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NOISE FROM THE DUGOUT
Bud Cracks Down
By Tom Goldstein
Back in the early nineties, when home runs were flying out
of ballparks as if there had been a change in the earth's gravitational pull,
there was a lot of talk about juiced baseballs and, when the National League
expanded to fourteen teams in 1993, about the watering down of competition
in the majors. This talk became especially heated during the 1994 season when
several players, most notably Matt Williams of the Giants, seemed poised to
make a run at Roger Maris's then thirty-three-year-old single-season home
run record. I don't recall any discussion in baseball circles about performance-enhancing
drugs or steroids, but my memory of that time period is pretty fuzzy—canceling
a World Series will do that to a baseball fan.
In fact, as we've been reminded by Jose Canseco's controversial new book,
Juiced, steroid use in baseball has been a known quantity since at
least the mid-1980s. Sportswriter Tom Boswell of the Washington Post
wrote a column in 1988 alleging that Canseco was using steroids, and that
same year crowds in Boston taunted Canseco with chants of "Steroids!
Steroids!" during the ALCS.
So it's more than just a bit disingenuous for Major League Baseball officials
to claim, in the wake of congressional hearings held in March, that they've
been very aggressive about trying to crack down on steroid use and keep the
game free of performance-enhancing drugs. Sure, baseball adopted a tougher
steroid-testing program in January, but that was only in response to the furor
caused by advance publicity for Canseco's book. Otherwise, do-nothing Commissioner
Bud Selig was more than content to leave in place a completely toothless testing
regimen that would not have penalized a player until his second infraction
for steroid use—and only mandated a year's suspension upon the fifth
positive test.
Baseball just can't bring itself to admit that under the Selig regime nothing
even close to progress will come about absent a huge public outcry. (And shame
on Donald Fehr for letting the players association ignore the issue as long
as it did.) Case in point: during the 1994–95 strike/lockout negotiations
between the owners and the players, baseball management put forth a "comprehensive
proposal on steroid testing" that was ultimately rejected by the players
union. Why didn't MLB dig in its heels and insist that some kind of testing
program be a part of the new bargaining agreement? According to MLB Executive
Vice President Rob Manfred, "No one believed that there was significant
steroid use in the game at the time," and the desire to resolve "the
economic issues facing the game and getting the game back on the field"
thus took precedence over any concerns that baseball might have a new kind
of drug problem rivaling the cocaine scandal of the 1980s.
Although Manfred acknowledged before Congress that baseball's "policy
on steroids in the 1990s was inadequate and inappropriate," in the same
breath he noted that "the federal government's policy on performance-enhancing
substances was also deeply flawed." The message? If the government won't
act, neither will baseball.
To hear Selig and his minions tell it, however, baseball did as much as it
possibly could given the restraints of the collective bargaining agreement.
Thus, here is the first paragraph of Manfred's opening statement to the House
Committee on Government Reform:
In a perfect world, those of us privileged enough to work in Major League Baseball would have been aware of the use of steroids from the minute it became an issue among our players. In a perfect world, the leadership of Major League Baseball would have had the unfettered right to deal with the problem of performance enhan-cing substances as soon as we became aware of that problem. Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world.
Poetic rhetoric aside, what did the commissioner
know and when did he know it? Admittedly, Selig wasn't the
commissioner in 1988 when Tom Boswell wrote his piece for
the Washington Post regarding Canseco, nor was he commissioner
when a dying Lyle Alzado acknowledged in 1991 his abuse of
steroids in football. But it is ridiculous, if not bordering
on perjury, for Selig to tell Congress that it was only in
"the period of time following the 1994–95 strike"
that he began to "hear more about the possibility of
the use of performance-enhancing substances by players."
After all, the owners were trying to get a steroid-testing
policy in place during the strike. Does Selig really
expect us to believe that the most myopic, backward thinking
of the major professional sports only sought such a policy
out of concern for the game—and not in response to a
problem that insiders knew had existed for some time?
In a word, yes. "It was a sound proposal that reflected
foresight on the part of the leadership of the game,"
Manfred told Congress. Just like baseball has always been
on the forefront of innovation concerning integration, collective
bargaining, free agency, the designated hitter, cocaine abuse,
fan loyalty, promotion of blacks and Latinos, interleague
play, and a whole host of other topics. In much the same way
that former commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was able
to state during the thirties and forties that Organized Baseball
had no "formal policy" prohibiting its member teams
from employing black players, Selig can now argue that he
took decisive action once the problem of performance-enhancing
substances reached his desk. After all, until an informal
testing program was introduced in 2003, baseball had no tangible
proof of steroid use, right? Only in Bud Selig's universe
could such logic pass for truth.
In the grand scheme of life, the fact that talented baseball
players with physical gifts would risk their well-being by
ingesting or injecting steroids into their bodies is but one
of many minor tragedies that occur every day in the world.
Compared to famine, tsunamis, the AIDS epidemic in Africa,
widespread hunger, or the slaughter in Iraq, the Sudan, and
the Middle East, baseball's troubles with steroids—and
what impact they may have on the sanctity of some of the sport's
most hallowed records—just really aren't that important.
But everything is relative. As fans, we care about what goes
on in baseball for the same reason that we care about anything
in life: we want that which is most dear to us to be treated
with respect. So no matter how silly or trivial baseball may
seem in the universe at large, protecting what goes on within
the game has value.
In Juiced, Jose Canseco writes that the excitement
generated by the McGwire-Sosa home run duel in 1998 came about
"[b]ecause the owners had been smart enough not to chase
steroid use out of the game, allowing guys like McGwire to
make the most of steroids and growth hormone. . . ."
And this:
The owners' attitude? As far as I could tell, Go ahead and do it.
And why not? The steroid spectacle was making money for them. It brought the game back to life. Eventually they were going to have to find a way to deal with steroids, but back then they weren't worried about it. They weren't even testing. Instead, they gave players every reason to get bigger and stronger. If the athlete did his part . . . the owners did their part and wrote out the checks—which just kept getting bigger all the time. Everybody was profiting, and they never even had to answer difficult questions. . . . There's a name for that kind of thing: Good business.
I would never suggest that Jose Canseco is a particularly
credible spokesperson for the state of the game. But he
sure appears to be speaking Bud Selig's language—whatever's
good business is good for baseball.
After all, it's Bud who talked incessantly about baseball's
"renaissance" in 1998 and used that analogy over
and over again in his quest to build a new stadium in every
city with a major league team. And it's Bud who had no concern
about remaining owner of the Milwaukee Brewers while serving
as commissioner, somehow convincing himself that the obvious
conflict of interest could be circumvented with the sleight
of hand that created a sham blind trust. So why should it
surprise us that Bud would turn a blind eye toward steroids?
Why kill the golden goose?
In my universe, such thinking is absurd. Illogical. But
I don't think Bud and I operate in the same world. As wild
as Canseco's allegations may seem, on Planet MLB there's
a certain logic to the scheme.
In the end, whatever action baseball takes to deal with
this challenge will be based only on protecting the image
of the game—and the bottom line—and not out of
any concern for posterity or the health risks that steroids
pose for players. To feel differently would require Selig
(and, for that matter, Donald Fehr) to come down from the
clouds and live in the real world.
—EFQ
TOM GOLDSTEIN is publisher of Elysian Fields Quarterly. His planet is earth.
This column first appeared in EFQ 22:2,
Spring 2005
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