Juicing the Game

In 1994, a Wall Street Journal reporter named John Helyar pulled together a collection of stories that he had done on the business of baseball and released his book, Lords of the Realm. What Jim Bouton’s, Ball Four was to the inside of the clubhouse, Lords of the Realm was to baseball’s inner sanctum – a fly on the wall account of baseball’s dysfunctional, seedy relationships, not only with the Players Union, but internally with a cast of characters like of Charlie Finley, Ted Turner, and Gussie Busch. The book covered MLB’s stumbling and bumbling from the ‘40s through Fay Vincent’s 1993 ouster, right when Bud Selig was hoisted into the role of Commissioner.

Now, as Rafael Palmeiro tests positive for a powerful steroid, stanozonol, commissioner Selig hounds Donald Fehr and the MLBPA into tougher penalties in the Joint Drug Agreement of the CBA, and Congress breathes down baseball’s neck, the question is whether anything changed since Helyar’s book.

Howard Bryant’s book, Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, is a great companion book to go along with Helyar’s seminal work. Like Lords of the Realm, Bryant shows that those who run the game of baseball never seem to be able to look past their collective noses as owners jockey for position within the “Lodge.” MLB, as a collection of those owners, continues to place owners’ self-interest in front of the best interest of the game.

Those looking for a book that tackles just the steroid issue may be somewhat disappointed, as the book wanders through history. Those that are looking to find the underlying background into baseball’s past will not be.

Bryant uses the beginning chapters to outline the dysfunctional history of MLB from the owner collusion and cocaine scandals of the late ‘80s, to the Kohler meetings debacle, to the ’94 strike and World Series cancellation. This sets the stage for the uninitiated as to how MLB’s internal workings and relationships shape how the industry functions. Needless to say, it’s not a pretty picture. A key quote from Jerry Riensdorf explains how the owners’ self-interest enabled the game to enter the Steroid Era. Shortly before the coup to oust Vincent and raise Selig as the “owners’ commissioner,” Reinsdorf said to Vincent, “I hate all commissioners. It’s nothing personal to you. All these guys get to be commissioner and then you come up with something called commissioner-itis where you think you’re more important than us, and we own the game. All of us have money up. You don’t have any money involved. You have no financial interest in us doing well and I don’t think a commissioner should be running the sport. I think we should get rid of all of them and an owner should run the game.” Bryant’s deft use of this quote outlines how Selig’s ascension would occur and bridges past short-sightedness to baseball’s present situation, where those that run the game only react to negative influences when such influences reach into the owners’ pockets.

Juicing shifts into the topic of steroids by outlining the sudden and prodigious number of homeruns that became part of the nation’s collective conscious during 1998 when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa started to make a serious assault on Roger Maris’ single-season homerun record. The chase for Maris’ record would help start to slowly erase gaping hole that the ’94 strike had made, much to the delight of the Lords. How that assault transpired would be tied to something more than just pure talent.

As McGwire hit #55 off Brent Tomko at Wrigley, Steve Wilstein of the AP noticed a bottle of the male hormone, androstenedione in McGwire’s locker and reported as much in the New York Times. Confronted after the story, McGwire admitted to using the hormone. As Bryant describes it, “The news swept baseball like prairie fire.”

Bryant describes the MLB’s reaction as panic. The great season that was undoing the mess of ’94 was in peril of scandal of its own. The reply by the MLBPA and MLB was emblematic: Andro was a legal substance.

Bryant really cuts new ground in his detail of a meeting in Milwaukee that Selig had in 2000. There, a collection of doctors and trainers from roughly half the MLB teams were asked what the biggest concern in baseball was. In nearly every account, the use of anabolic steroids was the major concern.

Bryant portrays this moment as an epiphany for Selig, who started crusading to eradicate steroids in baseball. The antagonist becomes Fehr, Orza, and the MLBPA.

From this point, Bryant wanders back and forth through history and touches on nearly every relevant point in the discussion of steriods in baseball. While BALCO may be the defining moment for the public that capped the suspicions that started with Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s chase of Maris’ 61, Bryant’s Juicing fills in the gaps right up until Selig, Fehr, Orza et al., sat in front of the House committee on Government Reform to be grilled in March of 2005.

A must read for those who wish to look into the history of the business of baseball, and a great book for those who wish to delve into the state of the game as it struggles, yet again, to survive those who run it.

JUICING THE GAME: Drugs, Power and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball

Howard Bryant

Viking, $24.95,

439 pages