by Tim Elfrink
In a spasm of shortsightedness, the lab kept track of who each sample belonged to, and the players union failed to make sure those records were destroyed. In 2009, leaks to Sports Illustrated and the New York Times revealed four marquee names among the 104 dopers: Sammy Sosa, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, and Alex Rodriguez.
But even as baseball was conducting that anonymous first round of tests, the death blow was about to land to the freewheeling, steroid-shooting days that started with Jose Canseco and slowed with Ken Caminiti’s admissions.
It started with an IRS agent digging through garbage.
• • •
Agent Jeff Novitzky—lanky, bald, and singularly focused—had in February 2003 begun the lonely work of investigating a San Francisco laboratory by parsing through its trash looking for financial documents and other evidence. The place was called Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. Novitzky was working off a tip that Anderson—Barry Bonds’s trusted trainer—had been dealing steroids originating there.
The lab, better known by its abbreviation, BALCO, was the brainchild of a singular character named Victor Conte, a former funk bassist who’d reimagined himself as a cutting-edge nutritionist after buying a machine that could detect mineral deficiencies in blood. Conte had spent years insinuating himself into the competitive track and field circuits and trawling Internet bodybuilding forums. In public, he sold supplements and zinc pills. Behind the scenes he connected with cutting-edge steroid manufacturers and sold their discoveries to star athletes.
On December 3, 2003, Novitzky and dozens of federal agents raided BALCO and interrogated Conte. The case against the lab owner became a colossal embarrassment for Selig, Bonds, and scores of other top players.
A secret grand jury convened to consider charges against Conte. The proceedings quickly morphed into a sideshow of major leaguers parading into the courthouse to talk about their own drug habits and their ties to the steroid dealer. The testimony was supposed to be secret, but leaks galore later emerged.
With the story dominating sports pages and congressional pressure growing, the union finally caved to pressure, and baseball’s first punitive PED policy was born. Just before the 2005 season started, the new Joint Drug Treatment and Prevention Program made results public for any failed test. And instead of counseling, dopers would face escalating penalties: ten games for a first failed test, thirty for a second, and sixty for the third.
But that progress didn’t mean an end to MLB’s embarrassment. In the months after the new policy started, bombshells started exploding in bookstores. The first landed that spring, when Jose Canseco published Juiced, his memoir of steroid abuse. Before the book was published, the establishment lavished scorn on the ex-slugger. Tony LaRussa speculated that Canseco had only written it because he was broke. One early reviewer noted that he was left with the “overwhelming impression that Mr. Canseco is delusional.”
But a funny thing happened: The public read the book—in which Canseco named eight players as definite steroid users, including McGwire—and mostly believed him. Juiced became a bestseller.
Canseco’s confessions, combined with the ongoing Bonds saga, also spurred a tragicomic round of congressional hearings in March 2005, with House representatives grilling ballplayers over whether they’d used steroids. McGwire repeated, zen-like: “I’m not here to talk about the past,” and Rafael Palmeiro pointed at the panel, wagged his finger, and insisted, “I have never used steroids.” Five months later, he failed a test for stanozolol. Former hardball heroes were starting to resemble cigarette executives.
Just over a year later came Game of Shadows by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. The book exposed Bonds’s steroid-fueled transformation at the hands of Conte and MLB’s utter incompetence in preventing bodybuilding drugs from changing the game. Like Juiced, the book became a bestseller, and, in the court of public opinion, demolished Bonds’s claims that he’d assaulted the record books without chemical help.
Even with a legit—if belated—drug-testing policy in place, the hearings and the bestsellers forced the commissioner’s hand (though Selig claims he’s never actually perused the Canseco canon of literature). More important, with Congress threatening to set up an independent drug-testing organization to air out MLB’s dirty laundry, any lingering union resistance to anti-PED policies began to crumble.
“What baseball feared the most was that Congress would step in and legislate that they had to do drug testing. They desperately wanted to keep it in-house,” says Richard McLaren, a Canadian attorney who later coauthored the Mitchell Report. “The idea of MLB being under the jurisdiction of an independent body was impossible for them.”
So on March 30, 2006, Selig turned to Senator George Mitchell.
To say that Mitchell had worked through tricky conflicts before would be like saying Michael Jordan had hit a buzzer beater or two. Mitchell, who had turned down Bill Clinton’s appointment to the Supreme Court, was the guy you called for the world’s toughest circumstances. In 1998, he’d helped broker peace between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Three years later, he brought Palestinians and Israelis together for a landmark compromise. He’d even survived three years as the Democratic Senate’s majority leader while Republican George H. W. Bush held the White House.
But as 2006 edged toward summer, the seventy-two-year-old senator was starting to worry he’d been set up for epic failure. To start with, the union sent letters to every big leaguer warning that “any information provided could lead to discipline of you and/or others,” and even worse, “Senator Mitchell cannot promise that information you disclose will not be given to a federal or state prosecutor.” Although union chief Donald Fehr agreed to a brief interview with Mitchell, his chief operating officer, Gene Orza, wouldn’t do the same. The union even forbade representatives of the Montreal lab in charge of drug testing from talking to Mitchell.
But there were plenty of other sources. The story of drugs in baseball is one of millionaire athletes and even wealthier team owners, but it is also one of two-bit ancillary characters: a cocaine-distributing mascot and an extreme weight lifter and—in the case of Kirk Radomski—a former Mets batboy from the Bronx.
Mitchell’s investigation likely would have ended as a conspicuous flop if it wasn’t for the ex-batboy.
• • •
In December 2005, when Radomski opened the door of his Long Island home to Novitzky, armed with a search warrant, baseball’s accidental steroid kingpin knew immediately that this was not a scandal that was going away without players being named.
In a reversal of most narcotics investigations, Novitzky was more concerned with gathering evidence on the customers than on the dealer. “We’re not here to arrest you,” Radomski recalls Novitzky saying. “We just need to talk to you.”
To save his own hide, Radomski agreed to one of the more unique cooperation arrangements in history. Instead of building criminal cases against Radomski’s customers and associates, he would be helping to expose them in a senator’s effort to save baseball, with a promise that the agents would plead for leniency with the criminal courts afterward.
Unlike Victor Conte, Radomski wasn’t a guy who’d set out to build an empire around PEDs. He was just a neighborhood kid from the Bronx who, in 1985, had gotten a part-time job in the Mets clubhouse because the team’s equipment manager lived in a basement apartment around the corner.
When he got into bodybuilding—and regular steroid cycles—years later, players noticed his Schwarzenegger physique and started asking if he could get them a dose here and there.
When regular hookups like Mets outfielder David Segui moved to other teams, they passed along Radomski’s name as a guy who could be trusted. Starting around 1995, Radomski found himself fielding orders from everyone from superstar pitchers like Kevin Brown to average hitters like Rondell White. He’d simply mail them the stuff through USPS and get cash or a check in return.
“I wasn’t BALC
O, which was an entire laboratory set up to create designer supplements for players,” Radomski later wrote in his memoir, Bases Loaded. “I was one guy helping an occasional player on the side.”
Radomski didn’t consider pleading his innocence, and he soon accepted that he would have to betray his ballplayer friends. As part of his plea deal with the feds, Radomski agreed to bolster George Mitchell’s inquiry. After running into a brick wall with the players union and the testing labs, Mitchell had scheduled a short initial meeting with the clubhouse attendant and greeted him with suspicion. When Radomski handed over a list of everyone he’d sold drugs to, the senator scoffed, “This is pretty hard to believe.”
But when Radomski started to describe his dealings in undeniable detail, Mitchell canceled all his meetings for the day and spent almost nine hours with his new favorite witness. Though Radomski’s “spring cleaning” that October had destroyed what would have been valuable evidence, the senator had the former dealer get thousands of archived checks from his bank, showing that he was paid by MLB players including Mo Vaughn, David Justice, Eric Gagne, and dozens of others. Reams of phone records backed up his accounts.
Radomski led law-enforcement investigators to Brian McNamee, a strength-training coach for the Toronto Blue Jays and the New York Yankees who called himself a doctor despite only having a PhD from a school he later admitted was a diploma mill. Facing prosecution as a “subdistributor” for Radomski, McNamee struck his own deal, agreeing to dish his own dirt on some of the biggest names to surface in in Mitchell’s investigation.
McNamee told of Roger Clemens—who had put together one of the greatest pitching careers in major league history with the Boston Red Sox, Toronto Blue Jays, New York Yankees, and Houston Astros—joining baseball steroid don Jose Canseco for lunch at the notorious slugger’s home in Miami. More to the point, McNamee said under oath that he personally injected Clemens, Andy Pettitte—another Texan pitcher previously destined for the Hall of Fame—and Chuck Knoblauch, all of them Yankees teammates, with steroids and HGH. (Pettitte admitted to PED use and even implicated Clemens further. Clemens denied the accusations under oath and was tried—and ultimately acquitted—for perjury.)
Besides the Radomski/McNamee Venn diagram, Mitchell did have other sources that helped build his retrospective of the Steroid Era. Of particular help was a far-reaching federal case, this one centered on Florida’s booming anti-aging industry—the same industry where Tony Bosch was already setting up his own network.
An ambitious district attorney in Albany, New York, had decided to go after the online sites selling steroids and HGH, and his investigators zeroed in on an Orlando compounding lab called Signature Pharmacy and a ring of clinics that sold their drugs, most prominently a strip mall shop called Palm Beach Rejuvenation Center. They were all targeted in the cheekily named “Operation Which Doctor.”
It didn’t take investigators long to learn that the clinics were operating a ’roid-slinging racket, buoyed by a ring of doctors willing to sign their names to prescriptions for patients they’d never met. When agents raided Signature and a number of clinics, they carried out binders of patient records that later showed a host of professional athletes buying steroids and HGH, including Cardinals outfielder Rick Ankiel and Orioles outfielder Jay Gibbons.
Mitchell’s report landed on December 13, 2007, and the 409-page document named eighty-nine players tied to steroid use—the vast majority backed up by records from Radomski. “For more than a decade, there has been widespread illegal use of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing substances by players in Major League Baseball,” Mitchell’s report begins.
The report documents in glaring detail how Selig and the players union—distracted by their perpetual tug-of-war over power and by the short-term popularity gains sparked by the ever-growing use of steroids—had let PEDs take over their sport.
It described the negative effects of the boom, from an increase in teenage steroid use to the devastating health effects. And it included a stark list of recommendations for Selig, including increased testing and penalties and the creation of a new baseball investigative team to go after drug cheats and their suppliers.
After reviewing Operation Which Doctor, Mitchell was also alarmed enough to warn that “businesses that describe themselves as anti-aging or rejuvenation centers sell steroids or human growth hormone” to anyone, and that such businesses—particularly in Florida—should be an ongoing concern to baseball. That proved a prophetic warning.
• • •
As the Mitchell Report landed on the front pages of nearly every daily newspaper in America, there were very few baseball heroes left unscathed. Bonds and Clemens traded in their baseball uniforms for ill-fitting business suits as they fought twin perjury cases. Along with Pettitte, Palmeiro, McGwire, and a litany of other Steroid Era standouts, their Hall of Fame chances were likely shot.
But there was one remaining “seemingly clean” superstar, as Katie Couric put it. Three days after the Mitchell Report was released, 60 Minutes profiled the Yankees superstar who a couple of months earlier had sealed his title as baseball’s most irksome personality when he turned the World Series into an infomercial for his newly announced free agency.
For Alex Rodriguez, the appearance was part redemption tour, for that debacle and his poor playoff performance, and part victory lap. After all, the senator hadn’t exposed Rodriguez as a user of performance-enhancing drugs—even though he had secretly tested positive for steroids four years earlier and, as first revealed by this book, also secured permission to use testosterone in 2007, the same year as the Mitchell Report.
As if to downplay the “Stray-Rod” headlines, Rodriguez’s wife joined Couric’s segment as well. (Less than a year later, she filed for divorce, alleging infidelity and “other marital misconduct” before being silenced with a settlement that included a confidentiality agreement.) And Couric launched into a series of Mitchell-inspired questions that, in a couple of years, had body language analysts revisiting the segment to point out the telltale tics of dishonesty in his responses.
As millions watched on CBS, Rodriguez praised the commissioner he later fought tooth and nail. “I think Bud Selig and Major League Baseball have done a fine job of implementing some very strict rules,” said Rodriguez. “I mean, I got tested eight or nine times.”
“For the record,” Couric asked, “have you ever used steroids, human growth hormone, or any other performance-enhancing substance?”
Rodriguez responded: “No.” And he then told Couric that he had never been tempted to use steroids either.
“You never felt like, ‘This guy’s doing it, maybe I should look into this, too’?” Couric pressed.
“I’ve never felt overmatched on the baseball field,” Rodriguez said in a casual tone. “I’ve always been a very strong, dominant position, and I felt that if I did my work, since I’ve done since I was, you know, a rookie back in Seattle, I didn’t have a problem competing at any level.”
Rodriguez ducked his chin and puffed one cheek as if in brief rumination. “So . . . no.”
CHAPTER SIX
* * *
“Dr. G, You Are the Best!”
On February 17, 2009, Donald Hooton found his seat under a large wedding tent at George M. Steinbrenner Field, the New York Yankees’ spring training facility in Tampa, Florida.
Behind him were what Hooton later described as “the New York sharks”—sports writers, photographers, and videographers representing seemingly every media outlet in that city, as well as national news agencies.
Seated glumly to his left were New York Yankees baseball players both venerable and minor. Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Phil Coke, and other teammates were dressed in designer T-shirts and baggy jeans, resembling media interns who had forgotten their notepads, squeezed into seats beside the reporters they usually tried to avoid like arthroscopic surgery.
At a banquet table in front of the scrum, Alex
Rodriguez sat down between the Yankees’ manager, Joe Girardi, and general manager, Brian Cashman. He wore a black dress shirt untucked over khakis.
Ten days earlier, Sports Illustrated had published a cover story reporting that Rodriguez had failed the purportedly anonymous drug test in 2003. As Hooton now watched, Rodriguez implicated his cousin for bringing him a mysterious Dominican substance. He blamed his lack of a college education. He paused for thirty-seven seconds to perform an action somewhat resembling crying.
And he pointed at Hooton. “And I hope that kids would not make the same mistake that I made,” said Rodriguez, “and I hope to join Don Hooton, who has done some incredible things, who’s sitting right over here.”
Hooton’s seventeen-year-old son, Taylor, had committed suicide in 2003. His depression was linked to steroids he took to be a better high school baseball player. Since then, Don Hooton had made his life’s work publicizing the prevalence and dangers of kids using performance-enhancing substances. He had testified before Congress and met with Senator Mitchell. His quest had brought him to some remarkable places, none more “surreal,” he says, than front and center at the inaugural A-Rod Steroid Remorse Junket.
All of the scandals, gaffes, and poor playoff performances were just a dress rehearsal for the news story that forever altered A-Rod’s image.
Forget having his trade to the Red Sox blocked. Now Rodriguez actually had a legitimate reason to be pissed at the union. By not ensuring the anonymity or destruction of urine sample records in the 2003 test—which was meant only to reveal whether 5 percent of big leaguers were doping—federal agents raiding labs in California and Nevada had emerged with the samples of the 104 players who had tested dirty.
Though the list of dopers was under seal in federal court, sources had revealed to Sports Illustrated that Rodriguez had tested positive for testosterone and Primobolan, an expensive anabolic steroid not legally available in the United States. It was the first of three such stories to come in the next six months, with sources also revealing to the New York Times that Sammy Sosa, Manny Ramirez, and David Ortiz also failed that year’s test. The revelations appeared to be coming from attorneys familiar with the list, and outspoken then–Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen hoped the whole thing would just be made public: “Can somebody in baseball—we’re all begging, people—get that stupid list out and move on.”
