by Bud Selig
At the ballpark Robin rode his motorcycle in. There was a huge crowd there. It was such an emotional day. It was everything you could ever expect, and even in losing you could see how much this group and this team meant to the city. Much as I had said during the years after the Braves left, Milwaukee was indeed a baseball town.
10
AS ELECTRIC AS the season had been, there were things going on behind the scenes that even I, as involved as I was with the players, had no idea about. Perhaps the biggest one was an issue that demonstrated how quickly the culture around the game was evolving beyond anything we’d seen before, one that all of baseball would end up confronting numerous times in the months and years ahead: cocaine.
For my part, I learned of the trouble from a single phone call. Sometimes it can only take one phone call to lose your equilibrium. I had an acquaintance who worked for the FBI. I think he was a friend of Bob Uecker’s. He was looking out for me when he called one day and said I needed to come meet him somewhere we could talk. I knew immediately this was serious, and I went right there to meet him.
He told me Paul Molitor was involved with a big cocaine dealer, Tony Peters. I was surprised and disappointed, but I don’t know if I was stunned. Cocaine had become a big problem in America, especially with young people who had the means. Paul was single and popular in Milwaukee, very popular. I knew he liked the nightlife. Paul was one of my favorite players then, and through it all remains a personal favorite.
In terms of his fame, his situation was not unique. Around the country, players were going from being blue-collar heroes to true celebrities, subject to all the adoration and temptations that come with superstar status. The more money the players made, the more apparent this became. With players signing bigger contracts out of free agency, their private lives became flashier. The celebrity culture around the game was changing, and the off-field dangers escalated right along with it. Like so many other young people around America, especially those with money and access to glitzy clubs and the wrong kind of people, cocaine was creeping into baseball. And now, apparently, it was at the doorstep of my team and one of the Brewers’ biggest stars.
This was bad, very bad. The FBI guy let me ride with them that night and I was nearby when they moved in on Peters. Paul was there, as the FBI thought he would be. He wasn’t arrested and would never have to testify publicly in the case that landed Peters a sentence of twenty-two years.
But can you imagine what a shock it was for him to look up and see me? He and I were very close.
I still shake my head about what might have happened to Paul if I hadn’t been there that night. I was a part of a group that bought a team never dreaming everything would change like this, this fast. Seeing how rapidly the culture around the players was evolving, you began to worry. But I would have been downright petrified if I had known what was starting to happen with players.
As I’d learn over the years, this was not Paul’s first time getting into trouble. In his 1993 book The Game Behind the Game, Paul’s agent Ron Simon wrote about the police being called to his house on Christmas Day, 1980.
“They had to break in to see if Paul Molitor was inside, dead or alive,” Simon wrote. “Molitor was in my house, sleeping off a wild night of cocaine abuse.”
Needless to say, Simon didn’t bring up Paul’s cocaine problems when we talked about contracts or the future.
When Paul was inducted into the Hall of Fame on a gorgeous July day in 2004, he stood at the podium, in that beautiful field in Cooperstown, and told the world he “had problems with drugs early in my career.”
He once admitted to USA Today that he’d had bad judgment in that era. “I tried cocaine but that was it,” he told the newspaper. “It was a long time ago and I regret it, but those things come back to haunt you. Part of it was peer pressure. I was single and in Milwaukee and I hung around with some wrong people. I was able to get out before I got into serious trouble.”
I was proud of the way that Paul addressed his problems. He was caught up in what you could probably describe as an epidemic in professional sports. Here was a great young player with everything to live for and to achieve in baseball. Thank God he worked around it. I think he would tell you that I helped him, a lot.
We had a problem here, and so did many other teams. The FBI case against Peters disclosed the scope of the problem on those Brewers teams of the early eighties. We had an outfielder here in 1977–80 named Dick Davis. He later played for the Phillies, Pirates, and Blue Jays, then extended his career playing in Japan. Testimony in Peters’s case showed that Davis was purchasing cocaine and marijuana from Peters and passing it on to teammates and other players around the league.
But this was hardly a Milwaukee story. As we’d be reminded throughout the 1980s, cocaine use impacted many teams in baseball, as well as other sports. A three-month investigation by the New York Times in 1985 showed that players on almost every team had been named in connection with cocaine use. Many of those named were kept out of the public record, but baseball found itself with ugly, horrifying drug trials in Kansas City and Pittsburgh. Vida Blue, Willie Wilson, Willie Aikens, and Jerry Martin were handed prison sentences after admitting to cocaine use in Kansas City in 1983. As many as twenty-one players, including future Hall of Famer Tim Raines, testified against Phillies clubhouse caterer Curtis Strong in 1985. They’d all been granted immunity for their testimony, which was common in those cases.
Baseball’s embarrassment could have been much worse, but the government was going after the dealers, not the ballplayers. I felt our sport was lucky, and so were the players like Paul who realized they needed to clean up their off-the-field habits. Unfortunately, the leniency shown here by law enforcement allowed the league, and perhaps more problematically the players union, to move on from this black eye without implementing the changes necessary to make sure issues with drugs—be they recreational or performance enhancing—didn’t arise again.
The owners did seek help from the union in stemming a serious problem, but that was one area where Marvin Miller wasn’t any help to anyone. Peter Ueberroth, who had replaced Bowie Kuhn as commissioner, was used to having unilateral powers in his business dealings. He decided he was going to do something about our cocaine problems, instituting mandatory testing of players.
He dropped this bomb on the union shortly before the start of the 1986 season, saying that every player would be subject to testing four times a year.
“Someone somewhere has to say, ‘Enough is enough,’ to drugs,” Ueberroth said. “And I’ve done that.”
There was one problem, however, as I would be reminded repeatedly in future years. Drug testing couldn’t be implemented without consent of the Players Association. It was subject to collective bargaining, and Donald Fehr, who had been named executive director of the union after Marvin Miller retired, was quick to point that out.
Marvin handpicked Fehr, his assistant since 1977, as his successor, after Ken Moffett served for less than a year, and even though Marvin was retired he remained highly influential in the union. Marvin had us on the run for most of the previous two decades with his in-your-face style, but in the aftermath of the ’81 strike he’d celebrated his biggest victories. Salaries had soared since the fifty-day strike. The average salary had been $185,651 in ’81, and by 1984 it was already $329,408. That, to Marvin, was an example of winning a strike, and I don’t think owners would have disagreed. Having Fehr inherit the mantle from Marvin ensured that the union would be run for most of the next two decades the way Marvin had run it, with owners and players constantly fighting about one issue after another.
The biggest issue was drug testing.
Even after baseball’s obvious problem with illegal drugs, most notably cocaine, the union regarded a drug testing policy as an invasion of privacy, which did nothing to solve the problem that guys were abusing their bodies and putting their health in danger. If teams didn’t know who had the problems, if they were kept deliberately in th
e dark by the players union, then there was no way to help them deal with the possible fallout from addiction. Immediately after Ueberroth announced his plan to test for cocaine, Fehr filed a grievance, and in short order baseball’s arbitrator, Tom Roberts, ruled for the union. So that was that.
After that initial ruling, players wouldn’t agree to any form of testing for sixteen more years. Whether it was PEDs or so-called recreational drugs, the union’s ironclad opposition to testing left us with no consistent, defined way to reel in players with serious problems, like Steve Howe and Darryl Strawberry.
You remember Howe, right?
He’d been Rookie of the Year with the Dodgers in 1980 but couldn’t beat his demons. He wound up being suspended seven different times, by three different commissioners, including a lifetime ban from Fay Vincent on his seventh strike.
That came after an off-season arrest in Montana, where he was in the process of buying cocaine. Howe would ultimately plead guilty, and in June 1992, Vincent suspended him for life. But Howe still had the power of the union behind him.
My friend Dick Moss was his agent and argued the union’s case. The hearing turned into an ordeal unto itself—Fay angered George Steinbrenner, Gene Michael, and Buck Showalter by overreacting to testimony they’d given that seemed to support Howe, who was then a Yankee—and arbitrator George Nicolau would eventually overturn the suspension.
Howe would play for the Yankees from 1993 through June ’96, pitching until he was thirty-eight. He died at age forty-eight when he ran his pickup truck off the road in the California desert in 2006, and an autopsy found methamphetamine in his bloodstream.
No one won in protecting Steve Howe or other players from the cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Every time the owners tried to get testing, we were turned down flat. The union leaders were dug in, there’s no question about that. For some reason they were adamant that drug testing was harmful to the players—even as the league’s drug problem exploded in newspaper headlines. It was a horrible health problem, an integrity problem, a problem in so many ways, and they just didn’t care.
In so many ways, the cocaine abuse during the 1980s foreshadowed the later issues we’d confront around performance-enhancing drugs. Both the arbitrator’s ruling and the union’s refusal to budge on the issue laid the groundwork that allowed for the growth of steroid use a decade later.
As dangerous as it was, baseball’s problem with drugs was only beginning. This initial stonewalling of drug testing meant there was no accountability for players using drugs of any kind, leaving us no way to combat the burgeoning science behind anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and other performance-enhancing drugs that would become all too apparent in the years ahead. No one seemed to truly understand the stakes here—whether it was the risks to the league, to the union, or to the players themselves.
11
CHANGE COMES HARD to any institution as entrenched as baseball. And as the 1980s progressed, it became clear that the league was facing serious issues—both economic and systemic. Something had to give, and it started at the top, with then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
While Major League Baseball certainly didn’t do itself any favors back then, it was hard not to look at the NFL with quite a bit of envy. Even though the football league wasn’t anywhere near the juggernaut that it’s become today, it still seemed like it was the model for all professional sports leagues to follow. This was true largely because of the work of one man: Pete Rozelle
Rozelle epitomized what a commissioner should be, what a commissioner can do for his sport. As a baseball fan and then an owner, I was always envious of the magic he was making for the NFL. Pro football was a shaky proposition when he took over as National Football League commissioner, and he turned it into the slickest, most popular operation in sports. He’d merged the leagues and instituted revenue sharing in 1961, which was a remarkable display of foresight. I know the league was poor, but still, the fact that someone had the vision to understand that the teams were going to need revenue sharing is very remarkable.
By comparison, baseball was stuck in neutral and Rozelle took advantage of that. No question about it. He was extraordinary. He knew how to market his sport. He understood television and its relationship to sports. He was way ahead of us. I’ll say that very bluntly. When you look back at his career, he was brilliant. His vision was really remarkable.
There was just no will to do things differently in baseball, which was most unfortunate. Perfect example: Here’s something nobody knows. It was about this time that Major League Baseball missed a great opportunity.
We had a group that explored our television rights—Kuhn, Eddie Einhorn, and Bill Giles. We called it KEG.
ESPN was struggling financially in its early years. We had discussions about buying it from Getty Oil. Einhorn and Giles were very interested. Eddie actually thought it would be the best thing ever, and he was right, but Bowie didn’t want any part of it.
I was on the Executive Council when it came up. Bowie just said, we’re not going to buy it, and that was that. The concern at that time and in ensuing years was about what critics called the oversaturation of games on television. The Cubs were on WGN, the Braves on WTBS, so-called superstations that went into every market, and the other teams weren’t happy about it.
It’s hard to say what would have happened if we had bought ESPN. But I think history says we would have had tremendous success. We would have been able to market our game even better than the NFL marketed its game, and maybe later on we would have sold it for a few billion dollars. But instead of us, ABC bought the network from Getty Oil in 1984.
Missed decisions like these allowed football to take off at our expense. Rozelle was a PR guy. He understood. There was nobody like that in sports before him. He was a true revolutionary.
Baseball owners were generally like Walter O’Malley. They wanted what was good for them and their teams. Football owners were different, at least back when the NFL was growing into the powerhouse it is today. You look at Wellington Mara, Art Rooney, George Halas, Clint Murchison, lots of others. Rozelle worked with their willingness to think about the league, not just their teams, and that was why they were able to get so much done. Later on, like everything else, it began to pull apart. But the NFL was amazing in the early years.
Bowie was our commissioner for fifteen seasons, and he didn’t run the game as much as preside over it in an era when Marvin Miller and the union were making giant strides. Bowie, of course, was in office when free agency and salary arbitration were instituted. He knew the effect those changes had on player salaries. He could see we were headed for difficult times but didn’t address the reality. Bowie was involved, but under him we didn’t do anything to help our economic outlook.
This didn’t exactly endear him to the owners. I always liked Bowie personally—he loved baseball—but he didn’t build the relationships he needed to effectively lead the owners. Some owners always saw Bowie as a stuffed shirt, an elitist. He could be distant, and when he tried to make conversation it seemed he talked down to you—unless you got to know him well, as I did. There weren’t many owners who were comfortable talking to Bowie, but I was.
Seeing Bowie’s strained relationships with some of the owners taught me something that would be very helpful later—that the commissioner can’t have his favorites. If he is going to be effective, he has to talk to all the owners all the time. That’s what I did. I was on the telephone all day, every day, it seems.
With salaries escalating and the players union only growing in strength, there was a growing internal frustration that we weren’t solving our problems. We had all these work stoppages and resulting settlements and none of our problems were being resolved.
Bowie’s tenure came to an end at the winter meetings in 1981, when a group of ten owners said they wouldn’t vote for him to be reelected as commissioner when his contract was up. I was the one who delivered the news to Bowie. And oh, it was painful. Just like that, he became a
lame duck.
The next year was bad. He was in office but he didn’t have the power of the office. That’s not a great situation for anybody. At an owners’ meeting the next November, a group put together a compromise to give him a three-year extension. The final vote was 7–5 in the NL and 11–3 in the AL—both in favor of Kuhn. But reelection required a supermajority, which was ten votes in the sixteen-team AL and nine in the NL. He was left to serve out the rest of his term until the following August.
Of all the comments from the owners after the vote, one stuck with me. Eddie Chiles of the Rangers, an oilman who didn’t like to be told what to do by anyone, said he voted against Kuhn because he felt “the commissioner system has outlived its usefulness.” He wanted to see the office be restructured.
He wasn’t wrong. The commissioner system needed change. A lot of people never understood that, even later, when I became commissioner.
People would say, “If Kenesaw Mountain Landis were still alive,” referencing the commissioner who cleaned up baseball following the Chicago Black Sox scandal in 1919. You need a commissioner with a lot of authority. I took a lot of authority. I admit that. I don’t know what Eddie had in mind. I don’t even know if Eddie knew what he had in mind. But he was right in this regard—this was not the commissionership of 1940, ’50, ’60, ’70, or even ’80. It needed change.
I was appointed to lead the search committee for a new commissioner. Eventually, we had three finalists, and we spent a long time getting to know all of them. The finalists were Bart Giamatti, James Baker, and Peter Ueberroth. Giamatti, who was the president of Yale, was pretty easily accessible for us, but the other two were tricky. Baker was then chief of staff for President Reagan and Ueberroth was knee deep in preparations for the upcoming Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
Those were three great candidates. I fell for Giamatti, who loved baseball the same way I did, but it was impossible for owners to ignore the great job Ueberroth was doing with the Olympics. We didn’t know it at the time we chose Ueberroth, but those Olympics would return huge profits (as much as 31 percent, according to some reports) while showcasing Los Angeles in a way that we wanted baseball to be seen.
