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

by Tim Elfrink

  With both the commissioner’s office and the Players Association mute on drug use, the league was primed for embarrassment on a national scale. It wasn’t the last time.

  • • •

  In mid-November 1980, the Philadelphia Phillies organization was still riding an all-natural high.

  The Phils were one of the oldest franchises in baseball, dating their team back to 1883 when Pud Galvin was still in his prime. But the Phillies—once bought by a lumber baron who was banned for life midseason when he got caught gambling on the game—had spent nearly a century racking up dubious achievements: the most recorded losses of any team in American professional sports, for one, and also the only franchise among the original sixteen to have never won a World Series.

  Whatever curse lay over the Phillies—which the baseball gods hadn’t even blessed with a cute story like the Cubs’ billy goat episode—was shattered by a 1980 roster lousy with talent. At third base, Mike Schmidt roared to an MVP year with forty-eight home runs and 121 RBIs, while Steve Carlton won the Cy Young with a 24-9, 2.34 ERA season. The Phils even rode the thirty-nine-year-old Pete Rose for 185 hits.

  And on October 21, 1980, in Game Six of the World Series, the Phils dispatched the Kansas City Royals 4–1 in front of sixty-five thousand delirious fans. The Phillies, finally, were champions.

  Amid all the revelry, no one on the team paid much mind four weeks later when a physician named Dr. Patrick Mazza was arrested in Reading, a town an hour north of Philly. On November 21, the local district attorney announced the charges against Mazza, the team doctor for the Phillies’ local minor league affiliate. Between 1978 and 1980, prosecutors said, Mazza had illegally prescribed the amphetamines Dexamyl, Eskatrol, Dexedrine, and Preludin at least twenty-three times.

  Curiously, Mazza had gotten those drugs by filing false prescriptions in the names of Phillies stars and their wives, including Rose, Carlton, Larry Christenson, Randy Lerch, Larry Bowa, Tim McCarver, and Greg Luzinski. “It was possible that by using the names of well-known people, there would be little question by the druggists in the issuances of the prescriptions,” the local prosecutor speculated afterward.

  The truth turned out to be far more straightforward. The players all denied asking for the drugs, but prosecutors quickly realized they’d been duped. “They were made at the request of the ballplayers,” Mazza told the court, adding that Bowa said he needed “something to pick him up,” Rose “was having trouble with his weight,” and “Steve, being a moody person and a loner, needed something to pep him up.”

  (Mazza’s case was later dismissed. The authors of this book attempted to interview weight-loss patient Rose about this episode. Through a spokesperson, the all-time hit king Rose—banned for life from baseball for gambling on the sport—cited a “standing rule” demanding $500 per interview. The authors declined.)

  The Phillies’ arrangement was hardly unusual. All over MLB, players looked to discreet physicians to get the meds they wanted. When Bouton played for the Seattle Pilots in 1969, he wrote that greenies “are against club policy. So we get them from players on other teams who have friends who are doctors or friends who know where to get greenies. One of our lads is going to have a bunch of greenies mailed to him by some of the guys on the Red Sox.”

  And an investigation by Sports Illustrated’s Bil Gilbert found the 1968 World Series so chock-full of pharmacological help he called it “a matchup between Detroit and St. Louis druggists,” with amphetamines, barbiturates, antidepressants, and muscle relaxers all in heavy rotation.

  Whether Mazza’s treatments were standard fare or not, District Attorney LeRoy Zimmerman was apoplectic. “Unfortunately and regrettably,” he told the press, “there is nothing in the law in Pennsylvania to make what the Phillies did a crime. Although it may be unethical, improper, a lack of candor, a lack of cooperativeness and deplorable, there is no criminal violation of the perjury statute.”

  Mazza’s attorney, Emmanuel Dimitriou, was less verbose: “What you have here are a bunch of ballplayers who are world champions, but who are also champions of lying.”

  The case marked the first time in MLB history that a true performance-enhancing drug scandal had hit the newspapers, but there was hardly fiery outrage from fans. Greenies were baseball’s first PED, but unlike the chemicals to come, fans didn’t see them skewing the statistics that are such a holy link between the eras of America’s oldest sport.

  “The customers honestly don’t give a damn,” says Dr. Charles Yesalis, a Penn State professor who studies PEDs in professional sports, speaking about baseball’s drug scandals in general. “Have you ever seen big protests outside stadia? . . . During or after scandals, do TV ratings or attendance really drop?”

  Still, the case should have been a warning sign. For the first time, baseball’s lax internal policing had run up against a criminal trial and some of its biggest stars had been exposed. With a lack of outcry, though, the Phillies’ near-miss sparked no drug testing or stricter league-wide policies.

  • • •

  Three years after baseball’s speed habit made front-page news, another drug trend much more seriously scarred hardball’s reputation.

  Like the Mazza affair, the case that later became known as the Pittsburgh drug trials started with a character only tangentially tied to the pro baseball club. Former pitching prospect Kevin Koch was only twenty-five but was a long way from his playing days. He was notable for a different reason: Since 1979, he’d been the man inside the Pirate Parrot, Pittsburgh’s lime-green mascot.

  Between bouts of prancing around on the dugout roof, Koch had made friends with players, including superstar outfielder Dave Parker, with whom he’d bonded over a shared love of cocaine. Koch began supplying Parker and his teammates, and soon brought in a loose circle of friends who all helped keep the big leaguers well supplied with coke. They did it less for profit than for the chance to hang out with big leaguers; none were professional drug dealers.

  By 1984, it was far from secret that coke had been popularized in the major leagues in a big way. The previous fall, a sting had zeroed in on nearly a dozen Kansas City Royals players suspected of buying cocaine; in October, All-Star pitcher Vida Blue, outfielder Willie Wilson, first baseman Willie Aikens, and outfielder Jerry Martin all pleaded guilty to misdemeanor possession and were sentenced to ninety days in the pen.

  Then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn was worried enough that he visited the players’ dealer in prison to pump him for intel on how many others were hooked.

  The answer was many. Star first baseman Keith Hernandez later estimated that 40 percent of big leaguers used coke. The early ’80s were a perfect collision of a blossoming drug culture for baseball; as cocaine flowed in through Miami’s new class of Cuban-born gangsters, a generation of young players flush with cash and vulnerable to addiction spread the gospel of cocaine from one clubhouse to another.

  “My opinion is that it became an epidemic during the work stoppage in 1981, when you had a lot of young guys with too much time on their hands and some apprehension about their future,” says Sam Reich, the Pittsburgh defense attorney who represented many of the players involved.

  The Pittsburgh scandal started with a deeply troubled southpaw reliever named Rod Scurry, the Pirates’ former top draft pick who’d recorded a 1.74 ERA in 1982. Scurry’s performance fell off a cliff in 1983, though, his ERA jumping almost four points and his habit growing until he was doing bumps in the pen. On April 7, 1984, after a terrible spring training outing, Scurry binged in his hotel room and, hallucinating that snakes were swarming him, trashed the place.

  The incident forced the Pirates to send Scurry to rehab, but it also caught the eye of federal agents who’d been sniffing around drug use by big leaguers. They soon convinced Scurry to cooperate, and he led them to Koch and his friends, most prominently a caterer and coke dealer named Charlie Strong. (Koch, the Pirates mascot, later went undercover for the feds, trading in his fuzzy parrot costume for a wire taped to hi
s belly.)

  In early 1985—in a prelude to the BALCO steroid investigation to follow two decades later—a grand jury was marshaled in Pittsburgh and a stream of big leaguers amid tight secrecy marched into the courthouse to talk under oath about MLB’s cocaine habit. Reporters soon caught on, and a fevered speculation broke out that some of Pittsburgh’s biggest sports stars were about to be indicted.

  The public ate up the headlines as the story exploded out of Pennsylvania onto front pages nationwide. Amid the white flight and Reagan’s intensifying War on Drugs, the story confirmed many Americans’ worst fears: The national pastime had been infiltrated by cocaine.

  When the hammer finally dropped on May 30, Strong and six others were indicted, but unlike in the Kansas City case, no big leaguers were charged. This time, prosecutors went after the dealers, not the users. But if baseball’s new commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, breathed easier at the news, he wasn’t much relieved by the time the trial started a few months later.

  Led by Strong’s flamboyant attorney, Adam Renfroe, the cooperating players—who’d been given immunity—were grilled on the stand about their drug habits. National front-page stories detailed MLB’s raging coke problem. Hernandez admitted he’d used cocaine for about three years. Parker copped to introducing a dealer to the Pirates clubhouse and to arranging buys for his teammates. And All-Star Tim Raines even admitted that he’d kept a bottle of cocaine in his back pocket, wrapped in a batting glove, during games. To avoid breaking the vials during slides, he told the court, “I’d go in headfirst.”

  For all the headlines and moral outrage, cocaine wasn’t a performance-enhancing drug. In fact, coke addiction derailed many players, including Scurry, who washed out of the league in 1986 and died from his addiction six years later. But the drug trials—which ended with guilty verdicts for Strong and his codefendants—were an important point in MLB history.

  The case forced players to talk openly about how, more than a decade after the drugs were outlawed, amphetamines were still rampant in MLB. Dale Berra testified under oath that players openly popped greenies and that All-Star Willie Stargell had procured the drugs for his teammates, a charge Stargell emphatically denied.

  More important, the case exposed how the dysfunctional relationship between the commissioner’s office and the players union prevented any real attempts at drug reform. That same imbalance, in just a few years, ensured that another drug epidemic—this one with very real effects on players’ performances—also raged, unaddressed, through baseball’s clubhouses.

  “The problem is serious,” Bowie Kuhn had warned in early 1984. In June, three months before he retired, Kuhn and the union agreed to a new testing program; if a panel agreed there was “just cause,” they could order a player tested. But the provision was aimed exclusively at cocaine abuse, with no steroid or amphetamine testing, and it didn’t work: Almost no one was found to have “just cause.”

  So Ueberroth, after taking power, tried to institute a more serious policy after the Pittsburgh case. In September 1985, he sent a letter directly to every player asking them to submit to voluntary testing, pleading that “there’s a cloud hanging over baseball and it’s a cloud called drugs.”

  Union chief Donald Fehr—not for the last time—pushed back hard, calling the proposal “very possibly, if not probably” against labor law and advising players to dump Ueberroth’s letter in the trash. (Fehr had good reason to distrust the owners Ueberroth represented; that same off-season, they began secretly working to undermine free agency by colluding to underpay players.)

  In the end, Ueberroth suspended eleven over the Pittsburgh scandal but allowed most to return early in exchange for donating money to a drug rehab program. Just as with the Phillies’ amphetamine case, the mistrust between owners and players had ensured another missed chance to confront rampant drug use. The union’s refusal to allow testing while owners picked financial battles instead was a prelude of standoffs to come.

  • • •

  The first commercial synthetic steroid, Dianabol, hit American markets in the late ’50s. It was the brainchild of a Maryland physician named Dr. John “Montana Jack” Ziegler, a towering, six-foot-four man who’d been severely injured fighting in the Pacific Theater. His interest in muscle-building drugs had been piqued in 1954 when he accompanied the US weight-lifting squad to Europe and a Russian team doctor confided, after knocking down a few drinks, that his boys were doped up with synthetic testosterone.

  Zielger was a country doctor, but he had a side gig doing research for Ciba, a pharmaceutical company. He also lifted weights at York Barbell Company with Bob Hoffman, one of the first famous strongmen in America, and when he returned from Europe he began tinkering with testosterone formulas at Ciba and then testing them on his weight-lifting pals.

  Ciba bought his first formula, methandrostenolone, and released it in 1959 as a pink pill called Dianabol, which was experimentally marketed toward easing various symptoms in the elderly and burn victims. But off-label, with Ziegler’s guidance, weight lifters started popping Dianabol and pumping iron. Along with Ziegler’s next creation—an injectable steroid called Winstrol released in 1963—American athletics were changed forever.

  Ziegler came to deeply regret his role as the forefather of doping, refusing to continue helping bodybuilders when he realized that they were taking massive quantities of his drugs against his advice. “I wish to God now I’d never done it,” Ziegler later said. “I’d like to go back and take that whole chapter out of my life.” He died of heart disease, which he attributed in part to his own steroid use, at the age of sixty-three.

  By the mid-’60s, Ziegler’s inventions had revolutionized weight lifting and made significant inroads into professional football, where bulky muscle seemed to have the most immediate benefit. In his lawsuit, former defensive lineman Houston Ridge described how the 1963 San Diego Chargers forced players to take Diabanol twice a day during training camp, fining players $50 for not ’roiding with breakfast. (Ridge settled with the team for $265,000.)

  But most baseball players didn’t see the allure of steroids. Baseball was a sport obsessed with tradition, and nearly everyone was sure a ripped physique would ruin hitters’ swings and pitchers’ mechanics. Babe Ruth, after all, was hardly cut like a Greek god.

  Tom House saw that attitude firsthand in 1969. The cerebral lefty was two years out of USC and struggling to make an impact in triple A, so he asked his coach if he could start a weight-training program. “If I see you lifting, one of two things will happen: I’m going to kick your rear end, or you are going to the minor leagues,” House recalled his skipper saying.

  House wasn’t just one of the first to push back against that prevailing wisdom. He was also among the few players of his era to experiment with steroids. After ignoring his coach’s warning, he started weight training in Santa Monica, then the heart of steroid culture. A weight-lifting partner turned him on to Dianabol, and House ended up adding thirty pounds of muscle. “I pretty much popped everything,” he said. “We were doing steroids they wouldn’t give to horses.”

  House pitched for a decade for the Braves, the Red Sox, and the Mariners and is best remembered for catching Hank Aaron’s 715th homer in the Atlanta bullpen. He doesn’t credit steroids with getting him there, though. “I got bigger, but my fastball didn’t get any better,” he told ESPN. “The weight was too much for my frame and my right knee went out on me.”

  With those injury concerns and strong pressure not to get too bulky, few other players toyed with Dianabol or Winstrol. (Though they tried just about anything else. “I’ve tried a lot of other things through the years,” Jim Bouton wrote. “Like Butazolidin, which is what they give to horses. And DMSO—dimethylsulfoxide. . . . You rub it on with a plastic glove and as soon as it gets on your arm you can taste it in your mouth. It’s not available anymore, though. Word is it can blind you. I’ve also taken shots—Novocaine, cortisone and Xylocaine.”)

  By nearly all accounts, stero
ids hadn’t made serious inroads in MLB until after the Pittsburgh drug trials shined a light on the game’s coke habit. And just like so much of that nose candy, the path that anabolic steroids took to reach big league clubhouses leads right back to Miami.

  • • •

  Not big or talented enough to play varsity ball for Coral Park High School until his senior year, teenage Jose Canseco was drafted on the cheap by the Oakland Athletics. The team threw a $10,000 bonus at him partly because the scout who signed him was the father of a Coral Park classmate.

  In his first years of minor league ball, that pittance was looking like a ripoff. Canseco’s first memoir, Juiced, paints a languid portrait of the slugger before he found the substances that gave him a career, lifelong notoriety, and the title for his book.

  Canseco was a relatively puny 180 pounds of melancholy mass, neurotic about the fact that there were no Cubans in the big leagues and bizarrely apathetic. “Who was I to think that I was going to make it to Major League Baseball?” Canseco wondered. “I was kind of sleepwalking through games at that point.”

  It was an old Coral Park High buddy who gave him his first injection of liquid confidence. His mother had just died, Canseco said, energizing him to fulfill his vow to be “the best athlete in the world.” In Juiced, Canseco identified the Coral Park steroid connection only as “Al.” In an interview for this book, Canseco says that Al was a high school baseball player who was clearly juicing early in his amateur career. “I’d known him since he was thirteen or fourteen, and he was a big, strong guy even then,” says Canseco. “I knew he was using some kind of chemicals.”

  So when Canseco was sick of being a middling minor leaguer, he knew to call Al. They discussed steroids over pizza and then filed into Al’s room. Penned Canseco: “You actually feel the needle penetrating your buttock muscle that first time.”