The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  The arguments against compulsory testing, some of which will be presented below, are of considerable weight, and they were much discussed among the players at the end of last season and over the winter. (I should explain that my own sampling of player opinion was always a narrow one, never encompassing more than three or four players on any one club, but the players I did consult always tried to offer a fair estimate of what others in their clubhouse believed. Most of the opinions summarized here, whether from players or from front-office people and executives, and even owners, must be unattributed, since individuals on both sides requested anonymity because of the pending grievance hearing—the Big Case, as it is sometimes called.) Players on different clubs, including several player representatives, who correspond roughly to shop stewards in the Players Association, told me that about half of their teammates had no objection to compulsory urine-testing—in fact, many of them were eager to see the plan in operation, so that the whole distracting issue could be forgotten and they could get on with their work—and others agreed with the notion that testing was a valid way for baseball to begin to set its house in order. A few of the players who had tried cocaine and run into difficulties with it (Rod Scurry, now of the Yankees, for one) said that compulsory testing was the only weapon that might deter habitual offenders. Players on the other side of the question, however, were vehement in their opposition to testing; most of them saw testing as a violation of their privacy, and a good many also saw it as an unsubtle scheme by the owners to drive a wedge between the players and their union. These fears were not unfounded, one would conclude, for by the time spring training came around about five hundred of the major-league players (of the one thousand and forty on the winter rosters) had agreed to testing clauses in their new contracts. In many cases (it’s hard to say how many, since contract negotiations are kept private), an offer of more money in return for testing, and a threat of less money without testing, swung the balance. Compulsory testing seems to have carried the day, at least for the moment, and it is my belief that this conclusion to the issue has become very popular with the fans, not just because it appears to enhance, or even guarantee, the purity of the sport but also because it slightly but clearly demeans the players (who must produce a urine sample on demand, in the presence of a drug cop), and thus punishes them all for letting us down so badly, for damaging our dreams about the game.

  Penalties for the cocaine users who had testified or had been named at the Pittsburgh trials were announced by the Commissioner at the beginning of the spring-training season. After private interviews with all the players involved, he divided them into three categories, with accompanying degrees of severity in their punishment. For seven prime offenders—including Joaquin Andujar, Dave Parker, and Keith Hernandez—he decreed a year’s suspension from the game, with the accompanying provision that the suspension would be lifted in return for a fine of ten percent of their salaries, plus two hundred hours’ service in community programs to combat drug abuse, and compulsory drug testing for the remainder of their careers. Lesser penalties—sixty days’ suspension or five-percent fines, fifty hours of community service, and compulsory testing—were imposed on four other players, and testing alone on the remaining ten. There may be some cogency to the Commissioner’s expressed belief that this disposition of the very difficult matter of punishment might be of use in combatting drug abuse in and outside the game; and his determination of the cases—to judge by fans and friends I have heard from—has been popularly viewed as being fair and proper, although there remained a number of hard-line scribes and baseball executives who believe that the drug users, immunity or no immunity, should have been thrown out of the game for life, like the Chicago Black Sox. Mr. Ueberroth’s tone toward the offenders has been regretful and conciliatory, but I have heard not a few coarse expressions of satisfaction from old-line coaches and front-office men, who surely speak for some of their employers in their belief that the wealthy, insufferably privileged young players of today have at last been cut down to size by the scandal, at least for the moment. There is a sense on the management side that the Players Association has lost some of its constituency over the issue of testing, and that, fairly or unfairly, the union is viewed by the public as having no plan or program of its own, and as standing stubbornly on the wrong side of the whole business.

  Why not test? Here are some reasons presented to me by players, by officers of the Players Association, by a handful of front-office people, and by doctors and lawyers and friends and fans I talked to over the winter. The arguments are set forth in no special order.

  • Compulsory testing is a violation of personal privacy. The embarrassment of a compulsory urine test is not quite a constitutional issue, since the Fourth Amendment restrictions against unreasonable search and seizure apply only to measures imposed by the government, but testing clearly does harm to an individual’s sense of self. Racehorses have their urine tested, to be sure, but, as one All-Star American League infielder put it to me last fall, “I am not a horse.” Several of the more thoughtful front-office people I know explained to me this spring that compulsory testing is only a necessary small inconvenience, of exactly the same sort that we all accept when submitting ourselves to a metal detector at an air port—almost a convincing argument, I thought, until I began to envision lines of passengers at LaGuardia or O’Hare leading up to and into bathrooms occupied by waiting inspectors.

  • It attaches a presumption of guilt to all the players. The easy little turnabout in our minds (“If they’ve done nothing wrong, they’ve got nothing to hide.”) when we seize upon the quick fix of compulsory testing damages us in the end, for it demolishes an essential premise of a free society.

  •Urine-testing, up until now, has been an unreliable process, with a persistent error factor of from fifteen to twenty-five percent, divided equally between false negative and false positive results. Follow-up tests, in the case of positives, may correct a mistake, but they, too, require great care, and afford further possibilities of error and misdiagnosis. A more accurate means of urine-testing is available, but it is so expensive—up to five hundred dollars a test—as to make its everyday use unlikely.

  • Urine-testing makes no distinction between the occasional recreational use of a drug and habitual or addictive use.

  •Compulsory testing is a two-class system: lightly or forgivingly applied to star players, rigorously applied to everyone else. (Many black players believe that the system will be employed against them in discriminatory fashion.) Examples of this disparity are easy to find. When Dwight Gooden was presented with his new 1.32-million-dollar contract by the Mets this winter, it contained a compulsory-drug-testing clause; he demurred, and the matter was dropped without further ado. Mike Armstrong, a borderline member of the Yankee pitching staff, similarly refused, on principle, a drug-testing clause in his two-hundred-and-ninety-five-thousand-dollar contact, and eventually was forced to settle for thirty thousand dollars less in order to get it dropped.* Joel Youngblood, a veteran San Francisco outfielder who did not seem to fit into the Giants’ plans for the coming season, was refused a three-year extension on his contract this winter unless he agreed to unspecified forms of drug testing; when he and his agent protested the vagueness of the terms in the testing clause, he was told to take his wares elsewhere. No one had suggested or implied that Youngblood might be a drug user, but he was forced to carry the issue to a labor-grievance procedure before the ban was dropped. Then he made the team.

  • Compulsory drug testing in baseball has become a matter of public relations. Doctors and drug specialists I have consulted believe that, in practice, urine-testing is of limited use, and may even have a negative effect on therapy; the suggestion that it can help do away with the basic problem is illusory, and actually veils the stubborn nature of cocaine addiction and the difficulty of its cure.

  • Compulsory testing in baseball, the national pastime, will become a symbolic, integral part of a national pattern of drug testi
ng in industry and private business, in state and municipal governments, on newspapers, in schools, and so forth—part of a major alteration of our freedoms and priorities. This is a matter that has already produced very strong opinions on both sides. The recently presented findings of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime recommended widespread testing in industry and compulsory testing of all federal employees, but this part of the report was immediately challenged by several members of the commission itself. The question of testing is being debated almost everywhere now, it seems (the National Football League is embroiled in much the same sort of wrangle as baseball), and may ultimately be resolved only in the courts. It should not come as an absolute surprise that proponents of a safer, more rigidly controlled society should turn up among the conservative businessmen and entrepreneurs who buy their way into sports franchises, and this larger issue—at its heart, an intergenerational conflict—has been visible just below the surface in the bitter labor and salary negotiations waged between the owners and the players over the past two decades. Regardless of our individual inclinations in this emotional subject, we should probably remind ourselves that if the practice of compulsory drug testing is accepted by all professional sports organizations, it will only be a matter of time—a very short time, in my view—before it is required of all college athletes, and very soon thereafter, surely, we will be asking high-school boys and girls to subject themselves to the same process if they wish to try out for a team.

  If there is any hope or certainty to be found in this sorry business, it must be searched out somewhere beyond or to one side of our wishes for a restored “image” of the game, and also beyond or to one side of the assumptions by the Commissioner and the owners that the fans’ feelings about the drug issue are clear enough to constitute some kind of mandate. Confusions and contradictions crop up everywhere, and probably within most of us as well. Last September 10th, in a crucial game against the Cardinals at Shea Stadium, when Keith Hernandez came up to bat for the first time after his Pittsburgh court appearance, he received a sustained standing ovation from fifty thousand home-town fans (he had to step out of the batter’s box to compose himself), and no one who was there—as I was—and no one I have talked to since has quite been able to decipher the full meaning of that outburst of feeling. Maybe the fans were expressing forgiveness for Keith’s transgressions. Maybe they were hailing his extraordinary season’s performance, afield and at the plate, and saying that this outweighed all. Maybe they were saying “It’s OK, Keith—we understand,” or maybe they were only saying “Let’s play ball!” or “Let’s go, Mets!” Perhaps they were expressing their belief that some corner had been turned, and that drugs in baseball was over and done with at last. I just don’t know. I’ve heard in dugouts and pressrooms and clubhouses that the use of cocaine in the majors is much reduced from what it was four or five years ago, but no one knows how many recreational or habitual users there were or are in baseball—an amazing vacuum at the very center of the controversy. Physicians employed under the Joint Drug Agreement were preparing a confidential medical survey on this question, but the survey expired when the owners abandoned the agreement in October.

  The need for symbolic victory seems to outweigh every other consideration or sensible procedure. Many people would agree that Commissioner Ueberroth had to invoke some form of penalty against the cocaine users whose names had surfaced at Pittsburgh, but, as it happened, his system of suspension and forgiveness came down hardest on some players—Hernandez, for one, and Lonnie Smith, of the Royals, for another—who had recognized their own addiction and had voluntarily taken the necessary steps to cure it; they had broken the law, to be sure, and had been guilty of great and self-destructive foolishness (Hernandez had also lied about his cocaine habit before he was called to testify under oath and under immunity), but their turnabout, surely, was exactly the sort of difficult self-rehabilitation that the clubs and the leagues would hold up as an example to other afflicted players. Complexities and ironies abound, and in the end we can only respond to some of them with a dismissive shrug—the gesture of our times. Amphetamines, which probably affect game performance more than cocaine, are still in use in many clubs (there aren’t as many clubhouse jokes about greenies—which are now sometimes called “beans”—as there once were), but amphetamines, when prescribed, are legal. So is alcohol, and drinking, of course, is an ancient and celebrated companion to big-time sports—a seatmate at the games, so to speak—with infinitely more widespread and destructive consequences than drugs. It sounds naive to point out that the Commissioner and the clubs, to the best of my knowledge, have never imposed suspensions or other penalties on players or managers who have had their licenses revoked for drunk driving.