Steve Howe Still Thinking About Another Comeback

Steve Howe, who hasn’t thrown a pitch in the major leagues since a drinking incident ended his comeback attempt with the Texas Rangers, will be spending the coming weeks selling a new book.

Howe wrote “Between the Lines” with Jim Greenfield, a Philadelphia attorney and former newsman, about his career, his cocaine addiction and recovery and the strains it put on his marriage, which has survived.

Howe, 31, doesn’t rule out another comeback attempt and said several teams have shown interest in him, but would not name them.

“I’d love to be able to walk away from the game because I can’t get anybody out anymore,” he said. But the left-handed reliever who was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1980 and thrown out of baseball for cocaine and alcohol abuse, won’t accept any offers until next season.

“I made the commitment to stay out of baseball for one full year,” Howe said. “You have to understand that these commitments to myself are probably the most important things that I can keep for my recovery.”

In an interview Tuesday, Howe was a reflective, humble man, far from the self-centered young upstart who thought he could control cocaine.

Howe, while pitching for the Dodgers, checked into a drug rehabilitation clinic in 1983 and was suspended from playing the 1984 season by then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

Since then, he’s played for the Minnesota Twins, the Texas Rangers, in the minor leagues and, last summer, for a semipro club in Mexico. His last major-league stint ended when the Rangers terminated his two-year $1.2 million contract in January, 1988, for an incident involving alcohol during a three-day minicamp.

At the start of his second season, in 1981, he said he was determined to prove he did not have a sophomore jinx. He kept his cocaine consumption to two or three grams a week, spending $3,000 in the four months between spring training and the players’ strike.

“My case is a victory. By the grace of God we overcame this and I’m still alive. I still have my family. I still have so many things; I still have my health. I have a chance Lenny Bias will never get,” he said of the University of Maryland basketball star whose death was linked to cocaine use.

Howe said his healing began in earnest when he embraced God last Christmas. “The best treatment centers, the best help, the best psychologist in the world didn’t fix me,” he said. “There’s a side of my spiritual self that had to totally believe in God to take it over.”