Juicing the Game Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Praise for Juicing the Game

  “This might be the most thorough and unnerving look at any sport ever written.” —The Portland Oregonian

  “Juicing the Game is about so much more than baseball that it will speak to any reader concerned with substance abuse, the power of politicians, the influence of scientists, the frustrations of whistle-blowers, the role of journalists, the impact of professional athletes on youngsters, and—it’s tempting to say—truth, justice, and the American way. It is a remarkable book: well reported, compellingly written, a narrative breathtaking in scope.” —The Christian Science Monitor

  “An extraordinary book.” —The New York Sun

  “Well-timed and fantastically researched.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Howard Bryant has not suffered a sophomore slump after his award-winning book Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. Juicing the Game [is] another thoughtful and comprehensive work addressing social issues in baseball . . . a complex and fascinating story.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A masterpiece of investigative and sports journalism.”

  —The City Paper (Nashville)

  “If ever there was a ‘must-read’ sports book of its time, this is it. Because of the undeniable truths it tells, Bryant’s book is essential reading.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “An insightful examination . . . an excellent primer for hard-core baseball fans, as well as for casual readers who are interested in the anatomy of steroid use in baseball. Bryant details the growing crisis with skill.” —Rocky Mountain News

  “Some of the best reporting on the steroid issue that any journalist has done.” —The Star-Ledger (Newark)

  “A well-researched, thorough, and balanced look at all forms of power in baseball . . . Howard Bryant’s Juicing the Game gives anyone who loves baseball chapter and verse on how the game got to its current state.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Juicing the Game by Howard Bryant is a great book. Not ‘very good.’ If Howard Bryant hadn’t yet arrived as a sports author of the highest order, then let’s be clear: He has now. This is the definitive history of major league baseball over the past fifteen years . . . comprehensive yet concise, detailed yet clear, and a sobering yet breezy, captivating, page-turning read. Did I mention it’s a great book?” —The Hardball Times

  “A must-read for those who wish to look into the history of the business of baseball, and a great book for those who wish to delve into the state of the game as it struggles, yet again, to survive those who run it.”

  —Baseball Think Factory

  “The essential explanation of how things got so far out of hand.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Important . . . strongly recommended.” —Library Journal

  “A rich and measured tale of the last dishonest decade . . . No more comprehensive, balanced, or, yes, fair account exists. Bryant carefully and powerfully builds his case. In assessing blame for the drug scandal, Bryant is judicious. The self-inflicted catastrophe could have no better chronicler than Howard Bryant in his Juicing the Game.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  A PLUME BOOK

  JUICING THE GAME

  HOWARD BRYANT covers sports for the Washington Post and is the author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, which won the CASEY Award for the Best Baseball Book of 2002 from Spitball magazine and was a finalist for the Society for American Baseball Research’s Seymour Medal. Bryant previously covered the Boston Red Sox for the Boston Herald, the New York Yankees for the Record (Bergen, New Jersey), and the Oakland Athletics for the San Jose Mercury News, and wrote editorials and sports and technology columns for the Oakland Tribune. His writing has also appeared in the books Red Sox Century, Yankees Century, The Dodgers, The Good City, and Thinking Black. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Véronique, and son, Ilan.

  PLUME

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  First Plume Printing, March 2006

  Copyright © Howard Bryant, 2005, 2006

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  Excerpt from “Lifting the Game” by Pete Williams, USA Today Sports Weekly, May 7, 1997. Reprinted

  by permission of USA Today Sports Weekly.

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  who makes every day better

  INTRODUCTION

  For Bud Selig, it all came down to the question of how. How, during the easy, balmy days of spring training, the best time of the year in baseball, when his usual routine was flying to Arizona for the weekend to check in on his beloved Milwaukee Brewers, make the rounds to the other camps, and enjoy being the commissioner
of baseball, had he found himself in cold, unfriendly Washington, D.C., seated in the first row in Room 2154 of the Rayburn Building, the official headquarters of the House of Representatives, accused of being a primary cause of his sport’s struggles with anabolic steroids?

  Grim-faced, expecting an ambush, Selig’s second in command, Major League Baseball president and chief operating officer Robert DuPuy, sat stoically to the commissioner’s right, arms folded across his chest, listening to the members of the House Government Reform Committee, one by one, demolish the efficacy of baseball’s drug policy. Steroids had infiltrated baseball, they said, their influence cresting during the years following the 1994 player strike that wiped out the World Series. What was more, this infiltration had occurred with Selig’s knowledge, and for more than a decade, he had done nothing about it.

  The attacks were not the worst of it. DuPuy quickly realized, as Selig would later that day, that there was nothing the commissioner could say in defense of himself or his sport that would have any effect on the congressmen who now bore down mercilessly on him and on baseball. They would not believe anything Bud Selig had to say. He was wasting his breath.

  This couldn’t be happening, and yet there it was, unfolding in front of a national television audience. There stood the pillars of the game, its leadership and some of its greatest players, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa especially, not being celebrated but being judged for what they said and for what they did not say about the most remarkable decade of offense in the modern age. The distance between how the commissioner of baseball saw himself in regard to the larger topic of drug abuse and how he was being portrayed now by Congress, by certain elements of the press, and by an increasing number of people in his own sport was so great that everything that Bud Selig held close to him for a half century in baseball, since the day he first met the Milwaukee Braves’ star outfielder Henry Aaron in the mid-1950s, was coming undone.

  He told the committee members, as he had the Senate two years earlier, about a landmark meeting he convened in Milwaukee in the winter of 2000 with the trainers and doctors of approximately half of the major league teams. Selig remembered that meeting well, for it represented the seminal moment in his education on steroids. He also remembered that meeting because he was on crutches. During the unforgiving Milwaukee winter, he had slipped on a patch of ice and torn up his knee. There was a funny, though painful, irony that the commissioner was conducting a meeting with his sport’s top medical personnel shortly after sustaining a disabling injury. Selig took good-naturedly the ribbing from the doctors about this and enjoyed being part of the insular jocularity of the exclusive club that composed Major League Baseball.

  Then things got serious. Sandy Alderson, baseball’s executive vice president for baseball operations and the number-three man in the sport, recalled the meeting’s being fairly intense and pointed. Selig asked the experts what they believed the top concern in the sport to be. As he went around the room, Selig listened with surprise and intensity. He could not believe what he was being told. Each of the doctors, in their own way, came back to the same problem: The biggest medical issue facing baseball, they told the commissioner, was the growing use of anabolic steroids among the players. To Alderson it was a remarkable moment, unprecedented in his two and a half decades in baseball, for he could not recall so impressive an assemblage of medical experts in one room talking about such an explosive subject.

  Some doctors told him that, while it was true that steroids could make some players stronger, they believed that the drugs were responsible for new injuries the sport had never seen before. Others told Selig that doctors could tell simply from cursory examinations of their players, in some cases by looking at the players’ eyes, that they were using some form of muscle builders, usually anabolic steroids. There were others at that meeting who told the commissioner that team trainers and members of the medical staffs who tried to discuss the power and danger of these drugs were quickly rebuffed by the powerful Players Association.

  Amphetamine use had been tacitly condoned in major league clubhouses for forty years. Commonly referred to as “Greenies,” amphetamines were baseball’s open secret. The players used to joke about them. “Drugs have been in the game since I’ve known it. What do you think made Charlie hustle?” one former player said. “I’ve seen guys take Greenies and pills for years. I tried it once myself. I took some one night because I had a doubleheader the next day. In the second game, I’m swinging from the dugout like a fucking monkey, I was so high. That night, at four in the morning, my eyes were still open. It scared the hell out of me.” Amphetamines were accepted in baseball to offset the rigors of the season. Though illegal, Greenies were long thought to have been provided to players by their teams.

  Steroids were different. A conventional wisdom took over among the players that it would be difficult, in some cases impossible, to compete without anabolic substances. While gauging how many players actually believed this was always a dicey proposition, there was no question that - every player at both the minor and major league level was aware that some of their peers believed steroids could make the difference between a brutal career in the minors and a multimillion-dollar life in the Show. Now the doctors were telling Bud Selig this demanded his attention.

  The doctors’ words were powerful ones, coming as they did independently from so many teams and representing the attitudes of all of the clubs, and their message was clear: Steroids were eating away at the game’s core. For Bud Selig it was an epiphany. Steroids were a new, different, and dangerous animal. Over the next eighteen months, he would not discuss the substance of the secret meeting nor that one had even taken place. Instead he would convene with his labor lieutenant, Robert Manfred, and some trusted medical advisers to produce the first-ever comprehensive steroid-testing policy in the minor leagues. Two years after the meeting, Selig negotiated a steroid-testing policy for the major leagues. He believed he had done something remarkable. He believed that he had been diligent. Now he was being accused of a cover-up.

  IN WASHINGTON, the commissioner sat somewhat bewildered. For him, baseball was about two things: It was about the game being played on the field, and it was about business, and not necessarily in that order. He thought about all the things he had done that baseball said could not be done. He had wanted to introduce interleague play, in which teams from the National and American leagues would play one another during the season, a baseball sacrilege. When he did in 1997, it was a big hit, and attendance skyrocketed. He had also realigned the divisions and revamped the playoff format. A wild card team now qualified for the playoffs, joining the teams that won each of the game’s now six divisions. He remembered being excoriated for this affront to the game’s integrity, but instead of cheapening the sport, the wild card brought suspense and increased interest in the postseason. After the wild card Red Sox won their first championship in eighty-six years in 2004, Selig would reflect upon the irony of those early criticisms. “I bet,” he would often say, “that the - people up in Boston are happy I instituted the wild card.”

  He thought about the great moments of the past decade, about Cal Ripken’s streak, the home run heroics of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and the poignancy of the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park, where the great Ted Williams was adoringly surrounded by the game’s contemporary stars. Under Selig, an era of ball park construction brought baseball back to its past and the crown jewel of baseball, the New York Yankees, were again on top, a drawing card for everyone.

  He also thought about the bitterness that existed, not only between the players and the owners, but the owner-against-owner struggles that once threatened to bring the sport down. He thought about September 14, 1994, when he appeared on national television and canceled the World Series, and about a pleasant luncheon in the little Wisconsin town of Brookfield three years later at which, as the keynote speaker of the Wisconsin Associated Press Sports Editors Association, he spoke about the fact that his tenure was the most fruitful ever
. “This,” he said on May 22, 1997, “has been the most eventful five years in the history of baseball.” In 2001, baseball did $3.5 billion in revenue. The sport was more popular than ever. He told everyone that during his commissionership, baseball underwent a renaissance.

  BUT FOR nearly twelve hours, Bud listened to his sport come under siege. He was being told by the congressmen and the revived newspapermen, who had finally begun to grasp the implications of steroids, that the issue rivaled the 1919 Black Sox fix, the biggest scandal in baseball’s history. He was told that steroids had gotten so far out of control that they were worse than baseball’s last drug scandal, the drug trials of the 1980s, in which a federal investigation discovered a trail of cocaine that led from street dealers directly to major league clubhouses. Access to the players had become so easy that in Pittsburgh, the Pirates’ mascot was a drug courier. When the trials ended, all seven dealers who supplied drugs to the players wound up in prison, and eleven players were fined, suspended, and forever tarnished.

  On a cold Washington day, far away from the simple joys of spring training, Bud Selig sat next to Bob DuPuy, and no matter how he positioned it, the same question came back to him, the question of how. Half the teams in baseball were playing in new stadiums. The game’s greatest franchises were all competitive at the same time. Attendance had never been higher. There hadn’t been a work stoppage in a decade. Great players were doing great things on the field. How steroids became more important than all of this was a question for which Bud Selig never had a satisfactory answer. In Room 2154 of the Rayburn Building, some members of Congress thought they did. They believed it began with him.