Cooperstown Confidential (20 page)

The world outside baseball learned more about the use of amphetamines (affectionately known as “greenies”) in Jim Bouton’s classic first-person diary
Ball Four.
Bouton was an All-Star pitcher for the New York Yankees. In 1964, aided by uppers, he led the American league in starts.

Bouton’s book, set in the 1969 season, was filled with stories about girl-chasing, pill-popping ballplayers. In one scene, he describes a conversation with teammate Don Mincher about another player who had just received a supply of five hundred amphetamine pills.

“That ought to last about a month,” Bouton says. He asks Mincher, who had played on several teams, how many players he thought used uppers. “Half? More?”

“Hell, a lot more than half,” Mincher says. “Just about the whole Baltimore team takes them. Most of the Tigers. Most of the guys on this club. And that’s just what I know for sure.”

Greenies weren’t banned from baseball. They weren’t even classified as a Schedule Two drug until 1971. And nobody in the baseball establishment cared what players in far-off outposts like Detroit and Baltimore were doing. What rattled baseball was the stories Bouton told about his days with the New York Yankees.

Bouton revealed, among other things, that Mickey Mantle was a boozer and womanizer. This wasn’t exactly a secret—Mantle later died of alcoholism—but baseball writers had covered up for him for years, attributing his frequent absences to “injuries” and dismissing his nocturnal antics as good-old-fashioned high spirits. Mantle was so offended by Bouton’s breach of
omerta
that he refused to speak to him again. The Yankees declared the pitcher persona non grata and banned him from old-timer games until 1998.

In truth, Bouton went easy on the Mick. “Once,” Bouton wrote, “Mantle got a vitamin shot from a quack who used an unsterile needle and almost missed a World Series with a bleeding abscess on his hip.” The real story was more interesting. The quack Mantle went to was Max Jacobson, known to his celebrity clientele as “Doctor Feelgood.” Jacobson, an immigrant from Germany, specialized in dispensing “vitamin injections,” a home-brewed serum of thirty to fifty milligrams of amphetamine mixed with multivitamins, steroids, enzymes, and solubilized placenta, bone marrow, and animal organ cells.

Jacobson’s practice was located on New York’s Upper East Side, but he also did more than thirty White House calls for President Kennedy. Dr. Feelgood even went on a road trip with JFK, to the Vienna summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961. Bobby Kennedy warned his brother that Jacobson’s medicine could be dangerous; nobody knew exactly what was in it. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss, it works,” the president told his younger brother.
*

After Dr. Feelgood returned from the summit, Mickey Mantle came to see him, based on a referral by the Yankees Hall of Fame broadcaster Mel Allen. We don’t know how often Jacobson shot Mantle up with his concoction, but on the one occasion Mantle got infected, it caused him to miss several games in September, putting him out of the home run record race with Roger Maris. If Jacobson’s needle had been clean, Mantle might have been the first to break Babe Ruth’s 60 in a season—with chemical assistance.

Did other Yankees (and their out-of-town friends) visit Dr. Feelgood? It’s impossible to say; nobody wrote about such things at the time. There is a hint in
Ball Four
, though: Bouton mentions that Mantle’s close friend and teammate, Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford, also bypassed the Yankees team physician and used outside doctors.

In 1985, a Pittsburgh grand jury uncovered widespread use of cocaine and other stimulants in Major League Baseball. The players who testified got immunity. All-Star outfielder Tim Raines of the Expos admitted that he snorted cocaine during games, kept a vial of it in his uniform pocket, and avoided sliding into bases feet-first to protect his dope. Keith Hernandez of the Mets estimated that 40 percent of major-league players were using, although he later said it was just a guess. Mets first baseman/outfielder John Milner testified under oath that Willie Mays kept a bottle of red liquid amphetamine in his locker, and said that Pirates Hall of Famer Willie Stargell was also using, accusations that both men denied.

Even Hank Aaron, the anti-Bonds, confessed in his autobiography that he scored a greenie to counter a slump. Aaron implied—but didn’t actually say—that he only used once. And Bill Clinton never inhaled.

Baseball players are young men in a stressful, sometimes dangerous profession. They perform in front of millions of critics. They have short careers that can be ended by a single injury. If there are drugs that make them better (or make them
believe
they are better), heal them quicker, or allow them to work out more effectively, why shouldn’t they use them?

A study conducted in 1987 found that 25 percent of the mem-bers of America’s fifty-one largest classical orchestras use Inderal to fight stage fright. Trial lawyers use beta blockers for similar reasons. Millions of ordinary people take Prozac or other antidepressants to function better at work and at home. Former presidential candidate Bob Dole did commercials for Viagra, a perfor mance enhancer if ever there was one.

Pi lots and surgeons stay sharp with “cognition enhancers” like Provigil. Even scientists do:
Nature
magazine recently reported that 20 percent of its readers used Ritalin, Provigil, or some other “smart pill.” “These are individuals that are actively participating in science or have a very active interest in science,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. “[They] are more educated about the potential negative consequences of taking a stimulant medication. That’s why it’s so strikingly surprising. This highlights how prevalent the use of these medications is as potential cognitive enhancers.”

Does anyone really think that baseball players are going to just say no when biochemists, trial lawyers, Broadway actors, fighter pilots, symphony conductors, and Bob Dole are using new drugs to solve old problems?

Yes, but what about testing? Why can’t baseball players be
forced
to eschew PEDs by a rigid, aggressive, intrusive regime imposed by MLB? I can think of at least two reasons why this isn’t going to happen. First, many baseball players are citizens. They have rights, including the right to protection against arbitrary searches. True, the Supreme Court ruled, de facto, in the Flood case in 1972 that Major League Baseball stands above the Constitution. But a lot has changed in America since then. Does baseball really want to go to court to find out how much? Baseball would lose—if it was lucky. But if it “won” and the courts agreed that a ballplayer, to earn a living, must turn in samples of his urine (and saliva and blood) on demand, what would happen then? There would be strikes, busts, suspensions, and convictions that would cast a shadow over everything else in baseball. The game would find itself drowning in its own bodily fluids. Does anyone believe that MLB—or the Hall of Fame—would be self-destructive enough to bring this on themselves?

Even more important: testing doesn’t actually work. “Because advances in biotechnology have outpaced advances in laboratory science, the detection of certain drugs or biologicals is today either impractical or impossible,” says Gary Wadler. “To wit, human growth hormone, erythropoietin and, most recently, IGF-1 . . . Those are some of the drugs we know. But what about those we don’t know . . .”

Hein Verbruggen, head of the International Cycling Federation, has suggested that “undetectable drugs are 90 percent of estimated doping cases.” In other words, most current performance-enhancing drugs cannot easily be detected. Some, like HGH, require a blood test to be found. This country doesn’t permit mandatory drug testing for lethally contagious blood diseases—and it’s going to impose them on baseball players?

The march of biochemical progress will continue. In testimony before Congress in the aftermath of the Mitchell Report, Don Fehr, head of the players’ union, talked about what progress might well look like. “Gene doping will make what we see now look quaint. And the reason that it will make it look quaint is that if it is done right—my understanding is that people are trying to develop it so it will be done in utero and you would be penalizing someone for something—something his parents did at the time he was still being carried by his mother. That is a very serious issue. And I don’t pretend to have a handle on the ethical or scientific or policy questions that relate to that. It is a very difficult issue.”

“Recombinant DNA technology (gene tic engineering) faces our society with problems unprecedented not only in the history of science but life on earth,” said the late Nobel Prize–winning biologist George Wald. What is “natural” when a baby is born with engineered athleticism? When do we go from A-Rod to Superman?

Here’s the great irony of the Hall of Fame steroids debate:
There is
no proof at all that steroids, or other PEDs, improve baseball per for-
mance in a way that changes the competitive balance of the game or
alters the mea sure of “greatness.”

I didn’t say there are no anecdotes, urban legends, theories, suppositions, or accusations. I’m talking about actual empirical data. There is no evidence that anabolic steroids or other chemicals help a hitter hit or a pitcher pitch. None.

What there is is a conviction in the court of public opinion. Exhibit A—the fact that Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds hit more home runs while taking substances than they had hit previously, and more than any other players had hit in the past—is interesting but not dispositive. McGwire’s 70 home runs in the 1998 season was a leap of about 9 percent over Roger Maris’s total. In 1920, Babe Ruth hit 29; the previous record was 24, held by Gavvy Cravath of the Phillies—roughly twice that differential. The next year, Ruth hit 54—more than double Cravath’s record. Is that proof that he was taking a chemical substance? Spitballs were outlawed in 1920 (although current spitballers were grandfathered in); and corked bats were being used. But still, that year Babe Ruth hit more homers than any other
team
except the Phillies. Sometimes transcendent perfor-mances are simply transcendent.

The argument that steroids helped Bonds and McGwire also completely misses the nature of baseball competition. In track, the contest is between the runner and other runners. In baseball, it is between a hitter and a pitcher. In other words, there are two sides to every statistic. If only one side has access to a (supposedly) magical potion, it would obviously change the balance. But what if both sides are using the same thing? Doesn’t that even things out? In fact, the Mitchell Report found a higher percentage of pitchers than position players using PEDs.

Jonathan R. Cole, a professor of sociology at Columbia, and Stephen M. Stigler, a professor of statistics at the University of Chicago, analyzed the per formance of the players named by the Mitchell Report. Of the twenty-three pitchers, sixteen had
higher
ERAs in the year they are suspected of first using drugs than they did the previous season. Among forty-eight hitters, home runs and batting average were actually lower in the “after” season than in the “before.” Maybe this means ste roid use actually hurts per formance on average. But that’s just speculation of course; it all is.

The authors concluded that there is “no example of a mediocre player breaking away from the middle of the pack and achieving stardom with the aid of drugs.”

Some see the fact that Bonds and Clemens improved with age as proof they were getting pharmaceutical help. Asked about Bonds by the
Cincinnati Enquirer
, Frank Robinson said, “You don’t get better as you get older.” What person out of his teenage years can argue with that? Still, Warren Spahn pitched almost 260 innings and went 23–7 at the age of forty-two. Ted Williams hit .388 when he was thirty-eight, led the American League again the following year, and finished his career at forty-one hitting .316—with a higher on-base percentage than he had as a twenty-year-old rookie phenom. Pitcher Early Wynn went 22–10 at the age of thirty-nine. Stan Musial had a better statistical year in 1962 than he did in 1942. Nolan Ryan struck out 203 batters at forty-four. If great geriatric per formance is a proof of chemical de pendency, what were these guys on?

Cole and Stigler pointed out that Babe Ruth hit 198 homers in the last six years of his twenty-two-year career, 28 percent of his career total of dingers. In the last six years of
his
career, Barry Bonds hit 195, or 26 percent. “There is no convincing way,” the study said, “to demonstrate that Bonds’ perfor mance owed to drugs more than Ruth’s did to his prodigious use of alcohol and tobacco.” Which, of course, was nothing.

It seems perverse and counterintuitive to say that steroids add
nothing
to baseball ability. If they didn’t make a difference, why would players use them? Can’t we see that guys like Bonds and Clemens get big and strong on steroids? “Bonds’s hat size went up two and a half inches,” Steve Garvey told me at Cooperstown. “That’s supposed to be natural growth?”

And yet, even antisteroid experts like Gary Wadler concede that it is impossible to quantify the possible advantages provided by anabolic steroids to baseball players. He believes that these drugs increase acceleration—runners get off their mark a little faster and bat swings might be quicker. And he is pretty sure that steroids can help players, especially pitchers, come back from injuries more quickly. (Baseball has a long tradition to this kind of thing. In Tom Verducci’s 1999
Sports Illustrated
profile of Sandy Koufax, he describes the great left-hander’s struggle with arthritis. Only drugs kept him going. “His elbow was shot full of cortisone several times a season,” Verducci reported. “His stomach was always queasy from the cocktail of (legal) anti-inflammatories he swallowed before and after games, which he once said made him ‘half-high’ on the mound.”) What Wadler is saying, essentially, is that anabolic steroids appear to be a therapeutic aid and they may help a player who trains with them to increase the speed of his first step or the velocity of his swing. They will not help a batter connect with a baseball, or a pitcher throw one with control and movement. Steroids
might
make a great player greater, but they will not send a mediocrity to Cooperstown. They are a factor—among many, many factors—in the changes since the 1890s. Steroids (in their present form, at least) are no more a historical “discontinuity” than the abolition of the spitball, night baseball, greenies, sabermet-rics, or racial integration.