Speed Still the Name of the Game for Some

The clandestine jars in baseball clubhouses filled with “greenies” -- the potentially deadly amphetamines, speed or pep pills that secretly fueled generations of players -- are nowhere to be seen.

Now, caffeine-spiked, vitamin-boosted Red Bull, Spark and other concoctions promising energy are all the rage, lining glass-doored fridges and locker shelves, most packing no more wallop and presenting no more danger than a cup of drip coffee.

Yet few among dozens of major league ballplayers interviewed by Associated Press say that greenies or their chemical cousins in other colors really have been relegated to the past. Discretion, in this age of congressional hearings and calls for cleaning up the game, demands less visibility and less discussion.

Amphetamines are not banned by the major leagues, though commissioner Bud Selig last month called for testing for the stimulants. The players’ union has said it would discuss the issue.

Seattle’s Bret Boone, the Dodgers’ Jason Phillips, the Angels’ Darin Erstad, Detroit’s Ivan Rodriguez and San Francisco Giant Manager Felipe Alou were among many who wouldn’t touch the subject of amphetamines. Said Alou: “We’ve been through a lot with this ballclub” -- true enough, with Barry Bonds’ personal trainer still embroiled in the BALCO steroids investigation.

At the mention of greenies, Washington National Manager Frank Robinson, a Hall of Fame player who is among the most astute observers of the game, tightened his lips in a half-smile and drew his thumb and forefinger together across them as if to keep his lips zipped.

Among more than 50 players willing to speak on the record, guesses about how widely greenies are still used -- and guesses are all anyone could offer in the absence of tests -- ranged from less than 10 percent to more than 75 percent of all major leaguers.

“You hear stories about guys taking them as soon as they wake up in the morning and all through the day,” said Seattle Mariners pitcher Jeff Nelson, among those who believe the higher figure is most accurate and that amphetamines should be banned. “It just gets to be a habit. They need to pop more of them to get them more awake.”

Dallas McPherson, the Angels’ rookie third baseman, estimated that half to 75 percent of players use energy pills of some sort, but he didn’t favor banning any stimulants, prescribed or not.

“Most cases, they’re out too late and taking something to stay awake, give them a little extra pep,” he said. “If you take a pill to give you more energy, how does that help you hit a baseball? I don’t take it. I don’t need it. I’m 24 years old. Maybe when I’m 30 I’ll have a different opinion.”

Washington’s Jeff Hammonds laughed when he said “zero percent” of the players use greenies.

“Can’t go wrong with that,” he said. “I’ve seen greenies around. But I’ve never been offered any. You don’t know where they’re made and you don’t know what they are.”

The consensus among players and trainers willing to speak out was that:

* Greenies are still used in baseball, the only question being how widely.

* Amphetamines are not considered performance enhancers that give players a competitive advantage, but rather performance enablers that get them through some games on little sleep.

* Baseball should add amphetamines to the banned list as much for health reasons as to get rid of another contentious issue.

“I am against amphetamines, absolutely, without reservation,” San Francisco Giant trainer Stan Conte said. “Whether that drug has been part of the culture of the sport or not, it’s still illegal. In addition, I’m very concerned about the message it sends to college, high school and Little League players that somehow they need something other than practice to move up the ladder.”

The players were divided on whether baseball should continue its own drug-testing program with stronger penalties or turn it over to an independent agency, such as the World Anti-Doping Agency, which polices Olympic athletes.

*

Amphetamines and other stimulants glaringly were left out of Major League Baseball’s most recent drug-testing agreement with the players’ association. Baseball has no penalties for amphetamine use by players on 40-man major league rosters, although amphetamines are banned for players with minor league contracts.

Selig proposed stiffer penalties for steroid offenders last month and called for testing for amphetamines because “we need to put an end to all whispers.”

“There’s a lot of anecdotal stuff that’s gone on,” Selig said. “I was a young kid who walked into the Milwaukee Braves clubhouse and I heard about it. That was 1958, so that’s 47 years ago. You can talk to people that go four, five and six decades back.”

Union head Donald Fehr said in a letter to Selig that the players were willing to listen, but he gave no indication they would budge on amphetamine testing.

“There’s going to be a real fight on the hands of the owners if they try to ban amphetamines,” Kansas City pitcher and former player representative Brian Anderson recently told the Kansas City Star. “At the same time, if they make as big a stink about amphetamine use as they did about steroids, the players have already been beat up bad about steroids.

“If they take that fight to the public, we’re going to get slaughtered if the public buys into it.”

None of the current or former players interviewed by AP seemed to know what was in greenies, which were usually Benzedrine when they were introduced to baseball and football by players returning from the military after using the pills in World War II.

“Even while they were in the service, they played sports,” said Charles Yesalis, a leading steroid and stimulant expert at Penn State. “My dad was in the 101st Airborne. When he went in on D-Day, he was issued amphetamines.

“During football and baseball games, they quickly learned they work. When these guys came back to the pro leagues and colleges, they brought amphetamines back with them, and that’s how it started. They spread rampantly through a variety of other sports.”

Benzedrine, Dexedrine and other variants were used, and are still used, in the military to forestall fatigue, increase energy level and boost aggressiveness. Defensive linemen in football, in particular, found amphetamines useful, Yesalis said, as did the kickoff teams.

Baseball players had different motives.

“There is no fatigue in baseball, per se,” Yesalis said. “The old saying is, ‘It’s five minutes of action packed into three hours.’ Why would they use them? But there’s a consistency among the ballplayers I’ve talked with over the last several decades, and others who have talked with journalists and written books. It all revolves around the fact that it’s a very long season with very long road trips and recovering from nights out on the town. It’s used for getting over hangovers, the doldrums, the boredom of a 162-game season.”

The trouble is that amphetamines are so dangerous -- dramatically more so than steroids -- that the deaths they caused to cyclists, students and others who were using them led to the 1970 federal Controlled Substances Act and to drug testing in the Olympics.

“It was absolutely staggering how widely used amphetamines were in the general population in the 1960s,” World Anti-Doping Agency consultant Dr. Gary Wadler said. “Over 13 percent of American college students used amphetamines at least once.”

*

As Schedule II controlled substances, the same classification as cocaine, amphetamines are illegal to sell without a doctor’s prescription for a specific medical condition and require a higher level of monitoring than other prescription drugs. Amphetamines and more than 40 other stimulants are listed on WADA’s prohibited substances list. Caffeine no longer is banned.

“Amphetamines can stone-cold kill you immediately,” Yesalis said. “They’re highly addictive and you can overdose on them. They can cause psychotic episodes. They can lead to stroke and heart attack. In my judgment, they dwarf anabolic steroids as potentially dangerous drugs.”

Amphetamines and cocaine are closely related in terms of their effect on the brain and central nervous system, Wadler said.

Despite that, and despite their status as controlled drugs, amphetamines and related stimulants are easily bought via the Internet at sites such as PillsRX.net or IntegraRx.com. Advertised for weight loss, such WADA-banned stimulants as phentermine, phendimetrazine and benzphetamine are available online for $89 to $199 a bottle.

Adderall, which contains amphetamine and dextroamphetamine and is prescribed to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy, also can be bought online without an examination by a doctor.

“Baseball has to categorically ban amphetamines,” Wadler said. “They have to categorize it as a performance-enhancing drug, not as a drug of abuse, which has a different pathway of management. They’ve got to rid the game of it for health reasons, for violating the spirit of sport reasons, for legal reasons, for performance reasons.

“I’d like to ask these players if they know they’re taking a drug that has the capacity to kill them suddenly. And if they can’t relate to that, do they realize they’re taking a substance which is a first cousin of a drug [ephedra] that killed one of their colleagues named Steve Bechler. Now how do you justify taking it? So you don’t get tired? Give me a break. You’re bored? Well, if you’re that tired and that bored, then leave the sport.”

*

None of the players or managers interviewed by AP acknowledged using an amphetamine, though some said they had used dietary supplements with ephedra before it was banned by the FDA. A federal judge struck down the ban last month, and the FDA said it is evaluating the decision.

Yet, as Yesalis had found, most players cavalierly dismissed amphetamine’s danger and justified its occasional use to offset the rigors of travel, the length of the season and the night-day games.

Angel Manager Mike Scioscia doesn’t think amphetamines should be allowed in baseball, but he sympathizes with players who have taken them.

“This schedule is incredibly taxing on a player who plays every day,” Scioscia said. “The days off are few and far between, especially if you’re playing on the West Coast. They’re gobbled up. A day off is getting up early, getting on a plane and flying six hours to get to a hotel room to get ready to play a game the next day.

“So if you’re going to get rid of some of the things that have been around baseball for a long time, you’re going to have to maybe make some adjustments to the length of the season or the density of the season to give some more days off so guys can play at the high level they need to.”

Detroit Tiger third baseman Brandon Inge agreed.

“We play every day, straight through. You’re playing in front of anywhere from 15,000 to 50,000 people, and there’s more pressures there than a normal job. So there’s a need of something,” Inge said.

Aside from the fact that people in normal jobs don’t make millions of dollars a year to play a game, the notion that baseball players need pep pills to function doesn’t make any sense to someone like Tommy Lasorda. The former Dodger manager, now the team’s special advisor to the chairman, strongly favors banning and testing for amphetamines.

“I played and managed a lot of years,” Lasorda said. “Nothing wrong with a long season. I wish we could have played all year round. How the hell could they get tired doing something they love to do? A guy plays center field, he jogs out there nine times and he jogs back nine times. He goes to bat four times, maybe gets on one time. What the hell’s so tiring about that? How can anybody tell you that they’re tired playing this game. It’s a joke.”

*

Baseball took the whole amphetamines issue as a joke, or at least saw it as unworthy of attention, 35 years ago when former New York Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton wrote his landmark inside-the-game book, “Ball Four.”

Baseball continued to ignore amphetamines in 1984 when former Boston pitcher Bill Lee wrote about players popping greenies in “The Wrong Stuff.” In 1985, Dave Parker and Dale Berra testified in court during a cocaine scandal that they got amphetamines from Hall of Famer Willie Stargell, and John Milner testified he had used liquid amphetamines called “red juice” that Hall of Famer Willie Mays kept in his locker.

In 1999, when Dwight Gooden wrote in “Heat” about at least 10 New York Mets regularly using greenies, baseball still did nothing. Nor did it move on the issue in 2003 when another former Yankee pitcher, David Wells, now with the Red Sox, wrote in his own book that greenies continued to be prevalent in the game. He said many players bought “a season-long stockpile” of hundreds of pills and often shared them with teammates.

Rex Hudler, a former infielder and now a TV analyst for the Angels, told AP that greenies were common when he was in the minors and the majors.

“I’m sure they were in the game long before I even passed through,” he said. “It wasn’t like it was a huge deal. To me it was like routine.”

In “Ball Four,” Bouton wrote about a player who had received a jar of 500 greenies from a doctor friend. Many players told Bouton that they thought more than half of all players were taking amphetamines.

“On one of the teams, almost everyone was taking them,” Bouton told AP recently from his home in Egremont, Mass. “They were used pretty liberally.”

He wrote of one player who suddenly went berserk on the field.

“The comment in the bullpen was, ‘His greenies kicked in,’ ” Bouton said. “Another time a game got rained out and a player said, ‘I’ve got two greenies in me now and I’ve got to work these off somehow. So it looks like it’s going to be a late night on the town.’ It was just part of the culture.”

Some of the greenies actually were green, others were little red hearts, he said.

“Those you could get from the trainer,” he said. “The trainer would pass out the amphetamines.”

A number of the Yankees in the 1960s were using greenies, Bouton claimed, saying “mostly it was a private transaction in the trainer’s room.”

He said he never saw Mickey Mantle take an amphetamine, despite Mantle’s infamous late-night carousing.

“I can’t remember specifically who took what,” Bouton said. “I just know that the ethos was that you would take one if you felt you needed it.”

Asked about that, Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford said he didn’t recall seeing greenies in the Yankees’ clubhouse.

“Roger [Maris] and Yogi [Berra], I can vouch that they didn’t take them,” Ford said. “I’m sure somebody must have tried something. I know I didn’t take anything to wake up in the morning or get any pep. I’d stay in good shape. Mickey played more games than anybody in the history of the Yankees. I don’t think he needed too much. I’ve never seen greenies or seen anybody taking them.”

Bouton insisted that players always have and always will take anything to perform at the highest level.

“They need to be protected against their competitive instincts,” he said.

Wadler cited studies that show amphetamines mask fatigue and pain and improve eye-hand coordination, acceleration and speed. But even if players are using them mainly to function normally after too little sleep, Wadler wonders how baseball can justify its resistance to banning them.

Sen. John McCain also criticized baseball for not banning amphetamines when it renegotiated its drug-testing policy with the union in January.

“Why is baseball drawing a line in the sand around amphetamines?” Wadler asked. “Since it’s a controlled substance, it needs to be used only for the treatment of a legitimate disease with a high level of control over the kinds of diagnoses and within the context of a bona fide doctor-patient relationship. Being a baseball player is not a disease the last time I checked.”

*

On a snowy day in Louisville, Ky., last January, 11 days before the players’ association and owners agreed on a moderately tougher steroid-testing program, 130 strength and conditioning coaches, more than half of them from major league and triple-A baseball, gathered at a hotel for a steroid education course.

One of the speakers was the top lawyer for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, general counsel Travis Tygart, who went beyond steroids to talk about amphetamines and other WADA-banned stimulants to an audience desperate for more information.

“These guys are working 100-plus hours a week with their athletes and they don’t have the time to really go out there and find out about some of the medical and legal implications,” said Mike Barnes, director of education for the National Strength and Conditioning Association that organized the forum.

“So when Travis showed up, he did a fantastic job. He said if an athlete approaches you and says, ‘Hey, coach, what do you think about this steroid or amphetamine?’ -- boom, you better steer away fast. Because if something goes down, your name is going to be on the list. Protect yourself legally. Cover your own butt and don’t go down that road.”

The conference made a huge impression on the coaches working in baseball. They already were worried about the effects stimulants have on dehydration. To them, strained muscles were the least of the problems; they were more concerned about heart arrhythmia and heat stroke.

“Scare tactics aren’t going to work with ballplayers,” said Tim Maxey of the Cleveland Indians, president of the Strength and Conditioning Coaches Society. “You have to have sound principles, and alternatives to using performance-enhancing drugs. Any stimulant is going to put you at risk, especially in extreme hot, humid conditions.

“We have players coming up all the time saying, ‘Can you read this label for us? What’s in it? What does this mean?’ It could be ephedra or an amphetamine with a different name.”

Maxey used the information Tygart provided from USADA to put together a pamphlet for the Indians in English and Spanish. Other teams are looking at that as a model to educate their own players in the majors and minors.

“Travel schedules and game times make it difficult to adhere to a complete nutrition program, but you’ve got to fuel yourself appropriately,” Maxey said. “Stimulants are only a perceived energy boost, and they’re too dangerous to fool with.”

*

AP sports writers Arnie Stapleton in Milwaukee and Steve Wine in Miami, and AP freelance writer Joe Resnick in Los Angeles, contributed to this report.