by Roger Angell
Mr. Ueberroth, it must be added, has put forward no over-all program of his own for the treatment and rehabilitation of drug-afflicted players, which further reinforces the suspicion that the appearance of a drug-free sport is his prime objective. I don’t mean to suggest that he is indifferent to the problem of addiction or unconcerned about the welfare of the players—only that his peculiar office is, of its nature, symbolic, paternal, and much given to enforced optimism. On Opening Day last month, he announced a more detailed plan for the compulsory testing of all major-leaguers, with accompanying assurances of full confidentiality in the process, and with no penalty for an initial positive finding for any player, but at almost the same moment it became clear that testing has been little more than a gesture or a symbol all along. Barry Rona, the executive director of the Player Relations Committee (an owners’ group), said at a hearing before baseball’s impartial arbitrator, Thomas Roberts, that for technical reasons drug tests could not be enforced upon the signers of non-guaranteed contracts (those whose terms do not apply if the player is dropped before the beginning of the regular season), which suggested that compulsory testing, if it ever did come, would apply only to the forty-three players who hold guaranteed contracts, plus the twenty-one under drug penalties imposed by the Commissioner: perhaps five percent of all major-leaguers. If this sounds baffling and anti-climactic, it is no wonder, for these alterations of stance were clearly intended to influence the outcome of the grievance procedure. The Players Association, for its part, has been relatively quiet, which suggests some confidence there about its fundamental argument that the drug-testing issue must be resolved, now as in the past, through collective bargaining. (The Association, it must be emphasized, has never flatly refused testing.) Whatever that verdict turns out to be, it seems clear that the owners and the Players Association will eventually have to agree upon an all-encompassing plan for drug education, therapy, and rehabilitation, which will be administered for the benefit of the players themselves, as individuals, rather than for any of the reasons that have inflamed and distracted us over the past year. The two sides were very close to an agreement about a week ago, but they have since receded from what looked like an ingenious solution to the bitterly divisive testing issue. If they do eventually come to terms, it will no doubt be over a plan very much like the Joint Drug Agreement, with some temporary acceptance of testing under limited conditions. (The Anti-Drug Program of the National Basketball Association, which has been in operation since September, 1983, empowers a single independent expert to determine whether there is reasonable cause to suspect that an individual player may be engaged in the use of illegal drugs, and this expert may then authorize the NBA to test the player four times during a six-week period. Accommodations, in other words, are possible, and an accommodation, as I have said, will bring the two sides in baseball together once again.**
Several of the more progressive ball clubs—including the Baltimore Orioles, the Oakland A’s, and the Milwaukee Brewers—have been working quietly on their own drug-rehabilitation programs while awaiting a resolution of the over-all testing issue. These antidrug plans have been in place for several years now, and form part of the teams’ larger Employee Assistance Programs. During the past winter, twenty-two members of the Orioles’ major-league roster agreed to a drug plan devised by an agent, Ron Shapiro, which will be administered by the Johns Hopkins Hospital and School of Medicine, and which appears to guarantee player privacy, for the club would not know which players were in treatment unless the treatment should require their absence from the field; it also calls for testing. This year, the A’s were able to obtain drug-testing agreements from a majority of their players on an individual basis after their contracts had been signed; the documents had no relation to each other, that is. Sal Bando, who administers the Employee Assistance Program for the Brewers, told me that programs dealing with cocaine abuse in baseball should be aimed specifically at the player who is at the edge of making the shift from being a social user to being one with a more habitual problem; the true addict, he said, would always come into the program automatically, out of need. He also said that among the Milwaukee players who have recourse to the Employee Assistance Program, drug abuse is a much less common concern than everyday matters like stress, depression, divorce, child abuse, and alcohol.
Trust is what it comes down to, of course. Several players have told me that there are a handful of clubs with which they would readily sign drug-testing agreements, simply because they trusted the management there. The list was a small one, however, never exceeding five or six teams, and each of the players quickly added that he deeply suspected the ability or desire of most clubs to deal with their players in a non-punitive, consistent manner when it came to drugs. Some clubs have shown a degree of compassion toward a player who has admitted to cocaine trouble for the first time, only to turn pious and punitive if he runs into further difficulties. “They’ve taken a very hard line on drugs and testing, and you’ve got to ask what they were after, when we already had an industry-wide agreement that had a real chance to work,” one American League player said. “They wanted the monkey on our backs. We have this emotional pressure from the fans, and then here comes the Commissioner telling people there’s nothing that shows up in the sport that he can’t handle. It’s not right. The atmosphere is still very hostile.”
One general manager, speaking privately to me a few weeks ago, said, “In our business, we’ve gone from hero worship down to finding any excuse to blame and bloody the players. We’re cynical, and we tend to despise them, and we invite the public to join us in that. Something must be done to turn that around soon. It’s the Steinbrenner style, and it can destroy us in the end.” That same week, an official of the Players Association made almost the same point in conversation. “All our assumptions about fairness and innocence have been changed by the drug scare,” he said. “This is an ugly place for the national pastime to find itself, especially if it’s being done in the name of morality and of role models for our children. It always comes down to the same set of assumptions: the players should be better than the rest of us—they should set an example, toe the line, and all that, because they’re lucky to be playing ball and because they’re getting all that money. It’s pathetic stuff, if you think about it, and it’s got nothing to do with the realities of drug addiction. I see the Steinbrenner world view in this. It’s angry, and it seems to infect us all in the end.”
What we fans and bystanders think about all this is what counts, of course, because baseball belongs to us in the end, rather than to its transient and impatient owners, and because drug abuse in society and the image of professional sports are matters of our own making—images of ourselves. Most of my friends who are also fans seemed extremely upset with the players whenever the matter of drugs came up in conversation in recent months. Now and then, I ventured to suggest that baseball is simply another slice of American society, after all, and that since drugs are an everyday reality now it probably shouldn’t surprise us much if they also turn up in baseball. Sometimes I went farmer and pointed out that the large salaries now paid to major-league players, combined with their youth and their sudden celebrity, and with the unceasing pressures on them to perform at a very high level of success in a restricted, highly competitive line of work, would almost seem to guarantee some use of cocaine among their numbers. But most of my friends were unconvinced. “They’ve got it made,” I kept hearing. “And what about their responsibility to the fans and to families? Kids are looking up to them, you know. They’re meant to be models.”
And here I would shut up, most of the time, for this cherished and wishful idea of athletes as heroes and exemplars seems to lie too deep in our emotions and memories to be dislodged or altered by argument. It is there, all right—I recognize it in myself, even after years of association with the young men (they are now much younger than I am) who play ball for a living—but I don’t believe it means much. Most children I have known, including m
y own, have made the switch from hero worship of some ballplayer (or movie star or rock musician) to a more restrained and knowledgeable and accepting view of that individual almost overnight, with few visible signs of shock or loss. I can no longer remember the exact moment when I stopped thinking of Babe Ruth as a demigod, having somehow learned—I was ten or twelve years old—that he was much given to drinking and gluttony (I could see that he was fat) and prostitutes, but the news somehow made him more interesting to me, rather than less, and it did not impel me to emulate his disreputable habits or to turn on him because he had somehow let me down. Last year, I mentioned this matter of lost image to the peerless Kansas City relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry (I was preparing to write an article about him), and he recalled the moment when he first read Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four,” a funny, raucously debunking account of daily life with the New York Yankees (for whom Bouton pitched from 1962 to ’68), which depicted the lordly champions as a band of hard-drinking, girl-chasing boobs and overage adolescents. The book was roundly denounced by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and the entire baseball establishment when it was published, in 1970. “I was about seventeen when I read ‘Ball Four,’ and all my friends and I lived for sports back then,” Quisenberry said. “You could say I worshipped baseball, but when I read the book it only made the game and the players that much more exciting to me. I loved that book, but it didn’t change me at all. I was a straight arrow back then, and I’m afraid I’m still a straight arrow today.”
Last November, an acquaintance of mine came up to me at a party and produced a Polaroid photograph of his little daughter—I think she is about nine years old—dressed up in her Halloween costume. “She’s Keith Hernandez,” he said, and so she was, in perfect miniature: the blue-stripes Metsie home uniform, with Hernandez’ No. 17 on the tunic; the interlocked “NY” on the cap, and the cap bill pulled low; the left-handed batting stance and the proudly upheld bat (it was painted papier-mâché); and a smudgy, painted-on Hernandez mustache. It was a captivating picture. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to her when she grows up and hears about Keith and the cocaine,” the father said. “She’s a total fan of his. She’s crazy about him. I don’t know what I’ll say.”
I didn’t know what to say, either, so I was startled when the same man came back over to me about half an hour later and said, “You know, I was thinking about what I said about Keith and Ada, and it just came to me that I’m crazy. It won’t mean a thing to her when she finds out about Keith—I know that. She’ll just grow up. I don’t know why I’ve been so worried. She’ll be fine.”
Yes. I think a great many of us have begun to see how deeply we want baseball players and other athletes to be better than we are. We may wish this now more than ever before, because other heroes—in politics, in our daily lives—seem to be in short supply. We cared most for ballplayers, of course, back when they really were heroes to us and when we wanted to be them, if we could. We know better than that now, surely, but because we still wish to keep baseball, our old game, in some special place in our affections and our imagination we want the players to remain the same, too—to be good at the game and good at life as well. Good at heart. This is an image, all right, and there is no damage in it as long as we remind ourselves from time to time that it is a dream or a wish and that we really do know better. Ballplayers are not much different from the rest of us, except for their unforgivable skills when it comes to playing ball, and there is a sudden releasing pleasure for us that accompanies the realization that we need no longer patronize them by making them into heroes, and that they are not all of a kind. Not by a long shot. If you talk to them and listen to them talk on almost any subject, you will get a range of response that is almost impossible to summarize, especially if they’re talking about something like drugs in sports. “Of course we’re divided on this issue,” one team rep said to me this spring. “It’s right that we should be, because there’s nothing easy about it. We’re just trying to make up our minds.”
In Arizona this spring, I had a chance to talk with an old friend, Steve Garvey, the San Diego first baseman, who is baseball’s acknowledged prince of straight arrows. We got around to drugs at one point, and he said, “I’ve known guys in baseball to get caught in drugs, and I could see how it happened, because this is such a tough game. I felt sorry for them, but I still think it’s up to us players to do better than that, because of what we represent and who’s watching us. That comes with the job and the good pay and the good life we’ve been given.” Garvey takes this view somewhat farther in his recently published autobiography (“Garvey”), in which he says, “Baseball plays on its specialness to cultivate its position in the hearts and minds of the American people. We call ourselves the National Pastime and put ads on television dramatizing our importance as a tradition, even suggesting that going to games is the glue that keeps generations together. If we are going to tap those emotional veins to foster our own popularity, we in the game have an obligation to be clean—cleaner than the rest of society.”
No surprise there, perhaps, but the very next morning in Phoenix, I heard something rather different from Bruce Bochte, the Oakland A’s first baseman. Bochte is an original. Three years ago, he took a sabbatical year off from baseball to live full time with his wife and two daughters in an economically and ecologically self-sufficient community on Whidbey Island, in Puget Sound. He is articulate and iconoclastic—but this sort of aside or explanation, it occurs to me, would not be necessary, or even acceptable, if he were employed in almost any other line of work. Bochte said, “Drugs—well, you know, drugs are around. We’re just in a life style and at a salary level where drugs are going to come onto the scene. Sometimes I think the problem has been exaggerated, but if you’re in a business where you’re going to play a hundred and sixty-two games, travel all across the country, stay up late, be away from home, and all that, then drugs will come with the territory. The situation should be addressed, but most of our reactions to it are exaggerated.
“So much of all this comes down to image, just the way it did during the strike, when so many people were upset about what was really just basic stuff—negotiating over bargaining rights and the rest. The money came into it later. Why couldn’t people understand that? I couldn’t figure this out for the longest time. I think it came down to image. The baseball player still represents the image of the American hero. But what’s happened in our country? What is this country really like? The journey or destiny of the American people now is just to make money. We’re brought up with that, and it’s what everybody judges his performance on and sets his values by. We have an overpreoccupation with making money in this country. Well, we ballplayers just picked up on that. The twenty-six owners in baseball are mostly millionaires. We watch them, and we have to work for them, and we’re around them and other high-powered people all the time, so we just began to emulate them. The public has begun to see something different about the American hero, about major-league ballplayers, that they don’t like at all. Now if anybody asks me about our image I say, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re about. We’re Americans, so we’re making a lot of money. We’re exploited, we see drugs coming into the scene, we have antagonistic relationships with the people we work for’—well, I don’t, not here with the A’s, but most players sure do—‘because that’s what the American scene is like.’ I don’t want us to go around making out that we’re a bunch of good guys. We’re just the American thing.
“We have to work at the causes of drug abuse, I know, but you have to look at the basics, too. You can’t convince me that people who spend all their time and energy trying to maximize the profits of their business—making deals, working their butts off—are not doing damage to themselves and their families and other people they’re involved with. It’s an extremist mode of being. It’s stressful, and if we ballplayers sometimes get into drugs—well, those people are into stress and alcohol and heart attacks. So who are they to say we’re destroying America? There are diff
erent ways of destroying America, and they’re doing it. I know this runs against the old pastoral view of baseball and what it’s about, but it’s what I believe.”
I don’t think I can entirely accept this harsh, almost despairing view of things, but I can’t say that I wholly disagree with any part of it. It doesn’t matter much, either way, because I am not offering Bruce Bochte as a role model or as an image of anything but himself. He’s just another ballplayer.
*Less than a year after this was written, Dwight Gooden failed a voluntary urine test and then missed two months of the 1987 season while he underwent treatment for cocaine abuse. He had been a sometime user of the drug, it turned out, going back to his high-school days. Some fans and writers and front-office people instantly claimed that Gooden’s difficulties could have been headed off if compulsory testing had been adopted. Mets general manager Frank Cashen pointed out that if the old Joint Drug Agreement had still been in force, the club might have approached Gooden months before his use of the drug came to light.
**My optimism was misplaced. The ruling on the grievance-procedure case (it was the Joel Youngblood dispute, previously described) came in July, and it upheld the Players Association’s contention that since compulsory drug testing had never been subject to collective bargaining, it was a violation of the 1985 Basic Agreement between the player and the owners. Since the ruling, no progress has been made by the two sides toward the reestablishment of the Joint Drug Agreement, or something of its kind, which means that baseball has no over-all drug plan whatsoever. The whole matter will form part of the prodigiously difficult negotiations that will precede the signing (or non-signing) of the next Basic Agreement before the 1989 season.
