by Joe Torre
Radomski's business was taking off. It began with his personal connection to several Mets players or those he knew who came through the Mets’ system, including Hundley Segui, Fernando Vina, Chris Donnels, Josias Manzanillo and Mark Carreon. Business boomed through word-of-mouth referrals, and as those Mets players moved on to new teams to introduce whole new subsets of players to Radomski's magic. Segui, for instance, became Radom-ski's friend and one of his best salesmen, according to the Mitchell Report, sending customer after customer to Radomski as he bounced among six teams after leaving the Mets. The Mitchell Report alone names at least four players Segui introduced to Radomski: F. P. Santangelo, Mike Lansing, Larry Bigbie and Tim Laker.
All types of players flocked to Radomski. In 1995, for instance, Laker was a nondescript backup catcher for the Montreal Expos who was ready to jump the two hurdles of the health risk and the morality issue to get his hands on steroids. Segui was his connection, even though Segui had joined him as a teammate with the Expos only on June 8 of that same year. Segui put Laker in touch with his own steroids supplier, Radomski. Laker and Radomski met at the New York City hotel where the Expos stayed while in town for a series against the Mets.
Laker was 25 years old and owned a lifetime major league batting average of .205 with no home runs entering that 1995 season. He was the very definition of a fringe player, at risk at any time of being washed back to the minors and possibly even out of the game. He had trouble putting on weight, which he later blamed on a digestive disease for which he was diagnosed three years earlier.
The brass ring, however, was to hang around the big leagues long enough to make some money, provide for his family and maybe even qualify for one of those nice pensions for which the players association had bargained. What would you do for the brass ring? Work hard and eat right? Sure. But what if that wasn't enough? What if there was something else, even if it was illegal, that could bring the brass ring further into reach? And what if you knew there were no rules against it? And what if you knew guys in your clubhouse and guys across the field were taking it? Laker gladly took the leap over the two hurdles.
Radomski set him up with a doping regimen of Deca and testosterone. Laker would administer it himself. The catcher would inject himself in the buttocks once a week for 8 to 10 weeks, take some time off (in part so the body's natural testosterone production, fooled by the synthetic drugs, would not shut down entirely), and then crank up another cycle. When the Expos were home Laker would shoot up at his residence. When they were on the road he would shoot up in his hotel room, which presented something of a problem as far as how to dispose of the dirty syringes laced with an illegal drug. Laker decided he would wrap them up and transport them in his belongings out of the country and back to Montreal. He would dispose of them there.
Laker put on weight. The Montreal trainer complimented him on his improved physique. He kept doping for six years. Tim Laker did not transform into a star even with the help of performance-enhancing drugs. He never became an All-Star who hit 41 home runs in a season. He never set the home run record or made the cover of Time magazine or hit balls more than 500 feet or aroused suspicion from the media or fans. But he did carve out a major league career that included parts of 11 seasons and a .226 batting average. He was still in the big leagues at age 36. Tim Laker was nothing special. No, there were hundreds and hundreds of Tim Lakers out there in professional baseball.
“It's unfortunate,” Helling said, “that I had a lot of people I knew say, ‘I feel like I need to do something to keep up.’ They'd say, ‘I played with this guy for four or five years and suddenly he's hitting 30 home runs. We play the same position. I need to keep up.’
“You hear excuses from guys who have admitted [juicing]. ‘I felt like I had to do it.’ ‘I did it to keep healthy’ The way I looked at it, when I wasn't good enough myself, it was time to move on. A lot of players didn't think that. When they lost velocity or they did not have enough power to hit home runs, guys always had an excuse for why they could do it.”
Laker became yet another Radomski success story. The story might have been small scale, but it was a success story nonetheless. It was a story that was being repeated with growing frequency in every major league clubhouse, including that of the model franchise of major league baseball, the New York Yankees.
Nineteen ninety-eight was also the year Roger Clemens met Brian McNamee, Tim McCleary's St. John's buddy hired to be the Blue Jays strength coach. McNamee had earned his doctorate at something called Columbus University in Louisiana, which later would move to Mississippi after being shut down in Louisiana after it was found to be an online “diploma mill.” Clemens and McNamee made a connection, not so much as personal friends but as devotees of training. Clemens loved to work, but he always needed company, almost in the manner of someone who needed an audience rather than a taskmaster. McNamee, quiet and perpetually somber, was not a gregarious audience. But he was loyal, industrious and serious almost to a fault about training. McNamee gained Clemens’ trust. That was never more apparent than in June of that season, just months after they had met, when Clemens asked McNamee to stick a needle full of Winstrol in his buttocks, according to what McNamee told Mitchell in the presence of federal agents and later repeated in a sworn deposition to Congress. Clemens several times, including in front of a congressional committee, denied ever using steroids and filed a defamation lawsuit against McNamee.
“I knew nothing about it until Clemens came to me and asked me to stick him in the ass in ‘98,” McNamee said. “Winstrol was stupid [good]. You get a guy throwing 82 [mph], he takes Winstrol he's throwing 92. It's a sprinter's drug. For fast-twitch muscle fiber. If I took Winstrol in college I would have thrown a hundred. Without a doubt. I don't know if it existed then. But yeah, Ben Johnson took it. It's a big sprinter's drug. Hamstring, rotator cuff … oh, it definitely works. Horses were taking it.”
Clemens already was among the greatest pitchers of his generation, if not of all time. Clemens on a steroid regimen as alleged by McNamee was literally unbeatable. Clemens went 14-0 with a 2.29 ERA for the rest of the season. In his final 11 starts alone that season Clemens’ game-by-game strikeout totals were 14, 8, 15, 6, 18, 7, 11, 7, 11, 15 and 11. Only one other time in Clemens’ career did he strike out at least 14 batters four times in an entire season, and that had occurred when he was 10 years younger. And yet in 1998 he did it in just the last two months of a season in which he threw 234⅔ innings at the advanced age of 36. It was a freakishly phenomenal season, but like many achievements in 1998, gained little recognition because of the overwhelming fascination with McGwire, Sosa and the Great Home-Run Race.
The Yankees noticed. They traded an 18-game winner off their 125-win team, Wells, the same pitcher who had thrown a perfect game, too, to get Clemens from the Blue Jays at the start of their 1999 spring training camp. Clemens wanted his new buddy and trainer, McNamee, to join him with the Yankees. There was a prob lem, though. McNamee was under contract to the Blue Jays.
“He tried to get me out of my contract in ‘99,” McNamee said. “I had a player's contract. And he wanted me out of there by the All-Star break. The only thing is [the Blue Jays] would have filed a grievance and I would have been unable to work with a team for six or seven years because I broke my contract. And that's why I didn't leave. I wanted to leave the door open to get back into Major League Baseball. So I let it go.”
Without McNamee, Clemens did not pitch well in New York. Clemens’ ERA jumped by nearly two runs in 1999 to 4.60, the worst mark of his career. He did win the clinching game of the World Series against Atlanta. Just weeks later, McNamee said, Clemens called him.
“You're not going back to Toronto,” Clemens said.
“Okay,” McNamee said. “I'll train you.”
McNamee, the New York kid, was happy about coming home. There were a couple of issues that needed to be worked out, though. Clemens didn't want to have to fly McNamee around the country to train him while the Yankees
were on the road, so he petitioned the Yankees to make McNamee a strength coach. But the Yankees already had a strength coach, Jeff Mangold. Did they need another one? They did if they wanted to keep Clemens happy and productive.
McNamee flew to Tampa to meet with Yankees general manager Brian Cashman and assistant Mark Newman. A deal was struck. McNamee would be named as the team's assistant strength coach, with a base salary full medical benefits and complete access to the Yankees players and facilities. There was only one catch: Clemens would have to pay McNamee's salary. The Yankees would deduct the money from Clemens’ salary and give it to McNamee. The arrangement suited Clemens, who now had his personal trainer with him at all times on the staff of the New York Yankees without the bother of having to make separate travel arrangements for him or the worry of trying to gain him access to club facilities. Even McNamee found it odd that one player, acquired in a trade, not even with the leverage of free agency, essentially appointed his personal trainer to the team, a team that had forged its reputation on turning unselfishness into championships.
“It was set up to fail,” McNamee said. “Because I went in there to try to help and Roger put up a front and it was like me versus Mangold. Mangold was Joe's guy, but Roger would tell the players to go see me, not Mangold. And I hated going to work every day.”
McNamee had trained Clemens, Andy Pettitte and pitcher C. J. Nitkowski in Houston that winter after the 1999 season. When McNamee arrived at the Yankees’ 2000 spring training camp, it took only the first minute of the first stretching exercises of the first day of workouts for trouble to start. McNamee was leading the team in stretching when Cone, the respected elder statesman of the Yankees, yelled at him with only a modicum of humor that intentionally could not disguise his anger.
“What the fuck are you doing here leading stretching?” Cone yelled for all of his teammates to hear. “Did you get a quickie degree? What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here doing this!”
Cone went on to trash McNamee so badly that the pitcher admits, “I was getting a little embarrassed because it was in front of the whole team.” Cone, the old-school union man, was upset not only because he felt the Yankees catered to Clemens’ wants by hiring him, but also because he regarded McNamee as a gate-crasher, somebody who had entered the elite club of Major League Baseball without earning his way there, which is how the players have to do it.
“McNamee's leading the team in stretching and he's Roger's guy,” Cone said, “and then there's Jeff Mangold, who's another Gold's Gym guy from Jersey who wasn't qualified to have a big league job, I thought. I never understood why major league clubs would not use guys internally. Train them the way you want to train them and hire them in that position. I never understood that. None of those guys were ever properly vetted.
“I didn't like McNamee. Not that he was a bad guy. I never thought he was properly vetted. [Trainers] Gene Monahan and Steve Donahue were just like us. They had to go through the minor leagues. They were vetted. They rode the buses. They ate the ketchup sandwiches. They worked their way up to the big leagues. I always thought, There is another Gene Monahan in Double-A or Triple-A that has three kids and a family and needs a big league job. Why did McNamee get it? He went back and got a quickie degree? The guy was a bullpen catcher in ‘95 for me. Then all of a sudden he's gone, he comes back, he's doing some sports book? Basically, he's a hustler. And now he's a trainer.
“I didn't use either one of those guys. I used [trainers] Gene Monahan or Steve Donahue if I needed something. I never, ever understood that. That was more on principle than anything I saw. And yeah, there were whispers about what was going on, but we really didn't know.”
What was going on was that the Yankees, like every team in baseball, were increasingly turning to steroids and human growth hormone, and those so inclined now had someone on the payroll and in uniform and on the team plane to provide information and access to those drugs at any time if they so wished. In 2000 and 2001 the Yankees would joke among themselves about guys who worked closely with McNamee, especially the ones who showed obvious strength and body-type changes. “He's on Mac's program” was the joke, which often was reduced to the simple shorthand of “He's on ‘The Program.’ “ No one knew for certain the details of “The Program.” No one wanted to know the details. These were the days of “don't ask, don't tell, don't care.”
“They were on his program, guys like Roger and Andy and maybe [Mike] Stanton,” Cone said. “I thought he had some GNC stuff he was putting in shakes, over-the-counter stuff, maybe creatine or andro or whatever you can get over the counter. I thought that's what he was doing. I had no idea he had kits [of human growth hormone].”
McNamee intentionally kept a low profile. He rarely spoke or smiled. That was his personality.
“If I could go through the day without talking to anybody, it was a good day,” McNamee said.
Besides, he sensed the friction created by the assumption that he was “Roger's guy.”
“Bernie, Posada, Mariano, Pettitte, they all knew me because I was there when they first came up,” McNamee said. “But then the pitchers start talking and the players start talking and it's like a little bitch fest. ‘Oh, go see Mac’ Then it was like I was doing my own thing.”
“Go see Mac” and “The Program” became understood code for seeking out supplement options, legal or perhaps not. McNamee claims to be personally opposed to illegal performance-enhancing drugs.
“I had guys ask me general questions,” McNamee said. “I would give the good and the bad and my recommendation would be not to do it. I can get 200 players now I talked out of doing it. Or said no to. But I never said I could get stuff to anybody. I think because of [Jason] Grimsley Roger knew that I knew a guy, and because David [Justice] knew that I knew a guy and I knew that his stuff was legit, clean and whatever. And that's where the problem started. And I enabled that. And I shouldn't have.”
McNamee also had a practical reason for not emphasizing steroids: they would devalue his work as a trainer. How could he claim credit for the benefits of a conditioning program, for instance, if a steroid shortcut available to anybody made the biggest difference of all? But by 2000 and 2001 the drug culture in baseball was so firmly established that ballplayers were going to cheat whether McNamee or any other strength coach was on board with it or not. The signs were too obvious. Wells, for instance, would later write in his 2003 book, Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches and Baseball, that you could stand anywhere in the clubhouse and be no more than 10 feet away from illegal drugs.
“Yeah, that's a good guesstimate,” McNamee said. “Guys were looking in each other's lockers, guys were searching … that was pretty much it. Some guys were open about it, some guys weren't.
And you wouldn't believe the shit they were taking. I mean, it was like horseshit and crap. Like, they didn't know the toxicity levels. They didn't know orals. They were taking whatever the fuck … they were taking Ritalin, oral steroids … they were taking stuff that was bad for them. And then they're going out all night because they've got amphetamines in them, and they're drinking, and then they're sleeping all day, and then they've got to take amphetamines … It's a vicious cycle.”
Amphetamines had long been established in baseball to combat the mental and physical grind of the baseball season. But they became a routine part of the game.
“If you're not cheatin’, you're not tryin,’ “ McNamee said. “That was the motto.”
McNamee said players from the Blue Jays and Yankees during his year there would store their amphetamines in their lockers, but disguised in the plastic canisters of over-the-counter supplements.
“When you see that ‘Ripped Fuel’ thing? It was usually full of greenies,” McNamee said.
He said obtaining amphetamines was easy. Players never even had to leave their own clubhouse.
“There was a guy in California, a Mexican guy,” McNamee said. “He'd sit there all day in the clubhouse. Guys would
sign bats for him, and he'd give them boxes of greenies. In Anaheim. He'd be sitting there with a satchel full of greenies. There was green and green-and-light-green. That's what they used to make the coffee with.
“We used to open ‘em up and put ‘em in the coffee in the clubhouse, which I took one time [in 1998] and didn't know. I almost had a heart attack. I was out stretching guys. One of the Blue Jays was like, ‘Did you drink the coffee?’ I said, ‘Yeah. It's right near my locker.’ He goes, ‘Never drink the clubhouse coffee. Go to the back.’ I'm like, ‘All right. Thanks for telling me.’
“I didn't know one pitcher on Toronto's team that wasn't taking them, when he pitched. It's speed. Guys were beaning up to play golf after workouts.”
The prevalence of amphetamines contributed to the general acceptance of illegal drugs in clubhouses. Steroid use had spread virally around baseball. Segui, for instance, was traded in the second half of the 1999 season from Seattle to Toronto, where he met McNamee. McNamee went to the Yankees the next year, where he met pitcher Jason Grimsley. McNamee gave Grimsley Segui's telephone number, knowing both were interested in performance-enhancing drugs. And then one day during that 2000 season, McNamee was sitting with Grimsley in the Yankees bullpen during a game when he happened to mention that he really liked the Lexus RX300 SUV.
“Really?” Grimsley said. “I know a guy who works with Lexus.”
Grimsley gave McNamee the name and telephone number of his friend. His friend's name was Kirk Radomski. McNamee called him and arranged to meet him at a car-detailing shop.
“And that's how I met him,” McNamee said.
Radomski and McNamee became friends and business associates. Much later, after the feds closed in on them, they also became star witnesses in the Mitchell Report. The connection became a convenient one for Grimsley, who was purchasing his drugs from Radomski. Why not, Grimsley figured, have McNamee do his leg-work? He asked McNamee to pick up his kits of human growth hormone from Radomski. McNamee obliged, even though he was putting himself into the dangerous area of drug distribution.