Bud Selig’s inconsistencies are magnified under the hot lights of the Congress. He is angered by the tone of the day, yet has demanded silence from the only people in baseball with sufficient knowledge about steroids. He says he has given seven years of his life to stamping out steroids, yet knew for five years that androstenedione was a steroid and did not attempt to ban it. He says no one in baseball knew much about steroids. That is undermined by Tony LaRussa, Kevin Towers, and a Yankee organization that omitted the word “steroids” from a $120-million contract. He knew andro was a steroid and did not discipline Terrmel Sledge or Derrick Turnbow. He had the most public position of moral authority in baseball, yet during the steroid era did not discipline, did not fine, suspend, or reprimand a single player until Congress forced his hand.
He blamed the root of the problem on Donald Fehr and the Players Association. Yet given the chance he refuses to explain to Congress the union’s culpability. He believes that failing to act upon the findings of the 1999 andro study was the fault of the union. He believes the reason baseball did not release the results of the minor league policy at the end of the 2001 season was because it would have made the union an even more difficult adversary. He believes that the weakness of the 2002 testing policy was the result of a union that neutered his vision. Yet when Christopher Shays, the Connecticut Republican, asks Selig if he is blaming the players for the weakness of baseball’s policy, the commissioner, under oath, says no, an answer that betrays the entire foundation of the baseball establishment’s position. His refusal to say in public what he has been saying in private undermines the moral legitimacy he seeks.
Selig says that baseball knew nothing of a steroid issue before 1998. Yet as problems mounted, he said that a steroid policy was first proposed to the union in 1994. Rob Manfred does not view this as inconsistent but proof that baseball was looking ahead toward the future. Within weeks of the hearings, Rob Manfred produces a twelve-page draft of baseball’s proposed steroid policy of eleven years ago.
The document is remarkable both in its toughness and for the fact that an eleven-year-old draft buried away is, by far, the toughest statement baseball has ever made on the issue. The 1994 draft is stronger than any future proposals, when steroid use became a given and dealing with it required muscle. It covers both steroids and amphetamines, and asks for severe penalties for violation. A first offense calls for treatment under an employee assistance program. A second positive is an automatic sixty-day suspension. A third positive calls for a minimum ban of one year or permanent suspension, giving the commissioner the power to reinstate after one year. The fourth offense is a permanent lifetime ban from the game.
Shays is furious that baseball’s new policy does not call for a lifetime ban from the game until after the fifth offense, yet neither Selig nor Manfred makes mention of the proposed 1994 policy, nor do they include it in the subpoenaed materials they supply Congress to support their position.
Union officials believe they know the reason why. They say the draft never made it to the negotiating table in any meaningful form, and if it did, baseball did not fight for it during negotiations or after the strike. Union officials say they’d barely heard of the document.
“All they cared about was the money issue, the revenue sharing and salary cap,” said one player representative. “If they felt so strongly about a sixty-day suspension for a second offense, they should have let us walk. I mean, sixty days is real policy that would have gotten people’s attention. You just don’t forget that. The fact is that it just wasn’t that important a labor point for them, but it seems relevant now.”
One union official said, “There’s no doubt that we harbored serious issues in terms of privacy. We were concerned about that. And it is true that, yes, we stood in the way of allowing Bud to implement whatever he wanted on us. But it is also true that Bud Selig blames everyone for everything and takes responsibility for nothing. I think we’ve all seen proof of this.”
SELIG IS now fighting the mounting charge that he actively sought to secretly undermine his own drug policy. Congress believes this based on what they know. What they do not know is that Selig had worked each back channel in baseball with an intimidation campaign that would appear to be in direct opposition to his commitment to raising the level of education and vigilance against drugs within baseball. When the commissioner’s office placed a gag order on any baseball official speaking out in any way about steroid use before the 2004 season, it was not a request. Any member of a team’s medical staff found discussing steroids would be fined $10,000, to be paid by the individual and not the club. In its wake, Reggie Jackson, once a fiery conscience on the issue, grew silent. “Don’t ask me,” he says one day at Yankee Stadium. “I’m just a retired player.”
The members of the committee applaud Kevin Towers for his honesty and courage, but his bosses were not so impressed with his candor. After Towers spoke to Buster Olney for ESPN the Magazine, Bud Selig was furious. He called John Moores, the Padres owner, in a rage. Moores then called Towers, who, after absorbing a terrible verbal assault from his owner, was called back from spring training to San Diego, where Moores demanded Towers retract or reduce the severity of his statement.
IN TAMPA, Jason Giambi intermittently watches the hearings during his mundane spring training routine. Along with his brother Jeremy, Jason Giambi is the only player to be even remotely forthright about his role in the debacle, and feels the weight he bore over the winter, which is now smothering Bonds and destroying McGwire, lift from his shoulders. Months earlier, the Crusader John Hoberman predicted that from the embers of scandal, it will be Giambi who emerges with his dignity. “He’s the only one who told the truth without a great deal of qualifications or subterfuge. I - REALLY think Jason Giambi will be the canary in the mine shaft.”
A Giambi confidant, also tired of the game, thinks about everything said about his friend, about how other teams believed Giambi to be a steroid user, and how his own club, the Oakland A’s, had no illusions about his suspected use. He compares the well-known beliefs to the commissioner’s public stance that no one—not the owners, general managers, or managers—suspected much of anything and offers a cynical laugh. “If everyone thought Jason was a steroid user, and I know they said it, because everyone said it, why then, did the Oakland A’s offer him a ninety-one-million-dollar contract to stay there? Why would they offer a guy they believed used steroids ninety-one million dollars? When are we going to say ‘enough of this bullshit,’ admit we all screwed up, and then move on?”
Days later, Larry Starr, a former trainer for the Cincinnati Reds, tells Neil Hayes, a columnist for the Contra Costa Times, that he was completely aware of the steroid culture, as were the other trainers in baseball. Starr goes a step further, recalling the minutes of the annual trainers meetings at which steroids had been an annual topic, even before 1998.
With Selig’s position already usurped by Tony LaRussa’s defense of Mark McGwire and assault on Jose Canseco, these facts continue to force Selig into a corner, and a consensus forms: Either the commissioner knew about the steroid problem or he chose not to know. To the members of the House committee, there is no third way. The committee members—especially Christopher Shays of Connecticut, John Sweeney of New York, Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts, and Waxman—believe that Selig looked the other way on steroids. Selig remains adamant that he will not indict people without credible information, yet by refusing to investigate his decade he chooses not to seek out that information. Waxman is angry that the sport now relies on the fact that it had no rules regarding steroids, not having sought to implement any until 2002, four years after McGwire and three years after its own study revealed that androstenedione is a steroid. Waxman is angry that Selig said he would work with Congress yet forced the committee to issue subpoenas. At one point, Waxman asks how many players have been suspended for steroid use and pounces by answering his own question. “The answer is zero.” The end result, Waxman and Davis believe, is that
for the length of the tainted era, everyone skated. No one was fined, suspended, or reprimanded. The records will remain though clearly the decade had been adulterated.
If there is a moment of sympathy for the commissioner, it is when he begins to intimate that even his best intentions would have been thwarted by Fehr and the union. That resonates with some members of the committee, yet in other committee members it only solidifies their belief that if he can’t fight the union, Bud Selig is not a strong enough leader to run the sport. They offer a shattering suggestion: Perhaps baseball needs a new commissioner.
“I think you’ve let baseball down,” Waxman says to Selig. “More importantly, I think you’ve let kids down . . . we’ve been running in place for thirty years and I think we can do better. If you were the CEO of a company, I think you’d want accountability. I don’t want this to sound as harsh as it does, but . . . maybe it’s time for new leadership.”
THE FIRST spring training games have begun but the fireball has not diminished. Elliot Pellman is leveled by a New York Times story that reveals he inflated portions of his resume. The baseball world is beset with steroid fatigue, but there is also more than ever a desire to understand how its leadership allowed the game to get to this point. Weeks earlier, Bill Madden, the columnist for the New York Daily News, had begun referring to the steroid scandal as “Selig’s Watergate.” Indeed, Bud Selig in March 2005 resembles Richard Nixon in June 1974, close to the edge, devoured by a haunting issue that has eclipsed his shining successes. “Richard Nixon did a lot. He opened up China. He ended the Vietnam War. He was one of the greatest foreign policy presidents we’ve ever had,” says one baseball source. “And yet he’ll be remembered for one thing. He’ll be remembered for Watergate. I’m a Bud guy, but Bud is going to be remembered by history for presiding over, from start to finish, the dozen years when steroids undermined the history and the legitimacy of the game. This is baseball’s Watergate.”
One prominent pitcher listens to the litany of Selig accomplishments—interleague play, the wild card, a financially healthy game, an unprecedented era of stadium building—and reacts mildly. The pitcher will not allow for Selig’s new position that the upper management of baseball did not know about the steroid crisis until 1998. “If he did not know what was happening in this game until 1998, a full six seasons after he had taken over, what does that tell you about his leadership? That tells you that he isn’t running the game. It tells you either someone else is, or nobody is. By trying to defend himself, he just revealed the level to which he’s not been in control, of how completely out of touch he is.”
In the dusk of the clubhouse, no longer deep in the darkness, the drumbeat for Selig’s accountability grows. It started officially with Henry Waxman and Stephen Lynch, and is now a theme that is being voiced within the game, though not by ownership. “The word is leadership. You hear me? Leadership,” says one American League manager. “All of this happened on his watch. Put it any way you want, but the person at the top of an organization has to answer for the direction of that organization. If he doesn’t want to do that, if he can’t do that, maybe it’s time we find someone else who can.”
The driving force behind baseball in the 1990s might not have been a conspiracy by definition, as the motives pushing the game inexorably - toward heightened offense were not, on balance, malicious, but if the game’s leadership did not openly condone steroid use, it did not do enough to confront the issue until it was desperately too late, the consequences already disastrous.
“They’ve really damaged something,” says author and historian David Halberstam. “It’s quite a toxic thing, and now they’ve really tainted the one sport where statistics matter. In football, they don’t matter. In basketball, they don’t really matter. It’s a fascinating look at the psychology of weak, greedy men.”
Consideration of the decade, in which home runs flew, records fell, attendance soared, and the public remained entertained but less believing of what it was watching, conjures the words of Oscar “Happy” Felsch, a disgraced member of the 1919 Black Sox, a person who knew a little bit about conspiracies of silence and their ultimate price: “When we went into that conference in Cicotte’s room, he said that it would be easy for us to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, that we were expert ballplayers, and that we could throw the game scientifically. It looked easy to me, too. It’s just as easy for a good player to miss a ball as it is to catch it—just a slow start or a stumble at the right time or a slow throw and the job is done. But you can’t get away with that stuff indefinitely. You may be able to fool the public, but you can’t fool yourself.”
If the large majority of baseball people believe the game will survive, as it always has, they are less certain how Selig will come through the rigorous marathon that is history. His abandonment is the product of his stubbornness, his refusal to accept the truth that his inability to recognize, confront, and accept responsibility for steroid use was his greatest failure. Steroids, not interleague play, the wild card, Red Sox-Yankees, or the solid financial environment, has now defined the dozen years of his tenure.
One day in mid-March, Selig is adamant. He pounds his fist on a table during a press conference, infuriated by the hounding twin insinuations that he did not do enough and that he will forever be known as the man who presided over the steroid era. He throws himself on the mercy of the ultimate court. “History,” he says, “will prove me right.”
As the spring continues, even Tony LaRussa, once ferociously in denial and a highly culpable figure of the decade, now seems tired of the farce. “This is a real high-profile situation because it’s illegal, because it has some serious health effects. But it could have been handled within the baseball family,” he says one day at the Cardinals’ spring training facility in Jupiter, Florida. “I think, way back when it was first identified, maybe we could have done something to stop it. We should have done something to stop it. But now it’s gone beyond the chance of us doing anything within baseball. Know why? Because we didn’t take care of it.”
On a forty-three-degree night, the 2005 season opens at Yankee Stadium. The Red Sox are in town to renew hostilities with the Yankees. Hours before the first pitch is thrown, the first casualty of the reform era is announced. Alex Sanchez, a five-ten, 180-pound journeyman outfielder with four career home runs to his credit, is suspended for ten days for violating the league’s steroid policy. “Hopefully the rest of the league realizes they’re not going to be making exceptions for anyone,” Red Sox outfielder Johnny Damon says. “It’s not just the sluggers. They’re trying to get it out of this game.” When the game begins, Jason Giambi is introduced and receives one of the loudest cheers of any of the Yankees. When he comes to bat, he receives a standing ovation. Two days later, in San Francisco, a hobbled Barry Bonds takes the field before the Giants home opener against the Dodgers to receive his seventh MVP award. The crowd’s cheer is deafening. Bonds receives a sixty-three-second standing ovation, and declares, “I will be back.”
On April 18, Sandy Alderson resigns from Bud Selig’s cabinet, accepting a position to be the chief executive officer of the San Diego Padres. Alderson’s six years in the commissioner’s office were marked both by the success of breaking the omnipotent umpires’ union and by his failure to attain the level of influence forecast for him when he left the Oakland A’s. There are people in baseball who believe that Alderson was the closest thing baseball had to a lone voice in the wilderness during the steroid crisis, that through back channels he had implored baseball to be more proactive, to handle the situation before it devoured the sport.
When Alderson arrived in the commissioner’s office, he was considered to be a favorite to succeed Selig. In this he was no different from Paul Beeston, the respected former Blue Jays executive who resigned from baseball in frustration in 2002. Within a short time, however, it was clear that Alderson and Selig did not mix particularly well. “I always thought something didn’t fit there,” one baseball person says
of Alderson as a figure in the Selig regime. “He was a little too good for the room.”
In the end, Bud Selig is alone, isolated to a degree from the game over which he presides, the old history major banking on the fact that indeed history will absolve him, his renaissance destroyed largely by his own opposition to investigation. “We need to move forward,” Selig says in defense of the era. It is the worst indictment of the tainted era, that the commissioner of baseball honors the years he once so happily called the greatest in baseball history by refusing to look back at them.
EPILOGUE
The glacier, for decades impenetrable and unyielding, begins to melt. Long fortified by the solidarity of the players’ silence, the feigned ignorance of the owners, and the sort of colossal arrogance that so often precludes the collapse of an institution, baseball in 2005 inches grudgingly toward transition. Once convinced of its invincibility, baseball is now forced into action by the disgracing of high-profile players and political pressure from Congress. The steroid era, rife with denials of deed and responsibility, has now given way to the reform era.
On the field, the charade that had been upheld for so long has finally been abandoned. If players are not freely admitting that the post-strike era, and by extension their own performances, was tainted by steroids, nor are they any longer defending their long-held, and widely discredited, position that steroid use was a marginal influence in baseball trumped up by media sensationalism. The result is the kind of unburdening that often occurs when hypocrisies become untenable. Suddenly, everyone’s got a story, either about the culture of power that defined the post-strike years, or about the drugs that, for years, the players said did not exist. Tom House, the former Atlanta Braves relief pitcher, says he used steroids in the 1970s. Billy Sample, the former Texas Rangers outfielder, says steroids were readily available in the early 1980s. Former All-Star first baseman Wally Joyner tells Buster Olney that he obtained steroids from Ken Caminiti when the two were teammates in San Diego in the late 1990s.
Juicing the Game Page 50