Cooperstown Confidential (19 page)

This isn’t too hard to understand. Reporters often miss the most obvious stories. Twenty years ago, the entire American press corps in Moscow was shocked to discover that the Soviet Union—which they had been covering for years on a daily basis—was going out of business. They weren’t bad reporters, necessarily; they simply worked with a narrative that didn’t allow for the collapse of an empire.

steroids in baseball had a narrative, too. They were a slugger’s brew. Guys who used them went from line-drive hitters to long-ball monsters. These guys paid a price, of course—everyone knew ste-roids were poison in the long run—but they were willing to pollute their bodies, sacrifice their souls, and sell out the game of baseball for glory and profit.

But Roger Clemens? He was a
pitcher
—and a good ole boy to boot. He achieved greatness by working like a Navy SEAL to develop the special body God had given him.
SI
is a sophisticated and influential publication. Regular baseball writers, BBWAA types, had no reason to question the magazine’s take on the Rocket’s longevity. On the contrary, they burnished the legend with their own stories about his maniacal fitness regimen.

And then along came the Mitchell Report, and suddenly everyone could see what had been right in front of their eyes the whole time. And the same writers who had not raised the possibility before suddenly were certain of guilt and became outraged. Of
course
Clemens had been using steroids—just look at him! He was bigger than Bonds. Nastier, too—that time he threw a bat at Mike Piazza? ’Roid rage. He was a cheater. He lied to the children of America. Hell, forget the children, he lied to
us
!

A few days after the Mitchell Report, the
Rocky Mountain News
asked nineteen BBWAA members how they would vote on Clemens when the time came. Barely half said they would cast a ballot for the Rocket—far fewer than the 75 percent he’d need to get into Cooperstown. Dan Graziano of the Newark
Star-Ledger
said, “My personal feeling on this is that the Hall of Fame is a reward, and I don’t intend to reward people who cheated in an effort to get there. I did not vote for Mark McGwire last year and have no plans to vote for him in the future. Similarly, I have no plans to vote for Barry Bonds.” Mark Gonzales of the
Chicago Tribune
said, “I’m leaning strongly on Rule 5 of the Hall of Fame ballot that states a player’s candidacy shall be based upon a list that includes ‘integrity, sportsmanship and character’ as well as contributions.” Pat Reusse of the
Minneapolis Star Tribune
made the Cooperstown point in reverse. “I’ve been voting for McGwire, so I suppose I’ll vote for Clemens,” he said. “Baseball wouldn’t let us vote for Rose. If they don’t want the ste roid boys in the Hall, do the same.”

“Baseball” meant the Commissioner’s Office. The Hall of Fame is theoretically independent, but it has usually bowed to the decisions of MLB. It honored Judge Landis’s ban on Joe Jackson with a gentleman’s handshake. But it’s very doubtful that MLB is going to ban the “steroid boys.” The owners can collude to keep certain players off the field or deny them post-baseball jobs, but banning players for life is not so simple. Great stars have great personal fortunes, good lawyers, and a solid union. They won’t be easily deprived of their rights—including their right be enshrined in Cooperstown and participate in the haul of fame.

That means that it will be up to the Hall itself to decide how to handle the performance-enhancers. There are three basic choices.

Option 1: keep Rule 5 and seriously enforce it. This means excluding the players who juiced, or deciding that juicing, even with banned or illegal substances, is not a form of cheating that violates Cooperstown’s standard of good sportsmanship. The upside of this decision is that it is unambiguous. The downside is that it would exclude the modern Walter Johnson (Clemens), the modern Babe Ruth (Bonds), and potentially most of the great players of the current era.

Option 2: keep Rule 5 but enforce it selectively (which will look like bias) or not at all. The upside is that this is what Cooperstown has always done. The downside is that—in the era of YouTube, citizen blog-gers, and ESPN—you can’t count on hiding the truth from the public.

Then there is Option 3: drop Rule 5 and the pretense that baseball greatness is inextricably linked with good character. Make the price of admission to the Hall of Fame simple professional excellence, judged by the standards of the day.

Number 3 is the right choice. For one thing, honesty is always the best policy, especially when dishonesty is impossible to pull off. If the Hall of Fame wants to be regarded reverentially, it will first have to be taken seriously. That will require facing some uncomfortable truths about the nature of baseball, the nature of human beings, and the nature of nature.

There are baseball purists who believe that the use of steroids has altered the very essence of the game. One of the most eloquent is George F. Will, whose baseball book,
Men at Work,
is a great favorite in Cooperstown. In an influential column written in 2004, Will argued the case against PEDs on moral and historical grounds:

In recent decades, athletes have learned that, using nutrition, strength
training and other means, it is possible to enhance per formance. But not
all that is possible should be permissible. Some enhancements devalue
per formance while improving it, because they unfairly alter the conditions
of competition. Lifting weights and eating your spinach enhance
the body’s normal functioning. But radical and impermissible chemical
intrusions into the body can jeopardize the health of the body and mind,
while causing both to behave abnormally.

. . . Professional athletes stand at an apex of achievement because they
have paid a price in disciplined exertion
—
a manifestation of good character.
They should try to perform unusually well. But not unnaturally well.
Drugs that make sport exotic drain it of its exemplary power by making it
a display of chemistry rather than character
—
actually, a display of chemistry
and bad character.

If a baseball fan from the last de cade of the 19th century were placed
in a ballpark in the first decade of the 21st, that fan would feel in a familiar
setting. One reason baseball has such a durable hold on the country
is that, as historian Bruce Catton said, it is the greatest topic of
conversation America has produced. And one reason is the absence of
abrupt discontinuities in the evolution of this game with its ever-richer
statistical sediment. This makes possible intergenerational comparisons
of players’ achievements.

Until now, only one radical demarcation has disrupted the game’s
continuity
—
the divide, around 1920, between the dead ball and lively
ball eras. (A short-lived tampering with the ball produced the lurid offensive
numbers of 1930
—
nine teams batted over .300; the eight-team National
League batted .304.) Now baseball’s third era is ending
—
the era of
disgracefully lively players.

I have great respect for George Will, but I think he’s wrong on just about every count of his indictment of steroids in baseball, starting with the notion that current medical perfor mance enhancement pollutes the “continuity” of the game that makes it possible to use statistics to compare players separated by generations.

Baseball stats go back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Stats can tell us, for example, that in 1877, Lipman Pike hit .298. In 2008, Derek Jeter hit .300. Does that mean that Pike and Jeter were similar hitters? In 1877, Pike led the National League in home runs—with 4. In 2008, Ryan Howard led the NL with 48. There are sports, like track or swimming, where we can objectively mea sure the abilities of athletes over time. But batting averages or ERAs are only comparative figures; they tell you how players did against one another at a certain time, under similar rules and conditions.

The plaques on the walls at Cooperstown put players from the Pike era on the walls next to Goose Gossage and Cal Ripken. These old-timers were great at what they did, but it wasn’t much like modern baseball. Until 1883, pitchers threw underhand. Catchers had no mitts. There was only one umpire. Sometimes a walk consisted of six balls. “You reach a point at which the players of different eras can no longer interact,” says Bill James. “A team from the 1920s still has some chance to win playing 2007 baseball; a team from 2007 still would have some chance to win if they went to 1926 and had to play under the conditions of the game in 1926 . . . A team from 1897, in my view, might
never
win a game under modern rules and modern conditions, whereas a team from 2008 might hardly ever win if forced to play under the conditions of 1897.”

An 1890s fan, plopped down at, say, Yankee Stadium, would feel like a Victorian ballroom dancer at a Brooklyn hip-hop club. What are the stadium lights for? How did the field get so smooth? Why are they playing the “Star Spangled Banner” (which didn’t even become the national anthem until 1931)? What are the players doing with huge gloves on their hands, helmets on their heads, and body armor? How did the outfield fences get so distant? Why are there four umpires on the field? What is a “designated hitter”? And why on earth are there women in the stands, blacks on the diamond, and cars in the parking lot?
*

Since the 1890s, science and technology have changed the game, too. There was no cortisone to prolong Smoky Joe Wood’s career, but John Smoltz wrung another fifty wins out of his arm after undergoing Tommy John surgery. Players these days have videotapes to study, and managers use computers instead of (or along with) gut feelings. Stadium lights improve twilight visibility. Game balls are much cleaner and less scuffed than they once were. Players of the dead-ball era didn’t wear glasses, because they thought it made them look like nerds; nowadays they get LASIK surgery.
*

Some experts attribute the home run explosion of the mid-nineties not to steroids but to the new “impact bats” major-leaguers are using.
†
Strike zones shrink and grow over time, as MLB tinkers with the balance between offense and defense. Even the field itself is a historic variable. “Jim Bunning keeps saying that he’s opposed to ste-roids because he wants a ‘level playing field,’ ” says Marvin Miller. “When Bunning was playing, they raised the height of the mound.”

Pitchers are no longer allowed to hit batters with impunity—players are too valuable to be used for target practice. Today’s American players are about an inch and a half taller than in Ruth’s day. They also have a completely different attitude toward conditioning. “When I was playing [back in the 1960s], you came to spring training with a ten-pound winter beer belly on,” said Jim Leyland when he was managing the Pirates. “Now players do Nautilus all winter, they play racquetball, they swim, they exercise, and they come to spring training looking like Tarzan.” (One of the players he managed in Pittsburgh was an outfielder named Barry Bonds.)

One thing an 1890s fan
would
have recognized about today’s game is the willingness of players to do whatever they can get away with. All those umpires are on the field now because John J. McGraw, in his playing days, tripped and pushed so many baserunners around third base that additional authority was needed to keep the peace. Decades later, Gaylord Perry threw his way into the Hall of Fame using illegal spitters. As Buck O’Neil once said, “The only reason we didn’t use steroids when I was playing is because we didn’t have them.”

Anabolic steroids were invented in the 1930s. By the fifties, athletes used them openly to train for strength sports like weight-lifting and wrestling. Most baseball trainers believed that big muscles hurt per for mance, so it is possible that steroids weren’t widely used in the fifties (although it would have been interesting to ask Ted Kluszewski how he got those biceps).

Gary Wadler, a professor at New York University’s School of Medicine, is one of America’s leading crusaders against PEDs in sports. He is also a realist. He knows chemical enhancement didn’t start with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. “I don’t know how long steroids have been in baseball,” he told me, “but clearly they have been around at least since the seventies.”

In 1959, pitcher Jim Brosnan kept a diary of his year with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds.
The Long Season
was the first prolonged, honest account of life inside major-league clubhouses. Jimmy Cannon, a pioneer of realistic sports writing, called it “the greatest baseball book ever written.”

The Long Season
is filled with drugs. “Your pills are in that little plastic bottle on the shelf,” Doc Bauman, the Cards trainer, tells Brosnan in spring training. Brosnan recalls how Bauman “uncapped a bottle of Decadron and counted out a three-days’ supply to Alex Grammas.”
*

Brosnan also mentions a friendly rival who pitched on Equanil, a tranquilizer, to keep his throwing under control. Given a rare start, he asks the trainer for some “nine-inning pills.”

In August, on the way to a West Coast road trip, Brosnan sug-gested to a teammate, Ellis “Cot” Deal, that he ask the trainer for some Dexamyl, “to get you through the week.” Dexamyl is an upper that came into commercial use in the mid-1930s and was given to American troops during World War II to increase stamina and enhance battlefield per formance. Baseball players who returned from the service knew all about it. Brosnan’s account of major-league drug use is completely casual (though he does make a big deal out of drinking martinis); for players, it was simply a fact of the game.