by Joe Torre
That same winter, with the party raging at full throttle, one man rose up and basically announced the whole damn thing was a fraud. Rick Helling, a 27-year-old righthanded pitcher and the players’ representative for the Texas Rangers, stood up at the winter meeting of the Executive Board of the Major League Baseball Players Association and made an announcement. He told his fellow union leaders that steroid use by ballplayers had grown rampant and was corrupting the game.
“There is this problem with steroids,” Helling told them. “It's happening. It's real. And it's so prevalent that guys who aren't doing it are feeling pressure to do it because they're falling behind. It's not a level playing field. We've got to figure out a way to address it.
“It's a bigger deal than people think. It's noticeable enough that it's creating an uneven playing field. What really bothers me is that it's gotten so out of hand that guys are feeling pressure to do it. It's one thing to be a cheater, to be somebody who doesn't care whether it's right or wrong. But it's another thing when other guys feel like they have to do it just to keep up. And that's what's happening. And I don't feel like this is the right way to go.”
What Helling had just done was the equivalent of turning up all the lights, clicking off the music and announcing the party was over. “He was the first guy,” David Cone said, “who had the guts to stand up at a union meeting and say that in front of everybody and put pressure on it.”
There was only one way for baseball to react to this kind of whistleblowing:
Crank the music back up and keep the party rolling.
The union was having too much fun and making too much money to pay much attention to Helling's warning. It was far easier and financially prudent to ignore the issue, to assume that Helling was an alarmist prone to exaggerating, and to make sure everyone involved knew as little as possible about players injecting hard-core steroids into their asses. Don't ask, don't tell and don't care was the unwritten code of the day.
“What really bothered me was there were plenty of good guys, good people, who were feeling the pressure to cheat because it had become so prevalent,” Helling said. “I firmly believed at the time that it was an unlevel playing field. I was trying to find a way to do something about it. Make it as fair of a game as possible. Play it the right way.
“When you see guys coming into spring training camp thirty pounds heavier than they ended the previous season, or they had gained four or fives miles an hour on their fastball, I mean, those things are not normal. My whole career was played in the peak of the steroids era. I saw guys throwing 87 miles an hour one year and 95 the next. Unfortunately a lot of people, the press, the owners, the players, they turned the other cheek. I was like, ‘Are you serious? Can't you see what's going on? Are you seriously going to let these guys get away with it?’
“Unfortunately, it turned out just the way I thought it would. It blew up in our face.”
The union's executive board paid little attention to Helling. The owners were of a similar mindset. In fact, within a matter of days of Helling sounding an alarm that went unheeded, baseball provided official proof that steroids were not considered an urgent problem. At those same 1998 winter baseball meetings in Nashville, baseball's two medical directors, Dr. Robert Millman, who was appointed by the owners, and Dr. Joel Solomon, the designee of the players, delivered a presentation to baseball executives and physicians about the benefits of using testosterone. Angels general manager Bill Stoneman was so surprised at the tone of the presentation— basically, the message he heard was that no evidence exists that steroids were harmful—that he wondered why Major League Baseball even had allowed it.
Also in attendance was Dr. William Wilder, the physician for the Cleveland Indians. Wilder was so disturbed by the presentation that he wrote a memorandum to Indians general manager John Hart that whether testosterone increased muscle strength and endurance “begs the question of whether it should be used in athletics.” Wilder also endorsed sending information to players about the “known and unknown data about performance-enhancing substances.”
Wilder also spoke directly with Gene Orza of the players association. Orza advised him to hold off on any education about supplements until more information was available. Wilder was incredulous. Of Orza's request to postone any action, the doctor wrote, “That will be never! Orza and the Players Association want to do further study … so nothing will be done.”
Orza infamously revealed the players’ position on steroids more blatantly in 2004, even long after the lid blew off the steroid epidemic in baseball. Speaking as part of a panel discussion in a public forum, Orza said, “Let's assume that [steroids] are a very bad thing to take. I have no doubt that they are not worse than cigarettes. But I would never say to the clubs as an individual who represents the interests of players, ‘Gee, I guess by not allowing baseball to suspend and fine players for smoking cigarettes, I am not protecting their health.’ “
Well, there you had it. No wonder nobody wanted to listen to Helling. The owners and players didn't even want to acknowledge that something harmful was going on. A presentation on the benefits of testosterone? Not worse than cigarettes? Helling, though, didn't give up. Each year he would make the same speech at the players association board meeting … 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 … and each year nothing would happen, except that more and more bodies grew unnaturally bigger and the game became twisted into a perversion, its nuances and subtleties blasted away by the naked obsession with power. Baseball was reduced to the lowest common denominator: to whack the ball farther or to heave it faster. Baseball's inability and unwillingness to act made silent partners of Selig and his traditional rivals at the union, leaders Don Fehr and Orza. Neither side had the smarts or the stomach to make steroids a front-burner public issue.
“Steve [Fehr] and Don came to me and said, ‘Rick Helling is talking up steroids. Do you think there's a problem here?’ “ Cone said, referring to the Fehr brothers, including Steve, Cone's agent. “I said, ‘Maybe we need to talk to guys, but I don't really see a problem.’ “
The union, Helling said, did talk to some players about it, but the pitcher was wise enough not to expect anything to come of it.
“I understood their side of it, from a lawyer's side,” Helling said. “Their thinking was, ‘This isn't anything ownership has asked us for. It's never been an issue [in bargaining]. So why would we give them something without getting something in return. Why open this box?’
“I was active in the union. I know Don and Gene very well. Still to this day I talk to them. I understand. ‘We don't want to go down that road if we don't have to.’ Every year I brought it up. I'd say ‘This is more of a problem than you think.’ Bud, Gene, Don … they had an idea of what was going on. They didn't realize how widespread it was. As players, we kind of did know. Whether it was 50 percent or whatever, I can't say. It was more than people thought. It was more than Don, Gene and Bud thought. So the thinking was more, ‘If ownership didn't ask for it, why volunteer it? It's probably not that big a deal.’ “
Helling said he never saw a player inject steroids, but he heard all the clubhouse talk about what players were doing, as they would euphemistically put it, to “get an edge.” Helling himself had a very clear understanding of what was cheating and what was not. He was born in Devils Lake, North Dakota, and became one of only fifteen men born in that state to become a big leaguer. He attended Stanford University and made his major league debut with Texas only two years after the Rangers selected him with a second round pick in the 1992 draft. He pitched decently for both the Rangers and Marlins (he was once traded to Florida and back within 11 months) before committing himself to a strenuous conditioning and fitness program after the 1997 season. In 1998, his first full year as a starting pitcher, he won 20 games. He would pitch twelve seasons in the majors, compiling a record of 93-81 while earning more than $15 million.
“I can look back on my career, and whether it was good or bad, I know that everything I did, I did my
self,” Helling said. “I didn't do any form of cheating. It's unfortunate that there were a lot of people I knew who thought, ‘I need to do something to keep up.’ You hear the excuses of the guys who admitted it: ‘I felt like I had to do it.’ The way I looked at it, when I wasn't good enough to do it myself, it was time to move on. A lot of players didn't think like that. Guys always had an excuse of why they could do it.
“That's not what I was about. I can look back and know it was all me. That's the most important thing. I have my name and my reputation. Anybody who knows me knows there was no doubt that I played it the right way. And that's what I wanted to leave the game with. I couldn't care less if I made one million dollars or one hundred million dollars, whether I won one game or whether I won three hundred games. I was in it to be honest to myself and my teammates and to be a good father and husband. For me it was just the way I was brought up.”
Rick Helling, by playing clean, was swimming against the tide.
The party that was 1998 was also the same year the Toronto Blue Jays hired a man named Brian McNamee to be their strength and conditioning trainer. McNamee was a Queens, New York, kid, the son of a detective, who had attended St. John's University, majoring in athletic administration and playing baseball. In 1990 he began working as a New York City police officer. Three years later McNamee met Tim McCleary, an assistant general manager for the Yankees. Like McNamee, McCleary was a St. John's guy. McCleary helped hire McNamee in 1993 to be a bullpen catcher for the Yankees. McNamee spent three seasons with the Yankees until he became a casualty of the managerial and staff changes after the 1995 season, when Torre replaced Buck Showalter. McCleary also moved on after that 1995 season. He quit the Yankees and quickly resurfaced with the Toronto Blue Jays in a similar capacity.
McNamee, meanwhile, reinvented himself as a strength and fitness trainer. He was out of baseball for three years before McCleary reached out to his friend in 1998 to come back not as a bullpen catcher but as a strength coach for the Jays. McNamee had been out of baseball for three years. What he found shocked him. Steroids and drugs were everywhere. What had been a rogue, underground, fringe culture of steroid and performance-enhancing drug use only three years ago had become an all-out pharmacological war by 1998.
“From ‘93 to ‘95 you didn't see any of it,” McNamee said. “Supplements and some things here and there … Then in ‘98 … it was just … I couldn't believe it.”
Drug use had become so prevalent by 1998 that ballplayers talked openly about it among themselves, including speculation about who was using what and what drugs provided the best benefit. McNamee was stunned by the prevalence of the drug use and openness with which players discussed it.
The physical stature, success and popularity of McGwire and Sosa obviously contributed to the rush for players to gain strength. According to the book Game of Shadows, by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, it was the adulation given McGwire and Sosa that pushed Barry Bonds into the world of performance-enhancing drugs. Bonds, then 33 years old and at his natural peak, was an enormously gifted and far better all-around player than either McGwire or Sosa. In 1998 Bonds batted .303 with 37 home runs, a career-high 44 doubles and 122 runs batted in while stealing 28 bases and winning a Gold Glove. It was an astonishingly great season. It also was completely ignored. Seventeen players hit more home runs than did Bonds. McGwire and Sosa eclipsed all of them. McGwire and Sosa redefined not only the home-run record but also what it meant to be a national baseball hero. They were largely one-dimensional players who could not run, field or throw like Bonds, but America loved them for their heft and their ability to hit a baseball a very long way. Bonds, the superior player who was ignored, was just one of many players who recognized in McGwire and Sosa that the rules of engagement had been changed.
Said Cone, “After that, after 1998, there was a little four-or five-year window there where things happened real quickly.”
Nineteen ninety-eight didn't invent steroids in baseball; it only made them mainstream inside the game. Until then, steroid use occupied a dark corner of the game that was best left unspoken. Former Most Valuable Player Jose Canseco began shooting steroids thirteen years earlier, in 1985. One dealer, Curtis Wenzlaff, was supplying 20 to 25 ballplayers with steroids at the time of his conviction in 1992. Lenny Dykstra, the former Mets and Phillies outfielder, admitting to using steroids as far back as 1989, according to Kirk Radomski, the former Mets clubhouse attendant who became a key drug supplier to ballplayers. Radomski was busted by federal authorities in 2005 and forced to cooperate with the 2007 baseball investigation into steroids chaired by former senator George Mitchell.
“I think [baseball] guys were taking it in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, but they didn't work out,” McNamee said. “Working out became prevalent in the ‘80s, the mid-to late-’80s, so that's when you saw the bulk. That's when you saw the power. Because you just can't take it in high doses and see the benefit. You have to work out. And that's when the strength and conditioning era came into play where they started to say, ‘Well, it's not bad [to weight train]. It doesn't make you tight.’
“That's when they started hiring strength coaches, who were basically people's friends, but at least they monitored the weight room. They had guys lifting heavy. They were all ex-football guys, from college programs. Penn State. Florida State. They were hiring these assistant guys and they had football [training] programs. And everybody in college was taking steroids, so at least the knowledge was there.
“Guys that got big had success. Canseco was a sprinter in a big body. Dykstra was a short, little fast guy. Now, the bigger they got the more hurt they got. But they did put up some good numbers. Then the education got better, where the pitchers weren't getting bulky but they were getting better.”
Radomski was the right guy at the right time. He turned his baseball connections and own experiences as a weight-lifting gym rat into a booming business. Radomski told Mitchell that first baseman David Segui admitted using steroids as far back as 1994, when Segui played for the Mets and Radomski still worked for the club as a clubhouse attendant for the team. Segui, Radomski said, took the steroid Deca-Durabolin “because it was safe, did not expire for three or four years and was thought to alleviate back pain.”
Safe? Baseball, like other sports, had turned a significant corner in making steroid use acceptable. The health risks associated with steroids, including high-blood pressure, increased cancer risks and the shutdown of natural testosterone production by the body, had caused much of the taboo status associated with steroids. It used to be that an athlete had two hurdles between him and taking the plunge into steroid use: one was the severe health risk and the other was the moral issue of what was an illegal form of cheating. What happened in the 1990s was that ballplayers, with the help of trainers and drug “gurus,” completely knocked down the first hurdle. (And the second? Well, it wasn't cheating if there were no rules, right? Down it, too, went.) The athletes learned, largely from the guinea pigs of the gym and bodybuilding cultures, how to use steroids “properly.” Deca, for instance, might require one or two injections a week, perhaps in the range of 300 to 600 milligrams per week, for a cycle of about eight weeks. An anti-estrogen drug such as Clomid may be required at the end of the cycle.
The specter of Lyle Alzado no longer haunted them. Alzado was the former NFL lineman who told Sports Illustrated in 1991 that he had injected himself with steroids and human growth hormone almost constantly and, in his view, such chronic use was the reason why he was dying from a brain tumor. (Alzado died the following year at age 43.) The Sports Illustrated cover image of a gaunt, bald, dying Alzado was arresting. So were his words.
“Now look at me,” said the once hirsute, brawny man. “My hair's gone. I wobble when I walk and have to hold on to someone for support, and I have trouble remembering things. My last wish? That no one else ever dies this way.”
His warning had less shelf life than Deca. Almost immediately and certainly within a year or two, b
aseball players had dismissed Alzado's death as an anomaly of another age that did not concern them. His problem, they reasoned, was that he had taken too many steroids for too long without properly educating himself. Ballplayers could go to their drug “gurus,” or even one another, to learn how to use steroids. This was very good for the business of people such as Radomski, who quickly went from picking up sweaty socks and dirty jocks from the Mets clubhouse floor to helping change how baseball was played with his supply of drugs and the expertise with how to use them.
“Yeah, there were whispers about what was going on,” Cone said, “but we really didn't know for sure. I was stunned about the oil-based steroids. I keep going back to Lyle Alzado. Stacking ste roids? I never made the connection. I never understood that. I saw Lyle Alzado die because of that. I would never think about that. For what? So you can get big and blow up? Maybe I was naïve. Guys were getting big around the league here and there but who knew what they were taking. I made the connection to over-the-counter supplements rather than Lyle Alzado-type synthetic oil-based ste roids. I was stunned to hear that later.”
After the 1995 season, according to the Mitchell report, Mets catcher Todd Hundley asked his clubhouse buddy, Radomski, for some help. Hundley was 26 years old and by and large an average major league player. He had played six seasons in the big leagues and never had hit more than 16 home runs or earned a salary of more than $1 million. Radomski started him on cycles of Deca and testosterone. This stuff was so good, Radomski told him, that he would hit 40 home runs on it. In 1996, Todd Hundley truly made Radomski look like a guru; he hit 41 home runs. He went on to make more than $47 million.