by Tim Elfrink
The way Canseco tells it—and despite all his faults, his most outrageous statements concerning steroids have proven to be true—that was a historic needle prick. Canseco takes credit for the steroid problem that overcame Major League Baseball. By that lineage, the national pastime’s performance-enhancing substance problem can be traced back to a single Miami high school juicer named Al.
Canseco first started using steroids after the 1984 season, just as the Pittsburgh drug trials were about to expose cocaine’s endemic use in MLB locker rooms. He started with synthetic testosterone and Deca Derbol, an anabolic steroid, and spent every day in the weight room. By the time he showed up for spring training in 1985, he had transformed into a ripped and confident 205-pound power hitter.
He spent the next season proving that baseball’s conventional wisdom about steroids—that they made users too musclebound to play well—was one old wives’ tale seriously lacking in fact. Canseco hit forty-one home runs on three professional levels, his scorching bat forcing the A’s to take notice and promote him by September. “I can tell you now: Steroids were the key to it all,” wrote Canseco.
By the time Canseco got to the majors, contracts were booming thanks to the onset of free agency. The average salary had almost tripled in five years, to $372,000, and routine eight-figure deals were on the horizon. Canseco says that players were finally beginning to see their bodies as a lucrative investment. “People changed the way they looked at baseball,” Canseco says in an interview. “Instead of this unhealthy way players were living, they started lifting weights for the first time.”
And they all wanted what Jose Canseco was having. In 1986, he won Rookie of the Year, hitting thirty-three homers to go with 113 RBIs. In the next six seasons, he made five All-Star teams and won an MVP.
In 1987, a rookie named Mark McGwire joined Canseco on the A’s and knocked out forty-nine home runs—without any “chemical enhancement,” according to Canseco. But Canseco says McGwire soon became an avid student of his regimen, and by the next season, the “Bash Brothers” combined for seventy-four home runs, leading the team to the World Series.
All the while, Canseco claimed in his book’s most lasting image, they were in the clubhouse bathroom, shooting each other in the ass with steroids before games. Wrote Canseco: “The media dubbed us the Bash Brothers, but we were really the ‘Roids Boys.’”
It was a pattern Canseco would follow throughout his journeyman career, spreading the epidemic to new teams with each trade.
On the Texas Rangers, Canseco claims he shared his chemical wisdom and steroid regimens with superstars Rafael Palmeiro, Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez, and Juan Gonzalez. (All three deny they took steroids from Canseco, though Gonzalez is named in the Mitchell Report and Palmeiro later failed a drug test for steroids.) During a second tour with Oakland, Canseco says he and McGwire took the talented young Jason Giambi into the bathroom and helped turn him into a barely recognizable monster of a home run hitter.
By the early 1990s, Canseco’s secret was extremely badly kept. Players around the league called steroids a “Jose Canseco Milkshake,” and the star slugger’s dad had threatened to beat up a Washington Post columnist for openly speculating about Canseco’s substance use. When he’d get in a fight with a teammate, they’d scream, “You steroid-shooting motherfucker!”
With Canseco as the “Typhoid Mary” of steroids, the major leagues were about to embark on a record-destroying power surge so openly fraudulent that it demanded Congressional intervention.
CHAPTER THREE
* * *
License to Dope
The footage is shaky and shadowy, sound-tracked by players’ moms screaming their lungs out from tin bleachers, but Alex Rodriguez already cuts a big league figure. As he steps to home plate, decked out in the dark green high school uniform of Westminster Christian, he makes mud with his spit and then troughs it with his cleats before adopting a swaggering, even-legged stance. When he takes his position at short, he appears a grown man on a child-size field, chattering instructions as he punches his fist into his glove.
All kids on baseball diamonds adopt the tics and mannerisms of pro ballplayers. What separated Rodriguez was that everybody at the park knew he would be one very soon.
It was May 11, 1993, and a grainy VHS tape shot by a fan that day shows the teenage A-Rod in West Palm Beach, taking on the underdog home team Cardinal Newman High in a playoff game. The Major League Baseball draft was only a few weeks away, and on the day before this game, the round-faced Seattle Mariners scout who had become Rodriguez’s shadow put pen to paper in a report likely cementing the draft’s first pick.
“Better at seventeen now than all the superstars in baseball were when they were seniors in HS,” Roger Jongewaard wrote of Rodriguez, adding that watching him play imparted a “special feeling” and that the high schooler was “similar to [Derek] Jeter only bigger and better,” the first of many times that Rodriguez was compared—often with less favorable results—with the eventual Yankees captain.
Rodriguez had committed to University of Miami, but the Coral Gables institution was well aware that he wouldn’t enroll there if he signed with an MLB team. Rodriguez wasn’t the only future baseball pro in Westminster’s lineup that afternoon. Doug Mientkiewicz, Mickey Lopez, and Dan Perkins all joined him in the bigs, and four other Westminster teammates played in the minor leagues.
The kids on Cardinal Newman, meanwhile, grew up to peddle life insurance, practice corporate law, and sell medical equipment. But they popped in dusty recordings of this game—Alex Rodriguez’s last in high school, as it turned out—whenever in need of a morale boost.
They love the part where Rodriguez clobbers a seventh-inning pitch 450 feet over the left-field fence, but the Cardinal Newman coach is able to convince the $25-a-game umpires that the ball had bounced before leaving the field. The umps ruled it a ground-rule double instead, Rodriguez slamming his helmet to the field in anger. “It got out so fast that I don’t think the umpires saw it,” former coach Jack Kokinda says now, proving that some dishonesty is fair game in baseball, “and I didn’t have anything to lose.”
But the game’s ultimate highlight came in the bottom of the ninth, with a man on second and the score tied at four runs apiece. A future software developer hits a slow roller to the man-size teenage shortstop. Rodriguez, who has already committed two errors in the game, rears back wildly as he fields the ball and launches the throw high over the second baseman’s head. The ball bounces off leather and into the outfield. A Cardinal Newman base runner races home from second and stomps on the plate with the game’s winning run.
The video ends after the cameraperson, sitting in the stands, pans from the ebullient, arm-waving Cardinal Newman mob descending on home plate to Alex Rodriguez, now slumped in the grass near the lip of the infield. A teammate bends over him, trying in vain to console the million-dollar baby. “The best player in the country plays his worst game,” Westminster coach Richard Hofman eulogized afterward in a Miami Herald interview. “He’s human.”
• • •
Call some of Alex Rodriguez’s former high school teammates and ask them about young A-Rod, and what you’ll hear in response is silence, dial tones, and statements like this:
“Alex has a lot of connections. I’m out of baseball, but I still want to make a living.”
“Man, I like sleeping with both eyes closed. I don’t want to sleep with one eye open.”
The A-Rod cone of silence is not a recent development. Author Wayne Stewart encountered it back in the halcyon days of 2006, when reporting an inspirational text for young readers, Alex Rodriguez: A Biography. “It’s almost like omerta, the mafia code,” says Stewart, who has since come to believe his former subject “might be a sociopath.” (Stewart isn’t the only author to have found penetrating the psyche of Alex Rodriguez to be a difficult experience. After signing a deal in 2006 to write a biography of Rodriguez, revered author Richard Ben Cramer struggled for years to strin
g together even a few thousand words on his subject, who he told friends was a “completely vacuous person.” Cramer died in 2013 with the project abandoned, and his estate is being sued for the doomed A-Rod book advance.)
It’s not baseless paranoia that makes Rodriguez’s high school teammates cautious. Rodriguez is wealthy and litigious. And his former teammates know in which direction any conversation on Rodriguez’s high school years will inevitably stray—steroids.
It was sixteen years after Rodriguez’s graduation from Westminster when accusations that Rodriguez did steroids in high school were publicly aired in the unauthorized biography A-Rod, written by Selena Roberts. But even as he was still in that dark green high school uniform, the whispers about Rodriguez’s miraculous bloom from junior varsity shrimp to hulking number one draft pick had become an incessant buzz.
“Absolutely there was speculation” about whether teenage Rodriguez was juicing, says Cardinal Newman shortstop Steve Kokinda, whose father, Jack, coached the team. “The guy was enormous . . . Twenty years ago, there weren’t any guys like that in high school. He looked like a pro guy and we all looked like high school kids.”
After transferring to Westminster, Rodriguez was mediocre at the plate in his sophomore season. “He was pretty scrawny,” says Richard Hofman, the Westminster coach. As a young major leaguer, Rodriguez said that he’d like to be a civics teacher or a basketball coach. Between being benched at Columbus, Eddie Rodriguez’s frank assessment of his big league chances, and a weak showing in that first year at Westminster, by the end of his sophomore season, summers off and a whistle on a lanyard were looking more likely than a career in professional baseball.
But when he reported to school for his junior year, he had transformed himself in the weight room, according to Coach Hofman. He had packed on twenty-five pounds of muscle. By his senior season, he had gained ten more pounds, and at six-foot-three and nearly two hundred pounds, he had become the tightly coiled combination of power and speed that had one college scout saying, “If you were to sit down in front of a computer and say, ‘How would I construct the perfect shortstop?’ you’d put all the data in and then you would see Alex Rodriguez.”
His batting statistics boomed with the growth spurt. In his senior year, Rodriguez batted an otherworldly.505, almost doubling his sophomore mark of .270. In a high schooler’s brief season, he popped nine homers and stole thirty-five bases in thirty-five tries. Rodriguez was also Westminster’s starting quarterback, and later said it was pressure from football—not baseball—that drove him to bulk up in order to be able to bench press three hundred pounds.
Jealousy and innuendo about steroids trailed Westminster in its baseball games around the state, especially amid speculation that Rodriguez would rake in a million dollars or more in a signing bonus.
When Westminster demolished Florida Bible Christian School on its way to a state berth in 1992, Rodriguez’s junior season, the school had its own ties to performance-enhancing substances. But its dugout had nothing but suspicion and disdain for Rodriguez. “Everybody knew who he was,” says Florida Bible pitcher Anthony Cancio Bello of Rodriguez. “He was a showboat even back then. It felt like a man playing against kids. We were all thinking: There’s something wrong here.”
Florida Bible outfielder Roddy Barnes wasn’t as much suspicious as inspired. “He was a shrimp his sophomore year,” says Barnes. “His junior year you saw the major changes. From one year to the next you saw his body composition change, and he went from an average player to an elite player. He became the perfect sculpture. He was a five-tool player; he knew the only thing holding him back was his stature, and he fixed that.”
Barnes says that Rodriguez was one of those players whose sudden transformation made him consider procuring human growth hormone—which even in the early ’90s Barnes says was popular among ballplayers his age. “Otherwise you watch these kids get these big contracts, and you kick yourself in the ass, like: ‘Damn, I should have used HGH,’” says Barnes. (Now a fire captain, he stopped short of saying whether he did use HGH as a young ballplayer: “You can’t ask, because I work for the fire service.”)
In A-Rod, Roberts made the case that her subject’s high school growth spurt was due to steroid use. She implicated a man named Steve Caruso, an amateur baseball coach, softball player, and greyhound racer who got loads of canine steroids on the cheap. Roberts cited “baseball sources in Miami” who claimed that Caruso generously doled out steroids to young ballplayers, including Rodriguez.
Roberts quoted an associate of Caruso’s named Steve Ludt recalling that the young ballplayer and the steroid source were so close that he overheard a phone conversation in which Rodriguez invited Caruso to Seattle for his first game there.
Roberts also cited anonymous sources who said that Rodriguez juiced in high school with the knowledge of Coach Hofman. The coach, in an interview for this book, called Roberts’s reporting “fraudulent” and said Roberts was “an obscure writer trying to make a name for herself by trumping up claims and all this dirt . . . I have no knowledge, recollection, or even suspicions at that time with any of my athletes, to be honest with you. Dead point, dead issue, beating a dead horse.” (Roberts was criticized by at least one of her own colleagues for her reliance on anonymous sourcing, with New York Times columnist Murray Chass calling the book an “abomination.”) A-Rod’s own path to muscular domination may remain murky, but what’s undeniable is that at the time he was crushing his way to a record signing bonus, steroids in South Florida high schools were as commonplace as third-period calculus.
Florida officials knew, or should have known, since at least the late 1980s that steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs were a problem for high schoolers. In 1986, South Plantation High’s student newspaper, Sword and Shield, reported that 65 percent of students polled knew another kid on steroids. The teenage journalists’ research was, remarkably, the only study on the subject. But there were plenty of other warnings: A couple of years later, Frank Pelegri, a wrestling coach at Southwest High School—home to Dade County’s top grappling team—was fired after being accused of distributing steroids to the wrestlers.
Almost immediately, Pelegri—who admitted only that wrestlers had done steroids with his knowledge—found a new job. He was hired by athletic director Hofman to coach Westminster’s wrestling team, and is currently the coach at South Florida’s Monsignor Edward Pace High.
Then there was, in the early 1990s, a spate of high school weight lifters attacking one another at meets. School officials discovered the impetus for the rage. “We had several instances where kids on steroids went absolutely crazy,” says Don Reynolds, who spent seven years as a district director and vice president of the Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA), the state governing body.
Reynolds and other FHSAA officials discovered that students were commonly having steroids delivered by mail through companies that advertised in the backs of weight-lifting magazines. “Steroid use in the state of Florida was rampant,” says Don Reynolds. “I bet you there wasn’t a school in Florida that didn’t have some of that going on.”
Though Reynolds and the FHSAA pushed for Florida to become the first state to drug-test student athletes, that plan was met with predictable opposition. “I think it’s a bunch of crap, personally,” grumbled an Immokalee football coach. The American Civil Liberties Union wasn’t pleased with the idea of teenagers being coerced to pee in cups. And even Reynolds admits that the cost of testing a significant sample of students would have been prohibitive.
“There was so much opposition to it,” says Reynolds, and enforcing a piss test—as Olympic and Major League Baseball officials could tell him—has never been a simple matter. He knew from experience that the parents of student athletes tended to battle every punishment. The testing idea died.
Florida-based Dr. William Nathaniel Taylor Jr., then one of the country’s leading pioneers in steroid and HGH research, said that after writing a book on the sci
ence of steroids he was besieged by calls from parents who “wanted to make their son or daughter a blue chipper in athletics” and were looking for PED connections or prescriptions.
The pressure on kids to succeed in sports was overwhelming, and the laws against HGH in particular were toothless. In that regard, little has changed since the 1980s and ’90s. Despite all the suspicion and scrutiny cast on a teenage Alex Rodriguez, there likely never will be proof that he did steroids in high school. (There’s more than enough to go around in his later years, though.) But perhaps the most notable aspect of Rodriguez’s Westminster years—and most relevant to Tony Bosch’s empire to come—isn’t that he may have doped back then, but that he wouldn’t have been much of an abnormality if he had. He wasn’t the first or last high school athlete to face extreme athletic pressure in a state where adults looked the other way from teenage steroid use.
Back in 1985, Taylor described to a newspaper reporter what thirty years later might be described as the Bosch business model. “If I wanted to be not as ethical,” Taylor mused, “I could open up a sports medicine clinic on US 41 and inject every kid with steroids. I’d become a millionaire by the end of the year.”
• • •
On May 13, 1993, two days after Alex Rodriguez botched his last game as a high schooler, it was a gorgeous spring Friday afternoon a thousand miles up the East Coast. For the first time all year, people had broken out their short sleeves in Washington Heights, Rodriguez’s crime-scarred neighborhood of birth.
To New York Police Department detective Hugh Sinclair, it was a lovely day for a drug bust. Undercover in the filthy clothing of an addict with his pockets stuffed with NYPD drug-buy money, Sinclair strolled down a block crowded with multiple drug operations and picked his targets.
