Caminiti Comes Clean: Ex-MVP Says He Won Award While Using Steroids

Sports Illustrated ^ | 28 May 2002 | Tom Verducci

[BluesDuke]

ATLANTA (CNNSI.com) -- Former major leaguer Ken Caminiti says he was on steroids when he won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1996, according to an exclusive report in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated.

But even though it left him with health problems that continue to this day, Caminiti defended his use of steroids and told SI's Tom Verducci the practice is now so rampant in baseball that he would not discourage others from doing the same. Caminiti told Verducci that he continued to use steroids for the rest of his career, which ended last season when he hit .228 with 15 home runs and 41 RBIs for the Texas Rangers and the Atlanta Braves.

[BluesDuke]

I'm taking a wild guess now that it was one thing when a known horse's ass like Jose Canseco popped off about steroid use, as he did last week when he revealed he planned to write a tell-all book. (It may be forgotten now, but Canseco was first accused of steroiding back in the early 1990s, by Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post - an accusation for which Boswell was roasted considerably, at the time.) But it may be something else when a player who didn't have Canseco's reputation as an ass (though Caminiti's drug revelations of last fall - and note his commentary about depression being a side-effect of his steroid use: could that not have prodded him to take at least some comfort in other drug abuse? - comment that he wouldn't say no to someone else deciding to use them may alter that somewhat) speaks up and speaks out.

And without once trying to undermine the severity of this issue, I would first remind my friends and observers here that, before there comes a smashing tidal wave of moralistic outrage, let's remind ourselves that baseball isn't the first professional sport bedeviled by the steroid question and it will not be the last. Anyone who thinks now to single out baseball as a hotbed of altered statehood should not be taken seriously on this issue.

Points to bear in mind:

1) You can bulk up to the Incredible Hulk's dimensions but if you didn't have the skills to begin with, the roids ain't going to help you now. (And, if anything, it seems that the more the roids are brought into a player's routine, the less agile, dextrous, coordinated in skill and execution he might become - consider Mr. Canseco, for one notorious example: As much as his having his head far enough up his ass that he couldn't see the moonlight without moving his tongue to one side, injuries likely prevented him from fully consummating what should likely have been a Hall of Fame career: How much of a factor might steroid use prove to have been in those injuries?)

2) Before anyone starts yammering about the single-season home run records being smashed to smithereens en masse, let us remember that the 60-homer plateau has been crossed six times beginning in 1998...by three (count 'em) players.

3) Baseball's offence explosion began at least a decade ago and was caused predominantly by a) the newer retroparks, mostly, being hitter-friendlier (Camden Yards, which all but started the trend, is a notable exception); b) a trend taking hold well enough before the 1990s of pitchers having the inside part of the plate taken away from them (by arbitrary arbiters and by batters ready to open cans of whoop-ass on the field if a pitcher dared to pitch inside) - no less than Greg Maddux has said (to Bill James, for the revised Historical Baseball Abstract) that within a very short time of his coming into the league (Maddux first made the Show in 1986, as a Cub) he noticed hitters crowding the plate and daring pitchers to try coming inside with remarkable impunity; and c) a baseball establishment which thought, in its infinite unwisdom, that for myriad reasons the game would die if the offence wasn't jacked up. (Interestingly enough, the offencive explosion seems this season to be abating somewhat, while the pitchers seem to be taking the inside part of the plate back.) You wonder: Could it really have been that surprising that at least some players, sensing the pressure implied by the very conscious bending of the game toward more and more offence, would have been willing to try anything to get in on the action, especially since (Caminiti notes this) it became a question of economic as well as athletic competitiveness in their minds?

That said, we may agree on this much: Steroids ought to have no place in the Old Ball Game; if the Players Association would like to reclaim the high ground by perception (and throw the owners for a glorious loop), it would be a magnificent gesture if they threw down the gauntlet and demanded - for the sake of their clientele's reputations and integrity - that a reasonable steroid testing program be put into place (much as is in place regarding other drugs); and, the government should stay the hell out of it and give baseball a chance to clean up its own act. (That third was for any and all eavesdropping nannygoats to whom there is nothing beyond the purview of the State.)

Remember: Jose Canseco aside (and he has perhaps as much credibility as Bill Clinton), no one of good enough repute is suggesting that every last baseball player in the majors is doing the roids - any more than people with brains in their heads didn't suggest that every last player in the NFL was using them when the question hit the NFL, or the college football ranks. But if Caminiti is right and maybe half have been doing so, it ought to alarm everyone who loves the game as deeply as I do and believes that baseball at its best is a game of unchallengeable and unsurmountable athletic artistry, a game that speaks volumes (and inspires just as many) and takes a grip upon the imagination of its devotees to deeper extents than any other game in America; indeed, a game which enacts a grand and embracing metaphor enunciated best by its shortest-serving but perhaps finest commissioner: Baseball teaches that, long as you travel and far as you roam, the purpose is to get back home, back to where the others are. A game such as that should have no room for this sort of business, but being played by human beings with all the flaws and weaknesses which are endemic in mere humans, there was probably bound to be something of this sort occurring even in the Great and Glorious Game. And if it gives the game a sufficient enough kick in the ass to get down to cleaning out as much of the roid use as possible, then Sports Illustrated will have done baseball and the nation which has been its cradle a service of perhaps immeasurable depth.

And, if that doesn't work, maybe some pitchers really should think about dialing 1-800-GAYLORD and getting a little help with meeting those great expectorations. There's nothing more likely to shave some points off a batting average than a case of what Boswell called hitter hydrophobia (translation: spitter on the brain). I think baseball would be better off if steroids were banned but the spitter was legalised. Oops! Baseball hasn't yet managed to put a steroid-testing program into place, but God help you if someone thinks you're throwing what George Bamberger liked to call the Staten Island sinker...

[stromsfriend]

Before anyone starts yammering about the single-season home run records being smashed to smithereens en masse, let us remember that the 60-homer plateau has been crossed six times beginning in 1998...by three (count 'em) players.

Steroids or better training techniques have a lot to do with it, but there must be immense pressure for fringe players to do soething or get shipped out.

Why doesn't MLB just start testing the way the NFL does?

[BluesDuke]

I suspect the testing issue will be negotiated in short enough order, though I tend to concur with those who have suggested (I heard a lot of comment about it on radio this afternoon) that the owners probably couldn't have cared less as long as the big bombers and fatted offences were putting the proverbial fannies in the proverbial seats, and that there were enough among those players who have been using the juice to pressure those players who haven't as what SI called "playing naked" (i.e., without steroids). I would support testing myself. I found or heard these comments from around the game today...

Hey, if someone thought he had to be using steroids to hit against me, I'm flattered. But I'm going to tell you that anyone who says you can just juice up and play baseball never played baseball. - Rob Dibble, ESPN commentator and former major league relief pitcher. (You may remember him as one of the Nasty Boys, a trio of hard-throwing, slightly flaky Cincinnati Reds relief pitchers who probably made a lot of the difference in their striking 1990 pennant and World Series sweep of the Oakland A's; two lefthanders, setup man Norm Charlton and co-closer Randy Myers were Dibble's partners in crime.)

I don't know who's on and who's not. There is definitely more activity in the weight room nowadays. I was hoping that it was just old guys working hard in the weight room. I really think it's time for testing. It really is. - Frank Thomas, Chicago White Sox.

I think it's a total exaggeration unless you're saying some of the stuff like MetRx mix and the blender stuff is a steroid, then I stand corrected. As far as something injected or prescribed, I think it's preposterous to say 85 percent. - Bobby Valentine, New York Mets manager.

It's easy for me to sit here and say I don't care about drug testing because I don't take steroids and don't take drugs. It's not a big deal to me, but obviously there is much greater cause for concern that goes into why you would or would not agree with doing that. - Tom Glavine, Atlanta Braves pitcher and player representative.

I'm not sure how widespread this problem is. I've seen players go from tall, skinny guys to tall, strong guys. Sure, you can say he's got to be doing something, but I've never had anybody tell me for sure that, "This person is doing this." It's always, `I heard this guy is doing it." - Joe Torre, New York Yankees manager.

You have to be careful not to paint everybody with the same brush. - Buck Martinez, Toronto Blue Jays manager.

As for the pics of Mark McGwire, one comment: He quit using his particular pair of steroids (andro was one but I forget the other one he used periodically) when it had been revealed because he didn't want to influence anyone else to do it - and he still parked 65 into the seats the year after he became the first to go yard 70. And as I remember, McGwire's particular concern had been not muscle enhancement but muscle replenishment (the other steroid, I remember reading, was usually prescribed to help replenish depleted muscle). Because, until the further weighting of baseball toward offence uber alles, McGwire was already strong enough, as George Will once wrote memorably enough, to hit rice pudding 500 feet.

But I am willing to accept the prospect that those players who do use the roids were doing so as a near-direct consequence of baseball's powers that be having decided, rather cavalierly (and most likely from an inability to admit that they had lost their proper grip on how to promote and represent the totality, the whole balance, of the game they seem so bent on wrecking), that the game needed a fix of...excitement, of...thrills, and that the way to do it was to find wherever it was that baseball could approximate the instant gratification which is endemic in the hard and finite contact sports. The hell with the beauteous balance of the game; the hell with the natural spontaneity of individual acts from pitcher to batter to fielder and round again never quite the same way twice consecutively; the hell with the brilliant paradox between the pastoral and the bustle, in a green field toward a homecoming, that makes baseball as beauteous as it is. The business of baseball's powers that be decided that the game of baseball, which wasn't broken, needed to be fixed.

And anyone with half a mind and half that of sense could have seen it coming as far back as the early 1980s, though I don't know for certain that it was exactly preordained for the roids to enter the picture. But when you had batters charging like bulls when pitchers pitched them tight to back them off the plate, as had been done from time immemorial, and the designated arbiters rounding into position where a pitcher was more likely to face repercussion for even thinking about it than a hitter was for retaliating, it was probably a mere matter of time before the offence became the favoured child.

And I cannot help also wonder: How is it so that now comes the story of steroids in baseball, in a season in which the long ball offences actually seem to be somewhat less than they've been the past several seasons while the pitchers seem little by little to be beginning to reclaim the balance by which they work, even to where a few more than last season are beginning to move the hitters back or even knock them down if said hitters even think about crowding the plate? And, a big question for the Lords of Baseball: If the fannies in the seats still don't want to see anything less than the 600-foot bomb, how the hell did Ichiro Suzuki become a major star, or Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson become so popular last season, or a child prodigy named Mark Prior pack the place in Wrigley Field when he pitched his first major league game last week?

I suspect the steroid question in baseball means that a very treacherous chicken has come home to roost.

[BluesDuke]

More comment from the game...

I think it's exaggerated. But, sure, it's there. You wonder. You go up to a guy after the offseason, around the cage, put your arm on his shoulder and you're like 'Whoa.' Sure, it's there. But 50 percent, 85 percent … I think it's exaggerated. - Frank Robinson.

I know people can say whatever they want, but man, it's a shame that people leave the game and then they make comments like that. You talk like that, you make others who aren't involved with that stuff look bad. You live your life. I know how I live my life. - Mo Vaughn, New York Mets.

I welcome drug testing for me at any time. I've never done anything, but I'm the only person I can comment on. I can't speak about other people, nor would I feel it was right to speak about them. If somebody wanted to use it, that's their own decision, and I would not be surprised if I found out that other players used it. It would not be shocking to me. - Eric Karros, Los Angeles Dodgers.

If it's as big a part of the game as they're saying it is, maybe it has to be addressed. - Trevor Hoffman, San Diego Padres.

If you want to keep home runs in check, if you want to reduce home runs, start testing for steroids -- it's that simple. [But] I don't think Major League Baseball wants to do that because fans like home runs. It's a very scary situation for the health of the ballplayers. I personally would love to see it banned or abolished. - Mark Grace, Arizona Diamondbacks.

Those of us who don't do it, we feel like we aren't on an even playing field and that's something that shouldn't happen. - Tom Glavine.

Baseball itself, and the players' union, should really get together on this thing and start to let the players get tested. If I have the ability, the talent, I want to get tested. I don't want to have all these suspicions hanging over me. If it's a problem, let's clean up the game. - Frank Robinson.

[BluesDuke]

I almost forgot to BUMP my basic baseball list!

[ValerieUSA]

I'm a basic baseball?

[ValerieUSA]

"I've made a ton of mistakes," admitted Caminiti, who is also a recovering alcoholic. "I don't think using steroids is one of them."

Yeah, an alcoholic is a good judge of his self-abuse - NOT. He's made a ton of mistakes and continues to make them because he is MISTAKEN about a whole lot of things.
For every artificially muscular clothed athlete image we see on TV the public needs to picture the shrunken genitals and laugh. What a hideous deal with the devil these body worshippers strike when they inject steroids.

[Zack Nguyen]

McGwire was fortunate that his taking of androstendione didn't harm his home run quest. Androstendione belongs to a new class of supplements known as prohormones that are allowed through a loophole in Congressional legislation banning steroids.

Prohormones work like this. Androstendione is a "precursor" of testosterone. McGwire pops a few "andro" pills before he lifts. Theoretically, the pills are processed through the liver, producing a 40%-50% "jump" in testosterone levels for perhaps 90 minutes or so.

The pills were very poorly engineered and, perversely, produced high estrogen levels in men. Some users lost hair. McGwire was fortunate that this didn't hinder his playing.

[Zack Nguyen]

You can bulk up to the Incredible Hulk's dimensions but if you didn't have the skills to begin with, the roids ain't going to help you now.

Yes and no. Of course, if you are not gifted in the speed and hand-eye coordination to begin with, steroids will not make a horse-drawn carriage into a sports car.

But in my non-PHD opinion I would maintain that they do help you hit a ball. Many steroids, in addition to building strength and power, also stimulate the central nervous system. As any educated athlete will tell you, the central nervous system enables athletes to run fast, swing fast, etc. That would make it easier to hit ball. Possibly it might make it easier to "see" a ball as well. Surely it would make a fast player very fast, and a good hitter will good bat speed a superb hitter with blinding bat speed.

It would also enable guys to keep hitting as hard in September as they do in April, and possibly make it easier for their bodies to "remember" the proper swing technique, as they could practice more without getting tired.

Caminiti was incredibly foolish in his administration of steroids. Apparently he took them for several months straight without a break. Only an unsupervised athlete would do such a thing. Athletes cycle now - several weeks on, several weeks off, to keep their endocrine system from collapsing under the use of exogenous hormone. Their are also medications that can help.

Even with all this, you can still bump into serious problems long-term.

[Zack Nguyen]

They do strike a deal with the devil in a way. Many educated observors feel that in track and field it is impossible to reach world-class status without drugs now. I'd rather not believe that, but it is probably so.

MLB must not follow the example of Olympic sports. Yes, they have testing, but it is a joke. No organized athlete should ever be caught.

I had a conversation once with a physiotherapist who worked on some of the fastest sprinters on the planet. He told me that many of the finest athletes get their drugs from people that can engineer the testosterone molecule so that the IOC computer screening system won't recognize them. They could make something like 10,000 derivations of the testosterone molecule. The IOC computers were programmed to recognize around 100 of them. Testing is a joke designed to satisfy the public that the athletes are "clean", while quietly allowing as many of them as possible to take enormous amounts of drugs.

If MLB seriously began testing - unscheduled, off-season, in-season testing they would catch a slew of athletes who haven't been careful up until now. I've no doubt that a huge number of players are on drugs. The pressures faced by these guys are not visited on the rest of us, so I have a little sympathy for them. But the sport needs to be truly cleaned up, or they need to not test at all.

[BluesDuke]

Yeah, an alcoholic is a good judge of his self-abuse - NOT. He's made a ton of mistakes and continues to make them because he is MISTAKEN about a whole lot of things.

And he knows it. Caminiti appeared in a radio interview this afternoon, and I happened to be listening when he did. He backed off, for one thing, on his "I don't think using steroids was one of them" addendum; in fact, he came right out and said he threw down a 50 percent estimate because - this was his exact phrasing - "I wanted to make myself look better for doing something bad". The interesting thing was that the host interviewing him hadn't yet even asked him about that - he volunteered it. He could easily enough have tried the plausible deniability route when SI asked him about the issue. He certainly has nothing to gain by it; this isn't Jose Canseco out for some sort of revenge against baseball and looking to hawk a book to that end.

For every artificially muscular clothed athlete image we see on TV the public needs to picture the shrunken genitals and laugh.

They probably did that a long time ago when the steroid issue hit the NFL and the NCAA. But for every pair of shrunken nuts drawing laughs, there's a Lyle Alzado dying of steroid-nourished cancer drawing tears. It isn't really a joking matter when people like this destroy themselves for the sake of hitting it like now lest they be left behind. I'll have a little more to say about that in my next Diamond District; I'm still reading the entire of the SI special report (the Website only offered up a few of the sidebars, which give you the drift but not really the full story).

And if you think about it, there's a parallel between this and the New York police corruption scandal of the late 1960s-early 1970s: much talk comes now of players who don't use the steroids or human growth hormones being somewhat stigmatised by the players who do, kind of the way David Durk and Frank Serpico testified (to the Knapp Commission investigating the police corruption) that the honest cops had more to fear from the dirty cops than the other way around.

What a hideous deal with the devil these body worshippers strike when they inject steroids.

I don't think it was "body worship" so much as it was real or imagined pressure to fatten it up at the bat. Consider: Even before the 1994-95 strike ended, baseball - misinterpreting its media signals and all manner of other signals, not to mention trying to bend itself to audiences that neither wanted nor appreciated the game, rather than fortifying its existing audience and nurturing its future audience as had generations prior - had been pushing in ways forthright and subtle alike to fatten up the offence, accelerate the fast thrills rather than the measurement of excitement and grip for which the game was famous, and the inherent checks and balances in the play of the game be damned. Instant gratification, don't you know. (Does it ever occur to people, I wonder, that one of the prime reasons why the owners one minute bitch about spiraling player salaries and the next minute see and raise them regardless, is that the generation of owners that has entered the game since, say, 1980 - 1973 if you factor in the granddaddy of this breed, George Steinbrenner - has a mindset which, individual deviations notwithstanding, is obsessed on getting it done like five minutes ago, by whatever means they can think of? This isn't the only factor, but it is one of them.)

Considering that sort of mindset, the shock really ought to be not that baseball, too, has its steroid questions, but that it took as long as it did for this particular chicken to come home to roost. (Hell, I was shocked in 1986-87 when Len Dykstra reported to 1987 spring training twice his own bulk - he'd been a little rug rat, comparatively, in the 1986 postseason, hit a few homers in the postseason, and within six months he's Tarzan Junior? I'm surprised no one was suspicious of him - unless his sudden bent toward swinging to go yard so unhinged him that within three years he had played himself off the Mets and was in danger of playing himself out of the majors, because his home run obsession seemed to be costing him the skills that made him prospectively a valuable leadoff man; by the time he got straightened out in Philadelphia, he had what, maybe four good seasons before quitting time?)

That said, I'm encouraged equally by the Frank Thomases, Tom Glavines, Frank Robinsons, Trevor Hoffmans, and Eric Karroses. I'd like to think theirs is the view that prevails in the end. I mean, if I were Sammy Sosa or Barry Bonds (don't even think about it: unless there's an X factor as yet unrevealed, he's been building that body of his over several years, which is how long it takes doing it straight, no chasers, and Sosa was pretty much always built like a brick----), I'd be furious that the steroiders had put a taint upon what I did legitimately the last four seasons. There are muscular ballplayers who got that way the tried-and-true way. Always have been. But I would be quite careful about extending the fact that baseball has a steroid problem, to whatever degree, to the supposition that everyone is doing it; or, that the offence explosion was strictly the result of the roids.

P.S. You're not basic at all!

[BluesDuke]

I would maintain that they do help you hit a ball.

Only to the extent that you put a little more distance or velocity on what you hit. But without apologising for the roids by any means, I would have to say there is a tremendous difference between adding ten or fifteen feet to a line drive or a fly toward the warning track and getting the bat on the ball consistently at all. A big difference.

Interesting side question: How come nobody in baseball could agree on banning the roids, but let a pitcher be accused of throwing the ol' Staten Island Sinker and he's immediately treated like a grand theft felon? (For that matter, since the most likely roiders won't be the pitchers, necessarily - David Wells didn't get that bulky from steroids, unless there's one made by Budweiser - why don't the pitchers, taking Glavine's comment about leveling the field seriously, really crack down? Since those in the game might be most likely able to spot those who are doing the roid, why don't the pitchers send them subtle little messages...like a phone call to 1-800-GAYLORD; or, a little chin music, maestro? If I were pitching, show me an inflated Mr. America smothering that plate like the Boston Strangler - oops! that's what they sometimes called Dick "Dr. Strangeglove" Stuart, in honour of his fielding nonprowess - and I'll show you a batter who's going on his ass whenever I can get away with it. He wants to destroy his gonads with the roids, that's his business - or headache, if his wife finds out - but he's not going to just have his way at that plate with me, pal...)

[BluesDuke]

If MLB seriously began testing - unscheduled, off-season, in-season testing they would catch a slew of athletes who haven't been careful up until now.

I think it's going to happen in due enough course. If you caught some of the comments above and keep an ear cocked for others from the no-roids players (I'm going to guess that more players don't do the roids, and that as many who do are usually the marginals trying to keep up with the marquees as might be a marquee player or three), they could well enough influence a point where the powers among the owners and the players union will have to sit down and wring out a workable test program. It won't be entirely foolproof - the best test program in the world won't catch every last roider, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool - but it would do a hell of a job in re-cleaning and keeping baseball re-cleaned. Just as I've suggested baseball's revenue sharing solution should begin with a home-visitor gate split parallel to the 60-40 split used by the NFL, there might be something in the NFL's testing program which baseball could well enough adapt and make work on baseball's terms. (Curiosity hold: Why doesn't the NHL, too, test for steroids, and they've got even more behemoth-type players than baseball does?)

[ValerieUSA]

But for every pair of shrunken nuts drawing laughs, there's a Lyle Alzado dying of steroid-nourished cancer drawing tears. It isn't really a joking matter when people like this destroy themselves ... I don't think it was "body worship" so much as it was real or imagined pressure to fatten it up at the bat.

I know I sounded harsh with my laughter and worship comments. That was my intention. I am not going to be sympathetic -- there are plenty of people who are willing to give aid and comfort to celebrities who abuse themselves.
My heart goes to the young kids who are encouraged to idolize professional athletes. Adolescent boys who wear the team clothes to school, who slept in team jammies under team comforters since they were toddlers and who think the secret to manly success is becoming star athletes.
I find the artificially bulked up athletes comparable to "supermodels," video singers and actresses, (oops, I mean "stars") puking up every meal, popping speed pills and getting their boobs stuffed by surgeons to present a false image of womanhood that adolescent girls think they must achieve to be happy and successful.
One way for average kids to develop healthy self and peer acceptance in this unrealistic TV world they are growing up in, is to start looking at the misshapen celebrities as freaks, not heroes. Perhaps it will help ease the pressure on the exploited players and models, as well as the kids, if audiences demanded health and reality, and if coaches, producers, advertisers and magazine publishers ran with that trend.
The tide has to turn, but it won't until the self-abuse is seen by the masses as hideous and miserable rather than beautiful and perfect.

[BluesDuke]

One way for average kids to develop healthy self and peer acceptance in this unrealistic TV world they are growing up in, is to start looking at the misshapen celebrities as freaks, not heroes.

From your lips to God's ears, my dear. But if it is one comfort, it is that the kids still tend, if looking at athletes, to figure out who are at least the more admirable. And it helps immeasurably when they have parents who are sensible enough to point forth as best they can the players who do perform and comport the right or at least the clean ways. It had to be done when the roids hit the NFL and the NBA, especially when things happened like Lyle Alzado's death. God willing, baseball (and the NHL, for that matter - the Lords of Hockey haven't banned the roids, either, yet) will be smart enough not to wait until its own Lyle Alzado buys the warning track before doing what the NFL and the NBA did. It may be a long shot, considering who's running the Old Ball Game now (I mean, you don't need to be a neurosurgeon or proctologist to know how far Bud Selig has planted and kept his head up his ass), but it's a crucial one.

Perhaps it will help ease the pressure on the exploited players and models, as well as the kids, if audiences demanded health and reality, and if coaches, producers, advertisers and magazine publishers ran with that trend.

Well, let's look again at baseball. For several years before the mid-1990s offence explosion, baseball's governors were looking to hype the offencive sweep, from various rule contortions and salary contortions (the abominable Bud Black deal - a .500 lifetime pitcher was offered Roger Clemens money by the Giants - was something of an aberration, albeit one with grave implications as it provoked another disproportionate salary inflation) to even the way they contorted new broadcasting deals. If and when you're getting signals like that that the proper balance of the game means nothing and one or another facet of it means everything - got to get those quick and fast thrills, you know, got to please the quick thrill fans and the hell with replenishing the game's inherent, established, and prospective real audience - and those who excel in that facet are bringing home the fatted cattle, of course you're going to be under artificial pressure.

The good news, I think: I think both Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti's (since recanted) published estimates are probably badly exaggerated (I think Canseco does indeed have an ax to grind with baseball and would have said anything to make himself look vindicated; I think, likewise, Caminiti - who was never particularly media savvy - was probably in one of the levels of substance abuse recovery and its demand for total honesty: scared to death and talking accordingly), and that it isn't even quite half the players who are doing the juice. But the bad news is that Thomas Boswell (who first published the suggestions that Canseco himself might have been juicing in the late 1980s, and was crucified for doing so) is quite right when he says that even if only 5 percent of players are doing the roids it contaminates the game and unfairly brings every honestly-achieved performance record under suspicion. (Think of it this way: If you were Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa, would you want the juicers around to let people think you did it with a little extra rocket fuel rather than what you had and built the old-fashioned way? One thing I dispute with Sports Illustrated - they made a point of mentioning Bonds going from 183 pounds to 240 over four years or so; well, guess what: That isn't really that much muscle weight to build up over four years.)

I notice that a lot of the players on the clean side (another piece of good news: the players' union won't be able to just dismiss the steroid issue because there's too profound a division among players on it now, with as many clean players speaking up and out even if they won't let their names be used just yet - it's like honest cops versus crooked cops: the crooked cops can and do make it miserable for the clean ones, rather than the other way round, until the matter is resolved by the proper powers of the department) are pitchers. (I don't think the clean players are all or mostly pitchers, but a lot are.) I gather from comments from pitchers like Curt Schilling (who favours steroid testing and banning) that the players can tell for reasonable certainty who may well be juicing up. Now, I wonder: Since one notices this season that more pitchers are beginning to re-establish a little more plate balance (I've seen some pitchers - Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown, Al Leiter, Pedro Martinez, Odalis Perez, Barry Zito, among others - starting to go in and tight if the batter's crowding that plate and even knocking them down to keep them honest...and look, ma! no brawl, mostly!), what's to stop the pitchers from sending the roid-oids a little message every time up, or every other time up, as a kind of calling card before some sort of ruling on the roids comes down from the lords and princelets of baseball?

Remember what I said earlier: Something is terribly wrong when baseball isn't yet banning the roids but a pitcher caught throwing the Staten Island sinker or a hitter surgically altering his bat is treated like a capital criminal.

The tide has to turn, but it won't until the self-abuse is seen by the masses as hideous and miserable rather than beautiful and perfect.

This is one of the values in Ken Caminiti speaking as he has been this week. He learned the hard way how miserable and hideous it is. Think of it this way: He had become a recovering alcoholic two years before he used his first steroid. (Here's one sad part: He wasn't doing it to beef himself into Frankenplayer, he started it because he thought it would help a shoulder injury heal quicker, and I'm told that is a reason why a number of athletic steroid users do start the stuff.) He was human enough to notice it also had a little effect on the way he put the ball in play or drove it to the wall, even on how quickly he moved around third base or ran the bases, and before he can say "Mike Schmidt" he's doing the roids like soda pop. Now, consider: One of the most frequently noted side effects of steroid abuse is depression (the testosterone drop contributes to it), and what's one of the reasons why people who customarily wouldn't think about it end up thinking about and trying the hard drugs like cocaine? Who's to say this wasn't a factor in Ken Caminiti's subsequent cocaine problem?

When I listened to him on radio yesterday, I got the sense he's not exactly quick or sure of tongue when he talks on the air, even to a reporter he's known for awhile, so maybe he isn't the world's perfect public speaker. But if his coming out (and no one seems to have put a gun to his head to force him to; I don't think his community service, a result of his cocaine arrest last fall, included public speaking) can put a big dent in any younger athlete's ideas about trying the roids, then he's done both them and him a bigger favour than he can conceive. It could begin with him showing his own before and after: He's 39 years old, but to see him today he almost looks ten years older.

Quotes That Should Be Heard Around The World: They look like Mr. Potato Head - heads and arms and six or seven body parts all in the wrong places. - Curt Schilling, on the steroid users.

They yell at me, "Don't hit me there, man. It hurts." That's because that's where they shoot the steroid needles. - Schilling, usually the effervescent type, on why he's become very cautious about giving teammates the old-fashioned attaboy swat on the butt after a good play or at bat.

[hobbes1]

It's easy for me to sit here and say I don't care about drug testing because I don't take steroids and don't take drugs. It's not a big deal to me, but obviously there is much greater cause for concern that goes into why you would or would not agree with doing that. - Tom Glavine, Atlanta Braves pitcher and player representative

But listen to him howl, when they call home plate at 17 by 81/2.....lol

[hobbes1]

Think of it this way: If you were Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa, would you want the juicers around to let people think you did it with a little extra rocket fuel rather than what you had and built the old-fashioned way? One thing I dispute with Sports Illustrated - they made a point of mentioning Bonds going from 183 pounds to 240 over four years or so; well, guess what: That isn't really that much muscle weight to build up over four years.)

57 LBS in 4 years, IS alot of weight to put on, especially muscle. If it were that easy, Bodybuilders would be ecstatic. Eating enough protein, and working out goes a long way, but playing 162 games a year, cuts well into maintaining that mass. And Sammy So-So ???? You've got to be Kidding me? Here's a clue, he lives somewhere in the Carribbean, which is Notorious for the availability of Dianabol.....

[hobbes1]

But if his coming out can put a big dent in any younger athlete's ideas about trying the roids, then he's done both them and him a bigger favour than he can conceive

Telling youngsters the TRUTH about steroids, rather than the currently in-vogue Alzadoesque horror stories (that, they will never usually see in real life, thereby making the danger seem more ludicrous) would go a long way toward curbing abuse, of what is essentially a healthy drug (though, not for youths...)

[BluesDuke]

But listen to him howl, when they call home plate at 17 by 81/2.....lol

Let him howl. He has the right. The umpires have been so damned inconsistent (other than shrinkage, of course) in sustaining a properly-delineated strike zone. It has been so since at least the latter 1980s, and most reputable analysts of the game attribute the offencive explosion of the 1990s (which also began rearing in the latter 1980s) to the strike zone controversies as one of a number of factors.

[BluesDuke]

57 LBS in 4 years, IS alot of weight to put on, especially muscle. If it were that easy, Bodybuilders would be ecstatic. Eating enough protein, and working out goes a long way, but playing 162 games a year, cuts well into maintaining that mass.

You have to consider: Baseball players since the early 1980s have actually had the off-season time - in addition to the exercise and weight rooms time during spring training and the season - to put in, if so they chose, the hard and heavy weight workouts that they could not do in the pre-free agency days or even the first few years of free agency. If you're doing a four-day-a-week or better regimen of weight workouts that go more than an hour or two at a time, it is conceivable and very realistic for a 50-60 pound muscle mass reconditioning and gain to occur. Barry Bonds may not be a likeable person, and he may tend to shoot from the lip a little too wildly when the mood strikes him, but it wasn't exactly a secret that he had begun going in for the power weight workouts at least four or five seasons before the 73 home run binge last year. And unless there is real evidence, I should not be too hasty in saying anything along the line of him using the anabolic steroids or human growth hormone.

And Sammy So-So ???? You've got to be Kidding me? Here's a clue, he lives somewhere in the Carribbean, which is Notorious for the availability of Dianabol.....

I once lived in an area notorious for easy access to prostitution. Does that mean I was making my way to the ladies of the evening? (You bet your ass it doesn't.) Whomever suggested to you that Sosa living near such availability means automatically that he availed himself, your answer should be show me the evidence.

Now, let me show you some evidence - as in, evidence real enough that it was not a surrealistic possibility for Sammy Sosa to cross the Big Six-Oh threshold; that, in fact, he was leading himself up to that direction for at least three seasons prior to his actually having done so.

First, let's look at his 1997 season next to Roger Maris's 1960. These are the seasons prior to the ones in which each man hit his 60+. You might be very surprised at how close they were - and, you might be somewhat more impressed considering a) Sosa's lineup protection was considerably less than Maris's, i.e. Maris had a Mickey Mantle batting behind him, and anyone who thinks Sosa had anything even close to that behind him has oatmeal for brains; and, b) Sosa in his three seasons prior to Maris's bust-it season actually had numbers that made Roger Maris look like a 98-pound weakling:

Roger Maris, 1960:
136 games, 499 at-bats, 98 runs, 141 hits, 18 doubles, 7 triples, 39 home runs, 112 RBI, 2 steals, 2 caught stealing, 70 walks, 65 strikeouts, .283 batting average, .371 on-base percentage, .581 slugging percentage, 290 total bases.

Sammy Sosa, 1997:
162 games, 642 at-bats, 90 runs, 161 hits, 31 doubles, 4 triples, 36 home runs, 119 RBI, 22 steals, 12 caught stealing, 45 walks, 174 strikeouts, .251 batting average, .300 on base percentage, .480 slugging percentage, 308 total bases.

They have their differences, of course, and Sosa did play every Cub game in 1997. But in 1996, Sosa had hit 40 home runs and twelve less other extra base hits than in 1997; Maris in 1959 played in 122 games and hit 16 home runs and drove in 72, playing with the Kansas City Athletics. He wasn't playing in a ballpark suited to his swing; Sosa was. Sosa became a more disciplined hitter beginning in 1993; in 1995 he began really putting up power numbers. It was, simply, not impossible to conceive of him going for the gold one, especially since at one point in 1996 he was thought to be on a pace to approach Maris.

Sosa, of course, did do what many thought Maris might have gone on to do, had the 1961 season not disgusted and battered him as thoroughly as did a round of nagging injuries (often involving his wrists) that cut his long-ball power down in a slow enough trajectory (he was never really the same power hitter again that he was in 1960-62). I don't think he gave up the ghost, as enough people do, but I do believe there is a case to make that his 1961 experience scared him shitless - he was as reticient a personality as Sammy Sosa is ebullient. Maris was nothing more and nothing less than a simple, quiet fellow who abhorred publicity as deeply as Sosa learned how to live with it and shine in it. I wouldn't call either case a character flaw, though it would surprise some people to understand that Maris had this much in common with Sosa: kids genuinely appealed to him (Maris, it turns out, habitually answered fan letters from children - they were practically the only fan mail he could stand to read).

Sosa caught a break in that his run for the roses with Mark McGwire captivated a nation rather than provoke comparisons and denigrations compared to past gods that bordered on the vile. Anyone who says public approval doesn't have an effect upon a public performer's performance has, simply, never tried performing in public. I'm convinced that, even with the television film 61* and the several books that have done Maris's story right, it is still impossible for too many people to accept that Roger Maris was abused as few athletic stars before or after him have been - maybe you had to be there to understand, but I have rarely seen abuse as vile, I dare say obscene, against any record pursuer as that with which Maris was battered in 1961. And if anything it is as much a testament to Maris's character that he could perform as he did in just his one big season under that kind of grotesquery as it is to Sosa's that he could keep it going even under the ego-stroking he surely received from the public fascination and adulation over his chase with Mark McGwire. [One of the shames of it, aside from that Maris could never really enjoy what he did achieve, is that the idiot brigades made it almost impossible for anyone to assimilate this inconvenient little fact: Maris needed five less plate appearances (684)to get 61 than Babe Ruth needed (689) to get 60. (Up your asterisk!)]

But I thought, too, that you might like to consider these points which many enough find inconvenient to their prejudices:

1) I think I noted this above, but only three players since Roger Maris have even hit 60 or more home runs, never mind 62 or more.
2) Only two of those players have done it twice or more.
3) Only one of those players has done it three times - and, thanks to the nearness of the other two, he did it three times in four seasons and didn't lead his league in home runs when he did it, but in the fourth of those seasons (with a mere 50) he did lead his league.
4) Aside from his 60 in 1927, Babe Ruth, who had a 22 season career, hit 50 or more home runs - count 'em - three times: 1920 (54), 1921 (59), and 1928 (54), and had one other season (1930) in which he might have hit 50 (he finished with 49).
5) Without denying that there is and has been a steroids presence in baseball which probably traces back even to the mid-to-late 1980s if not sooner, it is telling enough that, if the steroids and hGHs run that rampant around the bigs, inflating all the power numbers and such, only three players - all three of whom were established power hitters whose performances in the three seasons preceding their over-the-Ruthmaris-wall seasons could suggest reasonably enough that they might go over that wall - have outhomered Ruth and Maris in single seasons. Of the three, Barry Bonds (believe it or not) didn't hit as many homers over his three pre-70 seasons as McGwire or Sosa hit in their three, but Bonds was hitting his in streaks tight enough to suggest that he, too, had the chops to bring it off.

Here's a stat I don't think you might have considered: the home run totals of each 60+ home run man in the three seasons prior to their first date with the Big Six-Oh. I list them in descending order, according to the number of homers they each hit in the three preceding seasons:

Mark McGwire: 149 (39, 52, 58)
Barry Bonds: 120 (37, 34, 49)
Babe Ruth: 118 (46, 25, 47)
Sammy Sosa: 112 (36, 40, 36)
Roger Maris: 83 (28, 16, 39)

If anything, the argument that the performance of seasons immediately prior would seem to hold that Maris couldn't have done it all by his lonesome. But no one is going to suspect him of putting the tiger in his tank. And unless they're subjected to any kind of random testing and it comes up suspicious, there's no legitimate reason to suggest guilty-until-proven-innocent involving Sosa. Or Bonds. Or even McGwire (andro, hate to break it to you, isn't exactly a steroid, and McGwire's interest was in muscle replenishment, not enhancement - he was a tank before he joined the Cardinals). Remember two things: 1) The governors of the game were doing what they could to tip the game heavily toward offence in the past 20 years; and, 2) steroids in baseball is bad enough without there emerging a witch hunt. The game can (must) be cleaned up without one.