News Analysis
If Every Player Was Doping, Why Use Asterisks?

By TYLER KEPNER
Published: July 30, 2009

CHICAGO — The 2004 World Series championship ring has 45 diamonds weighing 1.89 carats, cast in 18-karat white gold. On its face is an Old English B, the logo of the Boston Red Sox. Johnny Damon does not wear his, yet it keeps losing its sheen.
David Ortiz was the most valuable player for the Red Sox in the 2004 American League Championship Series. Manny Ramirez was the M.V.P. of the World Series. Both on Thursday were revealed to have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003, and guilt by association may stick to that merry band of self-described idiots.

“I’m sure that’s what people are saying,” Damon said. “When and if that list comes out, I’ll be able to determine what that championship means to me.”

Damon now bats behind Derek Jeter, a cornerstone of Yankees championship teams that also included players said to have used performance-enhancing drugs. If any fans naïvely believe their teams were pure while the Yankees were tainted, Thursday brought a new reality.

“I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the only organization that had somebody doing it, you know?” Jeter said. “What does that mean?”

Perhaps it means that if an asterisk sticks to one group of champions, it could also apply to all. And if every great team of an era has an asterisk, what is the point of the asterisk, anyway?

“This makes me laugh,” the former Red Sox ace Curt Schilling wrote on his blog, 38pitches.com. “I have already seen the bandwagon fans start the *04 and *07 threads and remarks, people with teams who are far deeper into this than most other teams — as if this makes it all O.K. Every team going back 10-15 years needs an * if you want to consider giving it to anyone.”

Schilling has spoken out against steroid use — though he famously went quiet before Congress in 2005 — and Damon insisted his name could not have been on the 2003 list. “It better not be on it, or there’s going to be lawsuits,” Damon said.

Damon mentioned himself, Schilling, Derek Lowe and Pedro Martinez as other important contributors to the Red Sox then, but he seemed interested to know just how many of his teammates were doping. The more names, he suggested, the less weight the championship carries.

History may be kinder, and may side more with Schilling, who played in two other World Series, for the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies and the 2001 champion Arizona Diamondbacks. Both rosters were also dotted with steroid suspects.

Some have doubted the validity of the Yankees teams that included Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Chuck Knoblauch and Jason Grimsley, who appeared in the 2007 report by George J. Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, on steroids in baseball. The report named few players on the Red Sox, a team for which Mitchell is a minority owner, as is The New York Times.

But Mitchell’s report was not meant to be comprehensive, and he stated in it that players from all teams were found to have used drugs. Among his primary sources were Kirk Radomski and Brian McNamee, both based in New York.

“Common sense tells us every team in baseball had steroid users during that era,” said Bob Costas, who was here to broadcast the Thursday night Yankees-White Sox game for MLB Network. “Those that appeared in the Mitchell report by and large came from teams and circumstances where Mitchell and his staff had sources, and they didn’t have equal sources in every big-league city.”

Costas continued: “Texas didn’t win anything during that period of time, and it’s pretty clear that Texas might have led the league in massive steroid use. So I don’t know how you evaluate or devalue championships during that period of time.”

The players on Thursday seemed weary of the issue, the way it continues to monopolize attention whenever a new name is revealed. Yankees Manager Joe Girardi, who won three championships as a catcher for the team, compared it to a Band-Aid slowly peeling off the skin.

“Names just keep coming out,” said the Yankees’ Mark Teixeira, who is active in the players association. “I agree with everyone else and say, ‘Get it all out.’ It’s ridiculous. Let everybody deal with the issue at the same time, because every two months things come out, and it’s not good for the game. It happened in 2003. Just get it all out.”

Teixeira was a rookie in 2003 and said he was proud to represent a new generation of players — including Matt Holliday and Chase Utley, he said — that plays the game with honor. Teixeira said he hoped to be a role model.

Yet few players have had a cuddlier image than Ortiz, whose endorsements include a children’s video game with his cartoon likeness on the box. Cookie Monster is listed among his nicknames at baseballreference.com. And now he has fallen, too.

“This era saddens me,” Girardi said. “It’s just a bad day.”

All those involved were either suspended or Fired....including the coach.

Books of The Times
Taking a Swing at Baseball’s Hall of Fame (and Infamy]
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: July 28, 2009

Over the years the Baseball Hall of Fame, the shrine in Cooperstown, N.Y., that held its annual induction ceremony on Sunday, has been so fraught with controversies about who deserves admission and who doesn’t that Red Smith, the great sports columnist, once wrote that the only solution was to blow up the place and start over.
COOPERSTOWN CONFIDENTIAL
Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame
In his new book, “Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame,” Zev Chafets suggests that part of the problem is that the whole institution is built on a foundation of deceit: a falsified creation myth that asserts, all evidence to the contrary, that our national pastime was first played on the bucolic pastures of Cooperstown and that a leathery, rag-stuffed orb bought from a local farmer for $5 might be the game’s Holy Grail, the very first baseball.

Equally hypocritical is Rule 5 of the hall’s election requirements, the character clause, which specifies that admission should be based not just on a player’s record and ability but also on his integrity, sportsmanship and virtue. This is the bar that has been used to exclude Pete Rose (gambling) and Mark McGwire (performance-enhancing drugs), along with troublesome, mouthy characters like Dave Parker and Dick Allen, and that may eventually be used to banish Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and anyone else tainted by accusations of steroid use.

But the brand of moralizing practiced by the Hall of Fame has always been highly selective and inconsistent. At the time of the annual induction ceremony in 2007, Mr. Chafets writes, the hall included “a convicted drug dealer, a reformed cokehead who narrowly beat a lifetime suspension from baseball, a celebrated sex addict, an Elders of Zion conspiracy nut, a pitcher who wrote a book about how he cheated his way into the hall, a well-known and highly arrested drunk driver and a couple of nasty beanball artists.”

That’s just among the living members. The roster of deceased immortals (some inducted before the character clause went into effect) includes Ty Cobb, one of the very first members, famously a sociopath, possibly a murderer and a notorious racist who was also a card-carrying, torch-waving member of the Ku Klux Klan, as were Tris Speaker and Rogers Hornsby. The hall is full of gamblers, brawlers and defendants in paternity suits, and there are numerous drunks, starting with Grover Cleveland Alexander, who Bill Veeck, the colorful baseball executive, once said pitched better drunk than sober.

Despite its title, though, “Cooperstown Confidential” is not especially gossipy or tabloidy. Most of the dirt Mr. Chafets exposes has been dug up before, and he relies less on new reporting than on other books, especially “The Politics of Glory,” Bill James’s more thorough 1994 history of the hall, and Nicholas Fox Weber’s recent “Clarks of Cooperstown,” a history of the wealthy local family that founded and still controls the Hall of Fame.

As he readily admits, Mr. Chafets, a former columnist at The Daily News and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, is not a baseball expert, and it sometimes shows. He says that Jim Bunning pitched one no-hitter when he in fact hurled two, one of them a perfect game.

The approach throughout this short book is breezy, jokey and anecdotal, rather than exhaustive or earnestly finger-wagging. Mr. Chafets even writes with some affection for the Baseball Hall of Fame, which for all its flaws remains a stirring place to visit. If the hall mythologizes baseball a little, it merely does on an institutional level what so many fans do in their own internal museums.

Mr. Chafets’s main conclusions are hard to argue with. He wants to abolish the Veterans Committee, which in 1945 and 1946 went on a spree of cronyism, electing old friends and teammates, and then turned stingy and slammed the doors, apparently believing that new ballplayers couldn’t possibly measure up to the old-timers.

And Mr. Chafets thinks that the keepers of the other gate to the hall, the electoral one, need to be expanded or greatly altered. Since 1939, admissions have been determined by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, a self-governing body composed of mostly white, middle-aged men, and the idea of having writers vote on players was never a good one.

Back when the writers were a good deal more important than they are now (and when the players made much less money), the relationship between the two groups was far too cozy. Now, when the writers are increasingly marginalized and have to grovel for access, the relationship is frequently antagonistic. Jim Rice, who was inducted into the hall on Sunday, took 15 years to pass muster, probably because of his aloofness from reporters.

Mr. Chafets saves the subject of steroids — which makes his book particularly timely, with the looming elections of Bonds and Clemens — for the very end. His discussion is smart and provocative but, like the rest of the book, probably too brisk and perfunctory to convince the skeptics, especially the moralizers in Congress who turned the baseball steroid hearings into a pulpit for self-aggrandizement, and the insomniacs who spend too much time listening to sports radio.

Mr. Chafets writes that performance-enhancing drugs should be legalized, on the grounds that as currently used, they haven’t been proved to do any harm, nor any demonstrable good, either, and that there will never be a foolproof way to test for them. That seems unlikely to satisfy the guardians of Cooperstown, who are left in the unenviable position of having to surrender their moral agenda and let in Bonds, Clemens, et al., or else exclude them and turn the Hall of Fame into an even more mythical realm than it already is.

Ortiz Says He Was Not a Steroid User
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

At Saturday's news conference, Ortiz said he did not know which type of supplement could have triggered the positive result.



The Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz said Saturday that he had been careless about using over-the-counter supplements and vitamins that may have triggered a positive doping test in 2003, but he denied ever using steroids.
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“I definitely was a little bit careless back in those days when I was buying supplements and vitamins over the counter,” Ortiz said at a news conference at Yankee Stadium, hours before the Yankees and the Red Sox were scheduled to play the third game of their four-game series.

Ortiz sat next to Michael Weiner, the incoming head of the players union, who said that because of court-ordered restrictions the union was limited in what it could say about the 2003 test. The union confirmed to Ortiz that he was on the list of players whose tests were seized by federal authorities. But the union was barred from providing him with additional details, including what he might have tested positive for, Weiner said.

The New York Times reported 10 days ago that Ortiz and Manny Ramirez were among the roughly 100 major league baseball players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003.

Ortiz was the fourth player this year to be publicly linked to the 2003 test, but until now the union had been reticent to speak publicly about the revelations. That changed Saturday when Weiner raised doubts about whether those players whose tests were seized by the government had actually tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

He said there were discrepancies between the number of positive tests under the testing program in 2003 and the number of tests seized by the government. Weiner cautioned that some of the players linked to positive tests could have been using an over-the-counter supplement that was not banned by baseball at the time. Nevertheless, federal court documents show that the government only seized the records of players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

“Understand the position those players are in, they are being accused of doing something wrong,” Weiner said. “They don’t know the specifics of what they’re being accused of and they don’t have access to any of the information that might help them to defend against those charges.”

Ortiz apologized to fans and his teammates for creating a distraction.

”This past week has been a nightmare to me because I’m the kind of guy that I look forward to, I think about the fans every day,” he said. “I don’t think this game could have been as good as it is without the fans.”

For the union to be able to speak more openly about the 2003 tests, a federal judge would have to issue a special order for that information to be disclosed, and such a motion has not been granted.

In a statement Saturday morning, Major League Baseball said it did not possess the list of names of players who tested positive in 2003.

Contrary to what Ortiz said when his positive test was revealed, he said Saturday that he had been told by union officials in 2004 that he was among the players whose drug-testing information was seized by the government. To prevent players who were using supplements from testing positive, each test conducted in 2003 consisted of two collections, Weiner said.

“The first was unannounced and random, the second was approximately seven days later, with the player advised to cease taking supplements during the interim,” Weiner said in the statement released by the union before the news conference. “Under the 2003 program, a test could be initially reported as ‘positive,’ but not treated as such by the bargaining parties on account of the second test.”

Players were supposed to be told by the drug testers to stop taking supplements when their samples were first taken, but Ortiz said that he was never told to stop taking supplements. Ortiz said that he purchased supplements in the Dominican Republic and the United States.

“I’m not here to make any excuse or anything,” he said. “I really used a lot of supplements and vitamins.”

He added that companies would send him supplements, “but I never used or buy any steroids.”

The supplement industry has come under increased scrutiny in recent months for selling over-the-counter supplements that contain steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

Red Sox Manager Terry Francona stood next to the platform where Ortiz sat. In a statement released after the news conference, the Red Sox said that Ortiz had been tested “15 or more times” since 2004 and had not tested positive for a steroid.

Pete Rose might have his lifetime ban from baseball lifted by baseball commissioner Bud Selig. This would make Rose eligible for induction into The Baseball Hall of Fame, which Rose and his pals have been advocating for years. Rose was definitely a great player and manager, of that there is no doubt. But perhaps the main reason Rose should be inducted is because he ushered in the modern era of baseball, the era of the criminal slimeball.

In the years from 1963 to 1986, Pete Rose was considered one of the best players to have ever played the game. He is the Major League leader in hits, games played, at-bats, and outs as well as winning three World Series and a bunch of other awards. He later became the manager of the Cincinnati Reds and seemed to have secured his place in the pantheon of baseball, all of this in spite of his Moe Howard bowl haircut.

Then, in 1989 he was caught gambling, allegedly on his own team…to lose. The problem is that he was the manager of the Reds at the time and could, if he wanted, orchestrate a loss. He was dismissed from his job as manager and was banned for life from the game by commissioner A. Bartlet Giamatti (no relation to the chubby star of American Splendor.) There was a media shitstorm the likes of which wouldn’t be seen in baseball until the current steroid scandal. The Baseball Hall of Fame voted to enforce the ban on Rose by putting him on the “ineligible” list.

There is an ongoing debate as to whether the players that have been caught using steroids should also be banned. This would make someone like sausage enthusiast Roger Clemens (one of the greatest pitchers ever) ineligible from the Hall of Fame. The thinking is that these steroid users had an unfair advantage over their fellow players and that, perhaps without the ‘roids, these guys would never have played as well as they did. Pete Rose, of course, was not a steroid user and earned his records through talent and hard work, but he committed the cardinal sin of baseball: gambling.

The reason for this hatred of gambling goes back to 1917 when the Chicago White Sox threw the world series in exchange for serious mullah from gangster Aronold Rothstein. Back then baseball players made little money and were bound to unfair contracts by unscrupulous owners. Many people have argued that, given the economic limitations imposed on the 1917 Sox, they should be forgiven for their sin. The White Sox did not win another World Series until 2005, when they beat the Houston Astros [Ed. Note: Friggin' White Sox!] Rose is often cited in the same sentence with Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the players involved in the fix in 1917. Jackson is easily one of the greatest players of all time and yet, almost 100 years later, he is still banned from the Hall of Fame.

Rose spent several years denying that he had gambled on the game even though everyone knew he was lying. In 2004 he released his memoir, My Prison Without Bars, in which he admitted having gambled on baseball, though he says he never bet on the Reds. This only made Selig dig in his heels on lifting the ban. So why the sudden change of heart?

The answer lies in the very corruption that Rose helped usher into America’s past time. Rose was one of the first players to be caught committing a crime. Since then, you have some of the best players of the last 20 years breaking both federal and baseball laws by taking drugs (steroids and otherwise.) Players are also known to take advantage of high priced prostitutes, graft, and ad money. In the distant past it was considered uncouth for players to participate in advertisements. Now Derek Jeter has a cologne and A-Rod is selling trips to his native Dominican Republic. Rose led the way and showed the next generation of players that you could still be considered a great player while doing whatever the hell you want. Fans have also become used to this kind of behavior, shrugging their shoulders when a player gets caught doing something illegal or unethical and Rose has painted himself as a martyr at the hands of an unfair moralistic baseball commission. Finally, he may have earned some sympathy for his constant belly aching, “Boo hoo! I said I was sorry! Love me!”

After all, given the criminal nature of modern baseball, what’s a little gambling?

Perhaps the solution is to open an alternative Baseball Hall of Fame. Call it The Baseball Hall of Shame or The International House of Baseball Assholes. They can open it in Newark or Dumpwater, Florida or something. Rose should be the first inductee, just as Babe Ruth was the first at the Hall of Fame.

Petey the scum ball keeps waiting