How Baseball Got Steroids Wrong, From Bo to A-Rod
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February 13, 2009
Gather ‘round, boys and girls, and I’ll tell you a tale of arrogance, avarice and deceit. It’s a disaster that could have been averted, but each time, all the parties involved thought it best just to cover it up, and hope no one noticed. The stakes kept getting higher and higher, until the whole thing finally went kerplooey – and now that the jig is up, there’s no easy way out.
No, I’m not talking about Wall Street’s addiction to get rich quick schemes, but baseball’s addiction to steroids.
Contrary to what baseball officials would like you to believe, this mess didn’t suddenly pop up out of nowhere. In fact, according to ESPN, Michigan’s own Bo Schembechler started the first steroid investigation – 21 years ago. Before the 1988 Michigan State game, Bo looked across the field at the Spartans’ massive lineman Tony Mandarich – famously called “The Incredible Bulk” on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Bo told one of his assistants: “I might not be the best recruiter in the game, but I’m not that bad. Why is Mandarich twice as big as our guys?”
Bo called an FBI agent, Greg Stejskal, who discovered the answer was steroids. He was surprised to find such drugs were already spreading in football, but rampant in baseball.The FBI warned major league baseball – which promptly yawned.
After the players’ strike cancelled the 1994 World Series, baseball owners were desperate for salvation. They found it in home runs, which they became just as addicted to as the new home run hitters were hooked on steroids.
There were plenty of clues. Light-hitting second basemen were suddenly swatting taters out of the ball park like Babe Ruth himself, and the real power hitters became monsters. Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds all shattered the previous record of 61 home runs in a season – topping out at 73.
But forget the preposterous numbers. All you had to do was look at them. These guys arms grew like Popeye’s, and their heads like the Pep Boys’. When Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s all time home run record, Aaron himself – one of the most dignified men in sports -- was so disgusted by the whole thing he declined to attend.
In 2003, over a hundred players tested positive for steroids – but the test was confidential, so baseball wasn’t shamed into doing much about it. But the growing scandal was so obvious, even Congress grew suspicious, and called for hearings. They were a disaster. Sammy Sosa acted like he’d forgotten English, and Mark McGwire acted like he’d forgotten the entire decade. Rafael Palmiero adamantly declared he’d never taken steroids – until he admitted he had – and Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens all but challenged the Congressmen to a knife fight, until his friends testified against him.
So, the league was left to pin all its hopes on Alex Rodriguez, a lean, mean hitting machine. He’s on pace to break Barry Bonds’s home run mark, and remove the stain on the most hallowed record in sports. Even better, A-Rod always claimed he was as clean as a whistle, and he looked it.
But a funny thing happened. It turns out A-Rod looked leaner than the others because he was taking two drugs, one to pump him up, and the other to hide it – something he was forced to confess this week. Maybe his teammates’ nickname for him, “A-Fraud,” should have been a hint.
In public relations classes, the steroid mess should be taught as a case study on how not to handle a crisis. If baseball did the exact opposite, at every turn, things would have gone much better. The “other shoe” has dropped so many times, you have to wonder just how many feet baseball has. But at least that explains why the league has been tripping over itself for a decade.
This whole thing might be amusing, were it not for the damage done. Ken Caminiti was one of the first players to use steroids, 15 years ago, which helped him win the National League’s MVP award in 1996. Five years ago, I was the last reporter to interview him. He told me steroids had screwed up his chemistry so badly, his body could no longer make testosterone on its own. He became deeply depressed, spending an entire year in his bedroom with the drapes drawn. But when I talked to him, he and everyone else thought he was on the mend, and better days were ahead.
A month later, Ken Caminiti killed himself.
Not so funny after all.
Copyright © 2009, Michigan Radio
Makes me wish I was still a young kid who is naive about sports and the athletes. The cheating that goes on especially in college sports is very sad.
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Likewise... I guess I pine for the cold war days a bit when we could look down through our noses at the East Germans and Soviet Union (because we thought they were the only ones masking athletes in the lab instead of the gym).
I also coach youth sports and when I tell kids to study hard and stay clean, about 75%-80% of the parents get all over my ass; I don't have much hope for the future.
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Chris,
You make an important point.
These days American sports -- and particularly baseball -- are considered the renegades among international governing bodies. (You can look up Dick Pound's comments on this.)
The sad fact is, our athletic leaders have done worse than a bad job -- mere negligence cannot explain this wave of outlaws -- they have consciously chosen to enable the athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs, especially in baseball and the Olympics.
Bill Martin deserves credit, while the president of the USOC, from taking the organization from the back of the pack to the front in terms of testing and vigilance.
Baseball, clearly, has not followed suit -- despite more than a decade of chances to wake up, and take action.
-JUB
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Hey Chris,
In reading this again, I realized I forgot to respond to your second comment. To clarify, when you tell your players to study hard and play clean, the majority of the parents OBJECT to this?
If I read that right, that is rather stunning -- and alarming.
-JUB
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Hi John:
Sorry for the delay... been out of pocket. Yes, you read that correctly. I have 30-something parents of 12-16 year old kids who have "by any means necessary" mentality.
The parents ask to get put on my team because I've been very successful in player development and setting kids up for looks from colleges (it's all about the scholarship to this crop of helicopter parents).
When they get to the team they complain about everything I do. From preaching teamwork and communication to telling the kids they need to study hard and stay clean.
It's freaking unbelievable and made me consider quitting more than once. Two things have kept me in coaching:
1. I'm NOT sucking up to you but reading "Bo's Lasting Lessons" was a great sanity check for me. The kids and I have a good time but something tells me Bo would get a kick out of my practices.
2. If I quit, who is gonna help these kids out? They're not getting the proper skills and development at home.
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Hello Chris,
My word. As someone who not only has spent a lot of time in the company of Bo, his coaches and players (not to mention Red Berenson and his troops -- a very similar dynamic), worked as a sports writer and also coached some 16 seasons of junior high and high school-aged baseball and hockey players, allow me to say that I am genuinely stunned and appalled - and that takes a lot these days.
I must also say that I appreciate again the caliber of parents I was lucky enough to work with while coaching their kids. The problems were few and far between, the support was tremendous -- and I understand that is a rare situation.
I wish I had some simple solution for your situation, but Bo didn't deal with parents that much, of course. I can tell you when I coached, I told the parents I would be happy to talk to them about anything BUT playing time and strategy. That cured 95-percent of it, at least. Though it sounds like those limits might be ignored by this crowd in any event.
I think your two points are the only thing that might keep you going!
And let me add a third, courtesy of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The reward of a job well done, is to have done it.
You are clearly doing a great, and important, job. Good luck!
-JUB
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John,
Thanks a lot! You could probably do a whole piece on the problems with youth sports and how they are a metaphor for problems with society these days.
Just so you don't think I'm exaggerating, in the Denver metro area, some leagues:
* Have police on hand to provide security for coaches and refs at games.
* Have a silent sideline rule. Parents who direct any type of communication towards the field are removed from the park.
* Isolate parents from the players during the game. Both benches are on the same side of the field and the parents are on the distant end.
--Chris
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Very true, Paul.
When I became a sports fan, as a kid in the seventies, even the goalies looked skinny. The issues were race and gender -- fights worth fighting.
I cannot believe the baseball union has gone so far out of its way to protect the players' ability to take these drugs. They will be paying a dear price as the years go on.
-JUB
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Gentlemen,
This thing which absolutely floors me is hearing A-Rod (for example), say that the PEDs he took were not on MLB's banned list at the time.
Uh, so the fact what these players are doing is a felony doesn't seem to matter... as long as MLB didn't say otherwise, they're good to go.
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Hey Paul,
Yep, when I was growing up, the stories of athletes drinking and -- can you believe it? - pot use were just coming out, thanks partly to Jim Bouton's landmark book, Ball Four.
Were we ever that young? (He says, tongue in cheek.)
-JUB
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To me the most telling part is that baseball is more popular now than it was in the 80's and 90's. I'm not sure how to reconcile that with steroids, but it suggests that the fans don't really care about steroids, no matter how many times we are told to.
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AHF,
It's true that survey after survey indicates the American public simply doesn't care about the steroids mess. They're also voting with their feet, as MLB has been enjoying record attendance for years now.
A bit of a head scratcher to me -- but there's no denying it, and there it is.
-JUB
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The sad thing about the Mandarich story is that by the late 80's steroids had already worked their way down to the HS level. Kids would start working out at gyms and someone would offer them a shortcut. At the time I used to be involved with S&C and the guys on 'roids' would just smirk when you tried to warn them off.
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Phil,
Sad, but true. No one took it at all seriously then - and I'm not how much more serious we are now.
When my father was chairman of pediatrics at Texas Tech, one of his doctors told him parents were asking him to prescribe steroids. They were both stunned, did a study, and found it widespread among Texas high school football players -- two decades ago!
Certainly, some programs and sports are doing all they can to educate (and warn) their athletes about steroids, and keep them out, but in the battle between the chemists and the authorities, the chemists are ahead by a mile -- witness HGH, which can not yet be practically tested.
The saddest part will be the wave of athletes suffering real consequences in the years to come.
-JUB
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Enjoy your blog, John. Missed this entry somehow. How desperate are professional athletes to gain an edge? Tour de France cyclists, as early as the 1920s and possibly earlier, smoked cigarettes with the belief that doing so increased lung capacity. Enough said, for now.
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Hey Kevin,
Thanks for reading -- and commenting.
Loved the fun fact on Tour de France cyclists! That has been one of my favorite events -- and most troubling, too. The ones who weren't smoking in the twenties to get an edge were getting paid off. Even Hemingway wrote about this during his time in France. Just goes to show you, there isn't much new under the sun.
That said, steroids do represent a new level of corruption, and harm. Hope you caught Rick Telander's update on Tony Mandarich last week in SI. An odd piece, at best -- sort of a mea culpa for pumping Mandarich up (pun intended) 20 years earlier -- but falls short, in my view. That's not to say the steroids mess is Sports Illustrated's fault, of course, any more than the rest of ours in the media -- and the folks at MSU lied as much about this as the UM basketball folks lied about the Fab Five -- but that cover story played a role, for sure.
-JUB
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