The executives who employed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach regarding potential steroid use by their players explain that the pressure to produce an exciting on-field product not only enticed players to use drugs, but discouraged people in positions of authority from stopping them from doing so. Steve Phillips, the former general manager of the New York Mets, reveals an attitude far different from the ignorance Bud Selig said was at the root of baseball’s inaction. “I’m there to win ball games, too,” he says on ESPN’s Quite Frankly. “And if everyone is doing something that will give them an advantage, I want my players doing it, too.” Theo Epstein, the former general manager of the Red Sox, harbored deep concerns about the use of growth hormone in baseball, not only for the safety of his players but because of the resulting difficulty in evaluating players over the long term. In the visitor’s clubhouse at Fenway Park, Brad Fischer, the burly, soft-spoken first base coach of the Oakland A’s, remembers that during his playing days in the minor leagues, on the top shelf of each locker, tiny pills sat next to a paper cup of water. The pills were amphetamines. They were administered by the team and, Fischer recalled, using them was not optional. “They were there every day. Everyone knew it,” he said. “If you didn’t take them, you weren’t going to play.”
Drugs were only part of a decade engulfed by power. Tom Candiotti, the knuckleballer who played for sixteen seasons with five teams, remembers the intimidation tactics used by the umpires before Sandy Alderson cleaned house. Candiotti recalls both the umpires’ arrogance and their envy toward the players who earned such preposterous salaries. Some umpires wanted to cash in. Candiotti recalls one incident involving the Dodgers’ young catching star Mike Piazza. “They’d come into the trainer’s room, ask Piazza to sign some bats and balls, and if he didn’t, they’d tell him he wouldn’t be able to buy a call that night. They told him he’d need a microscope to see the strike zone. It may have sounded like a joke, but they weren’t kidding.”
Clark Griffith, the former owner of the Minnesota Twins, recalls the pressure placed on official scorers to call fewer errors in order to boost the offensive statistics of the home team. Influencing an official scorer in any way is a practice forbidden by baseball rules but teams repeatedly lobbied them for favorable scoring by having managers ask scorers to change their calls either nicely or with ridicule, while their fellow writers in the press box expressed hard opinions about the scoring decisions. To some, it was harmless politicking, the home team trying to obtain a certain home-field advantage. To others, it was yet another instance in which the people who ran the game found ways to manipulate it.
It is almost cathartic. Myths are being smashed across sports. In the NFL, Jim Haslett, the New Orleans Saints head coach, confirms what Crusaders such as former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman Steve Courson had been saying for years: much like the late ’80s Oakland A’s were in baseball, the dynastic Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s were football’s steroid team. Haslett confesses to having used steroids during his playing days with the Buffalo Bills in the late ’70s and early ’80s. John Hamlin, the 60 Minutes producer who put Jose Canseco on the air, produces another blockbuster: During their Super Bowl season in 2003, three members of the Carolina Panthers filled illegal prescriptions for testosterone cream written by James Shortt, a South Carolina physician now under investigation for writing illegal prescriptions for steroids and other performing-enhancing drugs. Months later, a fourth Panthers player is identified. It is later revealed that in addition to providing the players with performance-enhancing drugs, Shortt also provided them with an extensive tutorial on how to beat the NFL’s drug tests. With that the myth that only muscle-bound players use steroids is shattered. One of the guilty Panthers is Todd Sauerbrun, a punter.
DONALD HOOTON’S signature file, that personal identification tag attached to the bottom of many emails, is not just a mundane listing of his contact information—job title, work number, fax, cell, etc.—but a stirring call to action worthy of a crusader called into service by tragedy. Hooton, who became a national symbol of parental grief after his son Taylor’s steroid-enhanced depression resulted in suicide, ends each email with a quote: “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But, if you must be without one, be without strategy.”
Hooton’s testimony during the March 17 hearings, at which he read a painful, detailed account of his son’s descent into depression, put a public face on steroids and, more importantly, the chilling consequences of this cult of power. Hooton’s words were electric that morning. They were also quietly ridiculed by members of baseball’s leadership. While Hooton testified, baseball’s leaders fidgeted. It was not that Bud Selig and Bob DuPuy were unsympathetic to the father of a boy who had hung himself, but that Hooton’s testimony, in their view, was evidence of a setup. There was no way, thought Rob Manfred that morning, that baseball would receive a fair hearing from the committee members, not after parents who had lost children had spoken. When Hooton said that baseball players were not heroes, but cowards for not facing their responsibilities to the young people who idolized them, it was clear that Selig, Donald Fehr, and the players who would soon testify would, at least in the eyes of the Congress, be wearing the black hat that day.
Hooton left Washington the next morning equally mesmerized by the power of his government and the degree of press coverage the hearings received. When he arrived at his office in Plano, Texas, he received a phone call that stunned him. It was Bud Selig.
The Selig who spoke to Donald Hooton that day was not defensive, nor was he bitter about the critics, whom he would often call sanctimonious, that questioned his contention of ignorance. Selig, who would later say that he boarded his plane from Washington following the hearings with “tears in his eyes,” told the grieving father he had had an epiphany.
“He handled the call like a gentleman. He was sincere. He said he was shocked about the degree to which these drugs can harm a person. I don’t know if he ever believed that before,” Hooton recalled. “I think this is the first time he had spoken about this in a way that was real, as they all live in such a bubble. It’s one thing to talk about the business of baseball and the integrity, the record books versus whether the fans will come back. It’s another to talk to us, to parents, in detail about what we’ve lost and why we’ve lost it. I’m not saying that this is Taylor copying Sammy Sosa, so he killed himself. We all have a part in this, and Taylor made his own decision. I’m just not sure they thought about it in this way. For them, it was always the union versus management.”
No longer viewing steroids as just a bone of contention, but as a real issue with real consequences, a different Bud Selig hangs up the phone. He no longer feels persecuted. No more does he ask why baseball receives all the attention when 270-pound football players can run like centerfielders. In the following weeks, Hooton and Selig speak twice more. As a result of these conversations, Selig reaches a conclusion. The man who forced Congress to subpoena his sport, who weeks before the seminal hearings said, “As far as I can see, nothing has changed except that Jose Canseco wrote a book,” now tells Hooton that baseball must do its part in dealing with a “profound social disease.” Though he does not tell Hooton in advance, Selig donates $1 million to the Taylor Hooton Foundation.
FOR BUD Selig, the financial success of baseball during his time as commissioner still represents a resounding triumph, but there is no more talk of renaissance. In a sense, the steroid era, during which the most powerful figures from the highest levels of the game’s leadership claimed ignorance about the direction of their sport, is over. Selig is still firm in his conviction that investigating the years between the end of the 1994 strike and the beginning of the baseball’s drug testing policy is inappropriate, but from that conviction comes a new strategy. The history major goes on the offensive.
During Fox’s broadcast of All-Star Game in Detroit, a somber commercial airs. The background is black and in the foreground is Myron’s Discobolus
, the famous Greek statue of a muscular discus thrower. During the spot, the sinewy limbs of the statue begin to crumble. The voice-over warns that steroids cause damage to limbs, to the brain, to the organs. “Steroids don’t make great athletes,” the commercial concludes. “They destroy them.” The commercial is powerful in its presentation and represents the first time baseball has taken a proactive, antisteroid message to the public. Baseball did not go it alone. The sport that once told Gary Wadler it didn’t need his help took on the Partnership for a Drug-Free America as a collaborator.
Selig has been hounded by Congress and the press to use his power. If the Players Association has truly been the obstructive force behind the commissioner’s inability to adopt a real steroid policy, Selig’s critics reason then he should take his campaign to the public and force the union to respond. At least, his advisers tell him, there would be no ambiguity with the public as to where baseball stood on the issue. In April, Selig announces he is advocating a new policy: fifty-game penalties for first-time steroid users, one-hundred-game penalties for the second offense, and a lifetime ban for the third. The announcement is praised outside of baseball. Selig has finally gotten it. John McCain, the Arizona senator who has been the biggest power broker in elevating steroids onto the national agenda, lauds Selig for flexing his muscle.
The Players Association is less pleased. To some key union members, the announcement is futher support for the long-held belief that Bud Selig simply cannot be trusted. Following the March 17 hearings, Selig and Don Fehr met and agreed that the steroid issue would be reviewed. Fehr expected the union and management to release a joint statement that would appease Congress, prove both sides are serious about the issue, and illustrate the cooperation between the two rivals. Instead, Selig announces his proposal without the union, giving the impression that, instead of fostering a partnership to deter steroid use, baseball simply wanted to be in front of the issue to win the public-relations war.
WATCHING DON Fehr appear before Congress on March 17 reminded Chuck Yesalis, who once consulted Arizona senator John McCain when the latter was formulating a strategy to combat performance-enhancing drugs, of the admiration he has for Fehr’s resolve. “The Committee members were absolutely killing this guy,” Yesalis recalls. “And there he was. He just took it. I left those hearings with a lot of respect for him. He’s smart and he’s tough. You had to respect the way he stood his ground.”
Fehr’s toughness was never in question. Despite the momentum gained by Congress, Selig, and the press toward forcing the union into adopting a stronger steroid policy, it was Fehr who asked the question directly: why was a fifty-game penalty necessary? Fehr reminded Selig that he had always had unilateral control over the minor-league drug policy, but the commissioner never proposed a first-offense suspension greater than fifteen games. For months, baseball had said its testing program was working. During his most defiant moments, Selig said baseball could solve its own problems. Now, the commissioner wanted to impose a fifty-game suspension on a player after his first offense? It didn’t make sense. Why, especially after Selig announced that the number of positive tests declined in 2004, would it be necessary to increase the initial penalty nearly fourfold? Did this mean that baseball’s numbers portraying declining steroid use were illegitimate, that the tests were so easily beatable that a new deterrent was required? Did it mean that Selig wanted to appease the public and burnish his legacy? Or did it mean that baseball no longer wanted any part of the Congress and that these demonstrative penalties were proposed merely to assuage lawmakers and pressure Fehr?
“It appears,” Fehr writes to Selig in a September 26, 2005, memo, “the fifty-game initial penalty is principally a response to criticisms which have been made of our current program. We share your concern about the criticism our program has received, and, in response, the players have demonstrated, several times now, their willingness to take all reasonable measures in response. But we are still required to adopt, and defend, reasonable, fair, and appropriate agreements.” For his part, Fehr had counterproposed a first-offense penalty of twenty games, which could be reduced to no less than ten games by an arbiter, and seventy-five games for the second offense, which an arbiter could reduce to no fewer than fifty.
For the first time, the union is handed a resounding defeat. On November 15, 2005, the two sides announce that Selig’s proposal will become the rule in 2006. Baseball also announces that it will test for amphetamines for the first time, though players who test positive for amphetamines will be subject to a less severe penalty schedule than those who test positive for steroids. Nonetheless, the new policy will put to the test the contention of one Major League trainer who said, “If you test for amphetamines, you won’t have any players left.” On December 8, 2005, the players vote in favor of the new policy
Having finally used the full power of the commissioner’s office, Bud Selig has obtained the victory he so desperately craved, a victory that could restore his wobbly legacy and shed his reputation as more meandering than commandeering. He has cultivated alliances with advocacy groups he had long shunned and put baseball behind antidrug commercials and foundations created in the names of dead children, the real casualties of the story. He has used the momentum of the times to corner the union into the untenable position of advocating something less than a maximum-punishment policy. Indeed, it isn’t that the union lost, but that it couldn’t win without Selig having his way. That Selig’s facts had always been in conflict, that the method in which drug tests are administered to the players is so problematic that the penalty could be 1,000 games and the policy could still be ineffective, that no policy could completely prevent drug use until the Crusaders found a way to test for growth hormone and corral the conundrums of gene therapy, is immaterial compared to Selig’s political triumph. To his detractors, however, the incongruity between Selig’s assertions that steroid use is declining and his demands for the type of debilitating penalties reserved for the game’s greatest scourges stands as Selig’s greatest contradiction. What does the commissioner believe in his heart? By defeating the union on the most critical issue of his tenure, by shaking Don Hooton’s hand with tears in his eyes, Bud Selig believes he has finally provided the answer.
FOUR DAYS before Jose Canseco’s appearance on 60 Minutes, John Hamlin is deeply concerned. Over dinner at Masa on New York’s Columbus Circle, Canseco is turning state’s evidence against some of the players with whom he once shared both the clubhouse and the needle. Hamlin knows he has an explosive story in his hands. He just isn’t sure it won’t blow up in his face.
Peter Angelos is muscling the CBS producer, threatening a lawsuit the Orioles owner promises will bankrupt his venerable network. Hamlin is wondering if it would be better to cut Canseco’s allegations that he personally injected Rafael Palmeiro with anabolic steroids. His concerns are heightened because of the scandal that resulted months earlier when, during the presidential election, Dan Rather produced documents on 60 Minutes II eviscerating George Bush’s National Guard service record, documents that later turned out to be fakes. Several CBS News employees, including producer Mary Mapes, would lose their jobs as a result. Rather, the man who replaced Walter Cronkite and himself became a television icon as the anchor of CBS Evening News, would retire in March.
“I know he’s kind of out there on a couple of things,” Hamlin says to his assistant producer concerning Canseco. “But I believe him. I gotta tell you. I really do.” Angelos will call again, but Hamlin’s mind is made up. Canseco will go on the air.
A month later, Palmeiro defiantly testifies before Congress, denying Canseco’s claims. “Let me start by telling you this,” Palmeiro says, pointing his finger at the committee members and a national television audience. “I have never used steroids, period. I do not know how to say it any more clearly than that. Never. The reference to me in Mr. Canseco’s book is absolutely false. I am against the use of steroids. I don’t think athletes should use steroids, and I don’t think our
kids should use them.” He is lauded for being unequivocal in his response to Canseco, a sharp contrast to Mark McGwire’s refusal to discuss the past and Sammy Sosa’s attempt to hide behind his interpreter. Tom Davis, the chair of the committee, is so impressed with Palmeiro that he invites him to join the government’s zero-tolerance committee, a new attempt to teach children about the danger of steroids. Palmeiro says it would be an honor.
With Barry Bonds exiled by injury and suspicion, the forty-year-old Palmeiro is the center of baseball’s next great celebration. He begins the 2005 season with 2,922 hits, just shy of the epochal 3,000, and 551 home runs, tenth on the all-time list. In early July, the defending World Champion Red Sox come to Camden Yards for a four-game series and drop three games to the Orioles with Palmeiro doing the bulk of the damage. In the series’s final three games, Palmeiro goes 5 for 10 with 3 home runs and 9 RBIs, passing Reggie Jackson for ninth place on the career home run list along the way. Two days later, he collects his 3,000th hit in a 6-3 victory over the Mariners in Seattle that caps a four-game Orioles winning streak. After spending his career in the shadows of players such as McGwire, Frank Thomas, Jim Thome, and Jason Giambi, Palmeiro—just the fourth player in baseball history to amass both 500 home runs and 3,000 hits—is finally being celebrated for a career that has served as a testament to hard work and consistency.
That all changes on August 1 when Major League Baseball announces that Palmeiro has been suspended for ten days for violating the league’s drug policy. It is a seismic moment of American betrayal. If Jason Giambi’s damning testimony in the BALCO case began the downward spiral, Mark McGwire’s fall before Congress represented the steroid era’s loss of innocence, and Barry Bonds’s bizarre theater of half-truths, denials, and legal trouble kept doubt constant, the Palmeiro announcement has destroyed whatever shred of credibility the post-strike years may have retained. John Hamlin is vindicated. Baseball had bullied him. It tried to intimidate him, but he followed his journalistic instincts and he had been right. Yet Hamlin feels no satisfaction.
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