Throwing some heat
Congress tells baseball to get tough on steroids--or face some stiff inside pitching
Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco hit so many home runs when they played together for the Oakland Athletics that they were christened "the Bash Brothers." But last week, Canseco, McGwire, and a host of other baseball luminaries found themselves on the receiving end of the hits in a very different arena. Even by the standards of high-profile congressional inquiries, the session on baseball and steroids was quite a spectacle. The House Government Reform Committee administered an 11-hour scolding to the national pastime and made clear it wasn't done yet. "Today's hearing will not be the end of our inquiry. Far from it," said Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who chairs the committee. "We're in the first inning of what could be an extra-inning ballgame."
It was an ominous warning. The hearings come at a critical moment in baseball's struggle with performance-enhancing drugs. In his 2004 State of the Union address, President Bush highlighted the problem and called on players, owners, and coaches to "get tough" on steroids for the sake of children who see the drugs as the only way to compete at elite levels.
More than 500,000 teenagers--6 percent nationally--have tried steroids, nearly triple the number a decade ago, according to a 2004 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A survey by Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association found that few users were even aware of the potential side effects, which include everything from breast development in men to depression and suicide.
Canseco's newly released book, Juiced, which alleges that steroid use was rampant during the late 1980s and early 1990s, is flying off the shelves. This fall, four men associated with the controversial Bay Area Lab Cooperative are scheduled to go on trial for distributing steroids to professional athletes. And opening day is just a couple of weeks away. "The confluence of events is rightly drawing attention to the problem of steroids, and it will make it impossible for baseball to say in the future, 'We just didn't know,' " says Charles Yesalis, a professor of health policy at Pennsylvania State University and author of several books on the topic.
Credibility. While performance-enhancing drugs have long been an issue in elite sports, critics say Major League Baseball has been especially bad about keeping them out. Other organizations like the National Football League and the U.S. Olympic teams have more rigorous tests and harsher sanctions. Baseball, which began randomly testing players in 2003, gives a 10-day suspension for the first offense; even the fourth positive test is penalized by only a year. NFL players lose a quarter of their season for the first offense, while Olympic athletes are banned for two years. The result of baseball's foot-dragging "was an almost decade-long question mark as to not only the validity of the new MLB records but also the credibility of the game itself," says Davis.
What players said to the committee last week didn't help much. Canseco admitted using steroids and said they were "as prevalent in . . . the late 1980s and 1990s as a cup of coffee." McGwire refused to discuss whether or not he used steroids and repeatedly told the committee, "I am not here to discuss the past." Other witnesses warned of the dangers of steroid abuse. "There is no doubt that steroids killed our son," says Denise Garibaldi, whose son Rob, a ballplayer at the University of Southern California, killed himself at the age of 24.
The committee created an advisory group chaired by Curt Schilling of the Boston Red Sox and Frank Thomas of the Chicago White Sox, both outspoken steroid opponents. But it may do more than that, with some members of Congress threatening to go after some of baseball's government-sanctioned perks such as a federal antitrust exemption and subsidies from the country's largest cities. Rep. Henry Waxman suggested adopting a uniform testing and sanction policy--along the lines of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which monitors Olympic competition--for all professional sports. Gary Wadler, a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency, says adopting the Olympic standard would be the best way for baseball to fix its image. "Using the gold standard of testing," he says, "is the only way to regain the confidence of the fans."
This story appears in the March 28, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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