Baseball’s decade of dishonor

For a decade after the strike that canceled the end of the 1994 season, major league baseball seemed to be on a roll. Attendance was up. New ballparks like Baltimore’s Camden Yards brought a warm, old-fashioned feel to the modern game. Some teams were making a lot of money, as were many players. And excited fans were watching hitters like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds knock out home run records that were set by the game’s greats decades before.

But the worm was in the bud. The canker was eating baseball’s blooming rose from inside, invisibly at first, but thoroughly and inexorably. Drugs, performance enhancers that were supposed to make you play stronger and faster, were introduced into the game in such quantities that they called into question the very records and statistics that had always been the foundation of baseball, the way fans compared the players of the present with those of the past.

It is a rich and measured tale of the last dishonest decade that Howard Bryant, columnist for the Boston Herald, has to tell in “Juicing the Game.” No more comprehensive, balanced or, yes, fair account exists. Bryant is not one of those baseball writers who writes for those already in the know. His audience is the general reader who wants to figure out what happened.

Bryant carefully and powerfully builds his case: The culture of major league baseball is responsible for juicing the game. After the 1994 strike, baseball was so desperate to win back fans and its own standing that it ignored, willfully, Bryant powerfully argues, growing and alarming signs that performance-enhancing drugs were invading baseball, just as they had the Olympics and other professional sports, such as football.

The owners ignored the warning signs because they wanted the money that the reviving game was bringing them. In Bryant’s portrayal, baseball’s owners as a class are insular, backward, selfish and not very bright. They are the same kind of owners who so stubbornly and hatefully banned African American athletes until the Brooklyn Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson onto the team in 1947. Bryant is sympathetic to the argument that the long exclusion of blacks distorted the stats of this statistics-based game just as the juicing decade after the 1994 strike did.

In assessing blame for the drug scandal, Bryant is judicious. In his book, those who should have known better, those who had the power to acknowledge and expose and stop the use of drugs, are the most culpable. He does not exonerate the players: Some of them openly boasted about taking the stuff; others scornfully denied it or mocked the accusations.

But it is Commissioner Bud Selig who bears the brunt of Bryant’s considered judgment.

“In the end,” Bryant writes, “Bud Selig is alone, isolated to a degree from the game over which he presides, the old history major banking on the fact that indeed history will absolve him, his renaissance destroyed largely by his own opposition to investigation. ‘We need to move forward,’ Selig says in defense of the era. It is the worst indictment of the tainted era, that the commissioner of baseball honors the years he once so happily called the greatest in baseball history by refusing to look back at them.”

Some knots in this tawdry tale were wrapped up with the recent plea agreements that Victor Conte and trainer Greg Anderson received for their role in Conte’s Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, the steroid distributor that was uncovered, to baseball’s profound embarrassment, by federal investigators.

But the story is not over. Despite the new curbs on steroids that major league baseball has finally installed, the damage done to the national sport will resound for years. The self-inflicted catastrophe could have no better chronicler than Howard Bryant in his “Juicing the Game.”

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Anthony Day, former editor of The Times’ editorial pages, is a regular contributor to Book Review.