NY Times Book Review: "Juicing the Game"

July 5, 2005
The Taint Baseball Couldn't Wish Away
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

In that magical summer and autumn of 1998, as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased each other in their pursuit of sports immortality, Major League Baseball's commissioner, Bud Selig, congratulated himself on overseeing "a renaissance" in the game. The two players' shattering of Roger Maris's home run record, along with the Yankees' gaudy 125-victory season, had re-ignited the interest of fans, even those disillusioned by the 1994 strike. Along with the boom in home runs, attendance skyrocketed, salaries soared and in the 10 years following the strike, 14 teams would move into new ballparks. In 1998, Howard Bryant writes in his compelling new book, "the sport that once seemed to lack the ability to market itself had now become the singular sports story of the year, even dwarfing the retirement of the great Michael Jordan."

It is a measure of how deeply the steroid scandal (which accelerated this year with the Congressional hearings and the publication of Jose Canseco's incendiary book "Juiced") has tarnished baseball's image that the folks who were once hailing the post-strike era as the greatest in the history of the sport are now trying to sweep that period under the rug. During the hearings before the House, Mark McGwire repeatedly declared: "I'm not here to talk about the past." And Selig now says of the era he once exulted in: "We need to move forward."

A sport that prides itself more than any other on tradition had allowed a problem to metastasize, and in doing so, had created an era in which statistics - the measuring rod of history - had become deeply suspect and some of the biggest names in the game were now being regarded by many as liars and cheats. It had allowed the use of steroids and performance-enhancing supplements to grow unchecked for more than a decade - to the point where comparisons were being made to the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

In "Juicing the Game," Mr. Bryant - a sports columnist for The Boston Herald and the author of an earlier book, "Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston" - provides a smart, savvy appraisal of the steroid scandal, looking at its genesis and evolution and its implications for the game. He asks why baseball leadership, from the commissioner's office to the Players Association, did so little for so long, and asks just what role the huge profits the game accrued during the supplement-and-steroid-assisted offensive boom played in shaping the sport's mindset of denial.

Mr. Bryant's assessment of baseball's leadership is damning. Of Selig, he writes: "He was quick to blame the Players Association, yet no one in the game was in a better public position to take a stand. He had the moral authority and he did not use it." And of the Players Association, he writes that even in the wake of congressional hearings and public pressure, the powerful union "remains the one element of the baseball establishment that does not feel that the drug scandal deserves the type of emergency management and revision that has engulfed baseball."

Mr. Bryant's book, which draws upon in-depth interviews with players, baseball executives, union leaders, team managers and journalists, is informed by a deep knowledge of baseball history. And it's valuable not only for its lucid, unvarnished account of the steroid scandal and its long-term consequences for the game, but also for putting that scandal in context with other conflicts like the decades-old clash between owners and players, the divisiveness fostered by the growing importance of television (which tends to showcase individual heroics over team efforts, home runs over less spectacular plays) and pitchers' complaints that the game's recent infatuation with offense has devalued their own craft.Indeed, the post-strike years would see what Mr. Bryant calls "a power surge the likes of which the game hadn't seen since the 1930's." And the big hits weren't just coming from big stars like McGwire, Sosa and Barry Bonds. In 1996, Brady Anderson, who had never hit more than 21 homers in a single season, would finish the year with 50.

In an effort to explain what increasingly seemed less like an anomaly than a trend, people advanced an assortment of reasons besides rising steroid use: reasons like smaller ballparks, a smaller strike zone, a tighter ball, expansion teams (which meant a dilution of the pitching ranks) and the growing use of videotape by hitters to zero in on the weaknesses and strengths of individual pitchers.

Tracing the roots of the steroid scandal, Mr. Bryant notes that weight training (looked down upon by many old-time baseball people, who argued that the game was a skill sport, not a power one) began to become more popular in the late 1960's and early 70's. By the mid-90's, he writes, creatine - a dietary supplement that helps an athlete work out harder and longer - was "as ubiquitous in major league clubhouses as tobacco."

It wasn't long before creatine gave way to androstenedione ("a dietary supplement whose creation was designed to mimic a steroid"), and "andro," in turn, gave way to testosterone "and a host of powerful anabolic substances." For struggling players, such drugs and supplements could mean the difference between obscurity in the minor leagues and big money in the big leagues. For elite players, they could mean the difference between good, solid numbers and history-making records, the difference between celebrity and immortality.

A crucial turning point occurred, Mr. Bryant suggests, during the 1998 home run chase, when McGwire acknowledged using andro, and Major League Baseball simply hoped the story would go away. The Players Association, Mr. Bryant writes, "reminded the press and public that androstenedione was perfectly legal," and the "commissioner's office hurriedly concurred": "Androstenedione may have been illegal in the Olympics. It may also have been illegal in the National Football League, and maybe its effects did resemble those of steroids, but andro was a legal supplement easily purchased at a local health store."

By dealing so passively with McGwire, a tacit message had been sent to players that the league was not going to actively clamp down on the drugs that were changing the game - a stance that ensured, in the opinion of one steroid expert, that the league would pay for its inaction with an even bigger scandal down the road.

That scandal would arrive in 2003 with a federal raid on the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, or Balco, a California lab that specialized in nutritional supplements and that had ties to Barry Bonds, Marion Jones and dozens of professional football players. In the wake of that raid, news reports citing leaked grand jury testimony said Jason Giambi had admitted he had consumed a wide array of performance-enhancing drugs including illegal anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, while Bonds had acknowledged that he had used the designer steroid THG, though he said he did not know what he was taking at the time.

By 2005, Mr. Bryant observes, many baseball officials were not celebrating Bonds, arguably the best player in history, but were "lamenting the notion that they were being handcuffed by him." Bonds, who owned the single-season home run record, who'd broken Ted Williams's single-season on-base record in 2002, and who became the first man to reach base more than 60 percent of the time over a full season in 2004, now stood, Mr. Bryant says, "as the symbol of the tainted era, of its bitter contradictions and great consequences." Near the end of this powerful and unsettling book, Mr. Bryant writes about the future: "No one, for or against, friend or foe, could ever discuss the greatest player of his generation or the greatest records in the sport without in turn discussing the drugs that contributed to them. Not only would the decade from 1994 to 2004 forever be associated with steroids, but so, too, would the record books."