by Bud Selig
I said that was true. He said he’d been trying to get Henry on the phone but he hadn’t been returning the call. There was some business deal Barry wanted to talk to Henry about.
“Oh, yeah?” I said.
He asked if I’d call Henry and ask him to take his call since I talked to him all the time anyway.
“Do you want the commissioner to help you—one individual player in a sport with thousands of players—in a business deal?”
He looked at me funny for a moment or two, and said, “I guess I do.”
“Barry, the commissioner can’t be a go-between in a business deal. I can’t use my office and my friend to help you make money. That’s not appropriate.”
That was when the dealings I had with Barry turned tough. I guess he didn’t like me anymore, and he was doing things that I certainly didn’t like.
We were working hard to get ahead of the story on PEDs, but it was like we were running on a treadmill that just kept turning at higher and higher speeds. It never stopped. We could never catch our breath, let alone actually catch up.
With BALCO still in the headlines and Bonds in the middle of a run in which he would win the MVP Award four seasons in a row—delighting the Giants’ owners but absolutely no one else in baseball—Bonds became a target for public skewering.
Representative John Sweeney, a New York Republican, authored a bill to toughen steroid legislation. He called for an asterisk to be added to all of Bonds’s records.
Reggie Jackson went on an unusually candid rant talking to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“You’re going to tell me [Bonds] is a better hitter than Henry Aaron?” he asked. “Bonds hit 73 and he would have hit 100 if they would have pitched to him. I mean, come on, now. There is no way you can outperform Aaron and Ruth and Mays at that level.”
Reggie was right. The math didn’t add up. Our all-time greats were having their careers diminished by the soaring offensive totals. We had put a testing program in place, but it would be years before we began to undo the damage to our sport and again be perceived by the media and fans like the sports that had drawn a line on steroids earlier than we did.
McCain called another set of hearings on the subject of PEDs. He summoned officials from all across sports, including NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and Gene Upshaw, head of the football union, but they must have wondered why they were there. They got about as many questions as the security personnel ringing the room. This was about baseball, not the broader context of sports, and McCain was livid. He said the sport he loved was on the verge of “becoming a fraud.”
I was aware he had a relationship with Don Fehr from the Olympic Committee. He’d clearly heard a lot from Don about the owners, but as this hearing played out I noticed he was really listening when I spoke about how the union had obstructed our desire to get a testing program. He didn’t seem quite as friendly toward the union as he had in the past.
McCain threatened that Congress would take action that would force us to clean up baseball, whether either of us liked it or not. Then Don made a mistake. He turned the tables on McCain, pointing out how Congress had deregulated supplements, at least partially opening the door for the problems we were facing. I can’t say Don was wrong, but I don’t think it’s smart to say that in an open session of Congress, with television cameras in the room. I wasn’t going there. I did tell Senator McCain we wanted a tougher deal than we got in the 2002 labor agreement and that we were already working to strengthen it.
Baseball had been criticized by Congress through the years, with the union always wearing the white hat, but we’d finally reached a point where that wasn’t the case anymore. Over the years, with the media friendlier to the union than the owners, we’d never been able to effectively wage a successful PR campaign about any of our disputes with the union. Now, because of these hearings and the union’s largely indefensible position, the tables were shifting a bit. The union was feeling the pain, too, and soon enough, it showed.
After that hearing, I wrote Fehr seeking to reopen the CBA to toughen the penalties for steroids. It would take a while to pull it off, but there was momentum from the start.
Still, the bad news kept coming. We got our next black eye after the 2004 season, when the San Francisco Chronicle published leaked testimony to a BALCO grand jury from Jason Giambi and Bonds. Giambi admitted his use while Barry denied his, against all plausibility. He would wind up getting charged with perjury down the road, keeping the story alive far beyond when it could have been contained if he had been a little bit sorry for what he was doing.
From what I could tell, he sure wasn’t sorry.
My friend President Bush issued a statement urging baseball to deal with steroids and other PEDs immediately. McCain threatened to introduce legislation. But we were working hard on this before the latest governmental nudge, and we got the union to agree to unannounced, year-round random testing and a stronger schedule of discipline.
During spring training in 2005, Congress came calling again. This time the House Government Reform Committee didn’t just want Fehr and me to come talk to them. They wanted a lot of our players to interrupt their training to go to Washington for hearings, and showed how seriously they were taking it by issuing subpoenas to a number of players.
These would be the most famous of all hearings. They received enormous coverage in the press because of the players who were there—Sosa, McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling, with Frank Thomas appearing via a tele-link from Arizona.
I was busy behind the scenes doing the best I could to contain the damage we would experience in those hearings. I worked closely with Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia who was chairman of the committee, and Henry Waxman, a representative from California who was the ranking Democrat on the committee.
I went to see the players before the hearing. I had a great relationship with McGwire, but that day I could tell he was embarrassed. He was with his lawyer, and if he could have made himself invisible he probably would have.
The New York Daily News reported a steroid story on March 13, a few days before the hearings, which no doubt made Mark even more uncomfortable heading into the hearings.
FBI sources told the Daily News’s investigative reporters that McGwire’s name had come up several times during Operation Equine, a landmark anabolic steroids investigation that had led to seventy trafficking convictions in the early 1990s.
Two dealers caught in the case named a trainer who had provided McGwire, Canseco, and others with a variety of performance-enhancing drugs, injecting McGwire at his Southern California gym on multiple occasions. It was one more black eye for baseball, and it came just as the spotlight was about to be shined on all of us. Not great.
After meeting with Davis, I approached Mark the day before the hearing. I told him I wanted to talk to him. I really did want to pass along some advice I felt might be helpful. But he told me he couldn’t say anything. I knew he was in terrible shape for that hearing, and it turned out he damaged his name by being concerned about steroid use in a broad perspective but evasive about his own use of steroids.
He kept saying he wasn’t there to talk about the past, which just sounded terrible. Sammy Sosa was just as bad. He suddenly forgot how to speak English. That seemed odd, since he and I had talked many times, almost always having pleasant conversations, and always in English. But this time he was lawyered up, like a criminal. It was horrible to see.
Palmeiro would come off the worst, in hindsight. He wagged his finger at Congress and said he’d never cheated, never done anything wrong.
Then, before the season was over, he’d test positive for stanozolol, one of the most high-powered steroids, and become only the sixth player suspended for PED use. The first was Alex Sanchez, an undersized outfielder with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
Like Sanchez, Palmeiro did not look like a bodybuilder. He was a ballplayer with a beautiful swing. It’s true he piled up home runs in the second hal
f of his career, but he did it with grace, not brute strength. Palmeiro would insist he’d never deliberately taken steroids. He blamed one of his Baltimore teammates for giving him a vial that he thought contained vitamin B12, not a steroid. But rules were rules, and whether you were a guy with Hall of Fame credentials, like Palmeiro (3,020 hits, 569 home runs, 1,835 RBIs), or a journeyman like Sanchez, we enforced the rules without picking and choosing who would be penalized.
Make no mistake, the hearing that discredited McGwire, Sosa, and Palmeiro wasn’t a fact-finding mission. It was a shameless bit of politics, designed so politicians could show their constituents how tough they were. The demagoguery would have made Huey Long blush.
We were easy targets, and they laid into us. It probably made captivating television, but it was a nightmare for all of us involved. There were only so many times that I could say, “We would have a much tougher program if the union would agree.”
That hearing displayed the game’s failings on this issue for all to see. Still, there was a silver lining in my eyes. As painful as it was, we didn’t run from the headlines when our star players were involved. That’s one of the things that make me proud.
The hearing was also powerful for me for reasons that escaped almost everyone who wasn’t in the room. There was testimony from two families that had lost young men—Rob Garibaldi and Taylor Hooton—to suicides while they were using steroids. Their parents spoke and the testimony was heartbreaking.
They wanted to be baseball players, and they looked up to major league players. I thought about how I would have felt if these young men had been my children. I so admired the parents for telling their story, but I was haunted. I got on my plane to go back to Milwaukee that night and I cried. I couldn’t sleep when I crawled into my bed. So the next morning I called Don Hooton, Taylor’s father.
The first time I called and identified myself, he hung up. Hopefully he thought it was a crank call.
I called again and left a message, asking him to call me at my office number. He did, and we had a good talk. I asked him to help and he said he would. He created a foundation in his son’s name and has done great work speaking about the dangers of steroid use. Don Hooton created an advisory board of active big-leaguers that has helped his foundation work with major- and minor leaguers, reaching out to teenage athletes like his late son, Taylor. I’m proud that Major League Baseball has been a partner to the Hooton Foundation.
Later I would ask Don Fehr why I was concerned about the health of his union members while he wasn’t. I never really got an answer.
But I got an earful from the Hall of Famers when I went to Cooperstown that July. I always loved going to induction weekend, for a lot of reasons, but my favorite part was that as commissioner I had a standing invitation to join them on Sunday night for a dinner that was exclusively for the Hall of Famers, including the newcomers who had just been honored.
You should hear the stories at those dinners. But the subject of the day in 2005—after Ryne Sandberg and Wade Boggs had been inducted—was steroids.
The Hall of Famers were outspoken on the subject, and mad. In particular, the older players—guys like Bob Feller, George Kell, and others from an earlier era—were furious about what was happening to the game they loved.
I left Cooperstown extremely worried about our image. On the flight home to Milwaukee that night I got an idea—the next time McCain calls, I’m going to bring some guys. I knew there was going to be another hearing. He had told me that.
Sure enough, the very next morning, the phone rang.
“You won’t believe this,” Lori Keck said. “John McCain’s on the phone, himself.”
Well, that was certainly good timing, wasn’t it?
We had a great conversation. I told him what the Hall of Famers had said in Cooperstown, and I asked him if I could bring five or six of them to the hearing.
“Oh, my goodness,” Senator McCain said. “Can I ask who you’d bring?”
I started with Henry Aaron, who I knew would agree to go. Senator McCain respected Aaron so much, I don’t think I needed to add anyone else, but I mentioned Robin Roberts, Lou Brock, and Sandberg, who had just taken a shot at steroid users in his induction speech.
He was thrilled with the idea. I asked him to listen to what the Hall of Famers said, telling him he’d see that I wasn’t his problem. I told him we were busy at that time trying to toughen up the program again and were getting the usual pushback from the union.
When the hearing rolled around in September, I showed up accompanied by Aaron, Roberts, Brock, Sandberg, and Phil Niekro. We all went to an Italian restaurant for dinner the night before.
I had wanted to talk to them about what we wanted to accomplish at the hearing, but it was quickly obvious I didn’t need to say anything. These men were as ready for the hearing as they’d been for the biggest games in their lives.
Henry and I walked the streets of Washington after that dinner, talking about our relationship and the unexpected roads we’d traveled since we first met when Henry was a Milwaukee Brave.
I’ll never forget we stopped under this old-fashioned streetlight on one corner. Henry said to me, “Who would have believed when we met that one day I’d break the most famous record of all time and you’d be the commissioner of baseball?” We were two kids back then, twenty-three, twenty-four years old. Hank was already a hell of a player but a long way from what he became, and I didn’t even have a dream about getting into baseball. We had the best kind of friendship, the kind where we could always count on each other. It was a moment I’ll never forget.
Rob Manfred and Peter Angelos joined me and the group of Hall of Famers at the hearing. Henry had the committee enthralled when he spoke. I swear, it was like he was the voice of God.
Gene Orza was furious. He was so angry about having to sit apart from a group of great ballplayers, and there was an irony in Roberts being on the owners’ side. He was one of the founders of the union, after all. But these times were so different than the 1960s, when the owners refused to bring baseball into the modern age. Now it was the union with its head in the sand, and these hearings went a long way toward demonstrating that.
McCain asked me what I would do, if I could.
I told him I wanted maximum penalties.
He asked Don Fehr what he’d do.
“Well, we’ll take a look . . .” Don said.
I believe that was the moment where we knew we had gained the high ground.
“We’re at the end of the line, Mr. Fehr,” McCain said. “We’re at the end of the line here. How many more Rafael Palmieros are there going to be? . . . We need an agreement and we need it soon. It’s not complicated. All sports fans understand it. . . . I suggest you act, and act soon.”
Other senators followed McCain, calling out the union leaders for impeding progress. It was a great day for us, a horrible one for them, and before the year was over we had a much tougher program.
I was devoting my life to this issue, and so were Rob and our other top guys. They were talking to the union directly, and the union still wasn’t very helpful, not even by this point in time. Earlier that year, we had held a meeting with the union in Arizona to talk about increasing the penalties for a positive test. Rob was going to start the meeting without me, but I planned to join it later.
When I got to the hotel, it was only Rob and our people. “Where’s Don?” I asked. Rob just shrugged and gestured with his hands. He’d gotten so mad, he’d left. He’d stormed out. Rob said, “Buddy, he doesn’t want to talk to us anymore about it.” That’s how it was.
We finally got the discipline increased after the 2005 season ended. I had wanted one hundred games for a first offense, up from ten, and the union agreed to fifty. It was another huge step in the right direction.
One side benefit was that I developed a strong relationship with John McCain. I respected him as a man of principles and a great leader. He was a true American hero, and I was so sad when cancer cla
imed him in 2018.
We exchanged letters shortly before he died, through a mutual friend in Arizona. I told him how much I appreciated his looking at our situation in baseball with an open mind and how helpful he’d been to our process. I told him how much all of us in America had benefited from his service and his character. He was such a good man, with a real sense of integrity. His death was a huge loss.
Steroids were back in the news at the start of 2006, too. Fainaru-Wada and Williams, the two San Francisco Chronicle reporters who had broken all the BALCO stories, were publishing a book called Game of Shadows, and Sports Illustrated was running excerpts during spring training.
With everything we had done, we still didn’t know if we had gotten our arms around the full depth of our problems. Heck, we couldn’t even get our arms around Barry Bonds. We had been using Tom Carlucci, managing partner of Foley & Lardner’s San Francisco office, to be our eyes and ears out there, but there was only so much he could do.
When Game of Shadows came out, I thought we should do our own investigation of Bonds—but not just Bonds. We couldn’t target one player. We had to do a thorough, independent study that would fully investigate baseball’s steroid problem. I knew we were making progress, but we were still getting killed by the press and everyone else. I finally said to myself, we don’t have anything to hide, but maybe there are things we should know that we don’t know. People kept accusing us of cover-ups and everything else. So, okay, let’s find out. Once and for all.
It was in Phoenix in spring training. I was there with my staff—Rob, DuPuy, everybody. They all looked at me like I was crazy when I proposed it. They said don’t do it—the union’s going to be mad, players are going to be mad. I knew they were right about that, but I was convinced it was the right thing to do.
It was unprecedented, but we needed to do everything we could to restore our credibility, to show that we were motivated to protect the integrity of the game. I knew we could do that if we could find the right person to lead the study.