Cooperstown Confidential (21 page)

• • •

On January 20, 2004, President George W. Bush delivered his first State of the Union Address since the Iraq invasion. It was a busy time. Bush reported on the battlefronts in Iraq and Af ghanistan, warned North Korea against developing nuclear weapons, and once again declared his intention to fight “the manmade evil of terrorism.” But he also found room in the speech to address the scourge of steroids in baseball.

“To help children make right choices, they need good examples,” the president said. “Athletics play such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some in professional sports are not setting much of an example. The use of performance-enhancing drugs like steroids in baseball, football, and other sports is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message—that there are shortcuts to accomplishment, and that performance is more important than character. So tonight I call on team owners, union representatives, coaches, and players to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of steroids now.”

The president’s challenge was met with loud bipartisan applause. Only a few snide po litical commentators mentioned that when Bush had been an owner (and the managing general partner) of the Texas Rangers, he brought Jose Canseco, already a famous ste roid user, to the team. (The Bush-era Rangers had five players who were subsequently mentioned in the Mitchell Report: Canseco, Juan Gonzalez, Rafael Palmeiro, Kevin Brown, and Mike Stanton.

Did George W. Bush know what was going on in his clubhouse? Canseco is certain that he did. It is a matter of speculation; Bush is not known as an especially acute observer of things he would prefer to ignore. Besides, during the 2000 presidential campaign, he brushed off questions about drugs by saying “When I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.” Bush’s players were pretty young themselves, and had a lot more on the line.

• • •

Steroids are baseball’s gift to politicians. Representative Tom Davis, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, denounced steroids as a “crisis in national health,” convened a nationally televised hearing, and dragged players before the committee to build the audience. These hearings led to the Mitchell Report, and the Mitchell Report led to more hearings. The congressmen got the players’ autographs in private meetings off-camera, and then savaged them on tele vision as dangerously unhealthy role models.

Soon, health officials and concerned headline writers launched a campaign, full of horror stories about athletes gone mad with ’roid rage or brought low by terrible side effects.

Anecdotal reports hardened into conventional wisdom. But there was something slightly elusive about the problem steroids actually caused. In 2007, an ESPN reporter asked Gary Wadler about the specific health hazards of anabolic steroids.

“There can be a whole panoply of side effects, even with prescribed doses. Some are visible to the naked eye and some are internal. Some are physical, others are psychological,” said Wadler. “With unsupervised ste roid use, wanton ‘megadosing’ or stacking (using a combination of steroids), the effects can be irreversible or undetected until it’s too late.” The ESPN.com report continues, “Also, if anabolic steroids are injected, transmitting or contracting HIV or Hepatitis B through shared needle use is a very real concern.”

Wadler added that, “unlike almost all other drugs, all steroid-based hormones have one unique characteristic—their dangers may not be manifest for months, years, even de cades. Therefore, long after you gave them up you may develop side effects.”

Well, yes. You get sick from shooting steroids with a dirty needle. You shouldn’t take medication without supervision. Overdoses are a mistake. Medicine you take today could prove to be deleterious decades from now. (So might food. I belong to a generation raised on the belief that lots of eggs and butter are good for you.)

As for effects that can actually be observed, Wadler mentioned reduced sperm count, impotence, development of breasts, shrinking of the testicles, and difficulty or pain while urinating. These are undoubtedly unpleasant. Still, it is not hard to imagine a pro baseball player deciding that temporarily shrunken testes and low sperm counts are a price worth paying for a big-league life and big-league money. I personally wouldn’t make that choice for a million dollars. But for ten?

In April 2008, the government escalated the war on steroids. In an interview in
US News and World Report
, Barry Hoffer, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Intramural Division, was asked if steroids are really bad physically.

“Yes, they are,” he replied. “In fact, many professional athletes who have taken steroids to enhance their per formance have died from heart failure, liver failure and cancers like lymphomas. Teenagers who abuse anabolic steroids might never grow as tall as they would have, and may experience emotional problems and suicidal thoughts.”

I called the National Institute on Drug Abuse and asked for details. Spokeswoman Jan Lipkin responded by saying that the NIDA does not have a list of athletes killed by steroids and neither does Dr. Hoffer. She suggested contacting Professor Linn Goldberg at the University of Oregon—like Gary Wadler, an internationally famed expert on sports and steroids.

Goldberg sent me a list of deceased weightlifters and wrestlers who took anabolic steroids, but he cautioned that there were too many variables to determine the cause of death. No baseball players were on the list. “What scientific tests have been conducted that demonstrate that steroids, used in the way baseball players are alleged to use them, cause death or permanent injury?” I asked.

Dr. Goldberg’s reply surprised me. “Who knows how baseball players use steroids? I don’t. No one has done a study on the way baseball players use steroids. It is all by allegation, and there is really only one person”—Jose Canseco—“who described the way he took steroids. You can’t do ‘scientific tests’ on a population one is not studying, and not subjecting themselves to tests. You have to have willing subjects to perform tests and subjects that describe use patterns (dose/duration/frequency); family history; medical and surgical history; drug and alcohol use history; medication history. Without that, you can’t draw much of a conclusion.”

Let’s recap the conclusions you can draw.

We know that there is no scientific evidence that anabolic ste-roids, as they are currently used, are physically dangerous to adult male athletes, including baseball players.

We know that steroids can help a player get bigger and stronger and quicker by increasing his workout capacity, and they can probably help injured players heal faster. But we do not know if steroids have a quantifiable influence on baseball performance skills or, if they do, what the effect is. If Bonds faces Clemens, who has the advantage? If a steroid-using shortstop gets to a ball quicker on a grounder that’s hit by a steroid-using batter, who is helped more by the drug? Where is the unfair advantage if everyone is using the same enhancements? How, for that matter, are comparative statistics affected?

We know that there have been so many changes in baseball since the days of Lipman Pike or even Ty Cobb that one-to-one statistical comparisons with today’s players are sheer fantasy (although they gain some meaning when we know about, and can weigh, all the variables). We know that greatness is
measurable
(if at all) only by contrast to other players within a similar era.

We also know that baseball players have always used whatever they could find—cork, cocaine, saliva, emery boards, uppers, downers, booze, steroids—to gain a competitive advantage, real or imagined. We know that today’s players are no different.

We know that biochemistry is a fact of life, and that there is no likely way that sophisticated drug use can be detected; we also know that today’s fans live in the same culture as players. Do a blood test in the bleachers (or the press box) and you will find everything from Ritalin and Prozac to Vitamin B and Viagra.

And we know that modern media technology makes it impossible to keep secret the things we now know (and suspect) about performance-enhancing drugs and baseball.

Some people fear that baseball players who use steroids will become role models for kids, and this isn’t easily dismissed. There is some evidence that anabolic steroids can be harmful to adolescent males (and to women of any age). And some kids do idolize baseball players. A few even hope to get to the majors themselves.

Kids aren’t dumb. They know, for example, that ballplayers drink alcohol (and if they don’t know it, they can read about major-league DUI’s on the Internet). Does that inspire them to drink? Maybe it does. But the alternative is to reinstate Prohibition for adult baseball players.

Honesty, not fake purity, is what baseball players should be displaying to young fans. Right now, every player is a suspected cheater. Legalize the use of PEDs, and that cloud goes away. The players should be open about what they are doing to improve their performance—list the substances on baseball cards along with the training regime and diet. Fans will then know what they are watching. If MLB makes sure that steroids are prescribed and administered safely, by team doctors, the message will be: chemistry can be helpful, but only when it is used carefully, responsibly, and legally. There needs to be realistic steroid education in schools, especially for athletes. Telling a kid who dreams of getting rich playing baseball to “just say no” to anabolic steroids is about as productive and realistic as keeping birth control out of the hands of horny teenagers.

For many of the strongest opponents of steroids in baseball, practical issues are beside the point. “A society’s recreation is charged with moral significance,” George F. Will writes. “Sport—and a society that takes it seriously—would be debased if it did not strictly forbid things that blur the distinction between the triumph of character and the triumph of chemistry.”

Will assumes that baseball players once existed in a pure state, and that chemicals disturb the game’s natural order. This is a profoundly backward-looking view, akin to the critics of the Wright Brothers who said that if God had wanted man to fly, he would have given us wings.

I doubt very much that there was ever an ancient time when baseball players conformed to some Platonic ideal of virtue. Plato himself was not only a phi losopher but a wrestler. The name “Plato” (which means “broad”) was actually bestowed on him by his wrestling coach. Some historians say he competed at the Is-mathian Games. If so, I bet he took the same potions the other guys were using.

George Will’s belief in a baseball Atlantis, lost in the mists of time, is moralistic. He is a Luddite. (I say this with empathy; I myself believe that rock ’n’ roll died the day the Beatles stepped off the plane in New York in 1963.) “It still is unclear if there will be judicially imposed punishment in [the case of Barry Bonds],” he wrote in 2006. “But condign punishment for a man as proud as Bonds would be administered by the court of public opinion and by exclusion from the Hall of Fame.”

George Will is a great favorite at the Hall of Fame, and what he suggests—withholding immortality from ste roid users—will tempt the Cooperstown establishment. From its first embrace of the Abner Doubleday myth to the snubbing of Marvin Miller, the Hall’s instinct has been reactionary. Cooperstown generally lags a generation or so behind the norms of American society. It experiences social changes as a series of rude shocks. It integrated fifteen years after the rest of baseball. (I know, Jackie Robinson didn’t become eligible until 1962. But the Hall knows how to make exceptions when it wants to.) Almost a third of the players in the majors are Latinos, but at the end of 2008 there was still no Hispanic exhibit.

When the Hall
does
wake up, it tends to lurch wildly in the direction of what it sees as progress. The mass induction of Negro-leagues players, most of whom were unknown and unknowable (while leaving Buck O’Neil out), is an example. So was the bizarre partnership with Hugo Chavez on “¡Béisbol Baseball!” It’s not that the Hall doesn’t mean well; it simply works on a different calendar than the rest of the world. In the summer of 2008, as Barack Obama was on the verge of becoming America’s first black president, Cooperstown was still fussing around trying to get the wording of Jackie Robinson’s plaque right.

Barack Obama is America’s first basketball president, a high-school hoopster who still plays recreation-league ball. On the day after the election, he relaxed on his home court in a Chicago gym. He replaces George W. Bush, retired Little League catcher and the only American chief executive whose signature—on the owner’s line of Nolan Ryan’s Texas Ranger contract—rests in the Hall of Fame.

On the eve of the presidential election, Obama and John McCain were interviewed on
Monday Night Football
. Host Chris Berman asked them what single thing they would change in sports. Obama talked about fixing the college bowl system. McCain gave a ser-monette about steroids. “I’d take significant action to prevent the spread and use of performance-enhancing substances,” he said. “I think it’s a game we’re going to be in for a long time. What I mean by that is there is somebody in a laboratory right now trying to develop some type of substance that can’t be detected and we’ve got to stay ahead of it. It’s not good for the athletes. It’s not good for the sports. It’s very bad for those who don’t do it, and I think it can attack the very integrity of all sports.”

The interview made McCain sound old (which he is), pompous (which he usually is not), and as out-of-touch as a candidate from the 1950s raving about reefer madness. The election of Obama demonstrated that a majority of Americans are now comfortable with a black man in the White House—and my guess is they will be equally okay with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens in Cooperstown. Young people these days are used to sports realism and applied biochemistry and are unlikely to see steroids as a Satanic device. On the other hand, if the Hall of Fame decides to exclude the greatest players in baseball because a bunch of baseball writers—in conformity to Clark family values—think they lack character, Coopers-town will become about as relevant and as interesting as Colonial Williamsburg.