M4D1: PEDs and Cultural Values
M4D1: PEDs and Cultural Values
Required
Module Notes: Social Science and Performance-Enhancing Drug Use
Dimeo, Paul (2014) Why Lance Armstrong? Historical Context and Key Turning Points in the ‘Cleaning Up’ of Professional Cycling. (Links to an external site.) International Journal of the History of Sport, 31(8), 951-968.
Grant, S. (2013, January 23). The Effect of Performance Enhancing Drug Use in Sports on American society (https://www.elitefts.com/education/training/results-the-effect-of-performance-enhancing-drug-use-in-sports-on-american-society/). EliteFTS.
Holt, S. (2008, January 11). Marion Jones’s fall from grace (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/athletics/7184067.stm). BBC News.
Solberg, J., & Ringer, R. (2011). Performance-Enhancing drug use in baseball: The impact of culture. (Links to an external site.)Ethics & Behavior, 21(2), 91-102.
Verducci, T., Yaeger, D., Dohrmann, G., Llosa, L. F., & Munson, L. (2002). Totally Juiced (Links to an external site.). Sports Illustrated, 96(23), 34.
Zimbalist, A. (2010). Circling the bases: Essays on the challenges and prospects of the sports industry. (Links to an external site.) Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, pp. 146-169.
Optional
Meyer, K. (2007). Steroids and Ethics in Baseball: Testing Apologia and Image Repair Theories. (Links to an external site.)Conference Papers — National Communication Association, 1.
Munthe, C. (2002). Selected champions: Making winners in the age of genetic technology. (Links to an external site.) In Tannsjo, T. and Tamburrini, C. eds. Values in Sport: Elitism, Nationalism, Gender Equality and the Scientific Manufacturing of Winners. Florence, KY: Routledge, pp. 217-230.
Ritchie, I. (2016). Cops and robbers? The roots of anti-doping policies in Olympic sport. (Links to an external site.) Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, 9(6), 1-16.
Verducci, T. (2012). To cheat or not to cheat (Links to an external site.). Sports Illustrated, 116(23), 38.
View:
Required
Ken Burns, K. (2010). Baseball, The Tenth Inning (Links to an external site.). All written segments and embedded videos from “Dark Days,” including “It’s Over There Commissioner” forward. (Links to an external site.) Washington, DC: WETA and The Tenth Inning Film Project, LLC. [Video file, 52:52].
Segment#1, “Introduction,” (Links to an external site.) from Steroids: Big muscles, bigger problems. (2011). In Films On Demand. Retrieved February 23, 2016. [Video file, 1:29 mins].
Segment #2, “Recollection of Steroid Use,” (Links to an external site.) from Steroids: Big muscles, bigger problems. (2011). In Films On Demand. Retrieved February 23, 2016. [Video file, 1:20 mins]. https://fod-infobase-com.vlib.excelsior.edu/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=43517&loid=115966
Optional
ESPN. (n.d.) 30 for 30: Marion Jones (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6g3ce6). [Video file, 54:15 mins].
Discuss:
M4D1: PEDs and Cultural Values
***TOTALLY JUICED***
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Special Report
Steroids in Baseball
With the use of steroids and other performance enhancers rampant, according to a former MVP and other sources, baseball players and their reliance on drugs have grown to alarming proportions
Arizona Diamondbacks 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 go, ‘Don’t hit me there, man. It hurts,'” Schilling says. “That’s because that’s where they shoot the steroid needles.”
The Texas 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 clubhouse 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 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 SI 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 Atlanta 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 Oakland 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 build 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.
Says Chad Curtis, an outfielder who retired last year after 10 seasons with six clubs, including three (1997 to ’99) with the Yankees, “When I was in New York, a player there told me that hGH was the next big thing, that that’s the road the game’s heading down next. Now you see guys whose facial features, jawbones and cheekbones change after they’re 30. Do they think that happens naturally? You go, ‘What happened to that guy?’ Then you’ll hear him say he worked out over the winter and put on 15 pounds of muscle. I’m sorry, working out is not going to change your facial features.”
“Here’s one easy way to tell,” says a veteran American League infielder who asked not to be identified. He grabbed a batting helmet and put it on the top of his head without pushing it down for the proper fit. “They can’t get their helmet to go all the way down. It sits up on their heads. You see it all the time. You see this new culture of young players coming in, caught up in the vanity of getting big. They’re bloated and ripped, and they shave their chests [to accentuate their physiques]. It’s gotten to the point where more guys use [steroids or hGH] than don’t use.”
The infielder says that last year he asked a star teammate, whom he suspected of steroid use, why he used. The star replied, “It’s a personal decision. It’s like taking aspirin. Some people choose to take it and some don’t. I respect somebody’s choice one way or the other.”
Clearly, the players who choose to use steroids do so because they believe the drugs work. “It’s still a hand-eye coordination game, but the difference [with steroids] is the ball is going to go a little farther,” Caminiti says. “Some of the balls that would go to the warning track will go out. That’s the difference.”
The improvement steroids have made in some players has been striking. Says one veteran National League general manager, “You might expect the B player to become an A player with steroids. But now you see the C player go to an A player. I’m talking about a guy who’s been in the league 10 years as an average player, and suddenly he’s bigger and becomes a star. That’s very troublesome.”
Another National League G.M. tells a story about an overweight, lumpy backup player who had kicked around the fringes of the major leagues. “We signed him, and two years later the guy looked like someone in a muscle magazine,” he says. The player, by then in his 30s, won a starting job for the first time and, with a decent season, earned a multiyear contract. He subsequently suffered a series of muscle tears and ruptures and was quickly out of baseball. “He was gone that fast,” the G.M. says. “But the contract probably set up him for life. Other guys see that.”
Says Texas lefthander Kenny Rogers, “Basically, steroids can jump you a level or two. The average player can become a star, and the star player can become a superstar, and the superstar? Forget it. He can do things we’ve never seen before. You take a guy who already has great hand-eye coordination and make him stronger, and without a doubt he’ll be better.”
Steroids might even help a player become an MVP.
Caminiti was playing third base for the San Diego Padres in a series against the Houston Astros in April 1996 when Derrick May hit a flare into short leftfield. Caminiti dived for the ball, landed hard on his left elbow and shoulder, and tore his rotator cuff. “For the next six or seven days I couldn’t lift my arm,” he says. “I played for a month and a half in pure pain.” Finally, he says, he decided to do something “to get me through the season.” Caminiti had heard of players taking steroids to help them through injuries. He knew where to go.
“When you play in San Diego, it’s easy to just drive into Mexico,” he says.
Anabolic steroids are readily available in parts of Latin America as an over-the-counter item at farmacias that, in Mexican border towns such as Tijuana, cater to an American trade. Caminiti says he purchased a steroid labeled testosterona “to get me through the second half of the season.” Then 33, he was playing in his 10th big league season. Never had he hit more than 26 home runs. He exceeded that in the second half alone, belting 28 homers after the All-Star break. He finished the year with 40 home runs, 130 RBIs (his previous best was 94) and a .326 batting average (24 points better than his previous high). He won the MVP award unanimously.
“There is a mental edge that comes with the injections, and it’s definitely something that gets you more intense,” Caminiti says. “The thing is, I didn’t do it to make me a better player. I did it because my body broke down.
“At first I felt like a cheater. But I looked around, and everybody was doing it. Now it’s not as black market as when I started. Back then you had to go and find it in Mexico or someplace. Now, it’s everywhere. It’s very easy to get.”
Steroids are taken in what users call “cycles”–several weeks of use followed by several weeks of nonuse to allow the body to recover. Caminiti, a novice, never stopped using during the 1996 season. He wound up injecting twice as much steroids as was considered normal for ballplayers at that time. “I was just experimenting on my own,” he says. “I did it wrong. My body shut down and stopped producing testosterone.”
After a slow start the next season, Caminiti says he returned to steroid use, this time with the help of a friend in California who supplied the drugs. He says he continued using at various times through his career, learning from his supplier how to do cycles. “I felt like a kid,” he says. “I’d be running the bases and think, Man, I’m fast! And I had never been fast. Steroids made me like that. The stronger you get, the more relaxed you get. You feel good. You just let it fly.
“If you don’t feel good, you try so hard to make something happen. You grip the bat harder and swing harder, and that’s when you tighten up. But you get that edge when you feel strong. That’s the way I felt, like I could just try to meet the ball and–wham!–it’s going to go 1,000 mph. Man, I felt good. I’d think, Damn, this pitcher’s in trouble, and I’d crush the ball 450 feet with almost no effort. It’s all about getting an edge.”
Though he kept using steroids–in 1998, he says, “I showed up at spring training as big as an ox”–Caminiti never again approached the statistics he generated in 1996, partly because he never played another season without going on the disabled list. His injuries were mostly muscular, including a strained hamstring, a strained quadriceps, a strained calf muscle and a ruptured tendon sheath in his wrist.
“I got really strong, really quick,” he says. “I pulled a lot of muscles. I broke down a lot. I’m still paying for it. My tendons and ligaments got all torn up. My muscles got too strong for my tendons and ligaments.”
Caminiti was released twice last season, by the Rangers and the Braves. Upon his second release, Caminiti, who had used cocaine in the past, says he drove into a notorious section of Houston, rolled down his window and asked a man on the street where he could score some coke. Four days later Caminiti woke up in a drug-strewn motel room wearing the same clothes. Police showed up, and he was arrested for cocaine possession. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years’ probation and 200 hours of community service.
Caminiti lives on the outskirts of Houston, where he is tested regularly for drugs, attends support meetings three times a week and meets with his probation officer once a month. He visits often with his estranged wife and three daughters, who live about 45 minutes from him. He spends his time working out, customizing vintage cars and riding his motorcycles. He suffers from bulging disks in his back, underwent surgery last month to remove bone fragments in his right ankle and is scheduled to have surgery on his right ankle and right foot this month. He eats dinner at a pancake house near his home so often that the cooks know just what he likes: 10 egg whites. He still appears close to his playing size of six feet, 200 pounds.
“I don’t think this puts an asterisk by my name,” he says, referring to his 239 homers and .272 career average. “I worked for everything I’ve got. I played the game hard, gave it everything I had. Nothing came easy. I could sit here and lie and try to make myself look like a better person, but I’m not going to do that. I take responsibility for what I’ve done. I’m guilty of some bad behavior. It’s embarrassing, some of the things I’ve done. But like I said, I don’t consider steroids to be one of them.”
That’s not to say that Caminiti hasn’t paid a price for his steroid use. He is now legally prescribed weekly shots of testosterone because of his body’s continuing inability to make the hormone in sufficient quantity. “My body’s not producing testosterone,” he says. “You know what that’s like? You get lethargic. You get depressed. It’s terrible.”
He is 5’11” and 190 pounds. He is not a home run hitter. Pete is a speedy minor league outfielder. He is also a steroid user who has been juicing up for five years, hoping all those needles in his buttocks will finally get him to the majors. His wife knows about it. Sometimes she’s the one who sticks the needle in.
“I’m not looking for size,” says Pete, who asked that his real name not be used. “I do it for my fast-twitch muscles. If I don’t feel good that week or if my hands don’t feel good, if they’re a little slow, I’ll take a shot or get on a cycle. It helps immediately. I notice the difference. My hands are quicker, so my bat is quicker.”
Pete began his steroid use through a familiar gateway: Latin America. He was playing winter ball in Venezuela in 1997 when, after hearing other players talk about the easy availability of the drugs, he decided to purchase a steroid, Winstrol, at a farmacia. A year later he was introduced to a female bodybuilder in California who made steroid runs to Mexico. Pete would place orders with her or an intermediary.
While making contacts in the steroid subculture, Pete eventually found a supplier, his current source, in the U.S. Pete places his orders by telephone with the supplier, who ships the steroids and needles to him in a FedEx package. A user of Winstrol and Sustanon, Pete says 10-week cycles of steroids cost him $300 to $400, or about $12 a shot. He says steroids obtained in Mexico are cheaper, but the quality of the foreign product is not as reliable.
“You pay a pretty good price for the U.S. stuff, but it’s worth it,” Pete says. “The guy I have runs a fair business. He’s got the needles, which are not always easy to get. And he cares about his guys. He’s not just about making money. He wants you to use the stuff right. He’s got just baseball players–a bunch of them.”
According to Pete, steroid use is discussed so openly among players that everyone knows who’s using and who’s not. He says one player can walk up to another in batting practice, bring the subject up, and tell by his answers whether he’s using. “There are code words or street names that everybody knows,” Pete says.
“Listen, this is not my choice. I’d rather not [use]. I discussed it with my wife, and she understands. When you want to get to a higher level of competition, it’s pretty obvious that it’s worth trying.”
Last year Pete tested positive for steroids under the program administered by Major League Baseball. So did several other players on his team. Here’s what happened to them: nothing.
Major League Baseball randomly tests minor leaguers during the season. The best prospects, those on the 40-man major league roster, cannot be tested because they fall under the protection of the collective bargaining agreement. (Pete was not a 40-man-roster player.) That exemption explains why players in the Arizona Fall League, which is filled with top prospects, are notorious, one scout says, for driving by the carload into Mexico to stock up on steroids for the winter.
According to two highly placed baseball sources, physicians for Major League Baseball reported at an internal meeting among doctors and trainers last December that 10% to 15% of the minor leaguers tested came up positive for steroids. The sources acknowledged that the number of users is probably significantly higher than that because baseball does not test in the off-season, when many players follow the traditional steroid training regimen: They shoot up in November, December and January, then get off steroids to start a four-week flexibility program before spring training. Two minor leaguers told SI that they attempt to cheat the tests by gulping water and diuretics when a test administrator arrives to take urine samples.
Virtually all of the 20 or so minor leaguers interviewed by SI described the use of steroids and other drugs (including amphetamines and marijuana) as rampant in the minors. They said that testing is spotty. A Class A player in the Kansas City Royals system says he was not tested at all last season. One former pitcher in the Detroit system even says, “Two coaches approached me and suggested I do steroids.” Two players say they easily obtained steroids from contacts at their local gyms. “When you were in college, everybody knew someone who could get them pot,” says one minor leaguer. “In baseball everyone knows someone who can get them steroids.”
Pete says the follow-up to his positive test was familiar to any minor leaguer on steroids: A club employee told him he had tested positive, warned him about the danger of steroids and sent him on his way.
When asked why baseball doesn’t crack down on steroid users, Pete replied, “I’ve got an easy answer for that. I’d say, You’ve set up a reward system where you’re paying people $1 million to put the ball into the seats. Well, I need help doing that.”
It may not be so easy in the future. Robert Manfred, baseball’s executive vice president for labor relations and human resources, says baseball will suspend and fine repeat minor league offenders this season. The Padres have administered their own three-strikes-and-you’re-out steroid policy for the past five years, though they do not test in the off-season, either. “The word’s out in our organization, but the trend we’re seeing is that most of the players who tested positive were in [Class] A ball,” says San Diego general manager Kevin Towers. “That tells me the problem is spreading fast. I think it’s prevalent in college and high school–even before we get them.”
Kenny Rogers made his major league pitching debut with the Rangers in 1989. He was taught in the early years of his career that the safest place to throw a pitch was the low-outside part of the plate. Nobody was going to hit that pitch out of the park, coaches told him. “It’s not true anymore,” Rogers says. “Now you’ve got 5’7″ guys built like weightlifters taking that down-and-away pitch and hitting it out to the opposite field. No one thinks it’s unusual because it happens all the time.”
And steroids are not just for sluggers anymore. They’re used by everyone, from erstwhile singles hitters to aging pitchers. Says Rogers, “Just look around. You’ve got guys in their late 30s, almost 40, who are throwing the ball 96 to 99, and they never threw that hard before in their lives. I’m sorry. That’s not natural evolution. Steroids are changing the game. You’ve got players who say, ‘All I want to do is hit,’ and you have pitchers who say, ‘All I want to do is throw 97. I don’t care if I walk [everyone].'” Steroids have helped even mediocre pitchers turn up the heat. “The biggest change I’ve seen in the game,” says a veteran major league infielder, “is seeing middle relievers come into the game throwing 91, 92 [mph]. Those guys used to be in the mid-80s or so. Now everybody is throwing gas, including the last guy in the bullpen.”
The changes in the game are also evident in the increasingly hulking physiques of the players. The average weight of an All-Star in 1991 was 199 pounds. Last year it was 211. “We’re kidding ourselves if we say this problem is not happening,” says Towers. “Look at the before and after shots, at the size of some of these players from the ’90s to now. It’s a joke.”
Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants is often cited as a player who dramatically altered his size and his game, growing from a lithe, 185-pound leadoff hitter into a 230-pound force who is one of the greatest home run hitters of all time. Bonds’s most dramatic size gains have come in the past four years, over which he has doubled his home run rate. Bonds, who insists he added muscle through diet and intense training, has issued several denials of rumors that he uses steroids, including one to a group of reporters in April in which he said, “You can test me and solve that problem [of rumors] real quick.”
But there is no testing in baseball, and everyone continues to speculate. What’s a little speculation and innuendo these days anyway? Mark McGwire was cheered in every park on his march to 70 home runs in 1998 by fans hardly concerned about his reluctant admission that he’d used androstendione, an over-the-counter supplement that reputedly has the muscle-building effects of steroids.
“If you polled the fans,” says former outfielder Curtis, “I think they’d tell you, ‘I don’t care about illegal steroids. I’d rather see a guy hit the ball a mile or throw it 105 miles an hour.'”
Says Caminiti, “They come to the arena to watch gladiators. Do they want to see a bunch of guys choking up on the bat against pitchers throwing 82 miles an hour or do they want to see the ball go 500 feet? They want to see warriors.”
It is a long way from 1988, when Canseco lost a prospective national endorsement deal with a major soft drink company because of unconfirmed suspicions that he used steroids. Many players, too, are showing more acceptance of steroids, especially when users and nonusers alike believe the health risks can be minimized if the drugs are used in proper doses. Today’s user, they claim, is more educated about steroid use than Caminiti in 1996 or NFL lineman Lyle Alzado, who died in 1992 at age 43 from brain cancer he believed was caused by grossly excessive steroid use.
Pete, the minor league steroid user, says, “I’ve talked to doctors. They’ve studied [steroids], and they know if you don’t abuse them, they can help you. As long as you don’t go crazy with them, like Alzado, you should be fine.”
Says Curtis, who estimates that 40% to 50% of major leaguers use steroids, “There are two things that might stop a person from using steroids: a moral obligation–they’re illegal–and a fear of the medical complications. I was 100 percent against the use of steroids. But I must tell you, I would not fear the medical side of it. I fully agree you can take them safely.”
Rogers also opposes steroid use on ethical grounds, but understands why it is so tempting. “My belief is that God gave you a certain amount of ability, and I don’t want to enhance it by doing something that is not natural and creates an unfair advantage. I’m critical of guys who do it,” he says. “On the other hand if I were 22 or 21 and trying to make it in baseball, I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t try something when I plainly see the benefits other guys are getting. I can’t say I’m 100 percent positive I wouldn’t resort to that.”
The first generation of ballplayers who have grown up in the steroid culture is only now arriving, biceps bulging, chests shaven and buttocks tender. The acceptance level of steroids in the game may very well continue rising until…until what? A labor deal that includes a comprehensive testing plan? Such a plan, unlikely as it is, given the union’s resistance, might deter some players, but even baseball officials concede that the minor league testing program in place gives players the green light to shoot up in the off-season. And athletes in other sports subject to testing have stayed one step ahead of enforcement with tactics such as using so-called “designer drugs,” steroids that are chemically altered to mask the unique signature of that drug that otherwise would show on a urine test.
So even with testing, will it take something much darker for steroids to fall from favor? Renowned sports orthopedist James Andrews recalled the impact of two prominent deaths on the drug culture in football. “Major League Baseball can’t continue to leave this door open,” says Andrews. “Steroids became a big deal in football after Lyle Alzado [died] and ephedrine became a big deal after Korey Stringer. You don’t want to see it get to that [in baseball] before someone says stop. But, unfortunately, that’s what it seems to take to wake people up.”
Rogers has a nightmare about how it might end, and that is why he does not always throw his fastball as hard as he can. It is the thought of some beast pumped up on steroids whacking a line drive off his head. “We’re the closest ones to the hitter,” he says of the men on the mound. “I don’t want the ball coming back at me any faster. It’s a wonder it hasn’t happened already. When one of us is down there dead on the field, then something might happen.
Maybe. And if it’s me, I’ve already given very clear instructions to my wife: Sue every one of their asses. Because everybody in baseball knows what’s been going on.”
For continuing coverage of the subject of steroid use in baseball, including more analysis from Tom Verducci and video interviews with Ken Caminiti and Kenny Rogers, plus your chance to react to this issue, go to cnnsi.com/steroids.
PHOTO (COLOR): COMING CLEAN Caminiti says he took steroids–with no regrets.
PHOTO (COLOR):TRANSFORMED Caminiti lost the svelte look he showed in 1989 and bulked up into a slugger.
PHOTO (COLOR): ETHICAL QUALMS Curtis opposes steroid use on moral grounds but believes it’s safe.
PHOTO (COLOR): BODY CHECK Schilling says that batting records are being shattered by physical freaks.
PHOTO (COLOR): TEMPTED Steroid critic Rogers says if he were 21 and breaking in, he might try them.
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By Tom Verducci
With Reporting By Don Yaeger; George Dohrmann; Luis Fernando Llosa and Lester Munson
***TO CHEAT OR NOT TO CHEAT***
SPECIAL REPORT 10 YEARS AFTER
LOS ANGELES KINGS
A DECADE AFTER KEN CAMINITI HELPED PULL BASEBALL’S STEROID PROBLEM OUT OF THE SHADOWS, THOSE WHO CHASED THE BIG LEAGUE DREAM IN A DIRTY ERA STILL WRESTLE WITH HOW THEY DEALT WITH THE DILEMMA OF A GENERATION
The 1994 Fort Myers Miracle, a Class A affiliate of the Minnesota Twins, included four pitchers of similar attributes. They each threw righthanded, with average velocity, and were either 23 or 24 years old and had been drafted out of four-year colleges in no higher than the fourth round. All would become good friends as they shared the torturous bus rides and even worse food through multiple rungs on the minor league ladder. All clutched the little boy’s dream of becoming a big leaguer. Only one of them made it. Only one of them used steroids. Only one of them considered taking his own life. Only one of them harbors enormous regret. The big leaguer, the juicer, the near suicide and the shamed are one and the same.
This is a story about the real cost of steroids in baseball–not the broken records, not the litigation, not the talk-show drone about the elite players who juiced and how to weigh their Hall of Fame candidacy. This is a story about the hundreds, even thousands, of anonymous ballplayers whose careers and lives were changed by a temptation that defined an era. It is also a story about the secrets we keep and the casualties we create when we allow the corrupt to go unspoken–especially when the corrupt is something far more horrific than steroids.
On June 18, 2002, Donald Fehr, then the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, was asked a simple question by Sen. Byron Dorgan about steroids in baseball: “Is there a problem?”
Dorgan knew there was, because three weeks before that, a recent National League Most Valuable Player had defined the problem. In an SI cover story, not only did Ken Caminiti become the first prominent player to admit using steroids, but he also described steroid use in baseball as being so prevalent that he held no regrets about his usage. About as many major leaguers were juicing as playing it clean, Caminiti said. Other players confirmed to SI the massive scope of the problem. The unspeakable had been spoken.
Senator John McCain quickly called for a Senate subcommittee hearing, a procedure that Dorgan opened by citing the SI story as a call to action, a reason to decide whether any “legislative action is necessary.” Two months later the union, after resisting the idea of steroid testing on invasion of privacy grounds, reversed course and agreed to random drug-testing protocols for the first time in its history. It was the beginning of the end of the Steroid Era.
This season marks the 10th anniversary of the biggest reformation in baseball since commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned eight members of the 1919 White Sox in what stood as the denouement of an era dirtied by gambling. In the past decade the game and the bodies of those who play it have lost their cartoonish outrageousness, as have the statistics they produce. In the nine seasons before steroid testing, players crashed the 50-home run threshold 18 times, the 60-home run barrier six times. In the nine seasons with testing, there have been only six 50-homer seasons. Nobody has hit 60.
But in many ways, the cleanup came too late. Too late to save the record book and the bodies of ballplayers reshaped to grotesque proportions. And too late to do any good for the four Miracles. By 2001 all of them were out of baseball–each, in his own way, a victim of steroids. Lost in the noise about home run records and Cooperstown and federal prosecutions are the hundreds of every-day casualties of the Steroid Era. What performance-enhancing drug testing has wrought is at least the hope that what happened to the four Miracles will not happen again.
Dan Naulty was the tall, skinny Miracle, a 14th-round pick out of Cal State Fullerton in 1992 who stood 6’6″ but didn’t throw hard. Twins scout Larry Corrigan clocked him early in his senior year at 87 miles per hour and never again at even that modest speed.
Brett Roberts looked a lot like Naulty: tall (6’7″) with a slightly better fastball. The Twins drafted Roberts, a two-sport star who also played small forward at Morehead State, in the fourth round in 1991, the summer before he won the NCAA basketball scoring title. (A year after the Twins took him, Roberts was drafted by the NBA’s Sacramento Kings.) Keith Linebarger was a big, strong kid out of Columbus (Ga.) College. The Twins took him in the sixth round in 1992 largely because his 6’6″, 220-pound frame suggested there was still plenty of upside to his 87- to 89-mph fastball. Kevin Legault was a happy-go-lucky control pitcher from Seton Hall. He threw a fine curveball and a fastball that topped out at 88 mph. He was drafted by the Twins in the 33rd round in 1992.
The four righthanders started the 1994 season playing for manager Steve Liddle with Fort Myers of the Florida State League. Of Naulty, Liddle says, “He started out a tall, lanky kid that was mainly just skin and bones. He threw a ball that had a lot of movement. But he was a fringe player at best–and that was on a good day.”
Thirteen years later, Liddle and the others learned that Naulty used steroids to transform himself from a fringe minor leaguer into a massive big leaguer throwing 96 mph. They found out because of a 2007 fishing expedition by lawyers for former senator George Mitchell, who had been charged by commissioner Bud Selig to produce a white paper on the game’s steroid problem. In January 2007 one of Mitchell’s investigators phoned Naulty, one of the nearly 500 former players they attempted to reach.
“Hello, is this Dan Naulty, the former pitcher?” Naulty recalls the investigator asking.
“Yes, it is.”
The lawyer identified himself and asked, “Are you willing to talk about drug use?”
“I’d be happy to.”
There was silence from the lawyer. And then this: “Do you understand what I’m asking?”
“You’re asking me if I’m willing to tell you if I did drugs or not, right?”
“Yes.”
“I’m happy to talk to you about my drug use.”
Again, silence, and then: “Are you sure you understand what I’m asking?”
“I clearly understand what you’re asking. So let’s get on with it.”
The two spoke for four hours over two days. The Mitchell Report included only six paragraphs about Naulty. But he was all over television because he was one of the few players among the 68 who agreed to be interviewed to voluntarily admit to Mitchell’s investigators that he used drugs. (Caminiti had not been interviewed, having died three years earlier after a cocaine-related overdose.) “I was fairly shocked” that there were so few, Naulty says now.
His Miracle teammates were shocked too. Legault said it never occurred to him that Naulty used steroids. Linebarger had noticed in 1994 that Naulty’s legs were much larger than they had been, and had asked his teammate what he did in the off-season. “Ah,” Naulty said, “me and some football coach really got after the weights.”
“I always thought about that,” Linebarger says now.
Naulty’s revelation hit Roberts hardest. He was the only one of the Miracle pitchers who had played with Naulty when he wasn’t using steroids: They had been in Class A ball in Kenosha, Wis., in 1992, after Roberts had decided not to pursue an NBA career. On his off days between starts, Roberts operated the radar gun behind home plate. He consistently clocked Naulty at 84 to 86 miles per hour. Fifteen years later, on a Sunday morning in 2007, Roberts watched Naulty give a television interview about how steroids helped him reach the big leagues.
“I was pretty upset,” Roberts says. “Gosh, it’s hard enough trying to make it in this profession. You want to make it on your own abilities and work ethic, and all of a sudden, when you think it’s an even playing field, you’ve got somebody cheating. I was very upset, knowing my chance to get to the big leagues was cut short. I was jealous, hurt, frustrated, angry … all that stuff.
“I guess I should have been suspicious. How can a guy go from 85 miles an hour to 95 in three or four years? As I look back on it, it’s so clear and obvious that I can’t believe I was that naive and incredibly stupid. All the signs were there.”
Vin Scully provided the sound track to Dan Naulty’s childhood in Southern California, and Steve Garvey, Ron Cey, Davey Lopes, Dusty Baker and the rest of the Dodgers embodied a dream. Naulty grew up with two ambitions: to win the College World Series and to become a major leaguer. “All I could think about was being a baseball player and all that comes with it,” he says.
He had little interest in schoolwork, especially as he grew to his full height in high school and showed promise as a pitcher. But Naulty, despite sporadic weightlifting and a healthy appetite, could not gain weight. He knew a small group of classmates who were into bodybuilding, and the word was they had access to steroids.
“Sure, I’ll get you anything you want,” one of the muscleheads told him. “I’ll put size on you.”
Naulty bought steroids in pill form from the guy but says he did not take them. In 1988 he enrolled at Cerritos Junior College, then transferred to Cal State Fullerton two years later. He spent his entire college career on academic probation. One day during a sports psychology class, his professor asked why he didn’t give more of an effort. “I don’t need this class and I don’t need school,” Naulty said. “I’m going to play baseball and make more money than you can even think about.”
“I’ve known Dan since he was 19, 20 years old,” says Jeff Horn, a former catcher who played with Naulty at Cerritos and against him when Naulty pitched for Fullerton, and was again his teammate with the Miracle. “The thing that stuck out to me was his competitive nature. He loved to compete and figure out a way to get better.”
As a senior, Naulty had a chance to realize the first of his childhood dreams when Fullerton played Pepperdine for the 1992 College World Series championship. Titans coach Augie Garrido gave the ball to Naulty, his ace, on two days rest. Naulty gave up two runs in the first inning on a walk and three hits. Garrido pulled him after that one inning. Fullerton lost 3-2. “It was a devastating loss for me,” he says. “I just wanted to come home. I needed a rest.”
A few weeks later he reported to Kenosha to begin his professional career. Still despondent, he was further depressed by the threadbare Class A life. He lived in a spare bedroom in the home of a man who hosted a Kenosha player each year. Every night Naulty would come home after a game and find his host asleep in a chair in a room filled with books, a lit cigar in his mouth. He was sure they were going to die one night in a fire.
Naulty pitched six times for Kenosha, starting twice. He gave up 22 hits and 11 earned runs in 18 innings. He arrived at a quick conclusion: He wasn’t nearly good enough to become a major league pitcher. “I didn’t have the speed,” he says. “I didn’t have the location. I didn’t have the size. I had the height. That’s all. That’s essentially why I got drafted.”
Naulty concocted a way to get sent home: He exaggerated an injury. He took an awkward step and tripped during pregame fielding practice and milked the opportunity. He went home to Huntington Beach halfway through the season. “I just kept pretending my hip was bothering me and that was it,” he says. “I had scouts telling me, ‘Just gain weight, just gain weight.’ Everybody was telling me that. My coaches, scouts, friends … everybody. ‘Man, you’re 6’6”. If you could just gain weight, you’d be throwing a hundred!’
“Kenosha was really telling. I may not have taken drugs if I got there and was able to compete. But there was no way. I was not getting out of A ball. No chance.”
Naulty knew what he had to do. There was no way he could face people as a failed baseball player. The game was his only option. Soon after he returned home he spoke to a friend who played junior college baseball, a guy he had previously spoken to about steroids. He asked his friend for a supplier, who arranged a meeting.
“Tell me what you want to do,” said the supplier, a bodybuilder.
“I need to throw 95 miles an hour,” Naulty said, “and the only way I can see doing that is if I weigh 220 pounds.”
It was an outrageous number. Naulty weighed 180. Ten pounds gained would have been a colossal amount for him. Forty? The supplier didn’t blink: “I’ve got whatever you want.”
The supplier injected him, a job Naulty would later learn to do himself. “Within a few days I started gaining weight,” Naulty says, “and I was hooked. I started eating like a horse because when you take this stuff you just eat and eat and eat and you can work out like a fiend.”
He reported to spring training the following season at 200 pounds and with several extra ticks on his fastball. The Twins’ instructors were impressed. It was a cycle that would repeat itself every year: Naulty would use various steroids through the winter, gain muscle mass and velocity, and wow the coaches in camp. He would not use steroids during the season, causing him to lose some weight–about 10 pounds if he had gained 20–and his numbers to fall off as the year progressed. Then it was back to an off-season of doping, with a veritable buffet of steroids. “We were mixing them,” he says. “Some for size, some for speed. There was a steroid I took one off-season that was purely to speed your body up. You didn’t gain any size at all. [Your arm speed] just got faster. The point was the faster I moved the harder I’d throw.”
In four years Naulty gained 50 pounds and added 10 miles an hour to his fastball. (He would eventually top out at 248 pounds.) His legs were enormous. His shoulders looked like cantaloupes, with the rounded, watery hallmark of steroids. He loved the way his body looked, loved to take his shirt off, loved the compliments he got from coaches and loved the way nobody in baseball asked, How? The Steroid Era was taking hold, made possible by a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. “Everybody is telling you how great you look,” Naulty says. “Nobody ever asked if I was using drugs. I never had one discussion about steroids around another baseball player. All my discussions about steroids were with bodybuilders.”
Ninety percent of all drafted players never spend one day in the big leagues. Steroid users made the odds even worse for clean players.
Thirty-three players appeared in at least one game for the 1994 Fort Myers Miracle. Only six of them reached the majors long enough to earn $500,000 in their careers. Half of those players are known PED users: Naulty, outfielder Matt Lawton (who tested positive in 2005) and pitcher Dan Serafini (who flunked a test in ’07).
Kevin Legault was one of the naive ones. He was a three-sport star at Watervliet (N.Y.) High, near Albany. As a sophomore, he once threw a complete game and told his coach he was ready to pitch relief in a playoff game the next day. The coach took him up on the offer, and Legault threw another 150 pitches or so over seven innings, striking out 11 and walking six. He always took the ball. Years later in Triple A, his Salt Lake City team once used him in nine straight games.
Legault says it never occurred to him to use steroids. He was afraid of drugs and afraid that the bulk that came with them was anathema to ballplayers. He only threw 89 mph, and, he believed, “there would have been no way to juice up” enough to make a difference. He was unaware of how potent steroids could be, and that his natural velocity was already better than Naulty’s. Though the two were drafted in 1992, they didn’t play together until the following year. “He was already throwing [in the 90s], so I’m shocked he would even do it,” Legault says.
Legault grew up and remains a fan of Roger Clemens, whose perjury trial for allegedly lying to Congress about his steroid use is now entering its seventh week. Legault collects Clemens memorabilia and believes that the seven-time Cy Young Award winner had to have come by his 354 wins naturally. “People say, ‘Your stuff is worthless,'” Legault says, “and I’m like, ‘No way.’ I just think with steroids you get so much bigger. He didn’t get any bigger. I just don’t believe it.”
Linebarger, also, says he “had no clue about the steroid thing at the time.” Steroids, he says, scared him because of the medical risks they carried. Plus, he could not imagine living with “the guilt that never went away.” He played clean–and he never did gain velocity after the Twins drafted him.
Roberts never gained velocity either; in fact, he lost it because of arm trouble. “I would have known I was cheating,” Roberts says, imagining how he’d have felt if he had taken steroids. “I would have felt guilty the entire time. These guys were my friends. I couldn’t look them in the eye knowing I was cheating.”
In 1996 the Twins invited Roberts and Naulty to the club’s major league spring training camp in Fort Myers. Naulty, after his fourth off-season doping regimen, again reported with increased size and velocity. He made the team. Roberts was sent back to Triple A Salt Lake City. Three months later, Roberts was sitting in a hotel room in Vancouver with his roommate when the phone rang. It was Jim Rantz, head of minor league operations for the Twins. Minnesota needed a pitcher because of an injury.
“Hey, Brett. Gosh, I see your numbers are really good,” Rantz said.
Roberts’s heart began to leap.
“Keep it up,” Rantz said. “Hey, is Danny there?”
His heart sank. He handed the phone to his roommate: Serafini. Rantz told Serafini that he needed to get on a plane right away: He was pitching against the Yankees in a few days.
Says Roberts, “I was crushed. I was like, ‘I don’t know what else I could do.’ That was one of the lowest points of my career, other than getting released.”
Serafini was a lefthanded pitcher who, Roberts says, used to joke about steroids. The Twins selected Serafini out of Junipero Serra High in San Mateo, Calif., with their first round pick in 1992–the same year they drafted Naulty, Linebarger and Legault. He stood 6’1” and weighed only 160 pounds. He went 15-16 with a 6.04 ERA for six major league teams. In 2007, just after MLB and the union tightened its penalties for steroid use, Serafini became one of the first players banned for 50 games for flunking a PED test. (Serafini says he was given steroids by a doctor to recover from an Achilles injury, and that it was the only time he used steroids.)
After going 9-7 with a 5.40 ERA in ’96, Roberts returned to Salt Lake City the following year. By July his ERA had ballooned to 6.90, but he had just thrown the ball well in an outing against Edmonton. His dad had been in the stands for the game, and the ball came out of his hand with ease. His velocity was picking up. And then one day the manager, Phil Roof, called him at his apartment.
Roberts knew something was up. He figured he was getting traded. Roof came to the apartment and sat down.
“Brett, you’re the hardest working guy I’ve ever had,” Roof said. “The way you take care of yourself is second to none. But at this time the organization has decided to go in a different direction…. ”
Roof’s subsequent words floated and dissolved into the air like puffs of smoke. It was your standard-issue release. “Like Bull Durham and all those classic things,” Roberts says. “Knowing how I felt at the time, and years later there’s Dan Naulty on TV apologizing…. It’s bitter.”
Like a flower, a boyhood dream, for all its vibrancy as it grows, is an ugly thing when it dies. The four Miracles all played for the Salt Lake Buzz in 1997: Naulty, who was on a brief injury rehab assignment, Roberts, Linebarger and Legault. All of them would be finished with organized baseball within a year–except Naulty, the one who juiced. “It’s cheating,” says Roberts, who bristles at the steroid users who made it. “It sticks in my craw because I know how hard I worked. Was I going to be a guy with a five- to 10-year career? Probably not. But I know I could have been there.”
Linebarger was released by the Twins at the end of spring training in 1998. Rantz gave him the choice of taking his release or being stashed on the Triple A disabled list, even though he wasn’t hurt. He detected the lack of confidence in him and took the release. But five minutes later, after consulting with a coach who recommended the DL option, Linebarger walked back into Rantz’s office and said, “Is that still on the table?”
“Sorry, the secretary already put in the paperwork.”
He got the message. Linebarger hooked on with the Cubs organization, pitched poorly in Double A and retired.
Legault, who reported to Twins camp in 1998 after putting up a 7.52 ERA with the Buzz in 1997, was released within days of Linebarger. Legault remembers his first camp, in 1993, when he looked around and saw about 75 pitchers–all the minor leaguers begin together–and instantly understood that spring training is a fierce survival game. Players jockey for roster spots as instructors wearing sunglasses cruise the ball fields in golf carts, leaving nervous prospects to guess whom they’re watching. Naulty trumped the system by juicing every winter and standing out in the spring because of his peak physical condition and velocity. Others weren’t as lucky. The ones identified quickly as nonprospects sometimes were asked in the middle of a workout to leave the field and meet with a Twins official in an office, where he would be handed his release.
It was a day-to-day existence for Legault in 1998. Every day he made it to the morning stretch was a good day. And then one morning, before he could get dressed, Terry Ryan, the Minnesota general manager, called him into his office. Just like that, the dream was over.
Legault walked out to his ’88 Grand Am. A few teammates followed him to the parking lot to say goodbye. They fought back tears. Legault, with his upstate New York accent and goofy sense of humor, was especially popular. Naulty once called him the funniest guy he ever played with. Legault drove to his hotel, packed up his stuff and headed north.
It takes 24 hours to drive from Fort Myers to Watervliet. Legault did it straight through except for a brief break at a truck stop to take a nap. “The whole time I was like, Wow, it’s over,” he said. “You’re numb. Since you’re a kid, that’s what you think about–playing baseball. And then … it’s over. You’re crushed.”
Twenty-four hours in an ’88 Grand Am is a long time for a released player to ponder the thin line between the minors and the majors, between a dream realized and one broken to bits. But not once did it occur to him that the way to cross that thin line was with steroids. Meanwhile, Dan Naulty was beginning his third season with the Twins, pulling down $185,000 and living the major league life.
He was good at keeping secrets. Steroids? He carried around worse demons for much longer without anybody knowing.
In 1976, Dan Naulty was six years old and living in Pasadena when his father, Richard, and his mother, Una Mae, divorced. Richard stayed in Pasadena while Dan moved to Palos Verdes, Calif., with his mother and older sister, who was 10. Dan saw his father every other weekend. His mother would soon be overwhelmed with the care of his sister, who by her early teens was a heroin and crack addict and a thief who habitually stole from her mother. (Naulty’s sister is now clean and sober.)
“I was raising myself from seven [years old],” Naulty says. “I didn’t have that moral compass that parents are when you’re younger. I was my own compass. I was having sex at a very, very young age, making terrible decisions about every area of life. You saw a pattern in my life starting at seven of making terrible decisions.”
The boy had a gift for baseball, though. When Dan was 12, a local coach who knew of the boy’s talent suggested that Dan and Richard move to Huntington Beach, where the competition was better. The Naultys agreed. Soon, however, Richard took a job as a management consultant in Kuwait that kept him overseas for all but a few days each month, leaving Dan in the care of others.
The abuse of young Dan by the coach, who never had him on a team, began so slowly and gradually–the hand on the leg, the rubbing of the back, the massages–that he doesn’t even remember the first time it crossed into sex. “It’s a very slow process,” Naulty says, “and then once you’re sucked in and they’re abusing you on a regular basis, you’re so afraid to say anything. I couldn’t tell somebody I was being sexually abused, because I thought maybe it was my fault. I was 12, man.”
As the coach was sexually abusing Dan, so, too, was a woman, a teacher. Una Mae, who still spent time with Dan, had no idea about any of it. The abuse by both the coach and the teacher, which were not connected, went on for several years, until Dan was 15. “In my situation I was willing to give a little to get a little … to get the love I so desperately wanted. It’s whacked. I’m not sure I can explain it other than I was a desperately hopeless little kid and really wanted adults, an authority figure in my life, to love me.”
Naulty likens his upbringing to the launching of a rocket toward the moon with a one-centimeter mistake in the launch angle. The rocket winds up missing the target by 100,000 miles. “I was a little off [at the start],” he said, “and by the time I was older I was way off.”
Naulty did not tell anybody about the coach or the teacher until he was 30 years old. As with steroids, he kept the unspeakable unspoken for too long. “It’s a similar feeling to cheating the Kevin Legaults of the world,” he says. “It’s, ‘I abused you’ or ‘I let others be abused by you’ and never said anything. Those two things in my life I think about a lot and am saddened a lot because I shouldn’t have done it. I’m culpable even though I was the one being abused. I recognize I’m guilty for not doing [anything].”
The stuff works. When Naulty beat out Roberts for a roster spot with the 1996 Twins, he was throwing the ball harder and better than ever before. The skinny kid from California, the fringe prospect from Fullerton who threw 85 mph, had become a physical beast and was blowing the ball past major league hitters. By August ’96, Naulty had pitched in 47 games for Minnesota and had a 2.65 ERA. Big league hitters were batting .194 against him. Nobody questioned why.
And then Naulty’s jacked-up body started breaking down. In August his arm suddenly went numb; he was shelled in two appearances before doctors figured out he was suffering from thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition in which his first rib was pressing upon an artery. Doctors went through his neck to cut out the rib. In 1997, Naulty tore his right triceps. The year after that his groin muscle ripped off his pelvis. By then he weighed 240 pounds, 60 more than he did when he was drafted six years before. His body wasn’t built to handle such muscle mass.
Naulty started taking human growth hormone to help him recover from the injuries. He was also using so much synthetic testosterone that his body’s natural production of the hormone shut down. He was taking 7 to 10 cc’s a week of testosterone–seven to 10 times the dosage for someone who would be prescribed testosterone replacement therapy.
Naulty pitched in 97 games for the Twins from 1996 through ’98 with a 4.61 ERA, which was better than the league average. (As steroids took hold, the American League ERA in 1996 swelled to 4.99, the second-highest in history. This season it is 4.00.) While he says no one talked to him about steroids in those years, players talked openly about amphetamines–so openly that Naulty estimated that “80 percent of guys used drugs, no question.” Speed was socially acceptable in the clubhouse. Naulty would take greenies, little light- and dark-green pills, before games. Some guys took “black beauties,” massive pills that were so potent they frightened even a drug abuser like Naulty. The greenies were powerful enough. “They were equally as powerful as any drug I took,” he says. “You could run through a wall. You had stamina forever. I mean, you never got tired. That’s why I had to start drinking because I couldn’t get to sleep. It’s three o’clock in the morning, and I’m ready to go run a marathon.”
Naulty slid into a cycle of addictions. Every morning he would wake up hungover, so he would take amphetamines when he got to the park for an instant boost. He’d then pitch with the benefits of steroids, HGH and speed, and after the game medicate himself with alcohol to come down from the amphetamine high.
It was 1998. The country was enamored with the magic show that was the great home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Both of them smashed through the record of 61 home runs set by Roger Maris, a mark that had stood for 37 years but would be exceeded four more times in the next three years. Don’t ask, don’t tell remained the unspoken covenant.
The rationalizing and enabling goes on even today by players, fans and media. The popular myth is that before testing, steroids in baseball “weren’t illegal” (in fact, their use was made illegal by the federal government in 1988 unless prescribed to treat a medical condition), were “not against the rules” (a 1991 memo by commissioner Fay Vincent specifically prohibited steroids) and that “everybody was doing it, anyway.” (Tell that to Legault, Linebarger and Roberts.) But the silence in the culture of steroids is a dead giveaway that the users knew they were corrupt. “I was a full-blown cheater, and I knew it,” Naulty says. “You didn’t need a written rule. I was violating clear principles that were laid down within the rules. I understood I was violating implicit principles.
“I have no idea how many guys were using testosterone. But I would assume anybody that was had some sort of conviction that this was against the rules. To say it wasn’t cheating to me … it’s just a fallacy. It was a total disadvantage to play clean.”
In 1998 the Yankees won 125 games, the final four of which came in a sweep of the Padres (with Ken Caminiti at third base) in the World Series. Twenty-six days after the end of the season, the Yankees traded for Naulty. He was amazed that an elite team wanted a middle reliever with a body that was breaking down.
Shortly after the trade, Naulty went to a bar near his home in Southern California. He was a full-blown alcoholic by then. There was a dispute over a woman. A bouncer asked him to leave. Somebody wanted to mess with him, and Naulty was ready. Naulty wasn’t about to back down from a bouncer–or two or three or four or five. It took six men to finally bring him down.
“Just more testosterone,” he explained. “You’re a wild animal. It’s amazing I didn’t kill somebody, myself included, as much as I was drinking and everything.”
The cops hauled him away and, after emptying his pockets and taking his mug shot, threw him in a cell. Naulty sat there weeping, his head in his hands, convinced he had just blown his chance to pitch for the Yankees. Suddenly one of the cops walked toward the cell, holding up a card.
“Hey, is this real?”
