AS AMERICA ENTERS 2003, there are few more respected figures in the country than Colin Powell. Raised in the tough neighborhoods of the South Bronx, Powell rose through the ranks of the military to become a four-star general, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and now President Bush’s Secretary of State, the first African American to hold that office. What better man to sell the President’s case for the invasion of Iraq?
“We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he’s determined to make more,” Powell tells the U.N. Security Council on February 5. “Leaving him in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option.”
Nary a dissenting voice is heard in Congress or the national media, but as baseball players are reporting to spring training, several hundred thousand protesters line the streets surrounding the U.N. on the icy morning of February 15. An estimated 6–10 million people elsewhere in America and around the globe join in protest, begging their governments not to march into war in the Middle East.
Unmoved, President Bush sends military forces into Iraq on March 19. The administration is far too preoccupied with “Shock and Awe” to pay any attention to an IRS agent investigating a supplement company with ties to baseball’s biggest star. That will soon change.
Baseball offers the country little relief with a tragic start to the spring. Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler collapses on the mound during an afternoon workout, is rushed to the hospital, and dies of heatstroke early the next day. The 23-year-old Bechler was overweight and on a crash diet when he died, but an autopsy also reveals a high dose of Ephedra, an amphetamine-like supplement used to boost energy and cut weight.
While still available over the counter, Ephedra products have been linked to 88 deaths and 1,500 reported health problems, including heart attacks, strokes, and seizures. Ephedra products are banned in the NFL and the Olympics, but not in baseball. They rang up $1.3 billion in sales in 2002.
Commissioner Bud Selig reacts quickly, banning Ephedra in the minor leagues, and his daughter prohibits its use in the Brewers clubhouse. Don Fehr sends out a memo cautioning players “to be extremely reluctant to use any products containing Ephedra.” But Selig and Fehr know amphetamine use has been widely accepted for generations. Players may now steer clear of Ephedra, but no one is ready to give up their greenies.
The future of steroid use rests on random testing of players on each team’s 40-man roster—1,198 players in all—which begins the first day of March. Players can be tested at any time from spring training up to the second-to-last week of the season, and if 60 players test positive, penalties will kick in for the next two seasons.
All goes smoothly the first week, when testers show up at the camps of the Yankees, Mets, Giants, and Angels. But tension surfaces on March 11, when two testers arrive at Tucson Electric Park before a Mariners–White Sox game and 16 Chicago players refuse to take their tests. Tom Gordon, the unofficial spokesman for the group of 16, tells player rep Kelly Wunsch these players are boycotting the test so they’d be counted as positive, thus greatly increasing the chances of tougher testing next season.
“We need a level playing field,” says Gordon. “We need a comprehensive steroid policy for the good of baseball, and it seems the union does not want that.”
While the two testers wait next to urinals in the clubhouse bathroom, the players are at their lockers arguing loudly. Too many players are still using steroids, say many of those refusing to take their tests. Other users have switched to HGH, they claim, which can’t be detected in urine. “We’re tired of having to decide between using drugs or losing our jobs,” several players say.
Catcher Sandy Alomar Jr. speaks up, saying it’s every player’s responsibility to take the test. “That’s what we agreed on,” insists the 14-year veteran and son of a former major leaguer.
Wunsch has heard enough by the time he takes a call from Gene Orza, the union’s point man on steroid testing. “I’m not sure how the Players Association will react, but you are breaking ranks with your fellow players,” Orza tells Wunsch. Orza is sure some of those boycotting want tougher testing. But he’s just as sure that others are balking because they have something to hide and are worried the results won’t remain confidential.
“We made an agreement, and all players should abide by it in good faith,” Orza says.
Wunsch returns to the clubhouse, relays Orza’s words, and looks at his teammates. “Let’s take the test,” he says. The energy behind the boycott ebbs, and each player chosen for testing walks into the bathroom and is given a testing kit. Several will later tell the media off the record that they felt coerced by the union.
Though there are rumors of dissension over testing in other camps, there are no more public rebellions. But there are hard feelings, especially among the union’s player leadership. “If guys felt they wanted something stronger, then they didn’t speak up at the meetings,” says Braves star Tom Glavine, the National League player rep. “We met with every club. Every player on every team had an opportunity to voice their opinion.”
Neither Selig nor Fehr offers any comment, citing the program’s confidentiality clause. Keeping the results confidential was the most crucial aspect of getting this agreement, even for the players who were in favor of testing. And when testing for the rest of spring training is completed without incident, both men are confident that whatever the outcome, the confidentiality of the program will remain intact.
They will learn otherwise just six months later.
“Joe, what the hell are you going to do about Wells?”
George Steinbrenner’s question hangs in the air, and everyone sitting in the fourth-floor conference room at Legends Field waits for Joe Torre’s answer. In a book David Wells coauthored, the Yankees pitcher claims 25–40 percent of major league ballplayers are using steroids and the game is awash in amphetamines. But that’s not what’s bothering George about excerpts from Perfect I’m Not being read all around the country.
Wells’ real crime: the veteran says he was half drunk the day he pitched his perfect game in 1998, after partying all night with the cast of Saturday Night Live. Wells also says Mets slugger Mike Piazza should have shoved his broken bat up Roger Clemens’ butt in the 2000 World Series. Then there’s the picture of the rotund Wells standing naked, backside to the camera, in a field of sheep. Wells has embarrassed the Yankees, and there is no worse sin in Steinbrenner’s world than bringing dishonor to the pinstripes. George has always liked Wells, but the Boss can’t excuse this transgression. And now he wants to know what his manager plans to do about it.
“I’m not going to tell him anything,” Torre tells Steinbrenner. “This has nothing to do with me. If you have something to say to him, you say it to him.”
The others Yankees execs sitting around the conference table—Brian Cashman, COO Lonn Trost, assistant GM Jean Afterman—try hard not to groan. Randy Levine, listening in from New York by speakerphone, has to try even harder. Not only is George killing him about Wells every day, but Selig’s been bitching to Levine about the pitcher’s claims of widespread use of drugs. There’s never been any love lost between Levine and Torre, and right now it’s all the Yankees president can do to hold his tongue.
George has been pushing hard since the Yankees’ collapse against the Angels last fall, and everyone here knows this isn’t the time to push back. None of them are sure just when winning it all went from the team’s goal to the Boss’ obsession, when anything less than a World Series title signified failure. But they all know it now.
And everyone else in the organization knows it, too. It’s not hard to sense that at 72, Steinbrenner feels his time to oversee another big run is growing short. Or that George thinks everyone is letting him down—again. The Yankees still don’t have a deal with Cablevision, keeping the fledging YES Network in the red. His YankeeNets partners told him they’d get Cablevision owner Chuck Dolan to bend, damn it, but his old friend from Cleveland just rejected yet another agreement in February.
George still doesn’t see the urgency he expects from Torre, and that better change this season. But it’s Cashman—as always—who takes the brunt of Steinbrenner’s frustrations. George has whacked him on everything from the grand slam and two wild pitches Contreras gave up in the 1st inning of his Yankees debut to the Red Sox signing the Twins’ 26-year-old platoon first baseman David Ortiz. “I like him—we should have signed him,” George told Cashman, who knows Steinbrenner’s interest in Ortiz began only after the Red Sox signed him.
Then there’s Derek Jeter. If Wells is George’s prodigal son, Jeter is far and away his favorite, but the 28-year-old shortstop is still seething over George’s dig at his lifestyle last December. “He made a reference to one birthday party, and now I’m like Dennis Rodman,” Jeter said soon after camp opened. “I don’t think that’s fair. My priorities are straight.”
Steinbrenner still isn’t sure. “He always gives 100 percent,” George tells reporters, “but I need 110 percent.”
And George has no idea about the looming problem with Jason Giambi. His big first baseman spent two weeks last fall on an All-Star tour in Japan, where he met Greg Anderson, who introduced him to designer steroids from the Bay Area supplement company Balco. Take these, said the man who trains Barry Bonds, and you won’t have any worries about baseball’s new drug test. Giambi followed Anderson’s instructions, never imagining how quickly he’d regret his decision.
But that will be next spring’s problem. Right now Steinbrenner is focused on the growing headache Wells’ book has become. HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, is moving up the release to March 14 to take advantage of the buzz it’s already generated. If Torre doesn’t know what to do with Wells, George will figure it out for him.
“I want you to make him the 11th pitcher on the staff,” says the Boss, and everyone around the table cringes. Wells won 19 games last season, more than any other Yankees pitcher and tied for seventh best in the league.
“I can’t do that,” Torre says. “I don’t like the son of a bitch all that much, but he can still win games.”
“Well,” George says, “when are you going to have a talk with him about all this?”
“George, I’ve told you, that’s not my job.”
Levine is still on the line and can keep quiet no longer.
“Just do it, Joe!” Levine says.
“Shut the fuck up, Randy,” Torre snaps.
“Don’t tell me to shut the fuck up,” Levine says. “Just do what you’re told!”
Cashman, who’s served as Torre’s shield for years, jumps in. “Okay, I’ll take care of this,” says the GM, who is close with Wells. “It’s on me.”
Cashman takes two days to read the book and another two days to talk to Boomer and his agent. They agree on a fine of $100,000—over the union’s protests—and Wells publicly apologizes to his owner, his teammates, and the fans.
The rest of training camp doesn’t go much better. Mariano Rivera injures a groin muscle and will start the season on the DL. The team posts an uninspiring 16–13 exhibition-season record, belying its status as favorites to return to the World Series. Steinbrenner refuses to speak to Wells, who further upsets his boss by not showing up for a Sports Illustrated cover shoot with George and the team’s five other starting pitchers.
And with the season just two days away, the Yankees are still not on Cablevision, and that battle rages on. Dolan continues to tell Steinbrenner he’ll carry YES, just not on the basic tier, where every one of Cablevision’s 2.9 million customers pay for it—whether they watch the channel or not. Dolan wants YES to earn its money as a pay channel, just like HBO, which would significantly cut the network’s profits.
But the issue is bigger than that, and Dolan knows it. Every other provider has a clause in its contract allowing it to shift YES from basic, where it now resides, to a pay tier if any other provider secured such a deal. A mass move to a pay tier would effectively cripple the YES business model, if not its very survival.
Dolan’s plan blew up when Leo Hindery, the CEO of YES, convinced New Jersey’s lawmakers that Cablevision was violating antitrust laws by putting the network on a pay tier while other sports networks ran on basic. That put YES on Cablevision’s basic tier in the Garden State and opened the door for the same move in New York. Everyone at YES thought New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg had brokered a deal two weeks ago, but it suddenly fell apart in the last few days. Yet another strategy and bargaining session is set for later this afternoon—this one with New York’s aggressive Attorney General Eliot Spitzer—which is not the way Steinbrenner wants to spend the final day of spring training.
Maybe that’s why the Boss decides to embarrass his general manager again. A few hours before the Yankees play the Phillies in their final exhibition game—after which they’ll break camp and fly to Toronto for the season opener—Steinbrenner tells Cashman to personally collect the keys for rental cars used by every player and coach this spring.
This is a job for an intern, not a GM, but Cashman’s been down this road before. He knows fear and humiliation are George’s chosen methods of motivation.
“Absolutely not,” Cashman says. “I am not going to do it.”
“What do you mean you won’t do it?” Steinbrenner says.
“That’s a waste of my time,” Cashman says, “and it’s a waste of the money you’re paying me.”
“Well,” says George, “then your assistant has to stay here for a week to help make sure every minor leaguer gets to the right team.”
Not long after the Yankees beat the Phils 4–3, Steinbrenner, Levine, Trost, and outside counsel David Boies begin a marathon bargaining session to get YES on Cablevision, with Spitzer pushing hard on both sides. Negotiations stretch until 2 a.m., then resume after a five-hour break. A deal is finally reached a few hours later that satisfies neither side but serves as a stopgap they can both live with. About 1.1 million Cablevision subscribers who already pay for the MSG and Fox Sports New York networks will receive YES for free, while the company’s remaining 1.8 million customers will have to pay $1.95 per month if they choose to watch the 2003 Yankees.
And the kicker: if a negotiated settlement can’t be reached by next season, the dispute will go to binding arbitration.
The deal comes just weeks before YankeeNets CFO Keith Hightower reports that the network will finally break even in the first quarter of 2003—even without carriage on Cablevision. Just about every penny of profit YES earns from Cablevision will go straight to the bottom line, but everyone connected to YankeeNets knows their partnership is over. Four years of constant infighting over issues large and small have taken a serious toll, and talks to end this relationship are only months away.
But at exactly 6:47 p.m. the first YES broadcast appears on Cablevision, and—for the moment—all the partners are happy.
Drug testing is no longer the biggest thing on Selig’s mind when the season finally opens. Alex Rodriguez goes yard against Anaheim on April 2, making him the youngest player—at 27 years and 249 days—to reach 300 home runs. But Rodriguez is unhappy playing for the cellar-dwelling Rangers, and Bud is worried news that the game’s best player wants out of Texas will soon make the rounds.
Two days later Sammy Sosa hits his 500th career homer, making him the 18th player to join that select club. On the same day, Barry Bonds blasts the 615th home run of his career off the Brewers’ Todd Ritchie in Milwaukee’s home opener. Only Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays have hit more.
But Selig is not thinking much about home runs, either. The Commissioner is preoccupied with the fates of the two teams in which he holds ownership stakes, especially the one in Milwaukee, where he’s convinced that Ulice Payne—the man he armed with a five-year contract to change the team’s fortunes—is making a mess of things.
Selig and Wendy Selig-Prieb have lost faith in the man they hired barely six months ago. Their unhappiness surfaced early, when Payne purged the organization of many of Selig’s longtime employees, from high-ranking executives to the man who put together the team’s media guides. Their unhappiness grew as they became concerned Payne was not grasping the realities of running a baseball team in a small market.
Of course, Payne has concerns of his own. He inherited a team with but one true star—Richie Sexson—a weak pitching staff, and a bunch of bad contracts, most notably the three-year, $21.75 million deal they gave oft-injured Jeffrey Hammonds. (Hammonds will be released in June.) Their season-ticket base has fallen below 8,000 from 11,000 a year ago, when the team lost almost $10 million. There’s little chance Payne will allow GM Doug Melvin to improve the team if it means increasing their $40.6 million payroll, the third lowest in the game.
Selig is never one to keep what he’s thinking to himself, and when Payne heard the whispers that Bud was displeased with his work—one rumor has the Commissioner assigning someone from MLB to assess the Brewers president’s work—he demanded a chance to clear the air. The meeting takes place on April 6 at Miller Park, right before the Giants complete a three-game sweep of the Brewers. In calm, measured terms, Bud and Wendy share their concerns, deny that either has badmouthed him, and tell Payne they’re still rooting for him to succeed.
“No one wants to make this work more than I do,” says Selig-Prieb.
But Payne might be missing the real endgame: the Seligs are getting the team ready for sale. Selig’s conflict of interest has long ago grown awkward, no matter how many times he reminds people that his stake in the Brewers is in a blind trust.
Of course, selling the team even a few years ago was nearly impossible: too many losing seasons left the Brewers too far under water. The chance for a sale improved after Selig used revenue sharing checks to pay down the debt and got the taxpayers to build a domed stadium, which some analysts say could double Selig’s asking price.
It’s hard to dispute that paying down such a large debt is bad business. Or that keeping payroll low while restocking the farm system isn’t a smart way to build a winner. But neither measure fulfills Selig’s promise to give the fans a winning team—immediately—once Miller Park opened.
And this team has little hope of winning. It finally gets its first victory in the season’s seventh game, a 5–3 win in Pittsburgh, but loses eight of the last 11 games in April to end the season’s first month in last place in the NL Central, where they are destined to finish the season.
By May 11, the Brewers are 13–24, and attendance is flatlining: they’re averaging 15,891 fans a game, down 30 percent from a year ago. With these kinds of results, Payne confronts his critics head-on. “My club is in the bottom of our division in a new ballpark, we lost 200 games the last two years, and we lost 900,000 fans,” he tells the media. “Everyone’s questioning the pace of change, but the fans here are paying for the park.”
Things are going far better with Selig’s other ownership interest. Frank Robinson has the Expos playing sharp, heads-up baseball. He has two legitimate stars in outfielder Vlad Guerrero and second baseman Jose Vidro, and a group of good young role players. He has two stud starters—Livan Hernandez and Javier Vazquez—and a bullpen full of live young arms. The Expos finish April 17–10, tied with the Braves for first in the NL East.
Things are going even better on the business side. No, not in the short term. The Expos still aren’t drawing—everyone in Montreal knows this team is leaving. They’re even playing 22 “home” games in Puerto Rico this season. But Selig is playing for the future. Jerry Reinsdorf heads up a relocation committee that’s been talking to groups in Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, and Portland since the beginning of the year. And the two men have a plan for earning back far more than the $120 million MLB paid for the franchise in 2002: any city hoping to land the Expos must build a stadium—no strings attached—before Selig even begins listening to people who want to bid on the team.
The plan surfaced when the first group from Washington made its presentation to Reinsdorf’s committee at MLB’s offices on Park Avenue back in January. DC Deputy Mayor Eric Price laid out his plan, proudly telling Reinsdorf the financially strapped city was prepared to pay two-thirds of the estimated $300 million needed to build a stadium.
“Is that the number you had in mind?” DC Sports and Entertainment Commission Executive Director Bobby Goldwater asked Reinsdorf.
“Yes,” Reinsdorf answered. “Except we were thinking of a different split. We were thinking of three-thirds, no-third.”
Everyone in the group chuckled, and Reinsdorf smiled, too. But he was serious. And the news did little to diminish interest. Indeed, seven groups will soon make offers for the team.
The heated competition for the Expos is part of the news Selig delivers to the dozen sports editors who are meeting with the commissioners of pro sports in New York in late April. He also shrugs off suggestions that Baltimore owner Peter Angelos would oppose putting a team in Washington. “We had discussions, but he has never exerted any pressure on what we should do on the matter,” Selig says.
Short of suing Major League Baseball—something expressly forbidden by MLB’s constitution—there is little pressure Angelos can bring to bear, no matter how often he complains. It’s true MLB told him it would not rule out returning a team to Washington—only 38 miles down the road from Camden Yards—when Angelos was bidding on the Orioles in 1992. But it’s also true that Selig promised Angelos several times that he would never go against Peter’s wishes.
But that’s not how Selig sees it. If the city of Washington makes the best pitch—and that’s what Reinsdorf is telling him to expect—then Selig will make sure his friend in Baltimore is duly compensated. And to Bud’s way of thinking, making Angelos a terrific deal is a promise kept.
Selig has one more bit of news for the sports editors: he plans to retire when his current contract runs out on December 31, 2006. “There comes a time in life when you want to do something different,” says Selig. “When I got the extension [in 2001], I told everyone that was it for me.
“I don’t think I’ll change my mind.”
Reporters who regularly cover the Yankees stopped trying to make sense of the owner’s actions long ago. Just ask the questions, write the news, and let the headlines roll.
So no one’s surprised when George Steinbrenner spends much of the spring berating Jason Giambi for brooding when the Boss should have been thanking his first baseman for playing through patellar tendinitis in his left knee, a tender right hamstring, and a staph infection in both eyes. Giambi, struggling to keep his average above .200, didn’t think he could sit with Derek Jeter already out for the first six weeks with a dislocated shoulder. Especially when Giambi’s own backup, Nick Johnson, went on the DL with a broken hand.
Nor did any reporters think it unusual for the Boss to berate Brian Cashman when the team suffered a 3–12 slump in May after cleanup hitter Bernie Williams was hobbled by a torn meniscus for a month. Williams underwent arthroscopic surgery on May 21 and will be out until early July. Cashman received a plane ticket to Tampa for an in-person temper tantrum with Steinbrenner.
There are the usual swipes at Andy Pettitte—whom George continues to consider soft—for losing four of five in May. And plenty of harsh words for young Jeff Weaver, who seems to have forgotten how to pitch since Cashman brought him to New York in a much-heralded trade last summer.
But even the media veterans—and many in the Yankees organization—are puzzled when George calls a 4 p.m. media conference before his team’s June 3 game at Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park. George has an important announcement he says just can’t wait. Derek Jeter—the player George dressed down for his lifestyle this winter and feuded with this spring—is now the 11th captain in Yankees history.
“He’s earned it—he’s going to be the most important Yankee captain ever,” Steinbrenner says from Tampa while Jeter sits in the Reds media room, a blue-and-white Yankees banner draped over a red wall behind him. Jeter gamely defends the time and place for George’s announcement.
“An honor is an honor regardless of where you get it; it just doesn’t make a difference,” says Jeter, who joins the ranks of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Don Mattingly as Yankee captain. “It goes without saying that this is an honor that is not thrown around lightly by this organization.”
Nor is it an honor often used as a tool to embarrass the team’s manager, especially by an owner who worships at the altar of Yankees Tradition. But Steinbrenner is already insisting “it would be sick media stuff” to take today’s event as a shot at Torre. “We needed a spark,” George says. “I felt the need for leadership.” But isn’t that Torre’s job?
Steinbrenner never told his manager about this decision, leaving that chore to Cashman. “I know this will make Joe very happy,” says Steinbrenner, who knows better. Torre has often said his team doesn’t need a captain, and he hasn’t had one since he arrived eight years and four World Series titles ago.
But that’s of little concern to Steinbrenner, who is still annoyed that Torre isn’t pushing his players harder. It’s also no secret that George believes Torre and his coaches don’t work hard enough, especially for what he’s paying them. And few things anger Steinbrenner more than people who don’t earn their keep.
Still, why now? His team has just won four of its last six and sits in first place, 1½ games ahead of Boston. Despite their many injuries, the Yankees are 33–23, the second-best record in the AL. And they’ll be back home in six days.
Why send Cashman when his wife is expected to give birth to their second child any day? And if this is so vital, why are Steve Swindal and Hal Steinbrenner here while George sits in Tampa? “That’s a good question,” says Hal.
There’s no sign of the spark George expected—the Yankees lose today, then drop four of the next seven—but there’s too much talent on this team to keep losing. Powered by the pitching of Pettitte and Rivera and hot hitting by Jeter and a healthier Giambi, the Yankees put together a 16–2 run and soon sit three games ahead of the Red Sox entering a big game against their archrivals on July 7.
Steinbrenner nervously paces the Stadium’s auxiliary press box as a classic duel between Mike Mussina and Boston’s Pedro Martinez unfolds. He sweats when Mussina yields a 1st-inning run, complains when Pedro hits Jeter in the Yankees’ first at bat, cheers when his team ties it up in the 7th.
And he cries when Boston boots newcomer Curtis Pride’s soft grounder in the 9th, allowing the winning run to score.
Reporters rush to Steinbrenner, who does little to hide the tears streaming down from behind his oversized sunglasses.
“I’m just proud of the way Mussina pitched,” Steinbrenner says.
And the tears?
“You know, I’m getting older,” says the Boss, who turned 73 three days ago. “As you get older, this starts happening more.”