RANDY LEVINE STARES hard at Jason Giambi and asks the one question on the mind of everyone sitting in the Yankees president’s Manhattan law office.
“Did you take steroids?”
Brian Cashman, assistant GM Jean Afterman, and Giambi’s agent Arn Tellem all shift in their seats, waiting for the player to respond. It’s a simple question, but the answer is far more complicated than Giambi ever imagined.
It’s February 9, two months since the nation read all about Giambi telling a grand jury how he would stick a testosterone-loaded syringe in his ass, how he’d pinch the skin around his belly button and inject HGH, and how he loaded up on designer steroids from Balco. But now he has a new worry. Some details of a book written by his former teammate Jose Canseco trickled out three days ago in the New York Daily News, and they put Giambi right in the crosshairs.
It was Mark McGwire who introduced Giambi to steroids, says Canseco in Juiced. According to the former Oakland star, his two teammates would head into a bathroom stall in the team’s clubhouse and inject each other with anabolic steroids while he shot up in the stall right next to them. Giambi was so hooked, Canseco wrote, that everyone knew the Yankees first baseman was the biggest juicer in the game.
The only saving grace for the Yankees is that Canseco took dead aim at even bigger game: the book focuses far more on McGwire and even accuses the sitting President of the United States of participating in the scandal. Giambi knows much of what Canseco wrote is true, but Canseco’s sordid reputation and his high praise of the powers of steroids has kept this story from catching fire.
But that’s about to change.
Giambi knows Levine has already tried to void the remaining $84.5 million on his contract and that he wouldn’t have done it without George Steinbrenner’s blessing. Giambi called George two weeks ago, promising he was still the player the Boss thought he signed in the winter of 2001—not the one who’s hit .216 since the 2003 All-Star Game. What he didn’t say was his poor play coincided with his decision to stop taking steroids.
Jason knows everyone now sitting in Levine’s office remembers Tellem instructing the Yankees to strike any reference to steroids from their contract if they wanted to sign him. It was one of about 20 things Tellem asked the Yankees to change, but it’s the only thing people will hear if the story ever gets out. The Yankees can always say there were other clauses covering the use of illegal drugs, so striking any mention of steroids was no big deal—though the request was clearly a red flag.
Giambi, now 34, has done two-a-days all offseason, honing his baseball skills by day and lifting weights every night. Team doctors have pronounced him fully recovered from last summer’s treatment to remove the benign tumor in his pituitary gland. The Yankees signed Tino Martinez to play first, so he’s going to be the team’s designated hitter. Which he hates. But he knows the days of dictating terms are over.
He also knows the Yankees have him on a short leash. And so do the Balco prosecutors, who already threatened to send him to jail if he didn’t tell the truth about his steroid use to the grand jury. What if they call him back in after Jose’s book is published? What if they ask about McGwire?
Giambi’s lawyers keep reminding him that no one knows what the government is going to do. That’s why they’ve advised Jason to remain silent if anyone but the government asks about steroids. Anything he says can—and most certainly will—come back to haunt him.
“Jason,” Levine repeats, “did you take steroids?”
The seconds pass like hours before Giambi finally speaks.
“I just can’t answer that,” he says.
Levine isn’t surprised.
“You can’t fuck around with any of this stuff anymore,” Levine says. “We’re monitoring you.”
And so is the media. Giambi hasn’t said a word since the grand jury story broke, and the interview requests have piled up. It’s going to be a feeding frenzy in spring training, Levine tells him. “You have to do something up here first,” the Yankees president says.
A day later Giambi faces the media in the Yankee Stadium conference room, with Joe Torre sitting on a folding chair to his right, Tellem at his left. Both Torre and Tellem are dressed in dark suits and ties, their heads hung low, eyes cast at the floor. Giambi wears a dark T-shirt under a black blazer and fixes his gaze on each reporter who asks him a question.
No, Giambi tells the first reporter, he has not read the Chronicle story on his testimony yet. That said, “I feel I let down the fans, I feel I let down the media, I feel I let down the Yankees, and not only the Yankees, but my teammates,” Giambi says, turning to look Torre in the eye.
He apologizes repeatedly, though for what he does not say. “I accept full responsibility,” he says, “and I’m sorry.”
What about the stories Canseco wrote about you? “I find it delusional,” Giambi says. “It’s sad that Josey is that desperate to make a dime.”
How do you think the fans will treat you? “Everybody makes mistakes,” he says. “I hope people will give me a second chance.”
Will they ever get to hear your whole story?
“I know the fans might want more,” Giambi says as the 30-minute session draws to a close. “Because of all the legal matters, I can’t get into specifics. Someday, hopefully, I will.”
No one is more interested in how the New York media responds to Giambi’s comments about Canseco than Bud Selig. The Commissioner knows full well that one of his main tasks this season—perhaps his biggest task—will be controlling the steroids narrative. And Canseco’s book may now present the biggest challenge.
Everyone knew Canseco was writing a book, and everyone knew Jose was convinced he was blacklisted when he could not find a job at the end of his career. But no one thought he would break the code of silence that every player, from star to scrub, has always honored. “After batting practice or right before the game, Mark and I would duck into a stall in the men’s room, load up our syringes and inject ourselves,” Canseco wrote about his former Bash Brother. “I was the godfather of the steroid revolution in baseball, but McGwire was right there with me as a living, thriving example of what steroids could do to make you a better ballplayer.”
Canseco didn’t break the code—he shattered it. The book moved from Oakland and McGwire to Texas, where Canseco claimed he tutored Ivan Rodriguez, Juan Gonzalez, and Rafael Palmeiro on the benefits of steroids. “I personally injected each of those three guys,” Canseco wrote. “Many times.”
And the team’s famous general managing partner, the one who loved to walk through the clubhouse and pal around with the players? President George W. Bush “had to have been aware” of rampant use on his team, Canseco wrote.
Selig’s plan for Canseco was simple: have his surrogates shoot the messenger. “I’d be surprised if there was any significant follow-up,” Vice President for Baseball Operations Sandy Alderson—Canseco’s former GM in Oakland—tells the media. “It’s hard to understand why anyone would make these allegations—to sell a book?”
At first pass, the strategy appears sound. Selig considers Canseco a malcontent and a freak, a view shared by many in the media who remember Jose more for allowing a fly ball to bounce off his head—and over the right-field fence—in Cleveland in 1993 than as the first player to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases when they voted him MVP in 1988. Most writers simply don’t take him seriously.
But Selig and his aides have trouble getting their stories straight. On February 6, former A’s manager Tony La Russa tells the New York Daily News that Canseco openly joked about using steroids. A week later, Selig says Sandy Alderson—La Russa’s former boss—insists neither he nor La Russa knew anything about Canseco’s steroid use.
“They deny it vehemently, and I don’t blame them,” says Selig, oblivious to La Russa’s earlier statements. “Sandy would have no reason to lie to me.”
The following week brings more problems. On February 12, Bonds’ mistress Kimberly Bell tells Fox News that Barry told her he started using steroids in 2000. Two days later, Canseco’s tell-all hits bookstore shelves—it’s already a bestseller from advance sales alone. On February 15, news of Giambi’s stricken steroid clause appears in the New York Times.
That same day, the Daily News reports that an FBI agent told MLB Canseco and other A’s showed up as steroid users during an agency investigation in 1994. The information, says agent Greg Stejkal, was ignored. Alderson denies that baseball ever heard from the FBI, a statement MLB will have to retract several years later.
Canseco makes two appearances on 60 Minutes, the first on February 13, the next three days later on 60 Minutes Wednesday. Each time he repeats his most damning allegations to Mike Wallace. Did management know all this was going on? asks an incredulous Wallace. “The owners knew it,” Canseco says. “The Players Association knew it.”
Both Fehr and Selig decline to appear on either show. Fehr provides a statement focused on the new drug testing plan while Selig sends Alderson to make his case. “I’m not here to suggest there wasn’t a sense that something was going on in the case of some individuals,” Alderson tells Wallace. “But the notion that as an institution baseball was aware of a problem is just not true.”
But your manager says he knew about Canseco, Wallace says.
“That’s news to me,” Alderson answers.
“Why didn’t he tell you?” Wallace asks.
“You’ll have to ask him,” Alderson says.
The question is never asked. Baseball is not the only institution engaged in willful ignorance.
While the Commissioner is calling reporters to complain about their coverage of this story, there are complications happening behind the scenes. Federal agent Jeff Novitzky is in Baltimore talking to an FBI informant who says he has ties to a ballplayer using steroids—Orioles outfielder Larry Bigbie. The only thing the informant knows about Bigbie’s steroids dealer is that he lives in New York, but it’s enough to keep Novitzky interested.
Congressman Henry Waxman knows nothing about Novitzky’s tip either, but Selig’s refusal to look into Canseco’s claims grabbed the California Democrat’s attention. Nothing still garners headlines like baseball, and he’ll make the case that steroid use in baseball is a public health crisis. And the only way to address this crisis is to haul a handful of baseball stars before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and grill them while the TV cameras roll.
Never mind that this very committee refused to hold hearings into torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Or failed to investigate the leak of undercover agent Valerie Plame’s name. Or never looked into how the Bush administration could send troops to war in Afghanistan and Iraq without proper armor. Steroids in baseball is an issue everyone in Congress—on both sides of the aisle—can rally around.
Quoting from Field of Dreams in a letter to committee chairman Tom Davis (R-VA), Waxman says it’s high time the committee looked into how baseball is handling its problem with performance-enhancing drugs. They need to do this, Waxman writes, for the good of the kids who look up to baseball players. So while the country wages two wars and millions of American workers struggle with shrinking wages and rising health care costs, the powerful House Oversight Committee decides that getting to the bottom of baseball’s steroid problem is a matter of utmost importance.
Bud Selig is in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Washington, D.C., running through his lines. It’s March 16, and his senior staff is prepping him for tomorrow’s House committee hearing on steroids in baseball. They’re serving up the questions he should expect, polishing the talking points he will repeat. Selig is a born politician, but he does his best work in back rooms or on the telephone, not in front of television cameras with opponents looking to score points.
And Selig knows that scoring points is all tomorrow is really about. He was surprised earlier this month when Tom Davis and Henry Waxman sent “invitations” to him and Don Fehr to appear before their committee, along with Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco, Curt Schilling, and Frank Thomas. And he was angered when the two congressmen sent out subpoenas when most of their invitations were turned down.
But Selig was amazed by what he heard when baseball’s Washington lawyer Stan Brand asked Waxman and Davis what they were really after. We want more hearings, they told Brand, and a long list of documents. We also want tougher penalties for players who test positive for performance-enhancing drugs.
And we want baseball to conduct an internal investigation.
An investigation?
Selig wonders how the congressmen can be serious when there are two active and aggressive government investigations already under way. The government still has all of baseball’s 2003 drug tests, despite court orders to return them to the union. Hell, prosecutors have already sent out Barry Bonds’ urine to be retested for Balco’s designer steroids.
So while the tug-of-war over the 2003 tests is being litigated in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California, Davis and Waxman want baseball to expose even more of its players to possible prosecution by conducting an internal investigation. Are they fucking kidding?
Selig doesn’t even understand why he’s in Washington at all. He and Fehr already strengthened baseball’s drug testing program, just as John McCain instructed them to do last March and again in December. Under the new agreement announced just this past January, a player is now identified and suspended 10 games on his first violation. In addition, players will be tested year-round, and there is no limit on the number of tests baseball can request. So why is Congress holding a hearing before this new program even gets started? And after Selig just announced that only between 1 and 2 percent of players tested positive last season under the old program?
But Davis and Waxman have latched on to Bud’s ankle and aren’t letting go. So it’s up to Bob DuPuy, Rob Manfred, and the others in Selig’s suite tonight to make sure the Commissioner looks good tomorrow.
Everyone on the committee’s witness list is in town with the exception of Giambi, who got a pass when the Justice Department stepped in and determined the Yankees star’s testimony could hurt their criminal investigation into Balco. There’s no way the Balco prosecutors are going to let anything jeopardize their case.
The parents of three young baseball players who committed suicide are in town, too, and two of them are ready to testify that steroids played a key role—the key role—in the death of their sons. One father is the cousin of former Dodgers star pitcher Burt Hooton. Davis and Waxman aren’t satisfied with blaming baseball players for the rise in steroid use among teenagers. They want Americans to know that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro have blood on their hands, too.
Selig wonders if McGwire has finally made up his mind about testifying tomorrow. Selig is fond of Mark, and he doesn’t want to believe that any of the things Canseco wrote about him are remotely true. What the Commissioner doesn’t know is that McGwire spent three hours in Davis’ office today, offering to admit he used steroids if Davis can get him full immunity. The Virginia Republican is a big baseball fan and wanted to help McGwire, so he put in a call to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking him to grant Mark’s request.
Davis was almost giddy talking baseball with the home run champ while waiting for the AG to get back to him. But when Gonzales did call back, the news was what Davis expected. The attorney general refused to grant McGwire immunity, even though it would have allowed Davis’ committee to get exactly what it wanted: a confession from one of baseball’s biggest stars.
Davis could see McGwire was crushed. Mark is 41 years old and now leads a quiet life with his second wife Stephanie and their two young sons in their house on a golf course in Irvine, California. Canseco’s already pulled back the curtain on the home run champ’s secrets. McGwire wants to unburden himself, but doing so without immunity could lead him into a courtroom. So McGwire will follow his lawyer’s advice and refuse to talk about his past, even if that appears to validate what his former teammate has written.
Selig feels confident he knows his lines when he walks into the Rayburn House Office Building the next morning. One of the committee aides puts the Commissioner and his staff in an office where they can watch the day’s first panel on TV as they testify. “This is not a witch hunt,” Davis says as he brings the room to order. “We’re not asking for witnesses to name names. Furthermore, today’s hearing will not be the end of our inquiry.”
It’s not long before Davis swears in Dr. Denise Garibaldi. Selig stares at the TV screen as the psychologist from suburban San Francisco tells the committee that her son Rob grew up “idolizing Bonds and the Bash Brothers” and was good enough to be drafted by the Yankees in the 41st round out of high school in 1999 and earn a scholarship to USC. But scouts kept telling her five-foot-eleven, 125-pound son that he was too small to make it big, so Rob drove to Mexico soon after graduating from high school and bought his first cycle of steroids. He got bigger—eventually reaching 165 pounds—and starred at Santa Rosa Junior College and then USC. But he struggled academically, began taking medication for depression and a learning disability while still on steroids, and eventually lost his USC scholarship. At 24, he shot and killed himself one block from his home.
“There’s no doubt in our minds that steroids killed our son,” Garibaldi says. “In his mind he did what baseball heroes like Canseco had done.”
Next is Don Hooton, whose 17-year-old son Taylor, a baseball star in Texas, also turned to steroids when a JV coach told him he had to get bigger if he wanted to reach the pros. He, too, took his own life, and Hooton places the blame squarely on the large shoulders of major leaguers.
“Let me tell you that the national jury of young people have already judged your actions and concluded that many of you are guilty of using illegal performance-enhancing drugs,” Hooton says. “But instead of convicting you, they have decided to follow your lead.
“In tens of thousands of homes across America, our 16- and 17-year-old children are injecting themselves with anabolic steroids. Just like you big leaguers do.”
Davis clears the wood-paneled hearing room for a short break. When he gavels the hearing back in session, it’s standing room only, with a long row of photographers lining one wall. Selig and Fehr sit in the first row behind the table where their players will testify, with the three sets of parents sitting another row back. One million households are tuned in to see what will happen next.
The players slowly walk in and take their seats. They all refused to be sworn in with Canseco, so each raises his right hand and takes the oath separately. Canseco is the first to speak, and he advises the committee he cannot tell them much because he, too, was denied immunity. He’s worried what he might say will adversely affect his ongoing legal problems.
But Canseco says he stands by what he wrote, and he does have a few words he’d like to get on the record. “If Congress does nothing about this issue, it will go on forever,” the self-proclaimed steroid pioneer says.
Sosa’s advisers grilled him in advance about his steroid use and are reluctant to have him answer questions outside his native Spanish, so veteran D.C. lawyer Jim Sharp has already told the committee he will speak for his client. Reading from Sosa’s sworn statement, Sharp says the player did nothing to break the law in America or his native Dominican Republic. “To be clear,” reads Sharp, “I have never taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs.”
Rafael Palmeiro delivers a short but memorable opening statement. Looking up from his prepared text and jabbing his left index finger toward the committee, he emphatically delivers his message. “I have never used steroids, period,” says Palmeiro, his dark eyes ablaze. “I do not know how to say it any more clearly than that.”
But it’s McGwire who everyone in the packed hearing room is here to see. He’s smaller than most fans remember, at least by 40 pounds, and as he reads his prepared statement through a pair of reading glasses, he chokes back tears. He expresses his sympathy to the parents who lost their sons, but tells the committee that answering questions about steroids puts players in an untenable position.
“If a player answers no, he simply will not be believed,” McGwire says. “If he answers yes, he risks public scorn and endless government investigations. My lawyers advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family, or myself. I intend to follow their advice.”
McGwire’s credibility is almost gone. His reputation is about to go next. Missouri Democrat William Lacy Clay: “Can we look at children with a straight face and tell them that great players like you played the game with honesty and integrity?”
MCGWIRE: I am not going to talk about my past.
CLAY: In addition to Andro, which was legal at the time that you used it, what other supplements did you use?
MCGWIRE: I am not here to talk about the past.
NEW YORK REPUBLICAN JOHN SWEENEY: Were you ever counseled that precursors or designer steroids might have the same impact?
MCGWIRE: I’m not here to talk about the past.
MARYLAND DEMOCRAT ELIJAH CUMMINGS: Are you taking the Fifth?
TOM DAVIS: The gentleman made it clear…
MCGWIRE: I’m not here to discuss the past. I’m here to be positive about this subject.
NORTH CAROLINA REPUBLICAN PAT MCHENRY: You said you would like to be a spokesman on this issue. What is your message?
MCGWIRE: My message is that steroids are bad. Don’t do them.
MCHENRY: How do you know they’re bad?
MCGWIRE: Pardon?
MCHENRY: Would you say you have known people that have taken steroids and have seen ill effects, or would your message be that you have seen the direct effects of steroids?
MCGWIRE: I have accepted my attorney’s advice not to comment on this issue.
McGwire never strays from his lawyer’s advice, sounding guiltier with each refusal to discuss his past. Gone is the hero Senator Ted Kennedy once lauded as the home run king of working families in America. In his place is a man who all but admits his career was built on a foundation of lies. If Davis and his committee think public humiliation can deter teenagers bent on using steroids, McGwire has been the perfect witness.
Selig and Fehr are the headliners when Davis calls the last panel later this evening, and though the committee members take turns battering both men, the session with the game’s decision makers lacks the tension and emotion of the previous two.
Selig testifies that he barely heard mention of steroids in his sport until reading about the bottle of Andro found in McGwire’s locker in 1998, no matter how many committee members show him examples that prove otherwise. Yes, Selig concedes, he wishes he knew in 1995 what he knows now, but no one should question his commitment on this issue. “Baseball had no drug program at all until I took over,” he says. “None, zero.”
Selig insists the new drug testing program will work if they only give it a chance, but says he is ready to institute even tougher penalties. The reason he hasn’t done that already? The union. But he’s not blaming the players, at least not tonight. “Baseball will not rest and will continue to be vigilant on the issue of performance-enhancing substances as we move toward my stated goal of zero tolerance,” Selig says.
Fehr methodically answers questions for the dwindling number of committee members in the room. He understands this hearing for what it is. If this committee was serious about cutting off teenagers’ access to steroids and other dangerous drugs, it would regulate the sale of supplements, a practice Congress ended in 1994. But the $21 billion supplement industry is now too strong, and going after the makers of products like Ephedra is not going to get these committee members on ESPN or the nightly news.
One lawmaker after another asks Fehr why players should get more than one chance when they break the law. He calmly reminds them of the “well ingrained notion of progressive discipline in collective bargaining agreements in this country.” Cummings thunders that people in his district who are caught with drugs are thrown in jail, not given the five chances Fehr’s union members receive in their new agreement.
“My personal view is that our job with violations of substance use is not to destroy careers. Our job is to stop it,” says Fehr.
The daylong hearing has stretched past its 11th hour when the committee’s chairman brings the proceedings to a close. For now. “We are going to watch this closely,” Davis tells Fehr and Selig. “We represent people from vastly different districts, but tonight, we speak with one voice, conservative and liberal, Democrats and Republicans. This is not the end of our investigation into steroids.”
It doesn’t take Selig long to react to the game’s new landscape. He’s soon back in Washington, quietly meeting with the congressmen who are eager for the Commissioner to investigate steroid use in his sport. Selig knows how this game is played, so he listens, nods, and expresses interest, all the while hoping Congress will eventually lose interest and move on.
But Selig shifts his approach when several committees begin pulling together bills to mandate Olympics-style drug testing for all professional sports—legislation no one in Washington thinks has a prayer of passing. Rather than honoring the agreement he signed with the players just three months earlier, the Commissioner sends Fehr a letter on April 25, outlining a far more stringent drug testing program: a 50-day suspension for the first drug violation, 100 days for the second, and a lifetime ban for the third. He also wants to test for amphetamines.
“I am asking you now to demonstrate once again to America that our relationship has improved to the point that we can quickly and effectively deal with matters affecting the interest of our sport,” Selig writes.
Any improvement in this relationship evaporates when Fehr balks and then Selig squeezes harder, giving a copy of the letter to the New York Times. The newspaper runs the story on May 1, one day before Twins reliever Juan Rincon becomes the fifth player this season to be suspended after failing his drug test. This time Fehr replies, sending a letter of his own that he shares with MLB.com.
“As you have acknowledged, the Joint Drug Agreement is, in fact, working well, as indicated by the very low number of positives from 2004, before the new provisions were agreed to for this year,” writes Fehr, who says he’s open to a discussion, but not through the media. “Accordingly,” he concludes, “I will not here otherwise respond to your letter.”
Fehr’s response neither surprises nor moves Selig, whose proposal is unanimously passed by the owners on May 11. Six days later Selig and Fehr are back in Washington for a hearing called by Cliff Stearns, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee for Consumer Affairs. And this time the focus is not on baseball alone. Stearns has brought in the commissioners from all four major sports to discuss his proposal for an Olympics-style two-year ban for first-time drug offenders.
“Anything that impugns our integrity we must deal with and deal with quickly, with harsher penalties,” says Selig, who tells the committee that his latest proposal to the players will rid baseball of performance-enhancing drugs. But if his best attempts fail? “I would not resist federal legislation if Congress continues to believe that a uniform standard is necessary,” he says.
Selig has been on the losing end of every major battle he’s waged against Fehr. He was crushed when the owners colluded against free agency. He was blamed for canceling a season and then the World Series in his misguided attempt to secure a salary cap. He was scolded by a federal judge for using replacement players.
But now Congress has handed him a club to use against his longtime adversary, and he fully intends to use it. As often as he can.