by Bud Selig
For a variety of reasons, the All-Star Game had become an afterthought for the players, hardly the way it had been through its history. We had added the Home Run Derby as an attraction for television and fans at the Metrodome in 1985, and it just kept gaining in popularity, perhaps at the expense of the game itself.
With more players traveling on their own chartered flights, it became common for starting players to grab a quick shower and head to the airport before the game had ended. The clubhouse was clearing out as quickly as the bullpens in 2002.
There were long lines of limos parked nearby, waiting to take players and their families to the airport the moment they came out of the game. We were concerned before the tie.
Years before, I remember Ron Santo calling to say he was upset about what was happening to the All-Star Game. “When I was young, we loved the game,” he said. “It was an honor.”
Henry Aaron had said the same thing.
“When I played, Willie, Roberto, and I played nine innings,” he said. “Now guys are heading out.”
I’ll never forget attending the 1950 All-Star Game at Comiskey Park. Ted Williams shattered his left elbow crashing into the left-field wall to take an extra-base hit away from Ralph Kiner in the first inning but played until the top of the ninth. That’s how much those guys loved the All-Star Game.
But it was so different in Milwaukee, when I was hosting as commissioner. I had first become concerned about the supply of pitching when Joe used Oakland’s great starting pitcher Barry Zito for only one batter in the sixth inning. I told Sue, “I hope Joe knows what he’s doing.” Sandy Alderson was sitting near me and he was also getting nervous. Bobby Melvin, who had worked in the Brewers’ front office and now was Brenly’s bench coach in Arizona, was sitting at the end of the dugout, near us. He told me he was getting worried.
This was playing out in slow motion. You kept hoping somebody would get a big hit and end the game, but they didn’t—just the opposite, actually. Shawn Green reached second base for the home team, the National League, with one out in the tenth. But Freddy Garcia struck out Andruw Jones and got Jose Hernandez to hit a grounder to Tony Batista, getting out of that jam.
In the eleventh, Omar Vizquel drew a leadoff walk from Vicente Padilla but advanced no farther (in part because Torre had emptied his bench and had to let Garcia hit for himself). The NL threatened seriously in the bottom of the eleventh, with Mike Lowell reaching second with one out. But as my insides turned, Garcia struck out Padilla (also hitting for himself, with no reserves available) and Benito Santiago.
What are you going to do? That’s baseball. You almost never get the result that you want. The sportswriters call it Koppett’s Law, after late New York Times sportswriter Len Koppett—whatever creates the greatest inconvenience for the most people must happen.
Understandably, stopping the game angered the fans. It was an ugly scene, with beer bottles flying onto the field and fans going home angry. I understood the emotion but we couldn’t risk players getting hurt by having position players pitch or any of the other ideas that were floated.
I took the hit, which was okay. But the next day I got phone calls from both Joe Torre and Bob Brenly apologizing for what had happened. There was an embarrassing element to this, no question. It wasn’t the way I wanted the game to play out, but I did one interview after another, taking responsibility and saying we had to make changes to the game so it didn’t happen again. One thing I made sure to do was protect the managers. I wasn’t going to nail Torre and Brenly. I wouldn’t and I didn’t.
I did get off one good line the next morning: Did the fate of Western civilization change with a tie game?
Still, I meant it when I said we could never let this happen again, and we made the game competitive again by declaring that the winner would get home-field advantage in the World Series. There’s a misperception about why we made the change. People think it was the tie game. It wasn’t the tie game—or at least it wasn’t just the tie game. It was about the line of limos parked outside the clubhouse in the early innings as much as anything else. I hated the perception that represented, and so did our television partner, Fox, which wanted the game to be as compelling as possible.
Too many players simply didn’t respect the importance of the game to our fans. They loved elements of the event, especially getting to have their children on the field in front of the dugout for the Home Run Derby, and all the parties and rewards that came with being an All-Star. But they weren’t focused on the game itself, and it was showing. There were some serendipitous moments, like Pedro Martinez striking out the side at Fenway Park and forty-year-old Cal Ripken Jr. hitting a homer in his final season, but too many of the games dragged. Television ratings had dropped 33 percent in a decade, falling below 10 in 2002 from a high of 28.5 in 1970 (ratings points represent the percentage of television homes watching a show).
We weighed a series of ideas for how to revitalize the game following the Miller Park disappointment and settled on using the outcome to decide home field for the World Series. We had never had a great system for that, merely rotating between leagues on an annual basis. A lot of people ridiculed that idea, because the All-Star Game has always been an exhibition, but I was delighted watching the next year at U.S. Cellular Field in Chicago, where the leagues played a highly competitive game with managers Dusty Baker and Mike Scioscia grinding away trying to win. What’s wrong with that?
We were sitting right next to the dugout in Chicago, and the atmosphere on the field was completely different than it had been in Milwaukee, night-and-day different. Players on both teams were out on the steps of the dugout, into the game, just the opposite of what it had been.
I felt like I had done something for the legacy of All-Stars from earlier eras. When I told Santo and Henry that we were going to put home-field advantage for the World Series on the game, they were thrilled.
The morning after the All-Star Game, a number of reporters visited me in my office. They were there to talk about the labor negotiations, not the eleventh-inning tie.
I was more candid than normal in these situations. I told them that debt was no longer an abstract concept for troubled teams. One, I said, might be forced out of business in the near future because it can’t meet its payroll, and another could join it after the season, if we can’t get a better way of doing business.
“That’s it,” I said. “I’m done. Major League Baseball’s credit lines are at the maximum. We’ve done everything we can to help people by arranging credit lines. Frankly, at this point we don’t have that luxury anymore. If a club can’t make it, I have to let ’em go.”
This was hard for me to even discuss, but teams were really hurting. I was running out of ways to use the strength of the industry to prop up franchises that weren’t producing enough local revenue to build competitive teams, the kind that would put fans in the stands to grow revenue.
Teams like the Marlins and the Diamondbacks could build championship clubs through free agency but couldn’t produce the revenue to keep their roster intact and sustain their success. So not even winning satisfied fans for long, because teams couldn’t afford their star players. It was a sad cycle we had to break.
There were no breakthroughs in negotiations in July and early August, and we knew it was only a matter of time until the union played its usual card, setting a strike deadline. That happened on August 16, when Fehr announced that players would walk on August 30, a Friday, if we didn’t have a deal.
There were still two central issues—PED testing and how a luxury tax would work. We thought we could get agreement on everything else, but these two worried me. For at least the third time in these talks, I brought in new faces to sit across the table from the union leaders. I reached out to Cubs president Andy MacPhail, a third-generation baseball man whose father, Lee MacPhail, had been the AL president (and played a central role resolving the short strike in 1985) and Peter Angelos, the Orioles owner who had historically worked well with
unions.
I was in Milwaukee while talks were taking place in New York, but I’d get calls all the time and relay them to all the owners. The one guy I talked to most was Rob Manfred. I’ll bet I talked to Rob twenty times a day as we went down the stretch to get a deal. Nobody was sleeping much. We were working as hard as we had ever worked to find ways to get an agreement.
One thing I liked about having Angelos involved is that he was sort of an outsider as far as the union was concerned, but I knew he was angry. He saw where the sport was heading and was working to help. He was great. He never missed a labor session once I asked him to be involved. Neither did Andy. Those guys were great.
Andy called me one night.
“I wish you were here today,” MacPhail said. “It was worth the price of admission. Angelos and Orza were screaming about steroids. They just kept getting madder and madder. Peter got right in his face. It was great. You would have loved it.”
Orza and Fehr had held the line on testing as long as they could. It was becoming more and more clear that the players had seized momentum on the issue from their longtime leaders. They were telling the union executives they wanted testing, too. The players understood the risks steroids posed to the game, even if the players union was more focused on the privacy rights of players. Not all the players would have said it, but enough did that finally the union presented us with a proposal—survey testing.
The plan would work like this: We’d mutually agree on a threshold that would demonstrate steroids had become enough of a problem to require mandatory testing, then test every player anonymously and if there was enough use to reach the agreed-upon level we’d begin random testing with consequences for players who tested positive. If the survey testing showed a smaller percentage using PEDs, we’d continue to play without testing.
This wasn’t what I wanted, but it was something. I knew it was a major personal concession for Don and Gene because they both knew they were going to catch hell from Marvin Miller. He was always in the wings and he remained very influential. He would say later that if he were still in charge nobody would be peeing in a bottle. He was smart, but he was out of touch with the times.
Manfred and others convinced me survey testing could work, that we would get what we wanted if we were only patient a little while longer. This wasn’t overnight change; it was incremental change. But it was change, and that was huge for baseball.
We first had to argue about where to set the bar. We eventually settled on 5 percent. The union wanted the number to be higher, we wanted it to be lower, but 5 percent would prove to meet our needs.
Talks went down to the wire, the way they always do. I headed to New York for the final few days, but Manfred remained in charge, with MacPhail and Angelos playing big roles. I remember the last issue being the survey testing level required to trigger real testing, but others say it was the specifics of the luxury tax structure.
As confusing as these deals always get when it comes to crunch time, who can really say?
I do remember the last night before the strike. There was to be a day game in Chicago on Friday, the day of the deadline—Cardinals at Cubs—and the Cards had already flown there from Cincinnati. They’d be ready to play a game if we reached a deal. The Red Sox were the question. They were at home on Thursday and had a game scheduled at Cleveland on Friday.
Tony Clark, who had switched teams from the Tigers to the Red Sox, prevailed on the Boston players not to travel to Cleveland on Thursday, which had been a scheduled day off. Instead the team booked its charter for Friday morning, to take off only if we had a deal.
I didn’t know which way it was going to go. Honestly, I didn’t. I was hopeful, but we had our horrible history and this time we weren’t going to sign off on a weakened deal that didn’t address our issues. We’d done that too many times.
Late Thursday night, very late, about 3 A.M., I left MLB’s headquarters to walk back to the Regency Hotel, where I was staying. I didn’t know if I could sleep, but I was going to get a little rest. I walked up Park Avenue to the hotel and about the time I walked in the phone was ringing. Rob said I’d better come back.
“What the hell?” I asked.
He told me Tom Glavine, Al Leiter, and some other players had shown up in New York, and the tenor of the talks had changed. Glavine and his cohorts showed amazing common sense, the kind that had so often been lacking in negotiations. Michael Weiner had called Manfred and said they were coming over to the MLB offices. I hoped that would mean we could make a deal, and sure enough, we did.
The Red Sox got word in time to catch their flight to Cleveland, so every game that was scheduled on Friday was going to be played. It was anything but another weekend of games in baseball. It was the start of a whole new era.
20
EVERYONE SAYS BASEBALL should have acted quicker on steroids. But I stand by my position that we moved as quickly as we could have, given the complicated realities of the situation.
In the end, it didn’t matter who was at fault. Our image suffered. We paid a terribly high price.
Even after we had convinced the Players Association to accept testing, the story just seemed to grow and grow. It had a life of its own, forcing us to spend years trying to control the damage that steroids and cheating players did to baseball.
It was great to know that we had the support of so many players.
In the spring of 2003, when testers came around to camps to collect samples, there were many players who wanted to refuse testing—not because they had something to hide but because a non-test counted as a positive test—and the players themselves (many of them, anyway) were hoping we’d get beyond the 5 percent threshold to trigger a full-blown program in which there was regular testing and discipline for cheaters.
One heartening story played out in the White Sox camp. Pretty much their whole team was refusing to take tests when the testers showed up. I don’t know if it was Frank Thomas’s influence or somebody else’s, but the whole team wanted to go down as positives. I don’t think the union was too happy with those guys, and after a fair amount of arm-twisting they did agree to be tested.
But the message was being sent loud and clear—baseball players, like management, wanted a clean game.
Results from the survey testing wouldn’t be released until after the 2003 season. About twelve hundred players were tested—the forty-man rosters of thirty clubs—so we needed sixty positive tests to get the program we wanted.
The initial report received in November showed 104 positives, far more than we needed. There was the usual disagreement with the union about the results, but whether the total was 83, 96, or 104 it was clearly more than 5 percent, so the survey testing had worked, just as Rob Manfred said it would.
When I announced the results, I might have had my chest puffed up a little too much.
“Hopefully this will, over time, allow us to completely eradicate the use of performance-enhancing substances in baseball,” I said.
Through the ensuing years, I’ve learned it’s impossible to eradicate PEDs from sports. But we did a pretty good job limiting them. We went from being the last sport to have a testing program to having a program that even our very strong critics at the World Anti-Doping Association and the United States Anti-Doping Association say has become the best in professional sports.
None of us knew it at the time, but while we were working on survey testing, our biggest steroid scandal was about to happen, thanks to Barry Bonds and the work of a determined federal agent named Jeff Novitzky.
On September 4, two months before the survey testing results were released, the feds raided the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative facility, near the San Francisco airport. Like you, I had never heard of it until the San Francisco Chronicle began reporting on the raid and the company’s ties to athletes, including Bonds and other baseball players.
Suddenly BALCO became a part of the lexicon of sports speech, even if it was an unwelcome part for so many of us. I honestly d
on’t remember the first time I heard BALCO mentioned, but I do know that mention of a link between Bonds and steroids caught my attention.
Let me say this about Novitzky as well as the work of the Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. They nailed the story. So too would T. J. Quinn of the New York Daily News as the story grew.
I never traveled to BALCO myself. I never met Victor Conte, the guy who ran BALCO. I never met Greg Anderson, Bonds’s trainer, who was linked to the steroid regimen that was detailed clearly in the Chronicle and the book Game of Shadows, which would be released four years later. But that business and those people sure impacted my life.
That’s putting it mildly. The reality is this was an ongoing nightmare for me.
So was Barry Bonds, who wasn’t the most likable player I ever met.
Peter Magowan, the Giants’ owner, used to call me from time to time about things involving Barry. I’d go see him, usually in spring training, when I was in Arizona anyway. Barry and I had a good relationship for a long time.
But I think Barry is one of those guys who just don’t get it, who don’t know when to quit. He can be his own worst enemy, in ways he never really understands.
At some point in time after the BALCO story broke, I sought out Barry for a straightforward conversation. I wanted to ask him if all the stories were true, if he had used a regimen of PEDs while he was en route to his seventy-three home runs in 2001 (by the way, the only year he ever hit more than forty-nine).
I don’t know what I could have done to help Barry at that point, but my instinct has always been to help players. So I told him that if he was cheating, he should tell me, and that I’d do the best I could to help him manage the fallout that seemed to be everywhere. He looked me in my eyes and denied everything.
While I was there in Scottsdale, we had a pleasant talk about other topics. He stopped me as I was walking away and said his godfather, Willie Mays, had told him something that surprised him. He said he had just found out Henry Aaron and I had been close friends for fifty or sixty years.