him talk about all the sympathy he says he has for these families of children who committed suicide due to steroid use,” he said. “And then he says the most important thing is that he protects himself and his friends.”
A different McGwire returns from the recess. There are no tears or contrition, no humanity. There is but a stern and cold repetition of the same phrase. “I’m not here to talk about the past.” He clearly has an ally in Tom Davis, the committee chair, who intercedes any time McGwire is confronted by a hard question, from either a Republican or a Democrat. Watching on television in Florida is Reggie Jackson, and Davis’s protection of McGwire does not go unnoticed. Jackson winces each time his former teammate is asked a tough question by a committee member, only to have Davis intervene. Cummings asks him during one exchange if he is taking the Fifth. “I’m not here to talk about the past,” is McGwire’s response. He is melting in front of his country.
He has answers for nothing. He hit 583 home runs in his career and will not defend a single one. He will not talk about one at-bat, one hit, or one day of his career. He will not talk about androstenedione, even though seven years earlier he had discussed the drug openly. His refrain is constant. “I’m not here to talk about the past.” He says it so often that the gallery begins to laugh at the man who was once credited with saving baseball. His counterpart in the revival, Sammy Sosa, sits slumped in his chair, his lawyer to his right and an interpreter to his left. Sosa tells the committee he is clean but says little else.
McGwire leaves in tatters. Lacy Clay, a Missouri Democrat, through whose district runs a stretch of Interstate 70 named the Mark McGwire Highway, looks at McGwire and asks, “Can we look at children with a straight face and tell them that great players like you played the game with honesty and integrity?” McGwire stares forward, silent and lost, before turning to his lawyer for a few moments. When he turns to face Clay, he responds, “I’m not here to talk about the past.” It is a devastating moment in an afternoon full of them for Mark McGwire and for baseball. In two hours, everything he built in 1998 has been taken away. “I was appealing to him,” Clay said. “For McGwire not to be forthcoming, it’s tragic.” The next day, Lacy Clay will recommend McGwire’s name be removed from the highway.
That same day, Tony LaRussa is interviewed on camera by an ESPN reporter who asks him about McGwire’s testimony. LaRussa, caught between his disappointment in McGwire and the repudiation of his own thundering defense of his former player, boils and blurts. “I believe in Mark,” he says tersely, and walks away, the camera still rolling, trailing another casualty.
In the gallery, as the McGwire legacy deteriorates, are baseball writers, the men who hold the key to McGwire’s immortality. During the proceedings, on the telephones and in print, one question dominates: Is Mark McGwire worthy of the Hall of Fame? The discussion continues, and most likely will right up until McGwire comes up for a vote in January 2007. Days later, Curt Schilling does not let the press forget its culpability in the creation of the decade. “For seventeen years there has been this elephant in the room that has been danced around by a lot of you guys as well as by us,” he says in a press conference at the Red Sox spring-training facility on March 19, 2005. “The same players you guys are vilifying and crushing now are the same guys you touted to the world for the last fifteen to twenty years, with the same suspicions that we had.”
Jeff Horrigan, the Boston Herald reporter who has covered the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Red Sox, sees McGwire in the framework of a decade fueled by drugs and home runs, and will view McGwire the 2007 Hall of Fame candidate in the same light. “There were no rules. Players are like children. They push everything as far as they can until someone stops them. Everyone did whatever they wanted,” he said. “I blame the era. I don’t blame the man.”
BUD SELIG is out of control. His renaissance is in a shambles. He is flailing, grasping, angry. He is lost, swallowed whole by a phenomenon he never took the time to understand until after the fatal damage had been inflicted. If the notion of a tainted era and its full implications had not penetrated him fully before despite his jousts with McCain and the BALCO debacle, the devastation following the Canseco book shatters his calm. Aided by the new testing policy, Selig announces repeatedly during his weekly spring training visits to Arizona that he will not investigate the poststrike years. It is a decision that corners him, wedges him between his rhetoric and the facts. For nearly ten years, Bud Selig had referred to the decade as a renaissance, and now he is telling the public not to look back at the past. The thing to do is move forward, he says. The talk of a cover-up during his administration grows louder.
The players leave the hearings, diminished, replaced by the game’s leadership. There is Selig and Rob Manfred, Don Fehr and Sandy Alderson. There is also Kevin Towers, asked to appear for the same reasons Canseco, Curt Schilling, and Frank Thomas were asked: They had been the only men in baseball willing to challenge the fraternity with the truth about the era.
The next two hours are remarkable in their utter savagery. If baseball’s leadership believed the strategy to defy Congress was the proper one, they are being brutally disavowed of the notion. For more than eleven hours, the business of Major League Baseball has been brutalized by an angry Congress. Rob Manfred tries to hold his temper. Congress changed the rules on him. For more than a year, he had dealt with congressmen and senators asking him to toughen baseball’s steroid policy. Now, on national television, the congressmen are asking him why baseball’s policy is not as strong as the Olympic policy. Manfred knows that was never part of the deal. Asking baseball for an Olympic-style policy at this late hour is proof that Congress intends to make an example of his sport. Selig fights back wildly. He is furious that the journalistic community, which for years seemed as lost and uninterested as he, is now looking to him not for solutions to the future but for something more complicated: an explanation for the past. Congress has joined in pressing Selig on why baseball not only does not have adequate answers for a suspicious decade but also has not chosen to search for them.
Selig is stubborn. He remains firm, refusing to see how anyone could suggest that in the wake of the strike, baseball craved more offense, or that baseball knew more than it did and refused to act. He was asked to act and he did. He reveals that Major League Baseball reduced its positive tests in 2004 by 75 percent over the previous year. He says that the number of positives dropped from nearly 6 percent down to 1.7. This is proof, he says, of a program that is working. He says that before 1998, no one in baseball believed steroids were an issue. He says baseball cannot be faulted for this. This is his position. It is also his position that baseball will not investigate the decade. “What we need to do is move forward,” the commissioner says. During the flurry, when Selig reiterates that baseball will not investigate, he is accused by Waxman of a cover-up.
What Congress knows is damning, and it immediately devours Selig’s latest source of pride, the new drug-testing agreement. On the eve of the hearings, Davis and Waxman announced that after reviewing the revised drug policy they discovered that the supposedly mandatory ten-day suspension for a first offense is in fact optional, at the discretion of the commissioner. Instead of an automatic suspension and public disclosure of the player’s name, Selig can decide to fine a player up to $10,000 and keep his name confidential. It is a remarkable loophole, discovered only because Congress subpoenaed the testing policy, a fact that further turns the committee against baseball. For what feels like hours, the leadership and the committee spar over this clause. Both Rob Manfred and Don Fehr believe that the committee is suggesting that the clause will allow a player to choose his own punishment. What they fail to grasp is that the committee believes the clause is designed to allow Selig to avoid penalizing a star player in the same manner he would a nobody. The players are shocked;
none had ever heard of this backdoor provision, which baseball claims was designed to safeguard against the rare instance of a player’s testing positive for using a substance that produces a positive result but is not on the banned-substance list. There are other issues, the biggest being a clause that states that if government chooses to investigate any part of baseball’s drug-testing program, the players and owners agree to eliminate drug testing altogether.
Juicing the Game Page 49