If major league baseball players didn’t learn a vitally valuable lesson from the Kirk Radomski episode of the steroids wars, they should finally learn from the Tony Bosch chapter.
If they’re going to cheat, beware of the guys who make it possible for them to cheat. Know that in the end those enablers will turn on them to save their skin and sell out the players who paid them to play the illegal steroids game.
No honor among thieves, as the old saying goes? No honor either among steroids salesmen and their buyers. Who ratted on Roger Clemens? His former trainer and supplier, not to mention injector, Brian McNamee.
Where would Major League Baseball’s steroids initiative be without Radomski and Bosch? It would be in need of heavy daily doses of steroids, that’s where. (One key witness MLB or the government never got was Barry Bonds’ former trainer, Greg Anderson, who went to jail a couple of times for refusing to testify.)
Baseball has uncovered steroids cheats through its testing program, but those cheats have been a fraction of the players nabbed for using banned performance-enhancing substances – steroids, human growth hormone, testosterone, amphetamines.
MLB has done very little of its own original work to uncover the cheaters. Without Radomski, a clubhouse attendant turned steroids salesman, there would have been no Mitchell report. Without Bosch, operator of a now closed South Florida anti-aging clinic, there would be no current investigation involving allegations of use of banned substances by Alex Rodriguez, Ryan Braun, Melky Cabrera, Nelson Cruz and who knows how many others.
Once Bosch reportedly agreed to give MLB names of his alleged baseball clients, the baseball world, fueled by the news media, always hungry for a hot steroids story – remember, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story – erupted in an orgy of speculation.
I think ESPN.com was the best, or most incendiary or most outrageous. I guess the sports network felt it had a right to claim that status because its reporters were first with the story Tuesday. However, as we have learned over and over, being first doesn’t automatically make a news outlet right.
“Stark: Biggest sports bust ever,” said a headline over a story by veteran reporter Jayson Stark. “We could be on the verge of the biggest drug bust in sports history,” the report said.
On the Web site the next day, ESPN.com, under the triple byline of T.J. Quinn, Pedro Gomez and Mike Fish, reported, “Major League Baseball will seek to suspend about 20 players connected to the Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal, including Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, possibly within the next few weeks, “Outside the Lines” has learned. If the suspensions are upheld, the performance-enhancing drug scandal would be the largest in American sports history.”
I respect all four reporters who wrote those misguided words in both reports, but where is their knowledge of baseball history? And I’m not talking about ancient history.
Granted, this is not WAR or VORP, but have they never heard of the Pittsburgh drug trials of 1985 and the cocaine scandal, to use a popular and overused journalistic word, that prompted then commissioner Peter Ueberroth to discipline 21 players, suspending 11 of them and meting out lesser penalties to 10 others?
The ESPN reporters did not offer any context by mentioning 1985; the articles didn’t even mention the Pirate Parrot, who served as the players’ clubhouse cocaine conduit. And their editors, whom I have long found unworthy of editing a major sports Web site – they provide no help or support to their reporters – did nothing to illuminate the context for ESPN readers.
ESPN has banged away at Rodriguez and Braun because they are the biggest names in their story. But was Dave Parker a big name in 1985? Keith Hernandez (“Cocaine is the devil on earth,” he testified)? Joaquin Andujar? Dusty Baker? Tim Raines? Lonnie Smith? Gary Matthews? Vida Blue?
Were any of these names worthy enough to be raised in connection with the Bosch story?
Ok, if not, what about Willie Mays, Willie Stargell and Bill Madlock? They weren’t disciplined, but Parker and Berra testified that they got amphetamines from Stargell and Madlock when they all played for Pittsburgh. John Milner testified that Mays had “red juice,” the liquid equivalent of greenies, or amphetamines, in his San Francisco locker.
Readers, or viewers, will find no references to any of this in ESPN’s exclusive report on Bosch, the latest crook to turn on his co-conspirators.
No one has quoted Bosch about his decision to help MLB catch the cheaters, but he apparently decided to turn on them to get MLB off his back and drop its lawsuit against him. His cooperation with baseball may also make law enforcement authorities less likely to pursue prosecution against him.
No one has said he has been offered such a deal, but that’s what delivered Radomski to MLB for its Mitchell report. He was assured he would not be prosecuted if he cooperated with MLB so he did. His assistance made the December 2007 Mitchell report possible.
Without information from Radomski, the former United States senator and Senate majority leader had mostly old newspaper articles with which to fill his report. Instead he crammed it with 51 names, if my count is accurate, the most prominent of which were Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Jason Giambi, Mo Vaughn, Miguel Tejada, Paul LoDuca, Eric Gagne and Kevin Brown.
Commissioner Bud Selig disciplined none of the Radomski clients cited by Mitchell, which may provide a basis for appeals of any suspensions Selig may levy on any of the Bosch clients.
In the context of the ESPN reports, lf there are suspensions and players appeal them and win, I guess that would mean that the accused and the union foiled “the biggest bust in the history of sports.”