The Yankee Years

by Joe Torre

  “He asked me to pick up some stuff for him and Knoblauch,” McNamee said. “That's how that started. That was three times, and I stopped it, because I didn't feel good about it.”

  Members of the 2000 Yankees became good business for Radom ski. At some points over the 2000 and 2001 seasons, according to the Mitchell Report, Radomski provided drugs for Grimsley, Knoblauch, pitcher Denny Neagle, outfielders Glenallen Hill and David Justice, and later for pitcher Mike Stanton. In addition, the 2000 Yankees included three other players who later admitted their drug use (though not necessarily specific to that particular year): Jose Canseco, Jim Leyritz and Andy Pettitte. Most infamously, the 2000 Yankees had a tenth player who would be tied to reports of performance-enhancing drug use: Clemens.

  According to McNamee, Clemens came to him in the second half of the 2000 season looking for a boost. McNamee turned to his friend Radomski for steroids and human growth hormone. McNamee said he injected Clemens four to six times with the steroids and four to six times with the HGH. Clemens, who turned 38 years old in August that season, pitched far better in the second half than he had in the first, lowering his ERA from 4.33 at the All-Star break to 3.15 after it, while improving his record of 6-6 before the break to 7-2 after it. The Yankees finally saw the pitcher they traded for from Toronto. Did the players assume Clemens was on “the program”?

  “I think the fact that I picked up some stuff for Knoblauch and Grimsley there was an assumption they talked about it, too,” McNamee said. “I would think you would have to assume that Roger was taking something. I never talked about it. And I didn't want steroids and growth hormone to be the be-all, and that's why Roger was performing well. I made that clear to Andy once I knew he knew. He understood that. I think you would have to be an idiot not to think Roger was taking something.”

  Of course, such thinking did not stop McNamee from writing a guest column in the New York Times later that same year that was titled “Don't Be So Quick to Prejudge All That Power.” In it McNamee wrote, “The suggestion that steroids are the answer to the increased strength, recovery from injury and the improved performances of today's players is just wrong.” He concluded his opus thusly: “Yes, the players today are stronger, faster and smarter than their predecessors. But their superiority is not because of steroid use, but because of the advancement in sports-specific science and commitment of the organizations to strength, conditioning and nutrition. To suggest otherwise is irresponsible and disrespectful.”

  It was, naturally, a complete lie. Baseball had become one fraud piled upon another.

  “I did lie to the media,” McNamee said. “Because I got tired of going to clinics and kids asking me about steroids. I went out of my way to say no, never, never, never … I lied. But to me, what was I going to do? ‘Oh yeah, this is the way you should work out, but by the way, my guys take steroids.’ So I had to answer the question. Me, as a trainer, can't say, ‘I don't want to talk about it.’ Because that's an admission of guilt.

  “The fact that I enabled it was wrong. I shouldn't have done it. But it was a gray area for me. Because the way I got involved with Radomski had nothing to do with steroids. And it's a personality flaw, where you look at my job. My job is to protect these guys at all times. Before, during and after. So when these guys are already doing something that's wrong, I tried to help that. Because they're going to do it anyway. Was it wrong for me? I don't know if I would do the same thing again. I should have said no, but I can't. I have an inability to do that.”

  The 2000 Yankees won the American League East Division with 87 victories, stumbling badly to the finish by losing 15 of their final 18 games. They held off Oakland in the Division Series in five games, dispatched Seattle in the American League Championship Series—in which Clemens won Game 4, 5-0, with the most dominating game of his postseason career, a one-hitter in which he struck out 15 batters and threw 138 pitches—and then took out the Mets in five games to win the world championship. (Radomski said he provided drugs to at least two Mets players on that team, Matt Franco and Todd Pratt.) The Yankees were the best team in baseball. And when it came to steroids, they were no different from anybody else.

  “You had two guys from New York doing all the talking in the Mitchell Report,” Torre said. “That's why you have more information on New York players. If people want to devalue the 2000 team, is that how we lost 15 out of 18 down the stretch? We dried ourselves out and then got a heavy dose for the postseason? One thing I've learned is that people are going to feel the way they're going to feel, regardless of what happened. You can talk until you're blue in the face and there's no answer that's going to satisfy everybody.”

  Said one former All-Star and steroid user who competed against those Yankees teams, “Everybody around baseball did what they could possibly do. It was the survival of the fittest.”

  Nobody said, “This has to stop”?

  “Who would have?” the player said, laughing. “It's why the government regulates monopolies. If people could do it, they would fucking do it. Just like cheating on your taxes. If there's a gray area, you're going to find it, until the government said it's not a gray area anymore.”

  The player said that everybody in the game just understood that attitude was acceptable. “Now whether it was right or wrong, now you're talking about a moral issue, but there were no rules. You did what you did. It was the wild, wild west.”

  Torre came from a generation in which weight training and adding bulk were taboo. Steroids? He knew nothing about them. He never saw them. The players certainly weren't going to tell him what was going on, and he wasn't going to probe without invitation into their private lives.

  “I've always tried to respect guys’ privacy,” Torre said. “I remember in Atlanta in 1982 we were going to the postseason and rumor had it they were going to check bats to see if any were corked. It was the time when loading bats was one of the things that was starting up. I remember having a meeting and saying, ‘Guys, I never ask you what you do, but I know we've accomplished something very special here, by winning the division, and if they decide they want to check bats it could nullify everything we've ever done here. So if you were doing it, you better be careful. And if you weren't, don't even worry about it.’

  “That's basically been my attitude—unless I see erratic behavior sometimes. Unless somebody acts funny. I just don't go into people's lockers. Plus, I didn't see anything. I walk all over the clubhouse. I walk in the trainers’ room. I walk in the lounge. I walk in the weight room, and all that stuff. I never saw it.

  “I never heard players talk about it. Jeter used to kid about it. He'd joke around, ‘Yeah, watch me on steroids hit it to the warning track!’ The thing that comes to my mind with steroids is it can cut your life short. The other thing is I don't think it's fair. The analogy I use is that it's like some guys are using metal bats and some guys are using wood bats. It's not right. It's dangerous.

  “The one thing you have to remember is that baseball is business that has never interfered with putting asses in the seats. You can't tell me that with everything going on—Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs in 1927, Roger Maris hits 61 in eight more games in 1961, and then in 1998 two guys hit more than that—that nobody thinks it's suspicious? In 1998 when one guy hit 66 and one guy hit 70, baseball said it's great. And now baseball is pointing the fingers at everybody? That's the fraud to me.”

  Not all 10 members of the 2000 Yankees in the Mitchell Report were described as using drugs during that particular season, but the cooperation of McNamee and Radomski gave that team a higher profile than others in the report. For instance, outfielder and admitted steroid user Shane Monahan has said steroid and amphetamine use was rampant on the 1998-99 Mariners teams he played on. (Monahan also described hangers-on with clubhouse access brokering greenies-for-memorabilia transactions.) Nine players from those Seattle teams, both of which lost more games than they won, have been linked in various reports to performance-enhancing drugs. McNamee said the 2000 Yanke
es were no different from the 29 other teams when it came to drug use.

  “I think the talent level was better,” McNamee said. “You put ergogenic aids on top of that, you're going to get a better team.”

  McNamee said he told federal agents and Mitchell's investigators that both Toronto general manager Gord Ash and Yankees general manager Brian Cashman did not want to know if players were doping and that player agents were directly involved in procuring illegal drugs for their clients, but that Mitchell did not include those comments in the report. Gord Ash and Brian Cashman denied McNamee's assertion.

  “I told the [federal] agents and George Mitchell's people that the [general managers] came up to me and said, ‘We don't care what they're taking. I just don't want to know about it.’ “ McNamee said. “That wasn't in their report.” Cashman denied NcNamee's allegations, saying, “we thought we had a clean clubhouse. I never had a dialogue with him about what players may or may not be taking. Never, ever once.” Ash also denied McNamee's allegation: “I don't recall that,” Ash said.

  McNamee described his relationship with Cashman as a friendly one. Indeed, McNamee said in 2007, six years after the Yankees did not retain McNamee as the assistant strength coach, Cashman called him regularly to consult on strength training issues regarding the team.

  “If he didn't understand what was going on [with steroids], then he's a jackass,” McNamee said. “[But] what was he going to do? If he wanted [a clean clubhouse] he would have had to have said, ‘Hey, we're getting our asses kicked. Everybody take ‘em.’ That's the reality. I know that would have happened. You've got to be on a level playing field.”

  McNamee's run with the Yankees ended after the 2001 season. The team chose not to invite him back, principally because of an incident on October 6, 2001, at the team's hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida, while in town there to play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Police questioned McNamee in connection with a possible sexual battery incident after he was found in the hotel pool at 4 a.m. with a 40-year-old woman. Both were naked. The woman had ingested GHB, an odorless substance commonly referred to as a “date-rape” drug. McNamee was never charged. Though the Yankees cut ties with McNamee following that season, Clemens and Pettitte continued to train with him and would do so for a year.

  In May of the following year, 2002, Pettitte gave McNamee a call. The trainer was on the road with the Yankees and Clemens, this time not as an official member of the team, but only as Clem ens’ personal trainer with no special access. Pettitte was in Tampa, where, while on the disabled list after making only three starts that season, he was working out at the Yankees’ training complex to rehabilitate a strained left elbow.

  “I need some help, Mac,” Pettitte said.

  It wasn't just McNamee's training help that Pettitte wanted. It was human growth hormone.

  “You don't need to do that,” McNamee told the pitcher.

  “Yes, I do,” Pettitte told him. “I'm going to do it. Are you going to help me or not?”

  McNamee decided he wasn't about to change Pettitte's mind. There was only one thing to do.

  “I'll help you,” McNamee said.

  “Good,” Pettitte said. “Can you get it for me?”

  “Yeah, I can get it.”

  Said McNamee, “I don't even know how I got it down there. I didn't travel with it.”

  Pettitte would go to the Yankees’ training complex in the morning for 30 minutes of treatment. McNamee then would train Pettitte through conditioning and rehabilitation exercises. They would run through another training session at night. It was hard work, designed to get Pettitte back into the rotation as soon as possible while the Yankees, stuck in second place, tried not to fall too far behind the red-hot Boston Red Sox in the AL East. But the training regimen wasn't enough for Pettitte. Twice each day once in the morning and once at night, McNamee injected Pettitte with human growth hormone. Pettitte was a churchgoing, God-fearing Texan, known in the Yankees clubhouse for his integrity and earnestness. If Pettitte was going to cheat, who wouldn't? Of course, even Pettitte did not consider injections of an illegally obtained performance-enhancing drug as cheating.

  “I think he rationalized it with the information I supplied and why guys took it,” McNamee said. “I think he just really wanted to heal. It wasn't a performance-enhancing issue. As far as I know, he never took steroids. Everybody thought he did, because when I started training him he went from 88-89 [miles per hour] to 96. If you have a photo of him taking steroids, I don't know. I don't know what to believe.”

  Torre never knew about Pettitte's HGH use. He learned about it at the same time as the rest of the world: when the Mitchell Report was released in December of 2007. Pettitte was in the middle of preparing a statement in which he would admit to using HGH when Torre called him.

  Andy, I'm just calling to see how you're doing,” Torre said. “I'm not calling to ask any questions.”

  “Skip,” Pettitte said, “I'm just getting ready to make a statement.”

  “I don't want to know your statement,” Torre said. “I just want to see how you're doing.”

  “I'm okay,” Pettitte said.

  Torre noticed that Pettitte sounded anxious, or “jumpy” as he put it. After Pettitte released his statement, the pitcher called his former manager back.

  “I'm sorry,” Pettitte said. “I apologize to you, especially if I did anything to put you in a tough situation. I don't know how I did this. As religious as I am, I even question how God can help me make those kind of decisions.”

  “Well, Andy,” Torre said, “we don't always make the right decisions. It's what life is all about. Just knowing you the way I know you, and not a lot of people know you like I do, you were torn because you thought, being on the disabled list, the most important thing was to get yourself back to earning your money and helping the team. You were willing to try something, and then you realized you didn't want to do this anymore. So what did you do? You stopped.

  “It's what you did. Is it the right thing? The wrong thing? It's what you did. You certainly didn't have anything really devious in your mind at the time. You were just trying to get back to earn your money. You weren't trying to get back there to win a game for yourself.”

  “I feel badly about it,” Pettitte said.

  And what about the other donkey?” Torre said.

  Pettitte knew Torre was referring to Clemens.

  “Roger is Roger,” Pettitte said. “When I talked to him, he was Roger.”

  Torre immediately understood what Pettitte meant about his good friend: that a full-blown steroids scandal wasn't about to change Clemens from being the most cocksure cowboy on the planet. Clemens lived in his own world, surrounded by people who unequivocally verified it for him, and George Mitchell wasn't about to cause him any self-examination or doubt. Torre also understood how Pettitte fell victim to the culture of the times.

  “It's like Bob Gibson said: ‘To win a game you'd take anything,’ “ Torre said. “We'd all sell our souls. Winning is something that was first and foremost and that's what we wanted to do. Unfortunately now what stimulates the need to do this is individual performance and not winning. It used to be all about winning. It was, ‘Let's win this game.’ ‘Let's go to the World Series.’ That was the motivation at the time. Now it's more a case of the motivation being, ‘My numbers.’ But yeah, as a competitor, you'd sell your soul.”

  Pettitte might not consider his HGH use to have been cheating or performance-enhancing. The Red Sox, of course, might view it a little differently. Pettitte was off the disabled list and back in the rotation on June 14. The Yankees trailed Boston by 1 ½ games. Pettitte made 19 starts thereafter and was one of the best pitchers in the league at that time, going 12-4 with a 3.29 ERA. With Pettitte's help, the Yankees overtook the Red Sox and won the division with 103 victories. The Red Sox won 93 games. They did not qualify for the playoffs.

  At about the very same time Pettitte, with McNamee's help, was in a hotel suite in Tampa sticking n
eedles loaded with HGH into the folds of the skin in his abdomen, and four years after Helling's first of several pleas to the players association fell on deaf ears, Ken Caminiti sat across from a writer in a lawn chair in his garage in Houston, surrounded by his show-quality muscle cars, and made an announcement that was a long time coming: the emperor had no clothes. Baseball, Caminiti said, was rife with steroid users. It was a moment that would change how baseball would be played and administered. It was the beginning of the end of The Steroid Era, at least its Wild West days with no laws in place in the game.

  Not only did Caminiti, a former Most Valuable Player Award winner then in his first year of retirement, admit to using steroids himself, making him the first among the hundreds and hundreds of players who had used steroids to actually admit it, but he also expressed absolutely no remorse about having done so. Steroids were so prevalent, they had become the default choice if you wanted to make it as a big leaguer. How could you feel guilty about it if about half the players, as Caminiti estimated, were doing the same thing?

  What he said was not shocking at all. Baseball had given itself over to steroid users for more then a decade, though, as Cone observed, the rate of those crossing over to the dark side had greatly accelerated over the previous four years. By 2001 it had reached its tipping point: clean players such as Helling began to see themselves as the minority, put at a competitive disadvantage by the growing acceptance that steroids simply were, like occasional brushback pitches, now part of the cost of playing baseball. Steroids were no longer part of a rogue element. They were de rigeur.

  This important shift among the rank and file of players became clear in the second half of that 2001 season. Perhaps the breaking of the home run record yet again, this time by a garishly pumped-up version of Bonds, who hit 73 at the age of 36 after never having hit more than 49, helped fuel the intramural carping. Several clean players steered conversations toward this growing acceptance of steroids. They were concerned and angry, of course, though the thin blue line mentality among these union brothers and foxhole comrades prevented them from speaking on the rec ord. One of them joked, though with black humor, about the “steroid starter kits” that made the users so obvious and ubiquitous: in addition to the needles, the steroid user needed acne creams for the pimples that otherwise would fester on his back, and a good razor or wax job to keep the body hairless, the better to show off the new, well-muscled, if bloated, physique. These players became increasingly body-image conscious, even if they fairly glistened from the watery, hairless musculature. Some players had slight trouble speaking clearly because the HGH swelled the size of their tongues and jaws. Some players could not push their batting helmet completely down on their heads because their heads had swelled.