Inside Baseball: The Best of Tom Verducci (23 page)

Says Gossage, “People think I grew the Fu Manchu to intimidate people. That wasn’t it at all. I grew it to piss off [George] Steinbrenner.”

Some of the worst emotional meltdowns in baseball history involve closers. Dibble ripped off his jersey—buttons popping—as he walked off the mound at Shea Stadium after a blown save. Righetti heaved a baseball from the mound over the right centerfield wall of Exhibition Stadium in Toronto. A depressed Donnie Moore killed himself in 1989, and many acquaintances believe he did it in part because he never got over losing the ’86 American League Championship Series game that would have put the Angels in the World Series.

As a rookie with the Reds in 1984 John Franco watched how closers Tom Hume and Ted Power never seemed to change their demeanor, whether they saved a game or lost it. Still, when his time came to close games, Franco, flush with the raw emotions of youth, “busted up my share of locker rooms in my early years.” The more games he saved, though, the more Franco learned that those failures would be temporary. He learned, too, how to act like a closer. There was a certain way you had to stand and walk and carry yourself on the mound so that every bit of body language announced to the hitter, “I am supremely confident!”—especially during those times when Franco knew in his gut that it was a lie. Hitters are like dogs, he figured, who can sniff the slightest bit of fear in a person. If he thought his face gave off a faint hint of doubt, Franco would walk down the back of the mound and keep his back to home plate until, like an actor finding the soul of his character, he had fixed the most cocksure look he could muster.

“Never, ever let them see you sweat,” Franco says. That is the motto that has helped Franco, a 5′10″ sinkerballer who couldn’t make it as a starter because he would tire by the fifth or sixth inning, to 421 saves. That is also another bit of advice he has passed on to Benitez.

The education of Benitez continues, though Franco knows his successor as the Mets’ closer must figure out for himself how to handle the bad nights as well as the good. Even Franco, in his last years as the Mets’ closer, struggled sometimes with this core truth. As he drove from Shea Stadium to his Staten Island home after blowing a game, Franco would tune his car’s radio to the sports talk show station. He would listen to fans call in with pronouncements that Franco was finished. He was torturing himself. “I’d get so angry I’d want to drive off the Verrazano Bridge,” he says. “It’s bad enough that the game stays in your mind. Then you hear this stuff on the radio and think, Hey, so-and-so from Stony Brook, what the hell do you do for a living? What do you know?”

These days, as Franco drives over the Verrazano Bridge in the late hours of the night, he doesn’t think about busting through a guardrail. The radio is off. He pops in a CD of
The Three Tenors
or, perhaps, Andrea Bocelli. He has moved on to soothing music. He is a setup man now. The ninth inning, and all of its good and all of its bad, belongs to Benitez.

Postscript: No job in baseball (and few jobs in sports) generates as much mental stress as closing games, and no job so clearly inflicts torment in inverse proportion to the accompanying physical stress. Four months after this story ran, the baseball season ended on a blown save by the best in the business, Mariano Rivera. He stood at his locker immediately afterward and answered every question with grace and not the slightest sign of distress. It’s one reason why he’s prospered so long in a job that burns up so many.

JUNE 3, 2002

With this groundbreaking story, SI documented how the use of steroids and
other performance enhancers had become rampant in baseball, and how
players—and their reliance on drugs—had grown to alarming proportions

D
IAMONDBACKS RIGHTHANDER CURT SCHILLING
thinks twice before giving a teammate the traditional slap on the butt for a job well-done. “I’ll pat guys on the ass, and they’ll look at me and say, ‘Don’t hit me there, man. It hurts,’” Schilling says. “That’s because that’s where they shoot the steroid needles.”

The Rangers were packing their gear after the final game of a road series last year when a player accidentally knocked over a small carry bag by his locker. Several vials of steroids spilled out and rolled on the carpet. The player, hardly embarrassed or concerned, gave a slight chuckle and scooped them up. No one else in the room showed any surprise.

STEROID USE, which a decade ago was considered a taboo violated only by a few renegade sluggers, is now so rampant in baseball that even pitchers and wispy outfielders are juicing up—and talking openly among themselves about it. According to players, trainers and executives interviewed by S
PORTS
I
LLUSTRATED
over the last three months, the game has become a pharmacological trade show. What emerges from dozens of interviews is a portrait of baseball’s intensifying reliance on steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. These drugs include not only human growth hormone (hGH) but also an array of legal and illegal stimulants, ranging from amphetamines to Ritalin to ephedrine-laced dietary supplements, that many big leaguers pop to get a jolt of pregame energy and sharpen their focus. But it is the use of illegal steroids that is growing fastest and having a profound impact on the game.

The surest sign that steroids are gaining acceptance in baseball: the first public admission of steroid use—without remorse—by a prominent former player. Ken Caminiti, whose 15-year big league career ended after a stint with the Braves last season, revealed to SI that he won the 1996 National League Most Valuable Player award while on steroids he purchased from a pharmacy in Tijuana, Mexico. Spurred to try the drugs by concern over a shoulder injury in early ’96, Caminiti said that his steroid use improved his performance noticeably and became more sophisticated over the next five seasons. He told SI that he used steroids so heavily in ’96 that by the end of that season, his testicles shrank and retracted; doctors found that his body had virtually stopped producing its own testosterone and that his level of the hormone had fallen to 20% of normal. “It took four months to get my nuts to drop on their own,” he said of the period after he stopped taking the drugs.

Yet Caminiti, a recovering alcoholic and former drug user, defended his use of steroids and said he would not discourage others from taking them because they have become a widely accepted—even necessary—choice for ballplayers looking for a competitive edge and financial security. “I’ve made a ton of mistakes,” said Caminiti. “I don’t think using steroids is one of them.

“It’s no secret what’s going on in baseball. At least half the guys are using steroids. They talk about it. They joke about it with each other. The guys who want to protect themselves or their image by lying have that right. Me? I’m at the point in my career where I’ve done just about every bad thing you can do. I try to walk with my head up. I don’t have to hold my tongue. I don’t want to hurt teammates or friends. But I’ve got nothing to hide.

“If a young player were to ask me what to do,” Caminiti continued, “I’m not going to tell him it’s bad. Look at all the money in the game: 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 and make the money.”

ANABOLIC STEROIDS elevate the body’s testosterone level, increasing muscle mass without changes in diet or activity, though their effect is greatly enhanced in conjunction with proper nutrition and strength training. Steroids are illegal in the U.S. unless prescribed by a physician for medical conditions, such as AIDS and hypogonadism (an inability to produce enough testosterone). Studies have shown that the side effects from steroids can include heart and liver damage, persistent endocrine-system imbalance, elevated cholesterol levels, strokes, aggressive behavior and the dysfunction of genitalia. Doctors suspect that steroid use is a major factor in the recent increase in baseball injuries, especially severe injuries such as complete muscle tears.

Unlike the NFL and NBA, both of which ban and test for steroid use—the NHL does neither—Major League Baseball has no steroid policy or testing program for big leaguers. (Baseball does test minor league players, but violators are neither penalized nor required to undergo counseling.) Any such program would have to be collectively bargained with the Major League Baseball Players Association, which traditionally has resisted any form of drug testing but now faces a division in its membership over this issue. “Part of our task is to let a consensus emerge,” says Gene Orza, the associate general counsel for the players union.

“No one denies that it is a problem,” says commissioner Bud Selig. “It’s a problem we can and must deal with now, rather than years from now when the public says, ‘Why didn’t you do something about it?’ I’m very worried about this.”

But it is also true that fans have become more accepting of steroids as part of the game. Fourteen years ago the crowd at Fenway Park in Boston chided A’s outfielder Jose Canseco during the American League Championship Series with damning chants of “Ster-oids! Ster-oids!” The game had never before seen a physical marvel such as Canseco, a 240-pound hulk who could slug a baseball 500 feet and still be swift enough to steal 40 bases. Upon retiring last month after failing to catch on with a major league team, Canseco, while not admitting steroid use himself, said that steroids have “revolutionized” the game and that he would write a tell-all book blowing the lid off drug use in the majors. Canseco estimated that 85% of major leaguers use steroids.

Heavily muscled bodies like Canseco’s have now become so common that they no longer invite scorn. Players even find dark humor in steroid use. One American League outfielder, for instance, was known to be taking a steroid typically given by veterinarians to injured, ill or overworked horses and readily available in Latin America. An opposing player pointed to him and remarked, “He takes so much of that horse stuff that one day we’re going to look out in the outfield and he’s going to be grazing.”

STEROIDS HAVE helped create the greatest extended era of slugging the game has ever seen—and, not coincidentally, the highest rate of strikeouts in history. Power, the eye candy for the casual fan, is a common denominator among pitchers and hitters, as hurlers, too, juice up to boost the velocity of their pitches.

Schilling says that muscle-building drugs have transformed baseball into something of a freak show. “You sit there and look at some of these players and you know what’s going on,” he says. “Guys out there look like Mr. Potato Head, with a head and arms and six or seven body parts that just don’t look right. They don’t fit. I’m not sure how [steroid use] snuck in so quickly, but it’s become a prominent thing very quietly. It’s widely known in the game.

“We’re playing in an environment in the last decade that’s been tailored to produce offensive numbers anyway, with the smaller ballparks, the smaller strike zone and so forth,” Schilling continues. “When you add in steroids and strength training, you’re seeing records not just being broken but completely shattered.

“I know guys who use and don’t admit it because they think it means they don’t work hard. And I know plenty of guys now are mixing steroids with human growth hormone. Those guys are pretty obvious.”

If steroids are the cement of body construction, then human growth hormone is the rebar, taken in an attempt to strengthen joints so they can hold the added muscle mass produced by steroids. Human growth hormone can be detected only in specific blood tests, not the standard urine test used for other performance-enhancing drugs. It is prescribed to treat dwarfism in children, but it can also change a mature person’s body structure and facial characteristics. Players joke about the swollen heads, protruding brows and lantern jaws of hGH users. “And they talk like this,” Caminiti says, pushing his tongue to the front of his mouth and stammering, “because the size of their head changes.” One major league executive knows of a star player whose hat size has grown two sizes in his late 30s.