Kindred: How he and others missed/ignored the real McGwire story

This is my point. Dave is honest, Dave is forthright, Dave writes his ass off.

And yes, he's a close family friend. But my man keeps it real. In his writing. How he lives. How he looks at the newspaper industry (looking forward to the book, Dave), sports, news, everything.

I read Dave's stuff while an undergrad at Western Kentucky in the '70s. Ali's heyday. He kicked ass and took names, kinda like Ali his own self. Still does. Has been more than helpful over the years, on many fronts ...

That's all I've got.

 

I don't know if anyone else remember this but me, but at the time homer numbers started climbing off the charts, the big outcry was not that the players were juiced but that the ball was juiced.

IIRC, Brady Anderson was usually exhibit A in that argument.

 

Phil Kaplan just posted on facebook that Dave has been named the recipient of the 2010 PGA Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism.

Congrats, Dave!

http://www.pga.com/2010/news/pga/01/12/kindred/index.html

 

hindsight is 20-20.

nobody's career is a failure for missing the roid story in 98.

but what a missed opportunity for greatness. such an opportunity comes along once or twice in a lifetime - a chance to impact the game, culture, history.

wilstein, in retrospect, goes to the head of the class - and belongs in the writers wing of the Hall of Fame, a slugger, ahead of Gammons, and all the others who were, in retrospect, prolific singles hitters.

 

I'm trying to recall what kind of coverage the issue got pre-Verducci. It doesn't seem like that piece came out of nowhere.

Here's the end to a Boswell column during the 1998 season:

"What our turn-of-the-century heroes are trying to accomplish is every bit as authentic as it is unique. Let's not cheat ourselves by giving them short shrift."

Yikes. He does mention steroids in the column, but mentions that the advent of Creatine means that guys don't have to use steroids any more. That sounds like a reasonable take from that time period. I recall a lot of buzz about Creatine at that time, even on my college campus, as a wonder supplement. It was a good red herring for the players.

Here's from a Patrick Reusse story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about Juan Gonzalez that summer:

"When coaches and opposing players saw Gonzalez's tremendous size in the spring of 1994, there also was open conversation about steroid use. Gonzalez denied those accusations, but he did take the Rangers' advice that he spend more time working on flexibility and less on getting bigger."

Other than that, not much so far until andro broke. I'll keep searching archives.

 

Here, I think, is as near as we're going to get with a columnist calling out McGwire, Sosa, the game, et al., contemporaneously -- this is by my friend Dan Daly of the now-dead Washington Times sports section -- and it was written THE WEEK OF Steve Wilstein's reporting on andro....I'd not read it until Dan sent it to me two days ago...the first lines here are the Times' headlines....Dan says even in his own sports department he was a voice in the wilderness, regarded as a "Hall of Fame party pooper"....
****


Is Andro tainting chase?


. . . but it puts black mark on Big Mac


August 27, 1998
By Dan Daly
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


In the interests of journalism, I decided to try some of that androstenedione stuff that Mark McGwire has been taking, just to see if it really makes you stronGER AND . . . OH MY GOSH, I DON’T BELIEVE IT! I CAN'T TYPE ANYTHING BUT CAPITAL LETTERS! MAYBE IF I INCREASE MY DOSAGE I’LL START TO WRITE IN GAELIC!
But seriously, folks, isn’t this controversy swirling around McGwire a beaut? He’ll probably hold a press conference one of these days and say, “OK, so I use Andro. But I don’t inhale.”
No, he takes it in tablet form. (Although the nasal spray is said to give you a quicker boost.)
Look, I’m no endocrinologist, but I read about McGwire taking a steroid-like substance – while chasing Roger Maris’ home run record – and I thought: How much is enough for these guys? Isn’t it enough that most of the ballparks now, especially the new ones, are tailored for power hitters? Isn’t it enough that the ball is wound tighter than Cecil Fielder's pants? Isn’t it enough that McGwire gets to play in Denver and Phoenix, where the ball just goes and goes? Isn’t it enough that half the pitchers in the big leagues are Triple-A quality?
Does McGwire really need to be bulking up by popping these muscle-man pills, too?
It’s just excess, if you ask me. It’s just too much. I mean, what’s next, legalizing aluminum bats, so that 10 or 12 guys a year can hit 60?
This isn’t about legality or illegality. McGwire is in the clear on that front. As we’ve heard ad nauseum the past few days, the substance he takes is available over the counter and is considered okey-dokey by the baseball establishment. Indeed, almost half of McGwire’s Cardinals teammates use Andro, he says – as do many other major-leaguers, it seems.
No, this is about credibility. And about history. McGwire, after all, is trying to break one of the most famous records in sports, a record that has stood for 37 years. It would be nice if he broke it without undue chemical assistance. It would be nice if he didn’t come across as some kind of synthetic slugger.
What we’re talking about here is reasonable doubt. Because if McGwire swats 62, there are going to be people who wonder just how much the androstenedione had to do with it. Would he have hit 60 homers without it? Fifty-eight? Fifty-six? Or would he have hit 62 anyway?
A friend of mine – who could use a few steroids himself – doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “The stuff he’s taking isn’t helping him hit the ball,” he said.
To which I replied: “No, but it might be helping him hit the ball farther. It might be helping him put a few more in the seats. And that’s the issue here.
“I don’t think what McGwire is doing is unfair, because anybody in baseball can take this stuff. The playing field is absolutely level. But you run into problems if you want to compare McGwire to Babe Ruth or some other player from another era, because those guys didn't have androstenedione. All they had were vitamin B-12 shots and six-packs.”
It’s a curious case, you have to admit. Here’s an athlete who’s 6 feet 5, a veritable mound of muscle, and yet he looks in the mirror and thinks: Not big enough. Gotta get stronger. And so he starts taking Andro before workouts. It’s kind of like Reverse Anorexia. To you and me, McGwire is Arnold Schwarzenegger with a Louisville Slugger. But McGwire sees his reflection and thinks: Who let Freddie Patek in here?
Since the story broke last weekend, baseball people have done a great job of changing the subject. The issue, they say, isn’t whether or not McGwire takes a steroid-like substance. The issue is media snooping. What were the media doing nosing around his locker, anyway? Doesn’t a fella have any privacy?
McGwire reminded reporters that other sports allow athletes to take drugs such as Sudafed and painkilling injections, both of which can be performance-enhancing. But Sudafed and cortisone don't make you any bigger or stronger than you already are; steroids do. And while there are several things that go into hitting a home run – hand-eye coordination, timing, bat speed, etc. – strength is clearly one of them. If it wasn’t, why would major-leaguers be spending so much time pumping iron?
So let’s not be naive. There’s a reason why androstenedione is banned by the NFL, the NCAA, the IOC, the IAAF and, if I’m not mistaken, the AFL-CIO. Consider: Since they started cracking down on such substances in track and field, performances in the weight events – the strength events – have actually gotten worse, an unprecedented development. Baseball just happens to be behind the curve on this one. Someday, maybe, it will realize that this is the ’90s - the 1990s.
Again, it’s hard – impossible even – to assess the impact of Andro on McGwire’s home run total. But if he hits 62 or 63 or 64, I’ll have just one thing to say to new commissoner Bud Selig: I’m pretty sure Ford Frick kept the asterisks in the upper-right-hand desk drawer.

 

Yep.
I remember ESPN going so far as to investigate the balls, doing comparisons of them ones being used against older ones.

 

http://news.google.com/archivesearch?as_user_ldate=1980%2F01&as_user_hdate=2009%2F12&q=steroids+baseball&scoring=n&hl=en&ned=us&q=steroids+baseball&lnav=od&btnG=Go

 

Steroids sold to Vandy baseball player in 1985.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=E8chAAAAIBAJ&sjid=5p0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=1273,4725083&dq=steroids+baseball&hl=en

 

That Dan Daly column is terrific, then and ever more so now. Thanks for posting that.

 

I was covering baseball in 1998 and I think a lot of people completely believed that andro was the only reason why these guys had gotten so big, so fast. We all did stories on the off-season workout regimens that everybody talked about as the reason why they were finally able to go after the record.

What year was it that Reilly asked Sosa to take a drug test for SI?

I'm not a baseball and never really have been, but I must admit it was almost impossible not to get wrapped up in how cool that season was. It seemed like most of the season we were getting updates on how McGwire, Sosa, Greg Vaughn and Griffey were doing every at bat.

I also don't think it was a coincidence that most of the sluggers left their Andro sitting on the top shelf of their lockers for everyone to see.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, Mizzou, but it didn't really seem that implausible at the time, correct? There were new supplements coming out every few weeks, seemingly. It was the golden age of GNC. I guess in hindsight it all seems like snake oil, and the idea that these safe, legal products could replicate steroids with no ethical dilemma seems preposterous. But in the moment, it felt completely plausible. There was no reason for the casual observer to doubt that Andro or Creatine were wonder drugs that you could basically purchase at Walgreen's.