Friday Night Lights

The Man Who Saved Baseball (It’s Not Who You Think)

Do you remember how much you hated baseball after the 1994-95 strike? Even the most ardent fan took a step back and thought, “Hey, the playoffs and World Series, wiped out? It’s time to start golfing. Or bowling. Or fishing. Or doing crystal meth.” Could Donald Fehr be blamed for the explosion (no pun intended) in the manufacture of that drug in rural America?

Not that Fehr, the executive director of the player’s association, was ever blamed for anything. No, the fall guy was interim (and later full) commissioner Allen H. “Bud” Selig. Bud happily stepped forward, claimed his check, and received the ire and enmity of a nation of fans.

Far deeper than the strike, though, an enemy of baseball waited at the gates of the game. There were signs of the steroid scandal long before the first urine test came back positive. In fact, there were signs of this scandal even before the strike.

Dateline: Oakland, CA, 1989. The A’s beat the San Francisco Giants in the earthquake-interrupted World Series, four games to none. They won the Series behind the talent of the Bash Brothers, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. Perhaps those names sound familiar to you – perhaps as familiar as androstenedione and testosterone were to the Bash Brothers.

Then again, it’s highly probably that the World Series 20 years ago wasn’t the first tainted fall classic. Welcome to baseball, where it is honorable to bend the rules, as long as it helps you win. Pitchers doctoring baseballs, hitters corking bats, Kent Hrbek pulling Ron Gant’s leg off first base in the World Series – might as well give it a shot, as long as you can get an edge. Lyle Alzado, whose name became synonymous with steroids in football, began using in 1969. There’s no doubt in my mind that secrets are shared between sports.

And the secret was out once McGwire and Sammy Sosa went on their epic chase for Roger Maris’ record in 1998. Aided and abetted by new stadiums with Lilliputian dimensions, the Sultans of Steroids brought new interest to the game. Though supplanted by football as America’s pastime, baseball was relevant again, just three short years after a historic work stoppage that threatened to render the game summer’s version of hockey, adored by few and ignored by most.

The commissioner, once interim, now full, had to know that performance-enhancing drugs had infiltrated his once-proud game when McGwire and Sosa went off. I’ll stop short of saying that he ordered some already-strong players to start juicing (the visual of Bud injecting Mark and Sammy is surreal, yet strangely plausible), but Bud approved. After all, he had to.

Could you imagine what would have happened if Selig followed the advice of self-righteous sports commentators everywhere (myself included) and blew the whistle as soon as he knew about baseball’s little problem? Maybe as the home run chase ramped up in 1998? Instead of attention drawn to McGwire and Sosa, we’d have had parks full of asterisks and a tidal wave of shame descended on the game. It wouldn’t have been a death sentence for baseball. Monopoly sports are hard to kill. But recovery from labor strife and a crippling steroids scandal would have been borderline impossible.

So Selig chose path two. Leak individual results and make steroids a “personal” problem, rather than a league-wide dilemma. Don’t turn on the faucet all the way. Trickle the names of roided-out stars, one-by-one, so the nation doesn’t realize that their game is corrupt. Take the fall as the commissioner who should have been more vigilant.

Annually, the man has 17 million reasons to shoulder the blame. The commissioner’s salary is a bargain for the owners that reaped profit from this tainted, yet golden, era of the game.