For the Good of the Game

by Bud Selig

  I kept telling myself that no commissioner has ever gone outside his sport to conduct an investigation like this. I understood the negatives, but it didn’t bother me. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. I wanted somebody with an impeccable reputation to lead this investigation, which is why I kept coming back to George Mitchell.

  He was chairman of Disney when I reached out to him. I had first met George in the late eighties or early nineties, when he was Senate majority leader. He was very close to Haywood Sullivan of the Red Sox. If I hadn’t become commissioner he would have been a very serious candidate for the job. That was how highly I thought of him.

  When I spoke to him about the prospect of the steroids report, I said, George, we don’t have anything to hide. I need somebody to do a thorough examination. I’ll turn over everything we have and so will all the clubs. They did, too, to their ever-lasting credit.

  One thing George insisted on was complete independence. He wanted to hire his staff and do his work with total autonomy. He wanted free rein to follow the investigation wherever it took him. That was a given, as far as I was concerned. He was going to get no interference from the commissioner’s office.

  George did have a tie to baseball and personal ties to me. He was on the board of the Red Sox, and he was a friend of mine. There were some people who took umbrage at that. But George also had a good relationship with Don Fehr. They were on the U.S. Olympic Committee together. Don always told me how much he liked him, and you can’t help but like him. He is a very classy man.

  I said to all the clubs that George and his law partners were going to do a lot of looking, talking, examining—so the clubs should turn over anything they want. I was unaware of what they were going to find out. I didn’t know what players did. We had a good idea on some, but it was just an idea.

  I hired him amid protests from both sides. I knew I had done something right because both sides were mad. But I didn’t really care at that point. I sure didn’t care that my peers in charge of the NFL and the NBA thought I was crazy. They weren’t in my shoes. I had reached a point where I didn’t care what it looked like or what anybody thought.

  I really don’t know how much money we spent on what came to be known as the Mitchell Report, but it was a figure well into the millions. I formally commissioned the report on March 3, 2006, and he made his report December 13, 2007.

  I wasn’t the least bit surprised how long it took. I thought George and his people did a good job of reining it in, so to speak. They interviewed nineteen hundred people. They looked into everything. Yeah, there were some clubs that grumbled. They had to produce many, many documents. I remember talking about it once at a major league meeting. But really, the clubs were great. They indulged me.

  Mitchell wound up working closely with Jeff Novitsky and the BALCO investigators. Mitchell gained access to Kirk Radomski, a former batboy and clubhouse kid of the Mets who had grown up to become a supplier of steroids to ballplayers. He had pleaded guilty to distributing steroids and money laundering and agreed to cooperate with our investigation.

  That was a good break for Mitchell and a very bad one for a long list of ballplayers. They would be named in the Mitchell Report when it was released to a ballroom full of reporters at the Grand Hyatt in New York. It identified eighty-nine current and former players who were linked to steroids. The list included a guy who had the same kind of unquestionable Hall of Fame credentials as Bonds—Roger Clemens.

  Radomski had told investigators about selling steroids to a trainer named Brian McNamee, who worked with Clemens when he was pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays, after he’d left Boston as a free agent, and continued to work for him after the Blue Jays traded him to the Yankees. I had been tipped off about Clemens being in the Mitchell Report two days before by Bob DuPuy, who had met with Mitchell and his staff to discuss how we would present the findings. I should have been shocked, right?

  But we weren’t back in 1998 anymore. There had been so much scandal already that I’m not sure I could use the word shock. But was I disappointed? Yeah. I was disappointed. I was sad. He had been a very good soldier for baseball, and a great pitcher. One of the best ever. But I was philosophical at that point because I meant what I’d said to Senator Mitchell: We have nothing to hide. Go do what you have to do. I wasn’t going to stop anybody.

  Mitchell made twenty recommendations about how baseball could improve its operation regarding PEDs, including the creation of our own investigative staff. We did that, and it wouldn’t be all that long until that investigative group turned up results of its own regarding a lab known as Biogenesis, in South Florida.

  While it was sad that players were still tempted to use PEDs, I felt that the Mitchell Report really helped us completely develop our protocol for dealing with cheaters. I think the report showed the public that we were going to lengths no league had gone to before.

  In the years since then, you would have thought that players would be scared away from steroids, that we’d never have another scandal as bad as BALCO. They should have learned some hard lessons by the time we had our testing program up and running. But again, I was naïve.

  First there was Ryan Braun, a much-beloved player in Milwaukee. This hit home, of course. While my daughter Wendy had orchestrated a sale of the Brewers to Mark Attanasio for me in 2004, I remained close to the franchise. Braun was a franchise icon. We all knew him, of course, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like him a lot.

  He was Attanasio’s initial first-round pick and would win the National League MVP award in 2011, when the Brewers won the Central and reached the NL Championship Series. He was so valued by Attanasio that he handed him a five-year contract extension that season, even though he was still five years away from free agency.

  An owner only does that with a player he trusts. That’s why the events that transpired in the off-season of 2011–12 were stunning for me and troubling for Milwaukee fans.

  Rob Manfred didn’t always call me when positive results came in on a drug test, but with Braun he gave me the courtesy of a heads-up.

  “Do what you have to do,” I told him.

  Braun had been tested after a postseason game against the Diamondbacks on Saturday, October 1. The sample was sealed and boxed according to protocol. The tester would normally send it to the lab the same day, via Federal Express. This time, however, FedEx was closed by the time the sample was ready to be sent.

  The tester followed protocol, protecting the sealed sample in a cool, secure place under his care until Monday morning, when he shipped it. The test came back positive for synthetic testosterone, at a high level some reports said were unprecedented.

  Ryan appealed the decision. His lawyers argued that because the cool place where the tester stored the sample over the weekend was in his home refrigerator, such handling was questionable. Even though the sealed layers showed no evidence of having been tampered with, arbitrator Shyam Das ruled in favor of Braun. It marked the first time in our program when a player’s positive drug test was overturned.

  Manfred vehemently disagreed with the arbitrator’s judgment. That’s probably not putting it strongly enough. Rob was pissed, and so was everyone at MLB.

  Ryan held court in Arizona shamelessly. “It is the first step in restoring my good name and reputation,” he said. “We were able to get through this because I am innocent and truth is on our side.”

  We’d soon find out differently, to the embarrassment of all.

  Not even a year later we got blindsided with another calculated effort by players to use some of the most hard-core steroids available. The source was the Biogenesis clinic in Coral Gables, Florida, operating essentially for clients seeking help with weight loss and aging. But the operator of the clinic, Anthony Bosch, was supplying steroids to baseball players, including Braun and—oh boy—Alex Rodriguez.

  Again, I was long past being shocked, but you wouldn’t be wrong if you said I was horrified reading the report in the Miami New
Times, which had gotten records from a disgruntled employee of the clinic. Clearly Braun was not the guy he’d appeared, and A-Rod had not learned his lesson, either.

  One untidy bit of business from the survey testing in 2003 was that the union had failed to promptly take all the procedural steps necessary to destroy the samples and records linked to individual players. We had promised the players anonymity and, believe me, I wanted them to be anonymous. It did baseball no good for those names to get out, and it was extremely unfair to the players.

  But with the BALCO investigation going full tilt at that time, the government had issued injunctions to keep the samples from being destroyed. Then it seemed like the names of players testing positive dripped out batch by batch over time, with Rodriguez, a three-time AL MVP, being named by Sports Illustrated in early 2009. Alex quickly arranged to do an interview with Peter Gammons on ESPN and in it came off quite contrite—a posture that was working for lots of other players.

  He actually tried to shed some light on the motivation for players, saying he had used steroids only after he had left Seattle for Texas, getting that mind-boggling contract from Tom Hicks.

  “I felt like I had all the weight of the world on top of me, and I needed to perform, and perform at a high level every day,” Rodriguez told Gammons. “Back then, [baseball] was a different culture—it was very loose. I was young. I was stupid. I was naïve. . . . I did take a banned substance, and for that I am very sorry and deeply regretful.”

  Sounds good, right? But A-Rod was about as sincere as a snake-oil salesman. He was one of Bosch’s best clients, along with Braun and Nelson Cruz.

  For a variety of reasons, the Biogenesis investigation became very complicated. A-Rod was mad at everybody and lashing out. He would even sue the players union before everything played out.

  While the union was fully on board supporting the work we were doing to promote an even playing field, individual players were being creative in their defenses. Melky Cabrera and his agents had tried to pull a fast one when he was suspended for amphetamine use. A-Rod was doing everything he could to block our work on Biogenesis.

  That’s why, in the end, I handed down the longest suspension I’d ever given—211 games. That was the end of the 2013 season and the entire ’14 season.

  Alex, who was then thirty-seven, was allowed to play while he appealed the suspension. He would eventually get arbitrator Fredric Horowitz to reduce the suspension to 162 games, but that was a hollow victory, as he was still forced to miss the entire 2014 season.

  There is no question it was the right thing to do—and the only thing to do.

  Suspending a player for such a long time may be one of the most painful judgments a commissioner can make. Here is a pleasant, personable human being with such enormous talent who had all the makings of being one of the greatest players in the history of baseball. Yet, regrettably, he compounded his mistakes.

  It’s remarkable to me that Alex not only sued MLB but also sued the Players Association. Think about that. Think of where Alex Rodriguez would have been without his union in the first place.

  I believe Alex received very poor advice from people with whom he never should have associated in the first place. Alex paid his penalty, sat out the ’14 season, and made a concerted effort to be a good teammate when he returned in ’15, for what everyone figured would be his last season. Rodriguez did so well that season, he was back in ’16, and that’s a credit to his work ethic and talent. Few players could have missed a full season in their late thirties and been productive again. He did.

  I harbor no anger at Alex. He made terrible mistakes that cost him his good name. His mistakes cost his teammates and his franchise even more success. I’m sad about that, and for him.

  I also respect how prepared he was when he began his second career as a broadcaster in 2017. He rehabbed his image in ways guys like Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa never could. He did some TV work for Fox, mostly working a studio in the postseason, but ESPN named him to its highly successful Sunday Night Baseball booth in 2018.

  Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, and the other stars who hurt their names also hurt their innocent teammates. There were so many players who privately wanted tougher penalties and more testing, but most of them were nervous about talking publicly.

  When history looks back on this period, I hope there will be a full understanding that many of our players—including some of baseball’s biggest stars—were not involved in illegalities and were not enmeshed in scandal.

  In retrospect, there was a real shift in the dynamics of dealing with the union after we got the labor deal in 2002, which included the first provisions for testing. One part of that was a change in the leadership of the union, as Rob Manfred had forged a terrific relationship with Michael Weiner, who in 2009 replaced Don Fehr as executive director.

  But it was also true that union leadership miscalculated how strongly—and for how long—to fight against testing. It became out of step with its membership, just as so many of baseball’s commissioners and their labor lawyers had been out of step with the needs and desires of major league owners.

  There were a total of forty-four PED and amphetamine suspensions on my watch by the time I retired as commissioner in 2015. It’s fitting the list includes one (reliever J. C. Romero) for the substance that really started us on this journey, androstenedione. Senator Mitchell advised us against suspending players whose use was revealed by his report; otherwise the list would have been longer.

  Bonds was never suspended. Ditto Clemens, Jason Giambi, Jose Canseco, Lenny Dykstra, Andy Pettitte, Gary Sheffield, Kevin Brown, Juan Gonzalez, and dozens of other well-known players who were linked by the Mitchell investigation to banned substances, including human growth hormone (which we began doing in-season blood testing to detect in 2013).

  I wouldn’t have minded hitting those players with suspensions. I felt strongly that what they had done was an affront to baseball. But Senator Mitchell, Rob Manfred, and others persuaded me that it would be sufficient punishment merely to identify the players who had cut corners and beat the system.

  When you look at how poorly Bonds, Clemens, Palmeiro, Ramirez, McGwire, and Sosa have done in Hall of Fame voting conducted by the baseball writers, it’s clear that damage to their reputations wasn’t a small price for them to pay.

  By the way, I agree with the writers. I do not believe players who are known to have used steroids should go into the Hall of Fame. I hear the argument about there being others already in the Hall who aren’t necessarily of the highest character, and I’ll grant you that’s true. I also understand it’s impossible for voters to know who did and who didn’t do anything.

  Suspicion isn’t enough to keep a player out. Who can honestly say about players from this era? But when we do know that a player used steroids to make himself a better player, making it easier for him to compete against his peers, we shouldn’t ignore it.

  The integrity of the game is serious. Those players who took PEDs hurt the game. I don’t see how anyone can argue the other side on this one.

  21

  WHILE WE CONTINUED to deal with the fallout from the steroid issue, I had many good days after the 2002 labor deal. It served all the purposes that I hoped it would, making life better for teams that had been hurting financially and showing fans they could trust us to be responsible stewards of their interest.

  It was a huge development to negotiate a deal without a work stoppage—something that hadn’t happened since the Players Association was established. We set a foundation to peacefully negotiate the next three labor agreements, more often working with the union instead of constantly being in conflict with the players.

  With our labor issues no longer center stage every year, we began to grow baseball in ways we had never been able to before. We had finally become true partners with the players, which opened doors that we couldn’t have opened by ourselves.

  This was a vision I’d had for decades, not years. It was so rewarding to s
ee it play out.

  One of the best examples was the World Baseball Classic.

  It makes so much sense to have an event where players represent their nations, as soccer players do in the World Cup. Baseball may not quite be the same kind of global game, but it has grown internationally in a major way, especially in Asia and Latin America.

  More and more major leaguers have come from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and even Japan and Canada during my time in baseball. The passion for baseball in these places is apparent when you watch the game played in those countries.

  It was a natural for us to tap into, and we did.

  We began discussing our desire to hold a baseball version of the World Cup shortly after the ink dried on the 2002 agreement. But this event was different than any others we had ever held. It was a 50/50 partnership with the Players Association, and that was true from the planning stages.

  We knew we needed a dramatic event, and the union helped us create one. I’ll give Gene Orza credit. The union was very cooperative. Our guys were great, but Gene was great working with our people. We couldn’t have gotten this done without labor peace.

  We held the first WBC in 2006, with teams representing sixteen countries, including Cuba. It took a lot of work to coordinate the Cubans’ appearance in the event, but it would have weakened it a lot if they weren’t there. The Cubans had been a huge power in international tournaments, and lots of people thought they’d be tough to beat in this one, especially the Cubans themselves.

  That first year we played WBC games in Tokyo, Puerto Rico, Arizona, Florida, and two different sites in California, Angel Stadium in Anaheim and Petco Park in San Diego. We’ve played the event three other times since then (2009, ’13, and ’17) and gone to South Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, and Canada.

  We’ve seen so many great stories. The first year of the WBC we had an all-Asian semifinal in San Diego between Japan and South Korea, and the enthusiasm of the crowds was unbelievable. Japan beat Cuba in the championship game, and the atmosphere at Petco Park was electric.