by Bud Selig
President Clinton attended the Robinson dedication ceremony at Shea Stadium. It was a much more joyous occasion than the time we’d spent together in Washington a few winters earlier.
There were thirteen players wearing No. 42 on those 1997 rosters, and we agreed they could wear them the rest of their careers, if they decided. It was fitting that the last 42 in the game was Mariano Rivera, a great pitcher and every bit as dignified as Jackie and Rachel Robinson.
I think our understanding of who Jackie was and what he meant has grown a lot since his number was retired. I think it means a lot to players, especially African American players, to walk in Jackie’s spikes one day a season.
The Dodgers asked if all their players could wear 42 on that day, and of course we gave them permission. Credit Ken Griffey Jr. for the players on every team wearing 42 on April 15 these days. Junior called me at my home in Phoenix in early April 2006 and told me he had an idea.
“I was talking to the guys, and I know the Dodgers all wear 42 on Jackie Robinson Day,” Griffey said. “What about the rest of us? I’d like to wear 42. What if everybody wears 42 on April 15?”
What a great idea. I told him I’d think about it overnight and get back to him, but I was sold from the time I hung up the phone.
I’ve really valued my friendship with Rachel Robinson through the years.
Once we talked about Dixie Walker. I had read that Walker had refused to play with Jackie back in 1947 and been traded to Pittsburgh by the Dodgers.
I told Rachel that I broached that subject with Walker in 1964, when he was batting coach for the Milwaukee Braves. We were at dinner and Dixie was raving about Hank Aaron.
I don’t know how I got up the nerve—remember, I was only a thirty-year-old kid then—but I asked him if he’d ever been sorry about how he acted with Jackie Robinson.
He gave me an amazing answer. He said that yes, as a matter of fact, he did regret it. He was ashamed.
But Walker went on to explain that he’d been raised in a redneck environment in Birmingham, Alabama, with almost no interaction with blacks. He said that years later he wrote a letter to Jackie, telling him he was sorry, and that Jackie had replied, saying they should get together the next time Dixie was in New York.
“That’s absolutely true,” Rachel said.
She said that Dixie came and visited, and that Jack—as she calls the man we all called Jackie—appreciated it.
Ignorance has so much to do with the difficulties between races and different groups of people. But there’s no excuse for racism or to treat anybody badly based on any prejudice.
Imagine how difficult it was for Jackie when Branch Rickey instructed him to turn the other cheek to the vile slurs that came his way on a daily basis. That was not his nature, you know, but his brave, bold wife, Rachel, helped get him through that.
Society resists change; social institutions are very slow to change. But here was Jackie Robinson, change personified.
Jackie’s last public appearance was the 1972 World Series, honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of his taking the field in Brooklyn. He was in failing health, but he still looked handsome and strong, his wife and children by his side.
He was pushing for change even till the end.
“I’m extremely proud and pleased to be here this afternoon,” Robinson said, thanking Bowie Kuhn for the invitation. “But I must admit, I’m going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third-base coaching line one day and see a black face managing in baseball.”
Jackie died nine days later.
Frank Robinson was hired to manage the Indians in 1975, and there have been some terrific African American and Latino managers since then. Cito Gaston guided the Blue Jays to back-to-back titles. Dusty Baker, Ron Washington, and Dave Roberts have reached the World Series with their teams and Alex Cora, a Puerto Rican, led the Red Sox to a championship in his first year as a manager.
But you can’t take opportunity for granted.
That’s why I sent a memo to clubs in 1999 that requires them to consider minority candidates “for all general manager, assistant general manager, field manager, director of player development and director of scouting positions.” I asked to be included in the loop on their openings and their candidates, and pushed for candidates when it was appropriate.
It’s not a perfect process, of course, but I’m proud that it’s known as the Selig Rule. I was also tremendously proud when Dr. Richard Lapchick, who has long conducted the most prominent study of diversity in sports, praised me for helping “make MLB’s central and team front offices look like America.”
17
HENRY AARON BROKE Babe Ruth’s record by staying healthy and being incredibly consistent. He never hit more than forty-seven homers in a season. Think about that.
This was the kind of home run production I was used to from watching baseball from an up-close-and-personal viewpoint for almost three decades. Fifty homers in a season was magical. When Cecil Fielder hit fifty-one for the Tigers in 1990, it marked the first time anyone reached that milestone since George Foster’s fifty-two-homer season for the 1977 Reds. So when balls started flying out of ballparks at unprecedented rates in the nineties, it represented a significant trend in how the game was being played and how games were being decided.
Of course, you can look back now and say baseball was entering the steroid age, but that was not so obvious at the time. It wouldn’t be until the end of the 1990s that I really understood what a huge threat steroid use posed for our sport.
Looking back now, the first signs of what we were up against presented themselves back in the late eighties. It was 1988 when Oakland’s Bash Brothers team, with Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, played the Red Sox at Fenway Park. The Washington Post’s Tom Boswell, who has written about baseball reverently, had reported that Canseco was using steroids.
The Boston fans, always on the cutting edge in riding the Red Sox’s opponents, serenaded Canseco in the American League Championship Series. Fans in the right-field corner at Fenway were hooting at Canseco, then started a singsong chant.
“Ster-oids! Ster-oids! Ster-oids! Ster-oids!”
Canseco responded by flexing his oversized biceps at the fans, then led the A’s to a sweep of Boston.
As we got into the mid-nineties, no one was putting up obscene home run totals, but scoring was up all around baseball. There were fewer 2–1 games, more 10–9 games. There was a trend. There were about a third more home runs in ’93 than in ’92, but the high was forty-six, from the Rangers’ Juan Gonzalez and Barry Bonds, who was in his first season with the Giants. Five players hit forty-plus home runs in ’93, and twenty-two hit at least thirty. The numbers were changing, but the history of baseball’s stats has always been about the game’s cycles. There are always different factors at play, different eras and different players.
It’s easy in hindsight to say that more of our players were taking steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. There was no way for us to know that at the time because we couldn’t test the players. Ever since our attempt to drug-test the players following the cocaine scandal in the eighties, the Players Association had stonewalled us. We certainly didn’t understand the scope of the problem.
Still, it wasn’t as though steroids were legal in baseball. In fact, they weren’t legal anywhere. In 1990, there was enough concern about the increasing use of steroids in athletics in all American sports that Congress passed the Anabolic Steroids Control Act, making it illegal to possess steroids without a prescription from a doctor. That made them against baseball’s rules as well, on the banned substance list just like cocaine and other so-called recreational drugs.
But it wasn’t just that they were now illegal. Fay Vincent sent out a memo in 1991 serving notice to teams and players that we wanted steroids out of the game.
I’ll be honest, though. Fay’s memo went nowhere because we still had no way to test the players. Remember, drug testing was a subject of co
llective bargaining. It’s not something a commissioner can unilaterally implement. The union, both privately and very publicly, was absolutely, unalterably opposed.
So Fay put out a memo and we notified the union we’d seek testing in the next labor negotiations, which we did.
We put a provision for testing into our collective bargaining agreement proposal in 1994. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson had been stripped of his Olympic gold medal in 1988 after a positive test for a performance-enhancing drug. NFL star Lyle Alzado had blamed steroid use for his brain tumors before he died in 1992. We didn’t see steroids as a baseball drug because our sport is more about skill and hand-eye coordination than strength or sheer speed, but we wanted to do our due diligence.
Rob Manfred was then with the Washington law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. He was outside counsel to MLB. I had him draft a revised drug proposal to include in the ’94 talks.
It was detailed, twelve pages’ worth. It cited marijuana, cocaine, opiates, phencyclidine, and amphetamines, as well as “steroids or prescription drugs which the player uses or possesses without a valid prescription.”
We were offering treatment for the first violation, followed by a sixty-day suspension, then a twelve-month suspension, and for the fourth offense, a lifetime ban. We didn’t know then how big a problem steroids were, but I remember Rob saying “it’s better to be ahead of the curve.” He was right, but the union ignored our proposal.
We first informed the union of our interest in random testing for performance-enhancing drugs in the early stages of negotiations in 1994, but it was immediately clear our choice was either to go to war over that topic or table it. We had no idea at that time how widespread steroid use would become, so we kept our focus on the lack of real revenue sharing and the owners’ desire to put a salary cap in place.
Given all that we were up against during the strike in ’94, you wouldn’t be wrong if you said our focus was on the economic problems in the game, not how some of our players were circumventing our rules for their own gain. In truth, there was as small a chance of Don Fehr and Gene Orza accepting PED testing as there was of a salary cap, so to get a deal we pulled it off the table.
Bob Nightengale, then with the Los Angeles Times, wrote a story that has gotten a lot of attention in hindsight. This was 1995—three years before the great home run race—and he quoted one of our general managers, Randy Smith of the Padres, as saying that 10 to 20 percent of major league players were using steroids. He quoted an unnamed GM saying the total could be as high as 30 percent.
It was a sensational story but there was no follow-up on it, even by Nightengale. At the time, the feeling throughout the game was that steroids were not making a major impact on players or their performance. If more and more players were beginning to use steroids, they kept it to themselves. Once I did bring up the question of steroids at a major league meeting. The silence was deafening. Nobody knew. I didn’t know.
I called a lot of my players who I had great relationships with—Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Cecil Cooper, other guys, too. I asked them if we had a big problem.
Robin had the best answer. He said he didn’t know of anybody on his teams doing it. He said everybody knew Canseco did it, but everybody hated Canseco. That was his direct line. He didn’t think Canseco would be lining up players to follow his example.
There was no sign of the trend stopping, however. In 1996, six players actually matched or beat Henry Aaron’s season high for home runs—Mark McGwire with fifty-two, Brady Anderson with fifty, Ken Griffey Jr. with forty-nine, Albert Belle with forty-eight, Andres Galarraga and Juan Gonzalez with forty-seven. That year there were forty-three players who hit at least thirty homers.
It was a staggering amount of home runs. There were only thirteen who hit thirty in 1986, a decade earlier.
Something was going on, for sure. But we didn’t know what it was. Nobody really did. Players were spending unprecedented amounts of time in the weight rooms. That’s what I was told when I asked some of our best baseball men—John Schuerholz and Andy MacPhail, to name a couple—what they thought was happening. They could see the sizes of guys. But they saw them working out on all the new weight equipment that teams had installed, trying to build teams that would match up physically with the Canseco-McGwire Oakland team, which had gone to the World Series three years in a row. In hindsight, sure, you can point to steroids, but I’d asked players who had been in clubhouses as well as owners and nobody said they knew we had a big problem.
Early in the 1997 season, I did something nobody remembers me doing. Maybe I didn’t pound my chest enough for doing it. Maybe I knew that it was largely like Fay’s memo in 1991, well intentioned but lacking teeth.
You’ve got to remember that I like baseball players. I like baseball players a lot. And the Alzado story shook me. I worried about our players making decisions that came with health risks, as Alzado felt he had done.
That’s why on May 15, 1997, I sent out the following memo to our thirty clubs:
Baseball’s Drug Policy and Prevention Program
INTRODUCTION
This memorandum sets forth Baseball’s drug policy and the principal components of our drug abuse program. As in the past, the health and the welfare of those who work in Baseball will continue to be our paramount concern. No less compelling, however, is the need to maintain the integrity of the game. Drug involvement or the suspicion of drug involvement is inconsistent with maintaining these objectives.
The basic drug policy for the game is simply stated: There is no place for illegal drug use in Baseball. The use of illegal drugs by players, umpires, owners, front office, League or Commissioner’s office personnel, trainers or anyone else involved in the game cannot be condoned or tolerated. Illegal drug use can cause injuries on the field, diminished job performance or alienation of those on whom the game’s success depends—baseball fans. Baseball players and personnel cannot be permitted to give even the slightest suggestion that illegal drug use is either acceptable or safe. It is the responsibility of all Baseball players and personnel to see that the use of illegal drugs does not occur, or if it does to put a stop to it by the most effective means possible.
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL’S DRUG POLICY
The possession, sale or use of any illegal drug or controlled substance by Major League players and personnel is strictly prohibited. Major League players or personnel involved in the possession, sale or use of any illegal drug or controlled substance are subject to discipline by the Commissioner and risk permanent expulsion from the game. In addition to any discipline this office may impose, a club may also take action under applicable provisions of and special covenants to the Uniform Players Contract.
This prohibition applies to all illegal drugs and controlled substances, including steroids or prescription drugs for which the individual in possession of the drug does not have a prescription. Clubs will dispense prescription drugs only under the direction of the team physician and appropriate records of such distribution and use will be maintained. All drugs on Club premises will be kept under lock and key. For their own protections, players who are taking a prescription drug under the direction of a physician other than the team physician must notify the team physician of this fact and of the drug(s) prescribed.
Major League Baseball recognizes that illegal drug use has become a national problem, and that some players and Baseball personnel may fall victim to drugs. In such circumstances, Baseball will attempt to treat and rehabilitate individuals with a drug problem through a Club’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP) or through resources identified by the Commissioner’s Office. Baseball will approach its treatment and rehabilitation efforts with the welfare of both the individual and the game foremost in mind. However, Baseball will not hesitate to permanently remove from the game those players and personnel who, despite our efforts to treat and rehabilitate, refuse to accept responsibility for the problem and continue to use illegal drugs. Finally, the concern of an individual
Club about a player’s availability to that Club will not be a meaningful consideration in determining the course to be followed. If any Club covers up or otherwise fails to disclose to this office any information concerning drug use by a player, that Club will be fined $250,000, the highest allowable amount under the Major League Agreement.
In that memo I mentioned steroids specifically and raised my concerns for the integrity of the game. But in ’97 we didn’t understand the issue. I wasn’t yet worried enough about steroid use to publicly campaign to get them out of the game. I didn’t make a big deal about the memo. I probably should have made more noise at the time. In hindsight, it might have saved me some headaches from critics who have said I was secretly happy about the steroid use because home runs were packing stadiums. That’s a great theory, sure, and if I heard it on one talk-radio show I heard it on ten thousand talk-radio shows, but it couldn’t have been more wrong.
Ultimately, it probably wouldn’t have mattered how much I publicly pushed this memo; without testing we had no way to enforce any policy we set, dealing only with players who got arrested or publicly exposed by law enforcement.
It was against this backdrop of increasing home run totals and the absence of testing that we entered the 1998 season. Few baseball seasons have ever been as memorable or as surprising. We’d never seen anything like what happened that summer in St. Louis, Chicago, and ballparks all over the United States and Canada.
McGwire, who had followed Tony La Russa to the Cardinals in a midseason trade the year before, had pretty much crushed the ball his whole career, including a forty-nine-homer season as a rookie in 1987. I liked Mark personally. He was from a strong family. His father was a dentist. He himself seemed to be a good father. He was quiet. I found him to be very nice, very thoughtful. He hadn’t been blessed with good health, battling plantar fasciitis in his feet, but once he regained his health in the mid-nineties he was the picture of a slugger. Mark had big home run seasons in ’96 and ’97. He hit fifty-two while playing only 130 games in the first of those, then stayed on the field and hit fifty-eight the next year. He hit the ground mashing the ball in the spring of ’98.