For the Good of the Game

by Bud Selig

  McGwire homered in each of the first four games, including shots off Ramon Martinez (on Opening Day) and Mark Langston. He finished April with eleven homers and then went on a tear in May, running his total to twenty-seven in the Cardinals’ first fifty-three games.

  By the time we reached Memorial Day, sportswriters and fans were saying he had a shot to break Roger Maris’s record, the sacred sixty-one. There really hadn’t been that talk before. He’d missed most of April in ’96 and in ’97 had been only at forty-three after August, turning it on at the end to move into Maris’s neighborhood.

  The script was different this time. It changed in a major way in June, when Sammy Sosa seemed to hit every other pitch out of Wrigley Field. That’s hyperbole, but not by much. I had gotten to know Sammy a little bit through the years and, like almost everybody else, I liked him a lot. He had a big smile and played the game with a joy that came from appreciating the opportunities baseball had given him. Sammy had thirteen homers at the end of May, less than half of Mark’s total. But he hit twenty home runs in only 114 at-bats in June. It was crazy what he was doing.

  These homers weren’t coming entirely out of nowhere for Sammy, either. Like McGwire, Sosa had foreshadowed ’98 in ’96, when he hit forty homers before the Marlins’ Mark Hutton broke his right wrist with a pitch on August 20. He’d never had a fifty-homer season before ’98 but probably would have if he’d gotten out of the way of that pitch.

  McGwire and Sosa weren’t the only guys who showed this could be a historic season for sluggers. Ken Griffey Jr., one of the unquestioned really good guys, had thirty-three homers for the Mariners by the end of June. He had hit fifty-six homers the year before, so with the All-Star Game approaching we had three guys—not two—positioned to make a run at Maris.

  In truth, I didn’t really start focusing on the home run race until after the All-Star break. As usual, I’d been centered on the business of the game, identifying changes we needed to make and trying to build consensus to execute them. As always, I was looking for ways to increase revenue sharing. I was beginning to build a consensus for eliminating the two league offices and separate umpire staffs. That was the way baseball had always been run, but it really didn’t make sense anymore.

  When I talked on the phone to the owners about the need to modernize the sport, they returned the favor by saying I needed to take the word acting out of my title and step into the commissioner’s job permanently. It was a chorus I heard all the time, and finally we made it official in a meeting at Chicago’s O’Hare Hilton on July 9, with a unanimous vote.

  We had hired the Blue Jays’ architect Paul Beeston as MLB’s chief operating officer in 1997. I beefed up our staff by hiring Bob DuPuy and Rob Manfred away from their law firms and adding Sandy Alderson, a Vietnam War vet who had put together the Oakland team that went to the World Series three years in a row. These moves were all well thought out and would put baseball in a position to reassert its position in the American landscape. We had made some progress—revenues were up to $2.5 billion a year, about double what they’d been when I stepped in for Fay Vincent in 1992—and owners were beginning to benefit.

  At the meeting in Chicago, I told the owners that I was going to continue to work to build hope and faith for every team, and I vowed to help them grow their franchises. At the end of the day, I told them, judge me on the value of your franchise. The Dodgers had recently been purchased by Fox Entertainment Group from the O’Malleys for $314 million and the Rangers had been bought from George W. Bush’s group for $250 million. I can guarantee you none of the other baseball commissioners I dealt with ever would have used that as a yardstick, but I knew as an owner that the growth of franchise values was what teams wanted.

  That day in Chicago I wasn’t just surrounded by the owners who had become my longtime friends; I was humbled by the sight of the beautiful family that had supported me through my early years in baseball.

  In the heat of the summer, Griffey slipped into the shadows of the home run race. Even though he’d wind up leading the AL with fifty-six homers, the same as the year before, he couldn’t keep up with Sammy and Mark. They blew the doors off in August, entering September tied with fifty-five apiece. This really was crazy.

  Let me make a confession here. Down the stretch, I was just as captivated by the saga as was the rest of America—not because it was “saving baseball” but because it was unbelievable theater.

  As for anyone who looks back and says anything that happened in 1998 saved baseball, shame on them. Baseball didn’t need to be saved. It is and was too strong for that. We still were hurting, yes. Attendance had been down since the strike wiped out the World Series in ’94. Players and owners alike knew the strike had damaged the trust that the public placed in MLB, and we were eager to get it back. But things had been trending in the right direction for a while. Long before Sosa-McGwire, we had celebrated Cal Ripken Jr.’s breaking Lou Gehrig’s iron-man streak.

  I couldn’t imagine anyone playing more than 2,130 consecutive games. Gehrig did that and his record stood for fifty-six years. Ripken was cut from the same cloth as Gehrig—a supertalented player with a blue-collar work ethic.

  The Baltimore shortstop had played 2,009 games in a row when players went on strike in 1994. He resumed his march toward Gehrig’s record when we got back on the field in ’95, and passed him on September 6, to the delight of fans everywhere.

  Cal was magnificent in his role as a baseball treasure. He took time for the fans every day he was at the ballpark, and I have to say most of our players got a lot better at that following the strike. Ripken allowed us to regain a measure of goodwill with fans, who were reminded of how they loved the way our guys played the game. Thanks to Cal and a great, seven-game World Series between the Cinderella Marlins and the powerful Indians, we were well on our way to recovery before the McGwire-Sosa home run race.

  Financially, we had to make changes to get the game back on solid ground, that’s true. But it’s beyond preposterous to think that we were somehow orchestrating these developments to increase attendance and ratings.

  That’s just not true. Not a bit of a chance.

  What did get my attention, and the attention of a lot of people, was a story by Associated Press reporter Steve Wilstein. This was late August, in a piece Wilstein was doing as an overview on the home run race. Mark had homered in both games of a doubleheader at Shea Stadium on August 20—his fiftieth and fifty-first—and while Wilstein was in the visiting clubhouse, he checked out what was in McGwire’s locker. He wrote about packs of sugarless gum, a can of Popeye spinach, and “a brown bottle labeled Androstenedione.”

  Androstenedione. What the hell is that?

  That was Wilstein’s reaction, and it was certainly my reaction.

  Andro has steroidlike qualities, helping to raise testosterone levels, and was already banned by the NFL, the NCAA, and the Olympics. Yet you could buy it over the counter.

  I know because I went to my pharmacy the day after the AP story ran. The pharmacist, whom I had known for years, knew why I was there. “It’s right over there,” he said, and pointed me to the shelf of supplements to build strength and stamina.

  I knew we had to do something to address the issue. There was an almost immediate dialogue with Don Fehr and the union staff about how to approach this unwelcome development.

  We held a joint news conference on August 26, announcing we would hire Harvard researchers to study whether androstenedione works like an anabolic steroid and whether it presented a health issue to players. The union wouldn’t even concede that these substances enhanced the performance of players. They wanted the researchers to conduct an extensive study to establish the basics.

  Of course, we had no idea at the time that results of that study would not be completed until the 2000 season, more than a year and a half later. But that’s the pace the union was allowing us to move on steroids.

  When Mark hit his sixty-first and sixty-second home runs—in a series
against Sammy and the Cubs, no less—on September 7 and 8, I was there to watch. In fact, I was seated in a box down the first-base line, which I shared with Roger Maris’s children and Bob Costas.

  I like Bob. I always have, I always will. How can you not like Bob? But he was like so many of the reporters in that era. While the home run race was going on, he was enjoying it like a kid. Years later he’d insist he knew it was fueled by steroids all along.

  At the time, Costas wasn’t peppering me with questions about the acne on McGwire’s back or if I really believed Sammy took “Flintstone vitamins,” as he often said when asked about steroids. Nonetheless, he was loving every minute of this American drama, which was casting baseball in the light it had been in when we were all kids. It was a great story and we were all enjoying it. That wasn’t against the law.

  McGwire, of course, admitted his use later on when he became a hitting coach for the Cardinals and then the Dodgers. Sosa has always denied using illegal substances. But in the moment, none of that really mattered. Outside of linking McGwire to andro, we didn’t know anything else was going on, and without testing we couldn’t know anything. Not for sure, anyway.

  After McGwire sailed No. 62 over the left-field fence off Cubs pitcher Steve Trachsel, I went on the field and presented McGwire a foot-tall trophy with a sterling silver baseball mounted on the top. It was the first Commissioner’s Historic Achievement Award, which I’d later present to a cast of players, many of which I still greatly admire and a few others whose careers were later tainted by links to PEDs. I didn’t think twice before honoring McGwire or later honoring Sosa. There was no one on either of those clubs who said to me, “I think we’ve got a problem.” They celebrated it. They celebrated it in Chicago, and they celebrated it in St. Louis.

  Here’s an amazing fact about McGwire’s ’98 season: he was walked 162 times in 681 plate appearances—almost once every four times he left the on-deck circle and walked to the plate. Tony La Russa said in September that Mark would hit eighty homers if they pitched to him, and he wasn’t wrong.

  In the end, after a crazy last weekend in which Sammy briefly took the lead (66–65), McGwire finished the season with seventy homers, Sammy with sixty-six. We were all out of breath.

  In hindsight, it’s surprising that the steroid story largely moved into the background after that season, but that’s what happened. The focus was still on McGwire and Sosa in 1999, along with the rising offensive totals in general, but nobody within the game—nor in the media or among the fan base—seemed alarmed by what was happening.

  I did wonder if the data told us anything. I had recently hired Jerome Holtzman, the highly respected baseball writer who had retired from the Chicago Tribune, to serve as the game’s official historian. Jerome was really smart and had covered the game since the 1940s. At home, he had his own baseball library, including every issue ever put out of The Sporting News. He was a real treasure and we’d been friendly for years.

  Jerome had covered the founding of the Players Association and was one of the first reporters to see a baseball strike coming after Marvin Miller united players. He knew the landscape, for sure. So as one of Jerome’s first projects as baseball historian, I asked him for a report on the spike in offensive numbers—what did they say about the integrity of the game and, specifically, did they indicate widespread steroid use? He knew how worried I was, but he didn’t think anything was happening that was out of whack with the history of baseball. He said, “I can tell you right now how this is going to come out, but I’m going to look up the history and write you a report.” He said he knew it would show that anyone pointing toward steroids was “making way too much of it.”

  So Jerome did the research and wrote a long, detailed report. It said that in every decade since the twenties there were always certain conditions or factors that affected the game, whatever they were, and what was happening now was no different.

  Holtzman, whom the other writers called “The Dean,” went through the report with me, but mostly it was stuff I knew—how Babe Ruth’s style changed the approach of hitters; how a livelier ball was introduced at one point and how the ball had been changed in World War II, when the talent pool also was thinner than normal; how the talent base increased through integration and the arrival of Latin Americans; how expansion, Astroturf, and the designated hitter rule factored in. He went over everything and said the run-scoring in the nineties was just another trend and not anything to get worked up about.

  I asked him what I should say to people criticizing baseball about the suspicion of steroid use. I can remember his answer word for word: “Fuck those assholes!” That was Jerome for you.

  We had no choice but to wait for the results from the joint study of andro to come in. Given that the union leaders couldn’t accept what “performance enhancing” even meant, I knew this conversation wasn’t going to result in drug testing for a long time.

  But I didn’t take Jerome’s advice on how to address criticism. I began to press the union for testing every chance I got. I would be open when the subject was raised in interviews, saying I felt we should be able to test players to understand the issue and to minimize the impact of performance-enhancing drugs. It was a huge health issue, for sure, and that really worried me.

  I was consulting a lot with team doctors and professional athletic trainers. They were very concerned. But not that many other people were concerned in those days, certainly not the union.

  This became clearer to me after a conversation I had with Don Fehr around that time. His parents lived near my house in Arizona. I would bump into him from time to time. One day I was out walking and crossed paths with him. I didn’t recognize him at first, but he said hello, so we stopped to talk. We got around to talking about steroids and the conversations I was having with the doctors, and I said:

  “What do we say when someday, when you and I don’t have our jobs anymore, we’re retired, a widow of one of these players comes to us and says you guys knew the risks and you didn’t do anything about it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders and said, “We just can’t let you start testing. We can’t do that.” So there we were—facing a major problem and knowing our hands were tied. But whenever I got a chance to talk on the subject, I made it clear we wanted testing.

  I’m not exactly sure when it started, but the New York Times’ Murray Chass started referring to me as the Evangelist because I was preaching on the issue. Murray didn’t mean it as a compliment, I’m sure, but that’s the way I took it. And all this time the problems—along with some of the game’s best players—were getting bigger.

  Barry Bonds, who I still thought of as a tremendous hitter who was built like a wide receiver, was feeling overlooked. He had won the MVP award three times already. In the 1998 season he hit .303 with thirty-seven home runs, 122 RBIs, twenty-eight stolen bases, and 120 runs scored for the Giants, and he felt like nobody noticed.

  Bonds finished eighth in the baseball writers’ voting for MVP that season. The spotlight had been taken from him, and we would soon see the price he was willing to pay to get it back.

  18

  EVERY NOW AND then during my tenure, things would happen to remind me of the unique role baseball plays in American life. For all the change we had weathered inside the game, sometimes there were events outside the game that reminded all of us about the power of the game. Such was the case in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

  Most of my mornings start with a one-hour workout, either at home or in the fitness room of a hotel. The routine is the same either way—stretch for seven minutes and then ride an exercise bike for fifty-three minutes.

  Our quarterly meetings for September 2001 were at the Pfister Hotel, in Milwaukee. I was doing my workout before driving downtown, watching the Today show, as always. Suddenly, Katie Couric came in with a report of an airplane hitting one of the towers at the World Trade Center.

  Wow. That’s odd, I thought. I kept watching and then came the report o
f the second plane hitting another tower. Sue came down the stairs and asked, “What the hell is going on?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was stunned. She was stunned. Everyone in America was stunned.

  We kept watching the coverage and then there was a report of a plane crash in Pennsylvania and of another plane hitting the Pentagon. We watched people running down the smoky streets of New York City. The White House was being evacuated.

  The president, my friend George W. Bush, was speaking at an elementary school in Florida, but then he was whisked into the sky on the way to an underground command area. Oh, my God. What a frightening time. I still get chills when I think back on it.

  It was the most surreal day of my life.

  I got dressed and drove to the Pfister, where the owners had either stayed overnight or were arriving for our meetings. We just wandered around the lobby, not knowing what to do or think. We knew we needed to grasp the magnitude of what we were dealing with, as it was happening, but how could we?

  One thing that became clear quickly was that we were not going to hold our meeting. That was obvious. But the owners who were in Wisconsin had no way to get home, because airports were closed.

  Everybody scrambled to rent a car to get home. But the rental cars went fast and when the Mariners owners—John Ellis, Chuck Armstrong, and Kevin Mather—were unable to get one they bought a car in Milwaukee and then drove to Seattle.

  As they headed out of town, I walked over to my office, just a couple of blocks away from the Pfister. My office was on the thirtieth floor, and there were people in the lobby who didn’t feel safe in the tallest building in Milwaukee. People told me not to come upstairs, but I needed to be near my phones, so of course I got on the elevator and rode upstairs.