The toxicity levels of what was now being called the “Steroid Era” were lethal, and it was the numbers, always the lifeblood of the sport, that contained the most cancerous cells. From the time not long after California had still been part of Mexico until 1997, the sixty-home run mark had been reached just twice, by Ruth in 1927 and by Maris in 1961. Yet between 1998 and 2001, while the profits soared, sixty had been topped six times and the seventy—seventy—home-run mark reached twice. The top six single-season home-run seasons had been recorded over a four-year period. In a four-year period, Sosa hit sixty home runs three times but didn’t win a home-run title in any one of those years. Meanwhile, the cash registers ka-chinged melodically and the people cheered, while men like Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Reggie Jackson, and Mike Schmidt did a slow burn.
McGwire had hit seventy home runs in 1998, and after the last one, he said in an interview room, arms puffy and eyes shifty, that his record would never be broken.
But three years later, Barry Bonds hit seventy-three home runs.
Baseball had gotten other numbers it liked—revenues from $1.2 billion in 1994 to $6 billion in 2007 and $6.6 billion in 2008—and the public had gotten its thrills. If Bill Henneberry remembered when baseball was radioactive to advertisers and sponsors, nobody else did. But suddenly—or maybe not so suddenly—it had all gone too far, the joyride topped by one ice-cream scoop too many. McGwire-Sosa 1998 was supposed to be that ridiculous, magical year that made no earthly sense, wouldn’t happen again, and gave the people who saw it that special generational unity, like DiMaggio-Williams in 1941 and Mantle-Maris two decades later. Instead, as the numbers kept increasing, one fraudulent scoop after another, the authenticity of the game seemed increasingly remote. And now, chasing Aaron, there was Bonds, already viewed suspiciously by the public for his obdurate disposition and growing head size, chased by the federal government because it believed he’d lied to a federal grand jury about taking muscle-making drugs. Bonds was so dominant and so prolific when it came to hitting the ball out of the ballpark that by 2005 he had become Henry, circa 1969: the guy for whom breaking the home run record was no longer a question of if, but when.
Historians had clung to the Black Sox—the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox team that had thrown the World Series—as the standard of malfeasance in professional sports. They claimed that this was the cataclysmic moment when the game had been wrenched from its moorings. Steroids, they said, weren’t nearly that disastrous in terms of historical importance. The contemporaries liked to point to Pete Rose, baseball’s all-time leader in hits, now reduced to a cheap Las Vegas sideshow, as being worse than the rampant drug use that undermined the game.
But neither came close.
The apologists in the locker room, the front offices, and, worst of all, the press box said there was nothing in a bottle that could help you hit home runs. They demanded proof that their golden heroes would do something, anything, to run faster, hit harder, play more, earn more. When the information finally appeared, in the form of positive tests, grand jury investigations, sting operations, federal indictments, and empty, implausible lies, the apologists spun deftly, claiming that drugs were old news, that everybody knew players were using, and asking, Couldn’t we just move on? In the face of crumbling reputations and laughable, desperate denials, the apologists turned off their brains and their intellect and their enthusiasm for the great glory of the pastime, vigorously and petulantly shaking their heads in denial.
THE PUBLIC DIDN’T want numbers anymore, not with the IRS and the federal government hunting down MVPs and Cy Young winners as though they were La Cosa Nostra. Numbers were too suspicious. Numbers just confirmed the con game. Now they wanted a hero, someone who could remind them that the currency of baseball wasn’t something as unimportant as the number of times a man could hit the ball over the fence, but about the value systems and virtues that worthless feat once represented.
Reaching back into the past wasn’t going to be enough. Ted Williams, the cantankerous but hearty, authentic American, was gone. So was the immigrant hero DiMaggio (though it was virtually impossible to envision the embittered, mysterious Joe leading a public debate on values). Jackie, of course, was long gone, while Willie was making more a fool of himself every day he opened his mouth about a subject he knew little about. (I just don’t think steroids help you at all. They just don’t do anything.) Mays exhibited a combination of loyalty to his godson, Barry Bonds, and a severe tone deafness to the severity of the public breach. Star power and nostalgia alone weren’t going to do it this time. The word integrity was back in vogue, even if it was needed less as a guide and more to assuage the collective guilt. The public, as much as some of the people associated with the game, realized too late, and without enough response, that what had been lost—the belief in the difficulty that came with the game—was the very quality that gave the sport its power.
The apologists and the disbelievers and the ones who couldn’t be bothered, they all tried to minimize the effects of a game without integrity. Those effects, for once, could not be measured by money, but by numbers that could not be argued: McGwire, Palmeiro, Sosa, Clemens, and Bonds, one hundred combined seasons, forty-seven all-star appearances, 2,523 home runs, 354 wins, nine MVPs, seven Cy Young Awards, two single-season home-run records, and the most famous sports record in the history of the country, all publicly disgraced during the same era by the same issue.
No other sport, at no period in the history of the republic, could ever say that. No other sport could point to half a dozen of its greatest players, and a dozen more of possible Hall of Fame caliber, all from different teams, who couldn’t show their faces in public. And now the greatest record in the country was about to fall. Another tainted record. The public wanted someone who could provide a moral compass, someone who could bring them and their game back into the light.
So they turned to Henry.
There had always been a gap between Hank and Henry. Introverted and unsure in large settings, Henry thrived in tightly controlled private gatherings. There, he could relax and allow his natural suspicions to melt. He would be genuinely warm and funny and gentle, disarming his audiences with his easy laugh and quickness, like when he would take his grandson, Victor junior, to school every day. Friends would marvel at how he hated public speaking and yet shone so well in those small-group Q and A sessions, when members of the audience would file out, feeling as though they’d been talking to a familiar uncle. It was in these settings, with corporate executives, manageable groups of lucky fans, and children, where his charisma flowered.
But now, with the sport in moral crisis, the public wanted the other half of the man, not intimate-chat Henry but the great Hank Aaron, the leader of men, out in front and in public. They wanted his presence to make them feel better about a sport he hadn’t played in thirty years. In the months following the 2005 congressional hearings, the number of times the public yearned to hear the voice of Henry Aaron were too numerous to count.
The old guard came out, crotchety and indignant, in defense of their time.
“Go ask Henry Aaron,”313 Jim Bunning, the Hall of Fame pitcher turned Kentucky senator, thundered. Henry had worn out Bunning, hitting .323 against him in sixty-five at bats. In the first game of a doubleheader, May 10, 1967, in Philadelphia, Bunning gave up home run number 448 to Henry. “Go ask the family of Roger Maris,” Bunning said. “Go ask all of the people who played without enhanced drugs if they would like their records compared with the current records.”
On the face of it, one might have thought that Henry would have welcomed the attention, his inner desire for respect finally converging with the public’s appreciation of him. For years, Henry would argue that records were always valued until they landed in his hands, the hands of a black man. He used to say the all-time home-run record was the most hallowed in all of baseball—until he broke it. Then it wasn’t so important anymore. Later, he would say with no shortage of acidity that Joe DiMaggio’s
fifty-six-game hitting streak seemed to carry more value to the establishment than his record. Yet as Bonds approached, Henry only grew in stature. The New York Daily News, once the home of one of Henry’s great journalistic nemeses, Dick Young, now referred to the record, his record, as “sacred.”
After years of being dismissed as bitter and largely incurious, or disparaged and accused of being easily led by the more dominant female figures in his life, he was now an important man, the person who was being asked to be the voice of authority on the most important subject of the times. During the Steroid Era, there was no person in baseball whose word was more anticipated or carried greater moral weight than that of Henry Aaron. He had reached the position Jackie Robinson had so many years before, an athlete sought out more for his moral standing than for his past heroics.
And it was there, at the precise moment when he finally had the floor all to himself, that Henry Aaron chose not to engage. Henry’s old contemporary Frank Robinson was fierce and unequivocal. “Any player found to have used steroids, well, I don’t think their records should count,” Robinson said. “I think they should be wiped out.” It was a powerful, direct statement, emblematic of the uncompromising Robinson, who had been fourth on the all-time list for what felt like forever, with 586 home runs. “Pretty soon,” Robinson said, “I’m going to be way, way, way down the list.”
Robinson, Bunning, and so many of the old-timers were fierce, not just because their places in the continuum were being erased but also because for this generation of Americans, drugs were about as low as a person could go. Henry himself had been driven to action by what he saw drugs doing to black communities. He had struggled with his own brother James’s drug and alcohol addictions. James was the youngest of the Aaron siblings. He had remained in Mobile and at one point was living at the Salvation Army building.
But Henry was evasive on the ethical question of steroids, about whether he believed using performance-enhancing drugs was cheating, and nobody could understand why. He refused to engage about his feelings toward specific players and their chemically enhanced accomplishments, offering vague statements about how “unfortunate” the current situation was. Henry distanced himself. Even Bud Selig had reversed field, acknowledging the degree to which his sport had been derailed. In the spring of 2006, Selig announced he would launch an investigation, headed by former senator George Mitchell, into the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
A week into the 2006 season, Henry attended a dinner in Milwaukee, where he gave an impromptu press conference, and it was here that he would begin to define his public position about Bonds.
AARON PREFERS TO FOCUS
ON THE POSITIVES314
“I think what the commissioner is trying to do is trying to put an end to all of this,” Aaron said after a news conference at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee. “I know people have said, ‘Where is this investigation going, and what purpose?’ But I think he’s trying to put an end to it.”
Aaron said Selig was trying to do what is right. Asked if the allegations about drug use hurt the game, Aaron sidestepped the question.
“This game has got so much to offer,” he said…. “Yet we are focusing on one thing, and that’s steroids. We need to get rid of it once and for all and, hey, let’s get on with the job of playing baseball.”
He frustrated certain elements of the press, which believed that Aaron was being passive-aggressive: He complained about not being taken seriously and yet shrank when the world looked to him on a serious issue. Even his supporters were often perplexed by his lack of a position, for it was incongruous with the man they knew.
“The one thing Henry315 hated was cheating. The whole thing bothered him,” Ralph Garr said. “Why do you think he and Gaylord Perry never got on well? He might not have said anything, but anyone who knew Henry Aaron knew that the whole thing about drugs, that really bothered him.
“You’d have been ashamed to do stuff like that around him. He’d form his opinion from the inside. It wasn’t Henry Aaron’s way to tell you about your business. That’s why he’s not going to mention Barry. He’s gonna let that train pass.”
That Henry was quiet about steroids was to some degree generational. For a man of Henry’s time, drugs were designed to alter the mental state of the user. Drugs made you dopey—hence the slang term dope. But the sophistication and purpose of designer steroids and human growth hormone—There were drugs that could improve your eyesight?—were outside of his sphere. Dusty Baker thought that while Henry appreciated his status as baseball royalty, he did not want this issue, so tawdry and difficult, to be the one that forced him back into the public eye. Drugs were, as they say, a dirty business. On the one hand, he was still a ballplayer, and he bought into the rhetoric that there was nothing in a bottle that could help a player once he stepped into the batter’s box. The batter still had to see the ball and make contact. Yet he knew simply by looking at the numbers and the immense size of some of the players that something was amiss. “I played the game,” Henry would say. “It’s just not possible to hit seventy home runs.” In interviews, however, such as before game four of the 2007 World Series between Boston and Colorado, he referred to performance enhancers as he would a dime bag of marijuana.
“I just don’t want to get involved with conversations316 about dope,” he said.
Yet another reason was political. His friend of a half century, Bud Selig, was under assault—from the union, from the players, from the fans and writers, and from Congress—for not being swift and decisive on the issue, and Henry was careful with his opinions. A blistering indictment of steroid use would indirectly be a criticism of his ally Selig and Selig’s handling of the situation.
THE REAL POINT was, Henry thought he could not win on the Bonds issue. He would tell intimates that Bonds was a “lose-lose.” If he spoke out against Bonds, then he risked the criticism that he was just a bitter old man who could not deal with his record being broken. There were people close to Henry who believed that he enjoyed being the all-time home-run leader. He had held the record for so long that it had become a part of him. It had given him the sort of legitimacy that being a transcendent player did not. And what was not to like about holding the record?
Yet, this was not a reason for Henry not to want his record broken. What Billye Aaron admired most about Henry was the comfort he seemed to have within himself. “He knows what he did,”317 she said, “and he knows that the time would come when the record would belong to someone else. That part of it didn’t bother him, as far as I’m concerned.” Henry himself would repeat the same refrain: Records were made to be broken. It was a shopworn cliché, and it certainly masked whatever complex feelings he held toward Bonds, but it was true.
Henry also believed that if he said nothing, or supported Bonds in his quest to break the record, if for no other reason than to be a good ambassador to baseball, he would be tacitly condoning steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. Throughout his life, he had been proud of how he approached his profession. He didn’t want to be associated with the drug culture, which had changed the game and the way the sport was viewed.
For all of his fears, there was still another section of the press that knew Henry was being placed in an impossible position. Even saying nothing about Bonds was, by definition, a statement in and of itself.
During each public appearance, he invariably would be faced with a question about Bonds. His responses were often odd, and for a press that felt Henry was in a position of leadership, this was maddening. There was, for example, the day in Milwaukee when the Brewers were dedicating a plaque for Henry’s 755th home run, his last big-league home run, the record.
“Barry Bonds?” Henry said. “I don’t even know how to spell his name.”
To Henry’s inner circle, it was a great quote, one that made everybody laugh. Henry was showing his dry sense of humor to break up a tense moment. However, the press had the opposite reaction. Flippant and evasive comments did not endear Henry to th
e press. And then there was the bizarre interview he gave to the Associated Press:
Q: In fact, I was just going to ask you,318 how closely do you follow the games?
A: Oh, I watch the Braves play every day.
Q: How many games do you go to a year?
A: I don’t go to too many. I don’t attend too many, but I watch on television every day.
Q: Do you have any advice for Barry Bonds?
A: For who?
Q: Barry Bonds, because he went through so much, as you did.
A: I don’t have any…. As I said before, I don’t have any advice whatsoever, no advice to anybody.
Q: Have you spoken with him?
A: No. I have not talked to anybody, really.
Q: What will you be doing when he’s on the brink of tying or breaking your record?
A: I have no idea, probably playing golf somewhere.
Q: Would you reconsider your decision to stay away?
A: I will never reconsider my decision.
Q: That’s pretty strong. Why is that?
A: Nothing. Just that it’s the way I am…. I traveled for 23 years and I just get tired of traveling. I’m not going to fly to go see somebody hit a home run, no matter whether it is Barry or Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig or whoever it may be. I’m not going anyplace. I wish him all the luck in the world.
Q: Well, if it happened in Atlanta would you go?
A: No, I won’t be there.
Q: Really?
A: No.
Q: If he breaks your mark do you think it’s an accomplishment on par with what you did?
The Last Hero Page 58