by Joe Torre
Of course, steroids hardly were a secret in baseball then. Many media outlets had covered the topic, often with anonymous sources, and the Mitchell Report referenced many of those reports. But the topic never gained much traction, primarily because top Major League Baseball officials, union leaders and active players typically would not admit the scope of the problem or attach their name to a call for action.
By April of 2002, the increasing resentment among some players to steroid use was a sign that perhaps the “don't ask, don't tell, don't care” culture was about to crack. The worst-kept secret in baseball was the growing use and acceptance of steroids. Caminiti, who was a fierce competitor and bluntly honest character over his 15 seasons with Houston, San Diego, Texas and Atlanta, was the man who broke the coded silence in the pages of Sports Illustrated.
“I've got nothing to hide,” he said.
Still, there was an obvious sadness about him. His virility was gone. Caminiti moved and spoke slowly. His famously intense eyes had gone cold and dull. He complained several times that his body could no longer produce enough testosterone on its own, having grown dependent on the synthetic forms he injected into his body.
“You know what that's like?” he said. “You get lethargic. You get depressed. It's terrible.”
The story was enormous. What Helling had been trying to tell the players association for four years was now broadcast across every network and media outlet in the country. The secret was out, as much as some still didn't want to acknowledge the obvious truth. They wanted to perpetuate the myth.
“Everybody hates a snitch,” said Cubs manager Dusty Baker, remaining faithful to the ballplayers’ omerta.
Said Angels slugger Mo Vaughn, “Let me tell you why Barry Bonds hit 73 homers. Because he's a great hitter. Because the Giants moved out of Candlestick Park into a place where the wind doesn't blow as much.”
Of course, this was the same Mo Vaughn who was one of Kirk Radomski's best customers. Mitchell's investigators found that Vaughn, who was referred to Radomski by Glenallen Hill, wrote at least three checks to Radomski in 2001 totaling $8,600 for kits of human growth hormone. Radomski told Mitchell he personally delivered the drugs to Vaughn.
Then there was the post-Caminiti reaction of Jason Giambi of the Yankees. “I know this stuff is newsworthy,” Giambi said, “but hopefully people don't buy into it. There's no miracle thing for this game. Either you have talent or you don't. One common thread of all the greats of the game, they've had longevity.”
Of course, this was the same Jason Giambi, apparently short on requisite talent, who was pumping his body full of steroids and human growth hormone.
Try as they might, the ballplayers could not wish away the steroid issue. Three months after Caminiti spoke out, the players association suddenly dropped its long-standing and fierce opposition to random drug testing, and agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement that would require all players in 2003 to submit to anonymous “survey” testing. Before the union would even agree to do something about the steroid problem in baseball, however, the players bargained for an escape clause: a program just to find out if a problem even existed. Real steroid testing would take place starting in 2004 only if more than 5 percent of the anonymous 2003 tests came back positive—tests the players knew they would be taking in spring training. The players couldn't even keep from using the drugs long enough to beat the tests they knew were coming. Enough ballplayers still flunked to trigger the real testing program.
“It does surprise me a little bit,” said relief pitcher Mike Stanton, then with the Mets after his years with the Yankees. “But the tests don't like lie.”
Stanton was surprised? Of course, this was the same Mike Stanton who, according to the Mitchell Report, met Radomski when he was a Yankee in 2001, and received from Radomski three kits of human growth hormone in 2003—the same year Stanton expressed surprise at the survey test results.
Rick Helling was at least one person who was not surprised at what happened to baseball. Baseball in the Steroid Era was one lie piled upon another over and over, starting with the lie that baseball didn't have a steroid problem at the time, continuing with the wanton disregard of federal law that there were no rules against steroids, advancing to the lie that steroids did not help anyone play baseball, moving to the lies that go on even to this day that no one ever seemed to know anyone who used steroids or, God forbid, actually used the stuff themselves, and including the lies that pass as the career playing statistics for the hundreds of players who knowingly chose to break the law and the seemingly archaic code of sportsmanship. The Steroid Era was baseball's Watergate, a colossal breach of trust for which the institution is forever tainted. It floats untethered to the rest of baseball history, like some great piece of space junk, disconnected from the moorings of the game's statistics.
Like Watergate, the Steroid Era eventually and assuredly led to an age of discovery, a sort of archaeology of the times in which some of the ugly truths bobbed to the surface or were unearthed by the brushing away of the lies. Reputations were ruined or damaged. Helling was right. It blew up in the players’ faces. Two giants of the game, however, were hit the hardest of all, paying a steep price because their reputations were so outsized in the first place, and then because their personal trainers were ensnared in the legal unravelings of what had happened. One was Bonds. The other was the cocksure cowboy from Texas who helped deliver Torre's Yankees to two world championships.
4
The Boss
George Steinbrenner would shovel debris out of six inches of gunky green water while dressed in his loafers and slacks if it meant winning a World Series, which is exactly what he was doing in the eighth inning of Game 4 of the 2000 World Series at Shea Stadium. A fire had started in a third-deck trash container at Shea. When firefighters opened one standpipe to extinguish the fire, pressure built in another standpipe located over the Yankees’ clubhouse. The pipe burst, spewing torrents of dirty water and eventually causing the clubhouse ceiling to collapse. Great waves of fetid water cascaded over the clubhouse, and headed in the direction of the Yankees’ principal owner.
Steinbrenner's custom was to watch postseason games on television in the Yankees’ clubhouse. “You would show up for a game early and he would be the first one there, sitting on the couch waiting for the game to start. He watched the whole game right there,” said David Cone. Steinbrenner liked that the television cameras could not focus on him there, and he liked being able to communicate with his team during games. For instance, when hitting coach Chris Chambliss walked into the clubhouse during the game to look at videotapes, Steinbrenner barked at him, “We've got to get these guys going!” It was the old football coach in him.
As firefighters arrived to shut off the standpipe and to clean up the mess, Steinbrenner jumped in to help them. After they did the best they could to move the water out and shovel away the pieces of the demolished ceiling, Steinbrenner, soaked himself, took a wad of bills from his pocket and peeled off fifties and hundreds to give to the firefighters in appreciation of their effort.
Steinbrenner was the epitome of the hands-on owner. His presence was everywhere. Earlier on the same day the pipe burst, Steinbrenner ordered his clubhouse attendants to refurnish the visiting clubhouse at Shea Stadium with the team's own chairs, sofas and training tables trucked over from Yankee Stadium. The Boss was upset that the Mets provided only stools in front of each player's locker and he wanted high-backed leather chairs for his players.
“I can't have my guys sitting on these stools!” Steinbrenner said.
Nothing was too small or insignificant to be out of the purview of the owner of the Yankees. Indeed, Steinbrenner thought of himself as one of the guys, a former football player and coach who liked milling about the clubhouse and jabbering with the athletes, speaking their language and smelling the liniment. He would even sit in on scouting report meetings. Cone, more than any other player, recognized Steinbrenner's need to be a part of the jo
ck culture and toyed with him about it.
“I would do stuff just to get him going,” Cone said, “to make him feel a part of it. I liked having him around for that reason, because most people were too intimidated to say anything. I would always say, ‘What was it like to coach Lenny Dawson? Tell O'Neill. C'mon. Tell him! Give him that pep talk like you gave Lenny!’ I'd get him going. And O'Neill would hate it.
“George just wanted to be a part of it. He loved that. I remember one time we had a hitters’ meeting before one of the playoff games at Yankee Stadium. George would hang out in the clubhouse for the entire postseason after hardly seeing it during the regular season. He would be involved with the hitters’ meetings, the pitchers’ meetings, the scouting reports—after not coming by all year.
“I remember we had our pitchers’ meeting, and then George was back in the food room with all the hitters, and Chris Cham-bliss was going over all their pitchers. ‘This guy's got this, and that …’ Gene Michael had the advance report. And the Coke machine was over in the corner buzzing. Bzzzzz. It drove George nuts. So he got on his hands and knees and reached around and he's trying to unplug it. Bzzzzz. He's moving that thing, he's trying to go around it … Bzzzzz. He's yelling at the clubbies, ‘Help me move this thing!’ Finally, he unplugs it. It stops making the noise. He gets back up off the ground.
“So we had just finished our meeting and I walk in there and I saw him in there and I looked at Tino's face. And Tino looks as tight as a drum after going over everything. Now George is going over everything, looking over Chambliss’ shoulder. So I just screamed, ‘George, don't you fuck up those guys in there!’ He looked back at me like this, like, ‘What the … ?’ and everybody just looked up at me.
“I said, ‘Get out of there, George! Don't you fuck them up!’ Then I kind of waved, and he broke down and started laughing. Right then, Tino got up and they broke up the meeting.
“And George came up to me after that and said, ‘You just better be ready!’ I told him, ‘I'll be ready, George. I'll be ready.’ “
Cone was at it again with Steinbrenner just before the start of that fourth game of the 2000 World Series. O'Neill, famously intense and serious about his preparation, was walking by Cone in the redecorated clubhouse when the pitcher called out to Steinbrenner, “Time for a pep talk, George! O'Neill needs something. He doesn't look like he's ready to play to me.”
O'Neill shot a cold stare at Cone. Said Cone, “He's looking at me and he's as tight as a drum. He's bitter. He's pissed at me for trying to stir things up.” Cone, of course, kept up the banter.
“C'mon, George,” he said. “Tell him! C'mon. We need O'Neill today, George. He doesn't look ready to go to me. Does he look ready to you?”
Said Cone, “George just loved it.” O'Neill, however, took a very different view of Cone's gamesmanship.
“You,” he barked at Cone, “get the fuck out of the clubhouse! Right now!”
Said Cone, “I thought he was going to kill me. That's the first time I saw Paulie look at me like that. And he wasn't kidding.”
Cone had some more fun with Steinbrenner the next day, with the Yankees up three games to one and an opportunity to clinch the World Series. Once again, Steinbrenner arrived early to the clubhouse. Cone pointed out to him some strange cables that had not been in the clubhouse before. He found a microphone taped to the underside of one of the clubhouse tables.
“Look, Boss!” Cone said. “They're wiretapping us! The Mets are wiretapping us!”
Cone, however, knew the equipment belonged to Fox television in preparation for a possible clubhouse celebration.
“Cone knew how to push his buttons,” said Lou Cucuzza, the Yankees visiting clubhouse manager. “He knew Steinbrenner had a distrust of everything, and was always concerned about wiretapping.”
Steinbrenner took Cone's bait.
“Somebody,” Steinbrenner called out, “go get a pair of scissors and cut it!”
For better or worse, Steinbrenner contributed immensely to the harsh desire to win around the Yankees. Unlike most of the other owners, who busied themselves with their business-world interests and found pockets of time to check on their baseball team, Steinbrenner went to bed at night and woke up in the morning with the same thought: we have to win. He was ruthless in his goal. “I saw George make a player cry once,” said Brian McNamee, the former strength coach. “Might have been ‘93. John Habyan, a pitcher. He made him cry one day. It was sad.”
Another time, Allen Watson, a relief pitcher, threw a bagel at a clubhouse attendant while goofing off in the clubhouse during spring training. Just as the bagel sailed across the room, Steinbren-ner walked through the doorway. It was a case of perfect timing: the flying bagel hit Steinbrenner in the chest. The clubhouse fell ominously silent.
“Who threw that?” Steinbrenner demanded.
Watson raised his hand.
“I did.”
“I figured it was you, Watson,” Steinbrenner said. “That's why it didn't hurt.”
And he kept on walking.
Intimidation, and the mere threat that he could go off at any time, was part of Steinbrenner's persona and leadership package. A person could sense when Steinbrenner was lurking because Yankees employees would grow tense and anxious. He kept everyone on edge, which is exactly how he liked it.
“One thing about this organization,” said Cucuzza, “when The Boss was on top of everything, especially in Florida for spring training, everything had to be perfect. There was no being lax on anything. You knew he would come around the corner at precisely the weakest moment and be all over you. He knew just when to show up. You might be taking a break after working 20 straight hours. As soon as you put your feet up, boom, he walks in. ‘Hey I don't pay you to relax!’ He constantly did that.
“The thing about George was you knew where you stood with him. I knew how tough he could be on the players and Joe, but there was no gray area. You knew where you stood. That by far has been the biggest change. When he was at his height some people couldn't stand him because he was so tough. Now you hear they wish The Boss was back.”
One time during spring training, Cucuzza and his interns were assembled in his office to review the ground rules for their PlayStation football tournament. Suddenly he glimpsed Steinbrenner walking into the clubhouse. “I immediately went into a Vince Lom-bardi speech,” Cucuzza said. “ ‘And another thing, make sure you keep this place spotless.
Steinbrenner walked past Cucuzza and said to him, “That's the way to go.”
Cone was one of Steinbrenner's rare employees who was not intimidated by him and delighted in disarming him. There was another key person who was not so bossed by The Boss: Torre. Of course, it helped that Torre made a huge deposit into his goodwill account with Steinbrenner immediately upon being hired; he won the World Series in his first season. Their relationship, however, hit a key turning point the following year, 1997, when Torre proved he was not the “muppet” for Steinbrenner that the New York press had expected.
On August 10, 1997, Torre brought in Ramiro Mendoza to start the fourth inning against Minnesota in relief of Kenny Rogers with an 8-2 lead. Mendoza gave up three runs on seven hits over three innings. The Yankees still won the game, 9-6, but not comfortably enough for Steinbrenner. He called up Bob Watson, the general manager, and said he wanted Mendoza shipped to the minor leagues. Mendoza had a 4.34 ERA and had earned Torre's trust as an emergency starter, a long reliever and a groundball-throwing machine who could get out of jams with double plays. Watson called Torre after the Minnesota game to tell him Steinbrenner wanted Mendoza demoted.
“Just make sure,” Torre told Watson, “that George knows that when we do it and the writers ask me why, I will tell them that George wanted to do it—that he wanted to send him out. I didn't.”
Said Torre, “I couldn't in good conscience say, ‘We're sending him out. He didn't do the job.’ Everybody knew how I felt about him. The kid had been pitching his ass off and then one afternoon
he gives up a base hit.”
Watson relayed Torre's message to Steinbrenner. The Boss suddenly changed his mind. Mendoza wasn't going anywhere.
“That was a good lesson I learned early on,” Torre said. “It was really my first confrontation with George. He backed off. Because he didn't want that responsibility of people knowing it was his call.”
The divide-and-conquer dynamic Steinbrenner created with the Yankees encouraged some employees to stake out their own turf, to curry favor with The Boss or damage the standing of others to elevate their own. What Steinbrenner saw as a system to keep his employees perpetually on edge, Torre saw as divisive and unproductive.
“You'd like to believe that we all want everybody to get better and the whole team to get better and never give a shit who gets credit for it,” Torre said. “People would get in George's ear. All these people would make suggestions and never be accountable for what went wrong. When it did go wrong, it was, ‘Well, he's the manager’ or ‘He's the pitching coach.’