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

by Tim Elfrink

  “There is no question that collusion was the turning point of the relationship between the owners and the players,” Fay Vincent later said. “It colors everything that is going on.”

  For all the animosity, steroid use simply wasn’t part of the contract debate.

  Even Ueberroth’s brief battles with the union after the Pittsburgh drug trials over a testing program were a distant memory. In 1991, soon after Biden’s Anabolic Steroid Control Act passed, Vincent had issued a terse two-page memo to every clubhouse headlined BASEBALL’S DRUG POLICY AND PREVENTION PROGRAM. Vincent warned that “there is no place for illegal drug use in baseball,” noting that “this prohibition applies to all illegal drugs and controlled substances, including steroids.” Players could face “expulsion” for ignoring the ban. But without drug tests, it was an empty rule. Most teams didn’t even bother posting the memo in locker rooms.

  On August 12, 1994, the last attempts at brokering a new labor deal broke down. The next day’s games were canceled, and baseball wasn’t resurrected until the following April. For the first time in the league’s history, the World Series was erased by labor unrest. Selig viewed the shutdown as a necessary evil to get the game back on a profitable footing. But he seriously underestimated two effects of his historic work stoppage.

  The first was public dismay. Canceling the World Series struck a chord among ordinary Americans who only saw millionaires squabbling with billionaires. The hapless Montreal Expos had the league’s top record, Matt Williams had forty-three homers in August and was threatening Maris’s single-season mark, and Tony Gwynn was batting near.400. All that potential history was dashed. Many fans swore they’d never buy another hot dog at the ballpark.

  Selig arrived at his modest lakefront office building every Monday to find bundles of venomous letters on his desk. The commissioner thought he had to defeat the union to save the game, but he hadn’t considered that his hard-line stance might do equal damage.

  The second danger was more subtle. With baseball officially canceled, players scattered. A few stars signed contracts to play in Japan. Others went back to off-season leagues in the Caribbean or Venezuela. But the vast majority went home to local gyms to stay in shape.

  By the mid-’90s, the steroid revolution that had gestated in Florida and California weight rooms had spread across the country. Baseball’s decades-long bias against weight lifting was dead and buried. How could managers tell hitters with a straight face that bulky muscles would hurt their swings when Jose Canseco was mashing forty homers a year with Popeye biceps and Mark McGwire was protecting him with a neck carved from redwood?

  Add the two facts together and the result was simple: Dozens of ballplayers, freed from any oversight from their team’s trainers and managers, hooked up with dealers at their local gyms during that ’94 strike and started blasting iron and shooting steroids.

  Although the truth was, MLB’s Steroid Era had already begun in earnest before the 1994 strike. The time off just accelerated and spread the change. No longer were Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire lone, crazily muscular hitters aiming for the third deck. One example was Lenny Dykstra. He had earned his nickname, “Nails,” with countless gritty plays: flying into walls, barreling through catchers, taking fastballs to the rib cage. Dykstra’s game was built on energy, grit, and an OK bat with little pop. When he was traded from the Mets to Philly in ’89, he hit only twenty-six home runs in four seasons.

  But like so many other players, his stats suddenly inflated with his body. For Dykstra, the shift started in 1991, when he met a convicted cocaine dealer named Jeff Scott during spring training in Clearwater, Florida. The two hooked up at a bar when Dykstra joked about Scott’s bulging physique. Soon enough, they were hitting strip clubs around Clearwater and then hitting the needle back at Scott’s condo. By 1993, Dykstra reported to camp hilariously bulked up before proceeding to break the MLB record for at-bats in a season, leading the league in hits, and even blasting nineteen homers. When the strike hit the next season, Dykstra reported to Florida as usual. Instead of fielding grounders and working on his bunt, though, he spent months in Clearwater shooting Deca-Durabolin with Scott. He was far from alone.

  • • •

  The statistical signs were clear that Canseco’s virus had become an epidemic. By the time the strike began, five players were on pace to finish with fifty homers: Williams, Barry Bonds, Frank Thomas, Jeff Bagwell, and Albert Belle. (A group, to be fair, that only included one man—Bonds—definitively tied to PED use.) In the years since 1961—that legendary summer when both Maris and Mantle had each launched more than fifty bombs—only three other players had ever topped that mark. Nineteen ninety-five brought even bigger numbers.

  If that evidence didn’t scream out to Selig that a chemically powered era was blossoming, baseball’s leadership soon got a much more direct warning.

  It happened inside the Boardroom, a smoky bar inside the FBI’s training academy at Quantico that was usually haunted by agents blowing off steam after a day at the shooting range.

  A few days after the strike began, Greg Stejskal was sipping a beer and watching a Monday Night Football game when a handful of MLB execs sidled up. They nodded at Stejskal, who had just finished giving the baseball suits one of his annual presentations about legal threats to professional sports. It was a talk that mostly focused on gambling rings.

  Operation Equine had recently wrapped up as one of the most successful drug stings in history, nabbing more than seventy convictions of high-level steroid dealers. Sitting at the bar, Stejskal began chatting up Kevin Hallinan, an NYPD veteran who headed up baseball’s security operations. They talked about prospects for the strike ending and the latest gambling cases the FBI had run into.

  Then the MLB exec posed Stejskal a fateful question. “He asked what I knew about steroids,” Stejskal says. “I said, ‘You have some big issues in baseball. One of our guys gave us a lot of information about selling steroids to Canseco.’”

  As baseball’s top cop, Stejskal thought, surely Hallinan was the man to see how booming illegal steroid distribution could be a problem in MLB.

  But Stejskal claims that Hallinan literally shrugged. “He said, ‘We’ve heard rumors, but with all the problems with the strike, we can’t get the players to agree to any testing. So we’re not sure what to do about it,’” Stejskal recalls. (Hallinan later released a statement that he didn’t recall meeting with Stejskal in Quantico or getting direct warnings about Canseco.)

  Stejskal was then the nation’s single leading expert on illegal steroid distribution. He had sources with firsthand knowledge about some of the game’s biggest stars doping. “I told him we should follow up,” Stejskal says.

  But he says that Hallinan drained his beer and wandered out of the bar without pressing the issue. The federal agent never heard from baseball’s security chief again.

  • • •

  A few months after players finally strapped on their cleats and resumed professional baseball in 1995, the steroid epidemic that had begun before the strike began spreading exponentially. The Los Angeles Times soon published one of the first reports hinting at how the drugs were fueling surging power numbers.

  Padres GM Randy Smith guessed that up to 20 percent of the league was juicing, and All-Stars Tony Gwynn and Frank Thomas spoke on the record about their suspicions. “It’s like the big secret we’re not supposed to talk about,” Gwynn said in the July 15 piece. “I’m standing there in the outfield when a guy comes up, and I’m thinking, ‘Hey, I wonder if this guy is on steroids.’”

  For decades, a forty home run season had been the benchmark of an extraordinary power hitter. As late as 1988 and 1989, only one player topped the mark each season. Suddenly, in ’95 four players all topped forty bombs. The next season was Alex Rodriguez’s rookie campaign, and his thirty-six home runs were only good enough to tie him for twenty-second in the major leagues as seventeen hitters notched forty homers. From 1997 through 2001, sixty-six hitters topp
ed that mark. Recording at least forty jacks had suddenly become the standard for any decent-slugging outfielder or first baseman.

  Two of those years saw eye-popping individual assaults on the record books. The summer of 1998 smashed its way into baseball history as the year that Mark McGwire—now a St. Louis Cardinal—and his rival on the Chicago Cubs, Sammy Sosa, riveted fans with a daily sprint toward Maris’s record.

  McGwire had been a steady power hitter since his days in Oakland, topping thirty homers every year except for two injury-shortened campaigns; but after getting traded to St. Louis in ’97, he’d gone bananas, ripping twenty-four homers in just fifty-one games.

  The Dominican outfielder Sosa, meanwhile, had broken into the league as a skinny speedster before suddenly erupting for regular thirty-homer campaigns starting in 1993; in ’98, he had thirty-three home runs by the All-Star break.

  As the two chased each other toward Maris’s mark that year, no one embraced the rivalry more than Selig. When McGwire nailed a laser-beam shot—against Sosa’s Cubs, of course—for the record-breaking homer number sixty-two, Selig watched alongside Cards legend Stan Musial.

  While casual fans debated potential reasons for the power surge—was it poor expansion-team pitching or too-tight baseballs?—Bud Selig didn’t overanalyze the phenomenon. Selig felt the electricity in the stadium when McGwire broke Maris’s record. As the giant redhead circled the basepaths, Musial had leaned over and whispered: “This is the beginning of a renaissance.” The commissioner knew the home run chase had been vital for the sport’s bottom line.

  The numbers didn’t lie. After he canceled the Series in ’94, fans stayed away in droves. Attendance in 1995 was down 20 percent. By ’97, the year before McGwire’s heroics, ticket sales were still down 10 percent. But as Mark and Sammy went for the record, millions came back. St. Louis topped three million fans in the seats. Tens of thousands showed up early on the road just to watch the sluggers rattling the upper decks in batting practice.

  Baseball mattered again, Selig knew, because of those home runs. So even when McGwire’s record year briefly brought PEDs into the conversation, Selig showed minimal interest. During the heart of the midsummer chase, an AP reporter had spotted a curious bottle in McGwire’s locker labeled ANDROSTENEDIONE. His August story revealed that “Andro” was a steroid precursor already banned in the Olympics and the NFL.

  Selig was so caught off guard he ran to his neighborhood Milwaukee pharmacy to see if Andro was on the shelves there. He promised a study into the health effects of such over-the-counter steroid precursors, but stuck up for McGwire. “I think what Mark McGwire has accomplished is so remarkable and he has handled it all so beautifully, we want to do everything we can to enjoy a great moment in baseball history,” he told reporters.

  Others went even further, attacking the AP for daring to touch the issue. Cards manager Tony LaRussa threatened to kick the wire service out of the clubhouse. Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy scolded the reporter that it was “no wonder the players loathe the media.”

  If Selig was sluggish to react to steroids, the players union was outright hostile to any move toward testing. Their mind-set had barely budged since the cocaine trials of the 1980s, with union president Donald Fehr and Gene Orza, his chief legal counsel, making it clear that Selig would face another strike if he pushed the issue. Orza believed steroids were no more dangerous than cigarettes and that any move to randomly test players would be “dictatorial.”

  But at the same time, new warnings about the dangers of steroids were piling up on Selig’s desk. Two years after McGwire’s record, a group of MLB team physicians met in Milwaukee to alert Selig that steroid abuse was causing an injury glut.

  The commissioner missed the presentation. (He had slipped on an icy sidewalk and hurt his leg.) But Dr. John Cantwell, the Braves’ team physician, says an “informal discussion” among the other doctors found agreement that serious injuries were on the rise and steroids were a likely culprit. A study had found that the number of players sidelined by injuries had climbed by more than 30 percent in the previous decade, and they were staying injured longer. As players huffed around the bases with forty extra pounds of muscle, hamstrings snapped like rubber bands and joints creaked like rusty gate hinges.

  What really scared the medics was the rising potential for devastating steroid-related injuries. They all remembered a night in May 1999 when a young Tampa Bay pitcher named Tony Saunders went into his delivery, threw a wild pitch, and then fell to the ground shrieking in agony, his hand immobile and clawlike, as a stunned stadium stared in silence. His humerus bone had shattered from the elbow all the way to the shoulder. Jose Canseco, who played for the Rays that year, claimed in his book that Saunders’s freak injury came after he’d overused steroids and HGH, a charge the pitcher denies.

  Even pitchers who weren’t on the juice had reason to worry. The year after Saunders’s arm exploded, Red Sox reliever Bryce Florie was working a September matchup with the Yankees when slugger Ryan Thompson sent a laser up the middle. Before Florie could react, the ball demolished his orbital bone, cheek, and nose. Florie had no proof that Thompson was on steroids, but like all pitchers, he wondered how long it would be until someone died from a steroid-powered line drive.

  “I’ve wondered whether that batter hit that ball harder than he was born to hit it, and whether that might have made a difference in milliseconds,” Florie later wrote.

  Cantwell and his colleagues wondered what would come first: union negotiations or the players’ safety. “I had recently come from the Olympics, where penalties were very severe and testing was serious,” says the Braves doctor. “I was very concerned that the players union was so strong they could prevent that from ever happening in baseball.”

  Faced with the mounting evidence, Selig in 2001 instituted a minor league drug-testing program. Because minor leaguers aren’t unionized, Selig did not have to negotiate the new program with Fehr and Orza. It was a halting step forward—the program had no penalties for dopers—but it did help answer any lingering doubts Selig had about the prevalence of steroid use. In that first season, more than one in ten minor leaguers failed tests.

  • • •

  Three years after McGwire and Sosa’s home run chase, neither Selig nor the public nor the brotherhood of baseball writers were quite as enthusiastic when Barry Bonds demolished the still-fresh record. Bonds had broken into the league as a blue-chip talent, the wiry, whip-fast son of All-Star Bobby Bonds. The younger Bonds had always had pop to go with his speed, cranking forty-six homers in 1993, his first year in San Francisco.

  But as Bonds watched McGwire earn the adulation of the country in 1998, something had cracked in his competitive psyche. He was still an elite player, but Bonds knew he’d never capture national headlines unless he inflated his physique, changed his game, and became an all-time masher. So between 1998 and his record-breaking 2001 campaign, Bonds added more than twenty-five pounds of pure muscle. The once-wiry outfielder developed a body that wouldn’t look out of place stuffed into a WWF costume. His forehead bulged with new angles. And home runs screamed off his bat like bottle rockets.

  On October 5, 2001, Bonds banged two home runs off the Dodgers to shatter McGwire’s single-season record as he watched amid a delirious home crowd. He hit another the next night to set a new all-time mark: seventy-three.

  Unlike Sosa and McGwire, Bonds was a notoriously sour character despised by many in the press and on opposing teams. The national vibe was muted, or even hostile, as Bonds demolished the record weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Even Selig must have perceived that fans were starting to view the absurd home run numbers as more troubling than exciting.

  Less than a year later, the dominoes that cascaded into the crashing exposure of baseball’s Steroid Era started tumbling.

  A few weeks after Opening Day 2002, a former league MVP named Ken Caminiti became the first star to openly admit his career had been fueled by steroids. Known
for his thick-browed glower and penchant for designer motorcycles, Caminiti had averaged just fourteen homers a year in his first seven full seasons. In 1996 he had suddenly erupted, belting forty out of the yard and hitting .326.

  Caminiti also struggled with alcohol and heroin addictions but, as he told Sports Illustrated, he didn’t regret riding steroids to that MVP award. “If a young player were to ask me what to do, I’m not going to tell him it’s bad,” the retired slugger told the magazine, while also admitting he’d abused the drugs so badly that his testicles had retreated into his body for almost four months in ’96. “You have a chance to set your family up, to get your daughter into a better school. . . . So I can’t say, ‘Don’t do it,’ not when the guy next to you is as big as a house and he’s going to take your job.”

  (Just two years later, the slugger, who had opened up to the magazine in part to confront his alcoholism, became the poster child for steroids’ dark side when he lost his battle with addiction and died at forty-one from a heroin and cocaine overdose.)

  Selig told Sports Illustrated he was “very worried” about the admission, which gave him the ammunition to push Fehr and the union to agree to a baby step toward testing: In 2003, every player would be anonymously screened once. If more than 5 percent failed, mandatory tests would start the next season.

  Players wouldn’t need a PhD to avoid a positive. Not only was HGH not being tested for, but everyone was alerted ahead of time to the plan. The San Francisco Chronicle also obtained a recording of Barry Bonds’s trainer, Greg Anderson, warning the slugger of the precise dates he was likely to get screened, suggesting many players had ample warning before their tests.

  Yet when the results came in, 104 players had failed out of 1,438, well above the 5 percent margin. Mandatory random drug testing was on in 2004, though for now, dopers would be kept anonymous and sent to counseling rather than face a ban. And that wasn’t the only lasting result of those “anonymous” 2003 tests.