The 1998 baseball season was a party of epic proportions, the equivalent of an all-nighter with the music cranked and every care in the world, or at least the anger and bitterness of the 1994-95 players' strike, easily forgotten. The 1998 Yankees, the winningest team of all time, were just part of the fun for Bud Selig, whose caretaking role as interim commissioner finally ended in midsummer. Bud Selig, who had owned the Milwaukee Brewers, was the ultimate insider.
It was an expansion year, with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks adding two more television markets, $260 million in expansion fees, and another 324 games to the inventory of moneymaking possibilities. Attendance jumped 12%, with almost seven and a half million more people paying their way into ballparks. The per-game major league average improved by 4% to 29,054, the best it had been since before the strike hit. The ratings for games televised by Fox improved by 11%t.
It was the year David Wells threw his perfect game, a rookie Cubs pitcher named Kerry Wood struck out a record-tying 20 batters and the age-defying Roger Clemens, while in the employ of the Toronto Blue Jays at that stage of his pitcher-for-hire phase, became the first pitcher to strike out 18 or more batters in a game for the third time.
Most of all, it was the year that belonged to hitters, who just happened to be growing cartoonishly large and hitting baseballs into parts of ballparks where no baseballs had gone before. It was a freak show and baseball loved it. It was the first season in history in which four players hit 50 home runs. Greg Vaughn and Ken Griffey Jr., half of the 50-plus bombers that year, were dwarfed in size, production and attention by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Both McGwire, with 70 home runs, and Sosa, with 66, blew away the record 61 home runs of Roger Maris that had stood as the standard for 37 years. America was captivated by the two huge men and the great home-run race. Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, praised McGwire and Sosa as the "home-run kings for working families in America." McGwire, with forearms the size of a grown man's neck, 17 inches around, was a gate attraction unto himself, a modern wonder of the world. Ballparks opened their gates early and called in concession staffs to clock in early just to accommodate the thousands of fans who wanted to see him take batting practice. On September 9, Fox scrapped the season premieres of its prime-time Tuesday night shows to televise the game in which McGwire would hit his record-breaking 62nd home run. More than 43 million people watched.
Baseball was awash in goodwill, national attention and money like it had not seen in many years. The Los Angeles Dodgers garishly flaunted such largesse after that season by giving Kevin Brown, a pitcher soon to turn 34 years old, an age when players traditionally had neared retirement as their bodies gave out, a seven-year contract worth $105 million, sweetening the deal with private jet service back and forth from his Georgia home.
That same winter, with the party raging at full throttle, one man rose up and basically announced the whole damn thing was a fraud. Rick Helling, a 27-year-old righthanded pitcher and the players' representative for the Texas Rangers, stood up at the winter meeting of the Executive Board of the Major League Baseball Players Association and made an announcement. He told his fellow union leaders that steroid use by ballplayers had grown rampant and was corrupting the game.
"There is this problem with steroids," Helling told them. "It's happening. It's real. And it's so prevalent that guys who aren't doing it are feeling pressure to do it because they're falling behind. It's not a level playing field. We've got to figure out a way to address it.
"It's a bigger deal than people think. It's noticeable enough that it's creating an uneven playing field. What really bothers me is that it's gotten so out of hand that guys are feeling pressure to do it. It's one thing to be a cheater, to be somebody who doesn't care whether it's right or wrong. But it's another thing when other guys feel like they have to do it just to keep up. And that's what's happening. And I don't feel like this is the right way to go."
What Helling had just done was the equivalent of turning up all the lights, clicking off the music and announcing the party was over. "He was the first guy," David Cone said, "who had the guts to stand up at a union meeting and say that in front of everybody and put pressure on it."
There was only one way for baseball to react to this kind of whistleblowing: Crank the music back up and keep the party rolling.
The union was having too much fun and making too much money to pay much attention to Helling's warning. It was far easier and financially prudent to ignore the issue, to assume that Helling was an alarmist prone to exaggerating, and to make sure everyone involved knew as little as possible about players injecting hard-core steroids into their asses. Don't ask, don't tell and don't care was the unwritten code of the day.
"What really bothered me was there were plenty of good guys, good people, who were feeling the pressure to cheat because it had become so prevalent," Helling said. "I firmly believed at the time that it was an unlevel playing field. I was trying to find a way to do something about it. Make it as fair of a game as possible. Play it the right way.
"When you see guys coming into spring training camp 30 pounds heavier than they ended the previous season, or they had gained four or fives miles an hour on their fastball, I mean, those things are not normal. My whole career was played in the peak of the steroids era. I saw guys throwing 87 miles an hour one year and 95 the next. Unfortunately, a lot of people, the press, the owners, the players, they turned the other cheek. I was like, 'Are you serious? Can't you see what's going on? Are you seriously going to let these guys get away with it?'
"Unfortunately, it turned out just the way I thought it would. It blew up in our face."
The union's executive board paid little attention to Helling. The owners were of a similar mindset. In fact, within a matter of days of Helling sounding an alarm that went unheeded, baseball provided official proof that steroids were not considered an urgent problem. At those same 1998 winter baseball meetings in Nashville, baseball's two medical directors, Dr. Robert Millman, who was appointed by the owners, and Dr. Joel Solomon, the designee of the players, delivered a presentation to baseball executives and physicians about the benefits of using testosterone. Angels general manager Bill Stoneman was so surprised at the tone of the presentation — basically, the message he heard was that no evidence exists that steroids were harmful — that he wondered why Major League Baseball even had allowed it.
Also in attendance was Dr. William Wilder, the physician for the Cleveland Indians. Wilder was so disturbed by the presentation that he wrote a memorandum to Indians general manager John Hart that whether testosterone increased muscle strength and endurance "begs the question of whether it should be used in athletics." Wilder also endorsed sending information to players about the "known and unknown data about performance-enhancing substances."
Wilder also spoke directly with Gene Orza of the players association. Orza advised him to hold off on any education about supplements until more information was available. Wilder was incredulous. Of Orza's request to postone any action, the doctor wrote, "That will be never! Orza and the Players Association want to do further study ... so nothing will be done."
Orza infamously revealed the players' position on steroids more blatantly in 2004, even long after the lid blew off the steroid epidemic in baseball. Speaking as part of a panel discussion in a public forum, Orza said, "Let's assume that [steroids] are a very bad thing to take. I have no doubt that they are not worse than cigarettes. But I would never say to the clubs as an individual who represents the interests of players, 'Gee, I guess by not allowing baseball to suspend and fine players for smoking cigarettes, I am not protecting their health.' "
Well, there you had it. No wonder nobody wanted to listen to Helling. The owners and players didn't even want to acknowledge that something harmful was going on. A presentation on the benefits of testosterone? Not worse than cigarettes? Helling, though, didn't give up. Each year he would make the same speech at the players association board meeting ... 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 ... and each year nothing would happen, except that more and more bodies grew unnaturally bigger and the game became twisted into a perversion, its nuances and subtleties blasted away by the naked obsession with power. Baseball was reduced to the lowest common denominator: to whack the ball farther or to heave it faster. Baseball's inability and unwillingness to act made silent partners of Selig and his traditional rivals at the union, leaders Don Fehr and Orza. Neither side had the smarts or the stomach to make steroids a front-burner public issue.
"Steve [Fehr] and Don came to me and said, 'Rick Helling is talking up steroids. Do you think there's a problem here?' " Cone said, referring to the Fehr brothers, including Steve, Cone's agent. "I said, 'Maybe we need to talk to guys, but I don't really see a problem.'"
The union, Helling said, did talk to some players about it, but the pitcher was wise enough not to expect anything to come of it.
"I understood their side of it, from a lawyer's side," Helling said. "Their thinking was, 'This isn't anything ownership has asked us for. It's never been an issue [in bargaining]. So why would we give them something without getting something in return. Why open this box?'
"I was active in the union. I know Don and Gene very well. Still to this day I talk to them. I understand. 'We don't want to go down that road if we don't have to.' Every year I brought it up. I'd say, 'This is more of a problem than you think.' Bud, Gene, Don ... they had an idea of what was going on. They didn't realize how widespread it was. As players, we kind of did know. Whether it was 50% or whatever, I can't say. It was more than people thought. It was more than Don, Gene and Bud thought. So the thinking was more, 'If ownership didn't ask for it, why volunteer it? It's probably not that big a deal.' "
Helling said he never saw a player inject steroids, but he heard all the clubhouse talk about what players were doing, as they would euphemistically put it, to "get an edge." Helling himself had a very clear understanding of what was cheating and what was not. He was born in Devils Lake, North Dakota, and became one of only 15 men born in that state to become a big leaguer. He attended Stanford University and made his major league debut with Texas only two years after the Rangers selected him with a second round pick in the 1992 draft. He pitched decently for both the Rangers and Marlins (he was once traded to Florida and back within 11 months) before committing himself to a strenuous conditioning and fitness program after the 1997 season. In 1998, his first full year as a starting pitcher, he won 20 games. He would pitch 12 seasons in the majors, compiling a record of 93-81 while earning more than $15 million.
"I can look back on my career, and whether it was good or bad, I know that everything I did, I did myself," Helling said. "I didn't do any form of cheating. It's unfortunate that there were a lot of people I knew who thought, 'I need to do something to keep up.' You hear the excuses of the guys who admitted it: 'I felt like I had to do it.' The way I looked at it, when I wasn't good enough to do it myself, it was time to move on. A lot of players didn't think like that. Guys always had an excuse of why they could do it.
"That's not what I was about. I can look back and know it was all me. That's the most important thing. I have my name and my reputation. Anybody who knows me knows there was no doubt that I played it the right way. And that's what I wanted to leave the game with. I couldn't care less if I made one million dollars or one hundred million dollars, whether I won one game or whether I won three hundred games. I was in it to be honest to myself and my teammates and to be a good father and husband. For me it was just the way I was brought up."
Rick Helling, by playing clean, was swimming against the tide.
No comments:
Post a Comment