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

One thing I really believed back then -- and a lot of others thought this, too -- was the theory that being bigger and stronger didn't help you hit a baseball. You still had to have the skill and hand-eye coordination to make contact. So steroids weren't really a help.
When I was playing back in high school, it was always flexibility, not bulk. You saw guys who bulked up and couldn't throw anymore -- Brian Downing, Steve Sax.

 

but steroids aren't just for bulking up, there for quicker recovery and a variety of different things. This is why you can't just look at someone who is not a monster and assume they haven't done steroids.

 

Then the media's biggest sin was being uninformed. Until McGwire began pounding baseballs, there was a very common perception that steroids were either for beach going muscle heads or sports requiring brute force like football or Olympic weight lifting.

Even now, you see people on some of these threads talking about steroids like they were the province of power hitters exclusively.

 

I believe that is what changed with baseball. Players became more educated about what to take and how to train for maximum effectiveness.

 

Exactly my point. If we knew then what we know now ...

 

Which reminds of this USA TODAY interview with former pitcher (and Nolan Ryan's trainer) Tom House:

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2005-05-03-steroids-house_x.htm

"I pretty much popped everything cold turkey," House said. "We were doing steroids they wouldn't give to horses. That was the '60s, when nobody knew. The good thing is, we know now. There's a lot more research and understanding."

House, a former pitching coach with the Texas Rangers and co-founder of the National Pitching Association near San Diego, is one of the first players to describe steroid use as far back as the 1960s.

He was drafted in 1967 by the Braves and pitched eight seasons for Atlanta, Boston and Seattle, finishing his career with a 29-23 record and 3.79 ERA.

House, 58, estimated that six or seven pitchers per team were at least experimenting with steroids or human growth hormone. He said players talked about losing to opponents using more effective drugs.

"We didn't get beat, we got out-milligrammed," he said. "And when you found out what they were taking, you started taking them."

 

I started covering MLB in 97 and I remember the first time a player told me steroid use was a widespread issue was 2000. I wanted to do a story but couldn't get anyone to talk about it. Finally in May 02, I did a big package on the whole thing, but even then the closest I got to a smoking gun was one anonymous player saying he thought 50 percent of major leaguers were on steroids.

Clearly the story could have been done by someone with more time and connections than I had. You didn't need a paper trail or subpoena power. (Verducci's came out a month later.)

also, when I wrote mine there were three or four others I had used for reference, so the story was out there.

Of course, all this is referring to the 2000-02 period, not 1998.

 

I think the lesson here is about maintaining that skepticism, that critical eye, and not getting swept away by a feel-good story that turned out to be too good to be true. When Wilstein wrote about the andro in McGwire's locker, what was the reaction? My recollection was that too many reporters were focusing on the reporter's methods, whether he was snooping and whether he should have written about it, and simply dismissing the story rather than digging in. Did they have the court documents and BALCO back then? No. But they could have taken a harder look at baseball's anti-doping rules, which were basically non-existent.