Every few years, some former player or investigative journalist offers to pull back the curtain on baseball's reality. Canseco's book does so with the strange blend of swagger and paranoia that just so happens to be among the classic symptoms of steroid poisoning. Better by far was journeyman pitcher Jim Bouton's 1970 classic, Ball Four, a screwy and appalling (and very entertaining) memoir of lechery, substance abuse and practical jokes involving bodily wastes.
Fans look behind the curtain, then promptly and cheerfully forget what we've seen. The facts never really change, though players today have enough money to employ the players of Bouton's day as chauffeurs and pool boys. In every age, most baseball players are just what you would expect from any group of spoiled boys who, from early adolescence, are removed from reality to live, usually in their underwear, in locker rooms and dugouts full of spoiled boys just like them. Thanks to the minor league system, the game of baseball sinks its hooks into future stars in high school and in some cases never lets them go.
(Tom Kurry)
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Of course, there are virtuous exceptions among the tens of thousands of men who have played the game. But the Roberto Clementes, the Felipe Alous, the Jeff Conines underscore by their rarity the general rule: No sport rivals baseball in its stifling of maturity. What Mad Magazine is to literature, what Howard Stern is to broadcasting, baseball is to athletics.
Even the oldest coaches squeeze their guts into a uniform and wedge their bunions into a pair of cleats for the rigorous labor of penciling names into a scorecard or answering the bullpen phone. Think about it. You don't see Joe Gibbs in shoulder pads. Eddie Jordan doesn't wear a singlet and shorts on the Wizards' bench. But a man like 74-year-old Don Zimmer, the gray and gelatinous Yankees coach who last played a game during the Johnson Administration (as an over-the-hill utility man for the hapless Senators), wears his uniform to work.
Baseball means never having to stifle a belch.
Most writers through the decades have chosen to help us forget this aspect of the game. Even the best: Roger Kahn's paean to the Brooklyn Dodgers immortalized men in their twenties and thirties as "The Boys of Summer." In John Updike's masterpiece of ballpark reportage, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," the kid in question is a 42-year-old man, Ted Williams. When these "boys," these "kids," behave like jerks, they will be rendered, in most outlets, as "feisty" or "temperamental." Borderline sociopaths are dubbed "mercurial," or -- if they've been indicted -- "controversial." The class clown is inevitably "colorful." And players who read books are called "professorial" (although you don't see this one much).
But now the game is caught up in a scandal far bigger than eternal adolescence, beyond even the power of euphemism to sweep away. An Olympic track and field coach in North Carolina became suspicious of a substance he saw being consumed by a number of athletes. He managed to acquire a syringeful and sent it off for testing; the substance turned out to be a synthetic steroid, THG.
Possessing steroids without a prescription has been illegal in the United States since 1991. So, on the trail of a possible crime, authorities visited the place where THG was manufactured, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO). The company's clients turned out to include -- among others -- the reigning home run king, Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants.
BALCO's owners, and their customers, have been hauled before a grand jury. Bonds reportedly acknowledged that he had been using THG, human growth hormone and other bodybuilding drugs for years -- but without ever asking what they were. His professed lack of curiosity may save Bonds, but in the meantime the cat's out of the bag for baseball, and Tabby's got 21-inch biceps.
"The challenge is not to find a top player who has used steroids. The challenge is to find a top player who hasn't," writes Canseco, who calls himself "The Chemist" and claims to have revolutionized the sport. During his mercurial and controversial career, Canseco bounced from club to club, and as he went, he says, he planted new crops of steroid-users like a hopped-up Johnny Appleseed. Judging from the numbers, the drugs worked wonders. During the five years Bonds was allegedly using undetectable steroids, his home-runs-per-season average rocketed from about 32 to about 52.
Pretty good improvement, given that the five years in question began when he was 35.
What's so bad about steroids? You know, besides the breasts, and the shrunken testicles, and the mental disorders and the occasional rare kidney tumor?
There's the tyranny of the drugs. When Bonds, one of the greatest players in history -- drugs or no drugs -- uses steroids and gets significantly better, then players who are trying to compete with him have little choice but to use them, too. And when these mid-range major leaguers start using, then minor league players have no choice but to join in. And when all the minor leaguers are consuming the drugs, then ambitious high school players will feel compelled to use them.
Or maybe the problem with steroids is that baseball is a finely calibrated game in which the quality of the athletes, the sophistication of the equipment and the dimensions of the field have maintained a remarkable harmony over the years. Everything improves, yet the game remains the same. The batter gets stronger and faster at the same rate that the fielder gets stronger and faster, and, as if by miracle, down through the decades the ground ball well-fielded at deep shortstop always arrives an eyeblink before the runner at first base. Steroids have screwed with the calibration of the game. What once was the gold standard of home run hitting -- 60 in a season -- is now just another good year. Through more than a century of major league baseball, the 60-homer season has been achieved just eight times, six of them in the past six years.
Relax and enjoy, Canseco enthuses. "Home runs are fun and exciting . . . easy for even the most casual fan to appreciate."
Major League Baseball recently announced a new testing regimen. Some experts are skeptical that it will do much good. One of the most-abused substances, human growth hormone, doesn't show up on the tests. But what are the alternatives? We can take Canseco's medical advice, based on many years of reading bodybuilding magazines, and start injecting steroids ourselves. ("Steroids, used correctly, will not only make you stronger and sexier, they will also make you healthier.") Or baseball could begin a whole new record book (Volume 2: The Biotech Era).
That's about it for options. You can't move the fences back, because the change would eventually make the outfields too big for three men to patrol.
Bonds, thanks to his extraordinary burst of late-career home runs, is closing in on one of the most storied records still in the books: the 755 career homers of Henry Aaron. Instead of hyping the chase for the record, however, Commissioner Selig tiptoed around the subject during the off-season like a ballerina in a minefield. The less said, apparently, the better.
THE MONEY END OF BASEBALL USED TO BE SO SIMPLE.
Back before the big cable TV deals, before the nouveau-retro stadiums with the tax-deductible luxury skyboxes, before the bobblehead dolls and the gourmet food courts, baseball revenue flowed mainly from tickets, junk food, soda and beer. A small piece of the pie went to players. The rest went into the owners' pockets.
Player salaries were predictable because the players were basically serfs -- beer-swilling, skirt-chasing serfs. They were vassals of the extraordinary power wielded by baseball's ownership cartel, which is exempt from the rules that govern the rest of us.
In 1922, an elderly Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared, in one of the least-convincing Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, that the interstate commerce clause does not apply to baseball. True, the teams went from state to state, and the wallets of the owners had begun to show a decidedly commercial bulge. "Exhibitions of base ball . . . are purely state affairs," Holmes wrote.
Liberated from federal antitrust laws, the owners were free to collude in ways that might make Mafia families blush. Every player, no matter how talented, was required to sign a "reserve" clause in his contract that had the potential to bind him to the same team forever.
Then came the union. Players discovered they could go on strike without jarring the planets from their courses.
In 1994, their strike scuttled the World Series. Not even Hitler and Tojo had halted the World Series.
Step by step and strike by strike, the players recast the business. They won free agency (the right to sell their services to the highest bidder). They won binding arbitration (the right to have a neutral party decide whether Mr. Owner's proposed raise is up to snuff).
