by Bud Selig
By June 2001, Beeston was excited by the little bit of movement we’d gotten from them. But Manfred knew this wasn’t the framework for a deal that the clubs would authorize. We needed a lot more than they were offering. So I thanked Paul and Rob for what they’d been doing but told them it was time for us to try something different. Those talks were dead.
We pulled back from talks and got to work internally to try to devise ways that we could build an economic system that worked for us and was acceptable to the union. For Manfred and the staff that helped support him, the mission was clear. We had to be creative.
One of the ideas we had was to create a rule requiring clubs to generate enough cash from operations to service their debt. It’s a sound principle of business—any business—and wasn’t exactly a new concept to MLB. As far back as when Bowie Kuhn had been commissioner, I worked with William Williams, a co-owner of the Reds, on a finance committee that recommended a rule that required clubs to maintain assets-to-liabilities ratios of sixty/forty. We had put it in place but it had never been enforced or included in a CBA. This was the time to put financial stability rules in place, as debt in baseball was soaring. We had $2.1 billion in debt on the books in 1999, and it had grown to $3.1 billion two years later.
It was common sense to have this rule on the books—and to enforce it—but we had to convince the union we didn’t intend to use it as a drag on overall salaries, just a check on any clubs that were acting irresponsibly.
We had also begun to discuss the possibility of relocating some struggling franchises—the Expos were dying on the vine in Montreal, without any hope of a new stadium to save them—or maybe even eliminating some franchises as a means of making the sport stronger as a whole. This was a concept that got labeled contraction.
One of Fehr’s battle cries had always been that owners wanted the players to solve the owners’ problems. We were showing them we were serious about taking strong steps to clean up our own house. But, yes, contraction wasn’t just an issue for us. It would mean a loss of jobs for players, reversing a trend by which the industry had grown from 16 to 30 clubs since 1961. It wasn’t popular with fans, either, as a bad team was a lot better for a city than no team.
Fehr seemed outraged over the talk about contraction. I’d guess his players really were alarmed about the possibility of lost jobs.
There was some thought that the union might interpret our pulling the plug on talks in June as a sign of a split within ownership. That was the farthest thing from the truth, but the clubs awarded me a three-year extension as commissioner in late November, just to make it clear that we were still planning to go full speed ahead in the talks.
This was a strong statement of support as the deal I was given in 1998 ran through July 2003. The extension would take it through July 2006. We were finally in position to give ourselves the best chance we’d ever had at making a deal—a real deal—with the Players Association.
In early December 2001, just before everyone headed to Boston for the winter meetings, I invited the union leaders to Milwaukee to talk about restarting negotiations. Beeston and I met with the Fehr brothers—Don and Steve—and I presented an outline of terms that would work for a short-term agreement, say two or three years.
Because there were radical changes in the proposal, it made sense for both sides that we put it in place and then go back and address it after we had seen it in effect. But it was clear the union was, as always, committed to maintaining a status quo that was the result of dysfunctional negotiations on the owners’ side allowing the pendulum to swing too far to the players’ side. I can’t say I was shocked.
In mid-January, we met with the union at the Arizona Biltmore. While Manfred was going to head the talks—this time with DuPuy as his second, not Beeston—I attended the meeting so that I would have a firsthand feel for the tone of the discussions. I needed to have my finger on the pulse.
I also wanted to be available for interaction with Fehr, Orza, and the players who accompanied them, a group that included longtime Brewer Mark Loretta and then–Tigers first baseman Tony Clark, a rising star in the union (he would become the first former player to head the union after Weiner’s death from cancer in 2013). The one thing that was troubling to everyone was that the union—at least publicly—continued to reject our notion that teams were losing money. They would always say we were using accounting tricks, like audited financial reports.
There were owners who felt we should lock out the players to put pressure on them. But I knew we could not take another work stoppage. I would hope everybody knew it, but there were always some who didn’t seem to understand that we weren’t talking about short-term damage anymore.
The All-Star Game was scheduled to be played in Milwaukee, allowing Wendy and everyone associated with the Brewers to show off Miller Park, the beautiful stadium that still had that new-car smell. You could say I wasn’t shocked when there were published reports that the union was considering a boycott of the All-Star Game.
This was classic saber-rattling, and you could see it coming from a million miles away. But look: The All-Star Game largely funds the players’ pension fund, and it showcases the game’s greatest players. They might complain from time to time about missing out on time off over the All-Star break, but believe me, those players like to be All-Stars.
I was unhappy when I read the threats. It’s not the type of publicity you would want. Instead of solving problems, this was the kind of thing the union was doing. My answer back to Don Fehr was how about working together to solve these things?
I really wasn’t stressed. I had learned not to take these things too personally. It turned out I was right not to get caught up in this threat.
Talks restarted in earnest in March, with Manfred and DuPuy holding a series of meetings with the union staff in New York. Among the issues Rob was including was testing for steroids, which had to be in any deal we negotiated. We expressed that quite clearly to the union.
There were no dramatic developments until June, when owners and the union were summoned to Washington for a hearing before a Senate Commerce subcommittee. The subject, of course, was steroids.
In the years since the McGwire-Sosa home run race, speculation about players abusing steroids had only gotten louder and harder to ignore.
One of my first steps after the Steve Wilstein story linking McGwire to androstenedione had been to hold a summit of team doctors, trainers, and outside medical experts on the impact and use of steroids. We recognized the potential danger to the players and to the sport, but there was too much we really didn’t know. One thing we agreed was that we needed to gather as much information as we could.
Of course, we also joined the union in commissioning the joint study on andro, but it was a slow process. Andro was already banned by other sports, but the union challenged us to show it was really a performance-enhancing drug. We waited until February 2000 to get the report back from Joel S. Finkelstein and Benjamin Z. Leder of Massachusetts General Hospital. Their findings showed that test subjects given one hundred milligrams for seven days experienced no change in testosterone levels. But those given three-hundred-milligram doses increased their testosterone levels by 34 percent.
In the aftermath, we couldn’t even agree what those results meant. All the union would concede was that the study showed we should have more studies. That’s what we were up against.
We were beginning to have major public relations problems and damage to the credibility of our competition, and it was coming from the players themselves. There were two sensational stories in the media in May 2002.
Ken Caminiti told Sports Illustrated he had been taking steroids when he won the National League MVP Award in 1996. He estimated that half of players were using PEDs and didn’t apologize for his use. “I’ve made a ton of mistakes,” Caminiti told SI. “I don’t think using steroids is one of them.”
Jose Canseco kept getting attention, too. He told Fox Sports Net that 85 percent of player
s were taking steroids. “There would be no baseball left if you drug-tested everyone today,” Canseco said.
These stories caught everyone’s attention, including our elected representatives in Washington. For me and others in MLB, it was maddening to read them and listen to all the conversations they produced. We had kept trying to get our arms around the issue, and a lot of people—including baseball executives and many in the media—felt there were other reasons for the spike in home runs.
Call us naïve if you want—you wouldn’t be wrong—but that’s the truth about what was happening. Sandy Alderson, one of the smartest executives I’ve known, was working for Major League Baseball, and God bless him, he spent hundreds of hours in 1999 and 2000 studying all the possible factors—the balls, the bats, the smaller size of ballparks, the dilution of the pitching pool through continued expansion. We were looking for every reason in the book, including steroids, but Sandy really thought there was something to the bat and the ball.
It’s likely that all of those factors played a role, of course, but in the end—because it had taken so long to get there—we had to be hit over the head with the biggest reason.
And meanwhile, records were continuing to fall. Barry Bonds had broken Mark McGwire’s single-season home run record in 2001, blasting seventy-three home runs while essentially being almost impossible for pitchers to get out. He was combining artificially generated power with his best-in-the-game hitting skills, and ended the ’01 season with the following stats: .328 batting average, .515 on-base percentage, and .863 slugging average.
Bonds walked 177 times, but opponents probably would have been better off if they’d intentionally walked him every time he came to the plate. He was the type of hitter that nobody could have ever imagined when his godfather, Willie Mays, or his father, Bobby Bonds, were in their primes.
Bonds always denied using steroids, but the Caminiti and Canseco stories early in the 2002 season made it tougher to believe anyone’s denials.
Caminiti said that at first he’d felt guilty when he started injecting steroids in 1996, but that he “looked around, and everybody was doing it.” He was playing for the Padres that season and would cross the border to Mexico to get steroids, he said, but six years later it was everywhere. Maybe it was, but by then everyone knew we wanted to get steroids out of baseball. I had implemented testing for minor league players before the 2001 season. I could do it unilaterally because they weren’t protected by the union (although the most advanced minor leaguers, those on forty-man rosters, were in the union and exempt from testing). I just hadn’t convinced the union to allow us to test major league players.
Minor league testing might have seemed like a small thing because these were largely eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds nobody knew and older players—some in their thirties—who were chasing a dream. These weren’t the guys who were role models for children. But I was making a statement that performance-enhancing drugs have no place in baseball.
Following the Caminiti and Canseco stories, John McCain, the Arizona senator who had been a POW in Vietnam, exploded. He had voted to deregulate the supplement industry in the nineties, which now made it easier for athletes to use dangerous products, and he was angry. He called for the Senate Commerce subcommittee to hold hearings, and they were quickly scheduled.
For once I did not go to Washington. I assigned Manfred to represent Major League Baseball, while Don Fehr represented the union, at the hearing on June 18.
Manfred told the Commerce subcommittee that testing was a priority for owners in the ongoing negotiations. Every chance he got, he would emphasize that we had previously asked for testing in contract talks but had been stonewalled by the union.
Fehr told the committee exactly what he always told us—that testing was an invasion of privacy and personal freedom, that players shouldn’t be subject to testing any more than anyone in any profession.
McCain asked Fehr if players understood that the credibility of their sport was at stake. Fehr replied that they didn’t live in a bubble. They heard the talk in public, they understood the suspicion and the cynicism that existed with fans. Other senators jumped in, threatening action by Congress if baseball did not regulate itself. There was a lot of angry rhetoric, and Rob represented us very well. I can’t say the same for Fehr on behalf of the union.
Byron Dorgan, a senator from North Dakota who chaired the subcommittee, said he didn’t want baseball to become a sport where players had to use PEDs to “make it.” Fehr took the exact same position he and Marvin Miller had taken with our cocaine problems in the 1980s.
“The Players Association has always believed that one should not invade the privacy of an individual without cause related to conduct merely because of his status as a baseball player,” Fehr told the senators. He would not commit to even being open to testing in the ongoing negotiations.
While the hearing did little to resolve the issues of steroids, in hindsight it became something of a crucial first step in things to come. With the senators’ public grilling of Fehr and his evasive, sometimes combative responses, it seemed like he and the union hierarchy were willing to protect cheaters at the expense of the honest players’ reputations. I was told that a lot of players wanted to know why the union was protecting players who would use steroids or other banned substances.
In my earlier years in baseball, revenue disparity had divided owners, who could never stand together against the Players Association in negotiations. But finally we were seeing the union breaking, and that break had very little to do with us. It was all about leadership continuing to protect cheaters when a majority of players wanted a clean game and a level playing field.
I didn’t know this at the time, but a segment of players had quietly been pushing for testing for years. In his book The Game, author Jon Pessah reported that Rick Helling, a pitcher for the Texas Rangers, had told Fehr he was underestimating the scope of the problem at the union’s executive board meeting in December 1998.
“It’s a bigger problem than you think,” Helling said. “You don’t see what the players see. There are guys feeling pressure to use drugs to keep their jobs. I think it’s something we need to look into.”
Fehr turned a deaf ear to that segment of players, but by 2002 more and more of them were speaking up. The union leaders had been meeting with teams when they visited New York, holding informal sessions in the afternoon before games at Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium. Fehr would sometimes travel to meet with teams, keeping them apprised on labor talks, but it seemed that more and more he was listening while players took the floor and asked him hard questions about testing. The tone of talks continued to change after baseball’s latest trip to Capitol Hill.
On July 8, the day before the All-Star Game, USA Today published a Gallup poll it had conducted with CNN, asking fans about steroid use. It showed 86 percent of fans supported testing for players and 80 percent felt steroids were a factor in so many of our once sacred records being broken in recent years. USA Today also released its own survey of players that same day, and it was devastating for the union’s leaders who had been opposing testing. It showed that 79 percent favored testing. The story that ran with the survey quoted Derek Jeter, probably the most popular player in the game, saying he was in favor of testing.
I knew that was the case because of a chance encounter with Derek during one of my visits to New York. He had been there for some promotional work and then asked if he could see me. I always liked to talk to players.
He told me he was troubled that so many television and newspaper reporters had been talking about baseball being in “the steroid age.” He said it wasn’t fair to players who were accomplishing what they set out to do without steroids. He pointed to his Yankee teammates Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, and Mariano Rivera, along with himself.
“We haven’t done what we’ve done because of steroids,” Jeter said that day. “It’s not fair to call this the steroid age, because a lot of players are doing great th
ings and wouldn’t touch steroids.”
It was one thing for Jeter to tell me in private, and another for him to say it in USA Today, in a piece asking his union to implement steroid testing. For the first time that I could remember, the union was advocating a position that seemed at odds with the will of the majority of its members. The union was divided and its leadership was slow to react. For the first time ever, we were the side that was united during a labor negotiation. This would prove to be a major factor as we worked to put aside our past animosity and enter into a true partnership with our players. One era was ending, and one I had envisioned was looking more and more realistic all the time. Who would have thought that would be the one real benefit for Major League Baseball from our struggle to get players to submit to testing?
Negotiations were heating up. The Players Association held a meeting near O’Hare Airport on the day before the All-Star Game, when players were working out and holding the Home Run Derby at Miller Park. Then it absolutely poured that night, an epic downpour that at an indoor-outdoor gala held at the Milwaukee Art Museum ruined gowns and hairdos that had been planned for weeks. Noah would have been proud. We had everything except an ark.
On the day of the game, Manfred and DuPuy held a meeting with Michael Weiner and Steve Fehr at the Milwaukee law office of Foley & Lardner, just down the street from the Pfister and the Marriott, where they were staying. The press didn’t know about the meeting because Don Fehr and Gene Orza were at Miller Park, taking questions from reporters in a casual setting while also spending time with All-Stars.
And how did the game go, you ask?
I’m guessing you probably remember. We wound up with a 7-7 tie when I stopped play after eleven innings because the two managers, Bob Brenly and my old friend Joe Torre, had run out of players. The managers wanted to get all their players into the game, but a lot of players didn’t want to do more than make a quick cameo, which illustrated a fundamental problem that had developed.