The Mitchell Report and the Media Blame Game

By: D.K. Wilson

Former Cincinnati Reds and Florida Marlins trainer Larry Starr tried to warn owners about the burgeoning steroid abuse epidemic in Major League Baseball at the Winter Meetings. Bud Selig was there, but he did nothing. You would think the MLB commissioner might heed the words of a man intertwined with players’ health. The only problem with Selig was that he was not the commissioner - he owned the Milwaukee Brewers at the time.The year Starr sounded the clarion bell for MLB steroid abuse was 1988.

“Here’s the thing that really bothers me,” Starr said. “They sit there, meaning the commissioner’s office, Bud Selig and that group, and the players’ association, Don Fehr and that group… they sit there and say, ‘Well, now that we know that this happened we’re going to do something about it.’

“I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners’ group and the players’ association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, ‘Look, we need to do something about this. We’ve got a problem here if we don’t do something about it.’ That was in 1988.”

We are 19 years removed from those Winter Meetings, and all we have to show for the efforts of Starr and his peers is a report from a former senator with deep ties to the Boston Red Sox and Major League Baseball that is little more that a rehashing of already-published information.

With so many team trainers and physicians alerting owners to a problem with steroids, it seems unconscionable for both Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and the owners to turn a blind eye to something that could ruin the game. Ironically, baseball did have an excuse not to act 19 years ago. Just three years previous to Starr’s and others’ warnings about steroids abuse among MLB players, baseball had rid itself of difficulties with abuse of another kind. Though the controversy was reported as localized to Pittsburgh, its reach was league-wide.

Major League Baseball had just suffered through a cocaine epidemic that threatened to ravage the sport.

Pittsburgh Pirates players Dave Parker, Dale Berra, Rod Scurry, Lee Mazzilli, Lee Lacy, and John Milner - as well as Keith Hernandez, Tim Raines, and Lonnie Smith - were, in September 1985, summoned to appear before a Pittsburgh grand jury. Their testimony led to what became known as the Pittsburgh Drug Trials.

The grand jury heard astounding tales from the defendants. It was revealed that drug dealers frequented the Pirates’ clubhouse; Scurry testified that he left a game in the late innings to look for cocaine; Milner told of purchasing two grams of cocaine for $200 in the bathroom stalls at Three Rivers Stadium during a 1980 game against the Houston Astros. Even the Pirates’ mascot, Kevin Koch, was implicated for introducing players to a drug dealer and buying cocaine himself.

On February 28, 1986, then MLB Commissioner Ueberroth suspended 11 players for varying lengths of time for their involvement with cocaine. The players’ reinstatement was dependent upon successfully completing hundreds of hours of community service. Ueberroth even attempted to have the players submit to random drug testing upon their return to the game, but the players’ union blocked the implementation of what would have been the precursor to today’s drug testing policy.

A cocaine scandal followed by a steroids scandal would have been bad enough, but there was something else happening behind baseball’s public veil at the very time Starr and his peers were addressing baseball’s elite. National League President Bart Giamatti was meeting with Ueberroth, about Cincinnati Reds manager Peter Edward Rose and his gambling habits. In fact, just three months after the 1988 Winter Meetings (on February 21, 1989) Rose was called to the MLB offices in New York to officially speak with Ueberroth and Giamatti about gambling on baseball games. One month later, Ueberroth announced that Rose was under investigation. At the time it was left unsaid to the public, but we now know that John Dowd was investigating the gambling allegations against Rose, which would lead to his banishment from any affiliation with Major League Baseball.

With a recent cocaine scandal in their rearview mirrors and Rose in their immediate futures, it might appear to be understandable if baseball writers and sports journalists overlooked a burgeoning steroids epidemic. But there is a pervasive attitude in the writer’s milieu that smells of something wrong. This quote from a long Editor & Publisher article by Joe Strupp is indicative of this attitude among writers:

Other sportswriters who are less willing to admit mistakes claim that without a “smoking gun” or other proof, writing more than speculative stories or rumor-based columns was impossible.

“We should have suspected sooner, but there’s no way you can possibly know what is going on all the time,” says Bill Center, former president of the Baseball Writer’s Association of America and a 25-year baseball writer now with The San Diego Union-Tribune. “These guys are not going to be shooting up in the clubhouse. Revisionist history is easy.”

Longtime Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessey agrees with Center:

“It’s a hard area to pursue. I never saw any of it go on in front of me. It wasn’t something that jumped out.” He admits that the 1998 home run chase did not receive as much skepticism as it should have, but he notes that several acceptable factors contributed to the increased numbers, including smaller ballparks and more players swinging for the fences. “I don’t think it is fair to blame them,” he says of the beat writers.

Center and Shaughessey lose all credibility in the face of Starr and his peers’ plaintive wails about steroids, combined with the fact that Operation Equine, a federal investigation into steroid distribution, turned up the names of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire - among others - in 1992, just three years later. What makes their sentiment more insidious is that leading lights in the recent investigation of steroids - like T. J. Quinn, now of ESPN; and Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle - concur with these statements:

T.J. Quinn of New York’s Daily News, who covered the White Sox and Mets for different papers between 1996 and 2000, now covers a sports investigative beat that includes steroids. He says editors weren’t pushing for such stories in the past: “Maybe I should have had a little more of a critical eye, but I never had an editor ask me about it, or a fan. There was a real naivete about it.”

Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle… says the story might have been harder to get at. “It is so difficult to write about it because there is so much resistance in the audience to believe it,” he asserts. “But individual writers did some important stuff.”

Before being hired by ESPN, Quinn wrote for the New York Daily News and penned many steroid-related articles with Michael O’Keefe, who broke the Operation Equine story. Williams, as many people now know, partnered with Mark Fainaru-Wada to write the Barry Bonds book, “Game of Shadows.” With their combined experience in dealing with the subject of PEDs, how these two writers are capable of such statements is beyond comprehension.

However, those who espouse the, “We just blew it” tack, like ESPN’s Howard Bryant (who, when he was at the Boston Herald, penned the tome, “Juicing the Game“) are as culpable as Center, Shaughnessey, Quinn and Williams. Howard and those in his camp merely represent the other side of the coin of failing to pursue the evidence that was all but laid at their feet.

If you also throw in then-MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent’s 1991 official steroid policy, you have all the tools needed to investigate performance-enhancing drugs 16-19 years ago. In the face of this reality, the world of baseball and perhaps that of all sports looks nothing like what we see today.

Those sportswriters who have witnessed large chunks of the infiltration of steroids and growth hormone into the everyday lexicon of baseball players should be ashamed of the words they failed to write before 2004. Worse, they should be ashamed of most of what they have written since.

Very few of them have attacked the root causes of PED use, so let’s embark on that road.

Athletes are to blame for PED abuses

Of course this is so. Most athletes, given any opportunity to improve their performance and further their career, will leap at the chance to be better than their peers. As shown in the late June 2005 HBO Sports segment on steroids - “A Contrarian View,” hosted by Armen Keteyian - steroids, if used responsibly, have many benefits. And they run the gamut from the physical to the mental. When combined with weight training, steroids can make the athlete just that little bit stronger than the next person. Generally, they restore balance to the user. They provide the responsible user with a general feeling of well-being. They are said to make the user sleep better and sounder, and awaken more energized than the non-user.

Keteyian interviewed Dr. Norman Fost of the University of Wisconsin, who conducted and authored the only peer-reviewed study on steroids in healthy males over the age of 25. Fost told an astounded Keteyian that the testosterone level of every male over the age of about 33 drops up to 75% from age 25. Though presently men over 50 can readily use testosterone under a physician’s care, Fost recommended that the age limit for steroids to be dispensed by a doctor be reduced to 35.

In the interview following Fost’s, Keteyian spoke with and questioned Gary Wadler, the head of the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA). He asked Wadler if he knew how many peer-reviewed studies existed on steroids and healthy adult males. Wadler indicated that he had no idea. When Keteyian said there was only one study, and it advocated for steroid use, it was Wadler’s turn to be astounded. Wadler, though, was resolute in defending his idea that steroids, even used under a physician’s care, do not have benefits. He continued to believe, even in the face of Keteyian’s - through Dr. Fost - proof, that using steroids could be likened to playing “Russian roulette” with one’s health and well-being.

Keteyian is now steadfast in his new understanding of the steroid issue, and apologized for having been (through his seminal 1991 Sports Illustrated feature on the death of Lyle Alzado) a leader among sportswriters in creating anti-steroids hysteria.

Armed with information like Keteyian’s and similar anecdotes from body builders who have used steroids for decades (two of which Keteyian interviewed in his HBO segment), it only makes sense for athletes to use this drug to aid their performance.

The bottom line for professional athletes, though, is this: as children and teenagers, the difference in level and quality of athletic performance is about 85% physical and 15% mental. By the time athletes reach the professional ranks these statistics flip, and the difference is 85% mental and 15% physical (not counting for the rare freaks of nature that are almost unnatural in their physiques relative to the positions they play). Just think of what you can do as an athlete if you can separate yourself from your opponents and peers by, say, two to three percent more physically. It can be the difference between a second baseman batting .270 with 17 home runs, or batting .300 with 25 dingers. It is the difference between a two-year, five million dollar-a-year contract and a four-year, $32 million contract.

You do the math - then figure out if cycling on steroids and HGH isn’t worth the potential trouble.

Owners and GMs and the Players’ Union are to blame for PED abuses

This, too, is true.

General managers assess them. They research their backgrounds. They put their ear to the ground and listen for the scuttlebutt about players they want. When it comes to building a team, the GM must do all his homework on every player that might end up on the team he will field, because he must relay each tidbit, each crumb of information to the team’s owner.

After all, the owner is paying everyone’s salary.

This homework performed by the GM deals with what kind of commitment a player displays during a 162-game season, as well as how a player conducts himself during the offseason. GMs know if a player reported to spring training at 185 one season and 215 the next, and whether that newly added 30 pounds was fat, or muscle, or a combination of both. As does the team owner.

Additionally, GMs have at least a professional relationship with their managers. The clubhouse leader is used by the GM to take the temperature of the team throughout the inexorably long MLB season. Individual players, as well as teams, ebb and flow during the 162-game marathon. When a player surges at a time when his on-field history says he should be slumping, the GM is understandably happy with the unexpected bonus. But to enter this up-tick in play into his database, he must ask the manager if he can provide some rhyme or reason for this unforeseen boon in performance.

However, as we have seen, the answer might come with a price. Should the GM be informed through the manager or another of his many back-channel “sources” that the player found religion in a PED, he must make choices - one of these is not to tell MLB offices, but another is to inform the team owner. If there are contract negotiations looming, a revelation like this one is likely to make the following season’s talks with the player and his agent very interesting. The general manager and owner might want to use this knowledge to lowball the player, and perhaps save the organization valuable dollars that can be better spent on a sought-after free agent; or they might just want to save money to line their pockets.

The players’ union sees itself as protectors of morality. And morality can stand next to that which, to the untrained eye, might appear immoral; but is merely an extension of the rights we in society take for granted. Mandatory random drug testing at your home or place of work is an invasion of privacy, plain and simple… Unless you feel the threat of having to answer to Congress. Or unless the owners say they will stop paying your dues-payers and instruct the GMs to stop hiring your dues-payers.

So the union leaders know. They know well those who use and those who abuse PEDs, but telling the world the private lives of the men they represent is not the job of those who lead the union. Keeping the world from knowing is what they do, and do best.

Whatever the outcome of knowing, suffice it to say general managers and owners and union leaders know about PED use, but say nothing. For any of them to claim naivete or innocence after the fact is plainly bogus.

If everybody knew, then what?

This story can be spun so that blame can be placed almost anywhere. To this point, there have been commentaries by columnists blaming fans for the PED problem. If only fans demanded more of the players and the teams in their home towns. If fans held the players accountable by exhibiting their displeasure with the PED situation by not coming to games, then we could do something. Then writers would feel empowered enough to hold baseball over the fire and force change. If only the fans…

Huh?!

Baseball beat writers and baseball columnists are, on the whole, true believers in their game. They protect the game with every fiber of their beings because they believe in the game as much as they believe in what they do. They believe in the players and their power to cause millions of fans every year to spend a few hours at the park; that huge green expanse that is the field, peaceful and majestic until a pitched ball meets a catcher’s mitt with a smack! Or until pitched ball is met with the perfectly violent swing of a bat - then there is that unmistakable crack! In an instant, the peace and majesty is usurped by a cacophony of roars from tens of thousands of people who paid their way to bear witness to that moment…

That is what the baseball writer knows. One hundred and sixty-two games in 182 days, and baseball beat writers are there for all of them; every game every year, sometimes for over 30 years. In essence, they witness and play far more games in their heads than any baseball player ever will on the field (other than Cal Ripken). The Mitchell Report stung some of these writers so much that they asked their editors to be recused from covering the proceedings of Thursday, December 13, 2007 and its on-going aftermath.

It was as if they were being asked to cover a death in their own families.

That is why they can blame those who pay to watch the games, those who protect the rights of the players, those who manage the teams, those in management, those who own the teams - anyone but themselves. They can say, “we blew it,” but that is not enough.

The fans want to be entertained; they want that transcendent moment to carry them into the night and through their next day.

The union wants to protect the players, to keep their workplace from becoming a beacon of what they feel is oppression; employees without privacy, employees and not people.

The managers want to win - only. Winning means living another day. Every loss means they are one step closer to being tossed into the recycling bin with other unemployed managers.

The general managers want to successfully build successful teams. They, too, must win. There are only so many jobs for them, and their recycling bin contains only a few like them who will be allowed another opportunity to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of someone else’s money.

The owners want to make money. They want to win, surely, but their first priority is to make money.

The commissioner is an extension of the owners. He must ensure that the owners maximize their investments. The commissioner wants seats of stadiums to be filled, and the games to be exciting, and the players to be friendly, and the union to be quiet, and the general managers to build successful teams, and the agents not to ask for too much money for every player they represent, and for the players and managers to buy into the reality that their image can be their reality.

The only people who can stop this madness train, and humanize the game and everyone inside it, are baseball writers. The only people who can weave stories compelling enough that people will want to become educated about the game’s internal affairs and its public stances are baseball writers. These writers of baseball - a beautiful game - must be evangelists for truth if they want their game to survive and continue to thrive. The writers are the only people who can properly teach us how to pray at the altar that is the game…

There is an adage permanently affixed to the game of baseball. It is:

“Baseball is like church. Many attend but few understand.”

It is time for The Baseball Writers of America to cast aside their false idols, clothed in 30 different uniforms, and tell us from their hearts, with all the humanity they can muster, why we need to love their game.

Take us back to church and help us understand.

D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

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