Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball'sSteroid Era

by Tim Elfrink

  Rodriguez has said that he never knew how his private high school education was paid for. The answer, at least for one of the schools, was Tom’s father, Jim Bernhardt. Jim, president of both the regional Boys & Girls Club and Christopher Columbus High, admired the driven, lanky fourteen-year-old, whom he calls a “good listener.” “I knew he couldn’t go to a private school,” says Bernhardt. “I paid his tuition. I wish that wouldn’t be publicized, because he doesn’t even know that today.”

  Seven years after Anthony Bosch graduated Columbus High, leaving barely a mark on the collective memory of the school’s baseball community, Alex Rodriguez enrolled at the top Catholic school near Coral Gables.

  And the funny thing is, he didn’t fare much better on the baseball team than Bosch had.

  His slick fielding had attracted attention at Gulliver Middle School. And under Eddie Rodriguez’s tutelage, he had held his own in travel team lineups full of kids several years older than him and already displaying disturbing amounts of facial hair. So as has been the case ever since, Alex Rodriguez’s arrival was preceded by hype. “We knew who he was,” says Kelvin Cabrera, who was in the same freshman class at Columbus as Rodriguez. “The word was, ‘Oh, there’s this kid that’s just ridiculous. He’s going to be really, really good. This is the guy.’”

  But when he got there, and tried out for a team that already included future major leaguer Mike Lowell, Rodriguez sure didn’t look like much. Placed up against high schoolers, he was tiny. “He was this skinny, scrawny kid,” says Luis “Wicho” Hernandez, a senior during Rodriguez’s freshman year and a starting second baseman on the team. “He hadn’t filled out yet.”

  Says another teammate: “He was so skinny he could hide behind a palm tree at Columbus.”

  In fact, it appeared momentarily as if Rodriguez might have a brighter future in basketball than baseball. “He was a very cerebral player,” says Brother Butch Staiano, the Columbus varsity basketball coach. Rodriguez made quick mastery of drawn-up plays. A rash of guard injuries led Staiano to put him on the varsity squad in his freshman year.

  His first game, he made several baskets with only one turnover in a close loss to vaunted Miami High, by far the best team in the county. Soon the beanpole in the navy-blue jersey was leading his team off the bench. “He was one of only three kids that I ever played on varsity as a freshman,” says Staiano. “I thought he had a shot at being a Division-I basketball player.”

  But Rodriguez, who idolized Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr., had his heart set on hardball. Blocking him at that position on the baseball varsity squad was another freshman, named Ryan Rodriguez. Unlike Alex, his nemesis had peaked early, filling out a six-foot, 170-pound frame by age twelve. The varsity baseball coach, Brother Herb Baker, a member of the Marist Brothers, a teaching order in the Roman Catholic church, was testy and hype-averse. He chose the solid, unremarkable Ryan over Alex, who often appeared to fancy himself already a big leaguer in his flashy fielding and the way he swaggered with bat in hand.

  “He told Alex that as long as Ryan Rodriguez was on the team,” Hernandez says of Baker, “Ryan would be the starting shortstop.”

  Says Tom Bernhardt, who went to Christopher Columbus with Rodriguez, of Baker: “He has a temper, and he says things he probably wishes he wouldn’t say.” Alex Rodriguez was relegated to junior varsity.

  The consensus was that Rodriguez was too small to be a potential major league ballplayer. During a shit-shooting session in Eddie Rodriguez’s office, the gruff coach declared that Rodriguez would be his third choice to have a big league future—behind J. D. Arteaga and Tom Bernhardt. “Well, you’re not strong enough,” Eddie reasoned bluntly when Alex asked why the coach discounted his chances. “If you get a lot stronger, maybe you’ll have an opportunity to get there.” They were words Alex apparently took to heart.

  By all accounts, Alex wasn’t wounded by the twin snubs of Herb Baker and Eddie Rodriguez. When his dad left, it appeared to have inoculated him against further daggers. Instead, he was motivated. “A certain part of Alex sees himself as the underdog,” says Hernandez. “So I don’t think he was hurt. I think his reaction was ‘Oh yeah? I’ll show you.’”

  Rodriguez called Baker’s bluff. Before his sophomore year, he followed J. D. Arteaga ten miles north, to Westminster Christian. His mom eked out his tuition through grants. If Columbus High had been the waitress’s son’s introduction to the haves, the tiny, elite Westminster was Rodriguez being steeped in the 1 percent. And the place was a baseball machine, boasting several players who went on to major league careers. The squad was led by Rich Hofman, the winning-obsessed coach whose team’s success always blew away what would be expected of a school with such a small student body.

  By his junior season, Alex grew his physique to match such a juggernaut squad. “It’s the last time the world saw Alex Rodriguez,” says one former Christopher Columbus teammate, “and not A-Rod.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  Mystery Elixirs, Speed, and Steroids

  Pittsburgh’s Recreation Park simmered with humidity as James “Pud” Galvin strolled to the mound to face the Boston Beaneaters. It was August 13, 1889, and the Beaneaters had tormented Galvin’s Alleghenys all season. The two teams had played eleven times and Boston had won every single contest.

  Galvin was one of the most accomplished players alive, but at thirty-two years old, the thousands of innings he’d wrung out of his roly-poly frame were starting to take a toll. He was on his way to topping three hundred innings for the year as usual, but he was giving up more runs than any other time in his career. Like most of the league, the Beaneaters weren’t quaking anymore at his pinpoint accuracy and crafty changeups.

  Tonight, though, as Galvin rocketed warm-up heaters at his catcher, he knew he had a secret weapon.

  With a square, chubby face and waxed black mustache, Galvin looked more like a jolly neighborhood butcher than a hurler. Fans around the country learned Galvin’s name in 1876, when he recorded the first-known perfect game against a professional squad out of Detroit. The feat came just a few hours after he pitched a no-hitter against another Michigan club.

  Like any great ballplayer, Galvin accumulated as many nicknames as plaudits. They called him “Pud” for the way his fastball turned hitters to pudding (or maybe for his pudgy body), “Gentle Jeems” for his laid-back attitude on the mound, and “Little Steam Engine” for the drive and power packed into his stout frame.

  Galvin had once won an astounding ninety-two games in two seasons for the Buffalo Bisons, while perfecting a pick-off move so good it caught opponents with “trousers at half mast,” according to a newspaper account of him picking off three base runners in one inning.

  But in a league where few pitchers made it past thirty years old, Galvin was elderly. He had been mediocre and worse in the last two seasons. The dog days of August had left the Little Steam Engine huffing and puffing down the tracks.

  That’s why, the day before the contest with the Beaneaters, Galvin had agreed to a curious proposition from the physicians at the nearby Western Pennsylvania Medical College. The doctors hoped to use the aging pitcher as a test subject for a fad blazing across the nation.

  The trend had exploded about a month and a half earlier across the Atlantic, when famed French physician Dr. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard addressed his contemporaries at Paris’s Société de Biologie with a report that soon dashed across wire services worldwide. The doctor calmly told a gruesome tale of chopping testicles off live dogs and guinea pigs, grinding the organs into a paste, refining it into liquid, and then shooting the vile concoction under his own skin. The result? The seventy-two-year-old visionary felt at least a decade younger with no ill effects.

  Doctors were skeptical, but Brown-Séquard was not a snake oil salesman—in fact, the Frenchman was among Europe’s best-known scientists. Stories about his new discovery soon appeared in every newspaper around the United States. Many described the elect
rifying results local physicians had found by copying his technique.

  Around the country, stories described “broken-down” war veterans shot up with the testicle extracts and suddenly performing feats of strength. “A man read a newspaper in twilight without spectacles, which he had not done for ten years,” reported a wire story out of Indianapolis, where dozens had begged for shots from their doctors. “Among the decrepit old men of the city, the elixir has become the rage.”

  More than a century before Bosch and his ilk promised vitality and youth in injections and chewables, America was in the throes of the original “anti-aging” craze. And ballplayers soon got involved.

  Galvin wasn’t quite a decrepit old man, but he was battered enough to try anything. So the day before facing the Beaneaters, he’d traveled to the medical college and taken a shot of Brown-Séquard’s elixir—probably made from sheep testicles—under the skin on his stomach.

  Pud could hardly have made a better advertisement for Brown-Séquard’s backers. With sheep testosterone coursing through his system, the rejuvenated hurler held the mighty Beaneaters to just five singles in nine innings. The career .201 hitter even smacked a run-scoring double and an RBI triple on the other side of the plate while leading the Alleghenys to a 9-0 thumping of Boston.

  “If there still be doubting Thomases who conceded no virtue in the elixir, they are respectfully referred to Galvin’s record in yesterday’s Boston-Pittsburgh game,” a Washington Post writer crowed in the next morning’s edition. “It is the best proof yet furnished of the value of the discovery.”

  Calling Pud Galvin baseball’s first juicer would be a stretch. Not long after the summer of Brown-Séquard mania faded to autumn, the “doubting Thomases” had shown that his testicle cocktails were medical nonsense. If anything had actually rejuvenated the aging Pud Galvin on the mound on that steamy summer day against the Boston Beaneaters, it was a raging case of the placebo effect.

  But Galvin’s tale does illustrate a deeper truth about our national pastime. Dating back to the earliest days of hurlers with fancy mustaches and nicknames like “Gentleman Jeems,” a win-at-all-costs undercurrent has always thrived in baseball’s shadows, driving players to ingest substances with no thought as to possible side effects.

  Baseball history is as replete with cheaters as heroes, and the two are often hard to tell apart. Pitchers who greased balls with Vaseline and slashed them with craftily hidden razors share space in Cooperstown with Ruth and Mantle, and when the cheaters got caught, fans have often been more likely to congratulate them for their cunning than to demand asterisks beside their names.

  “Galvin’s story, to me, reconfirmed that the game is fifty percent psychological and fifty percent physical,” says Roger Abrams, a longtime baseball labor arbitrator who discovered newspaper clips about Galvin’s injections. “It’s not how you play the game but whether you win, and that’s always been the case.”

  Galvin’s experiments are also an early moment in the long history of drugs coursing through hardball’s veins. Ballplayers’ chemical dependencies have reflected the trends of ordinary Americans, from the amphetamine boom to the rise of cocaine to the bodybuilding-fueled birth of steroid culture and “anti-aging” medicine. Throughout every era, a dysfunctional relationship among baseball’s owners, commissioners, and players union helped guarantee a permissive, consequence-free atmosphere that let each drug boom flourish until scandals—from coke busts to steroid rings—marred the game.

  “Baseball players will take anything,” pitcher Jim Bouton famously wrote. “If you had a pill that would guarantee a pitcher twenty wins but might take five years off his life, he’d take it.”

  Amphetamines may not have offered ballplayers quite that Mephistophelean a bargain, but they were the first performance-enhancing drug to find a widespread foothold in American sports.

  For Pud Galvin and the whole next generation of players, it didn’t matter how badly they wanted to enhance their performance through science because the science simply didn’t exist. Brown-Séquard’s wasn’t the only crap elixir catching the American imagination at the turn of the twentieth century. The FDA didn’t demand truth-in-advertising for drugs until 1906, and through Prohibition many top-selling “medicines” were simply alcohol-based potions that didn’t do much more than get users drunk. Even if Babe Ruth or the other Bronx Bombers had wanted to juice their swings, there was nothing on the market to build their bodies—illegally or not. (Though Ruth was an enthusiastic drunk at a time when alcohol was just as illegal as steroids are today.)

  Back in 1901, the first synthesized hormonal drug, Adrenalin, came on the market, and its commercial success inspired two decades of experimentation by chemists to find other useful hormones. The next big splash came in 1921 with insulin, which sparked even more research.

  Eight years later, a young chemist named Gordon Alles, who spent his days making mixtures of pollen and cat hair for a Los Angeles allergist, used his free time to experiment with a compound called beta-phenylisopropylamine. He’d hoped it might help asthma patients, but when he started injecting it himself he noticed some curious side effects: his blood pressure rose, his mind became more focused and overactive, and he was suffused with a “feeling of well-being.” Alles had invented synthetic amphetamines. (A few years later, Alles tweaked a few oxygen molecules and accidentally invented Ecstasy—that self-experiment proved even more eventful, including hallucinations of smoke filling the room.)

  Alles’s patents eventually became Benzedrine asthma inhalers, which beatniks discovered could be cracked open to get to the amphetamine-coated strips inside. Popping “bennies” was soon the rage, and even before then, the Nazis pioneered the drug’s performance-enhancing use by giving huge quantities to troops, creating fearless—and sometimes hallucinating—paratroopers and dive-bombers. The Allies soon followed suit and by war’s end, American troops were eating Benzedrine and Dexedrine, its successor, like candy.

  Among those soldiers were thousands of major leaguers. When they returned to the diamonds at the war’s end, they realized that the same pills that had helped them stay focused through the brutal campaign could do the same during their 154-game slogs.

  Other professional sports had already proven speed could help. Cyclists had been using amphetamines since the late ’30s to survive grueling continental races, and one British doctor at the 1948 Olympics described riders doping themselves “like racehorses” with Benzedrine.

  Though amphetamines were banned in college and high school athletics by the late ’50s, American pro leagues didn’t just allow them, they embraced them. Houston Ridge, a defensive lineman, later sued the NFL and described a San Diego Chargers locker room in the early ’60s where players were force-fed steroids and amphetamines to the point that he played through broken bones without realizing it. A 1972 doctoral thesis found that nearly all football pros took amphetamines, with an average dose almost seven times stronger than the recommended prescription.

  In baseball, pitcher Jim Brosnan was among the first to talk about his greenies habit. In The Long Season, his bestselling account of his 1959 tour with the Cardinals and Reds, he recalls interrogating a team doctor who ran out of his favorite brand. “Where’s my Dexamyl, Doc?” Brosnan asked. “How’m I going to get through the day?”

  By the time Hall of Famer Johnny Bench made the big leagues eight years later, he found his team’s physician was always fully stocked. “The trainers had them and nobody thought twice about passing them out,” Bench wrote in his own autobiography.

  Bench once watched a teammate pop greenies until “his eyes would get all googly and he wouldn’t answer a question, just stay as high as could be and pitch his head off.”

  “Pills were misused and not just by pitchers, and for that I blame the trainers who dispensed them as much as the players who took them,” Bench wrote. “In the pros, you look for any leg up and a lot of guys, especially pitchers facing a tough start, thought daps and dexys were that edge.�
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  Marvin Miller, the longtime head of the Players Association, recalled some clubs where players didn’t even have to go to the trainer for a boost. “In most locker rooms, most clubhouses, amphetamines—red ones, green ones, et cetera—were lying out there in the open, in a bowl, as if they were jelly beans,” he told reporters.

  The draw was simple. On a physical level, amphetamines gave a quick jolt of energy; mentally, they helped imbue a sense of power and strength. Of course, that combination could be a double-edged sword, and by the mid-1960s, the medical literature was becoming clear that speed was also highly addictive and could lead to hallucinations and paranoia.

  “Some of the guys have to take one just to get their hearts to start beating,” Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four, Plus Ball Five. “I’ve taken greenies, but I think [teammate] Darrell Brandon is right when he says that the trouble with them is that they make you feel so great that you think you’re really smoking the ball even when you’re not. They give you a false sense of security.”

  The same year Bouton’s book rattled MLB with its unsentimental portrait of life on the mound, baseball’s love affair with speed hit a road bump. In 1970, Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, the landmark bill that created five “schedules” for drugs based on their addictiveness and risks; amphetamines ended up Schedule II, the second-most–tightly controlled category.

  Faced with a federal crackdown and then with the newly created Drug Enforcement Administration, teams couldn’t openly pass around greenies as if they were Tic Tacs. But like every other front in the new War on Drugs, stricter laws didn’t erase appetites inside baseball’s clubhouses. Instead, players turned to their team physicians to procure their speed.