How Pumped Up is Baseball

By Bill Saporito

Barry Bonds is a contact hitter who seems on his way to eclipsing Hank Aaron's career home-run record of 755. But it is Bonds' confirmed contact with illegal steroids that sent runners into motion last week to confront the biggest drug scandal in baseball history. Suddenly the most open secret in the sport was out, and it implicated baseball's biggest star and the titanic records he had accumulated. "I will leave no stone unturned in accomplishing our goal of zero tolerance by the start of spring training," vowed Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig in New York City. But that won't be soon enough for Senator John McCain, who upped the outrage meter by vowing that if players and owners can't agree on a stricter testing standard, he will seek to impose one legislatively in January.

How did Bonds get ensnared? The San Francisco Chronicle last week published secret grand jury testimony in which the Giants' star outfielder admitted he had used two substances that federal prosecutors have identified as steroids--called "the clear" and "the cream"--supplied by his personal trainer, Greg Anderson, in 2003. But Bonds denied knowing they were performance-enhancing drugs. He said he eventually stopped using the cream, which he took to relieve arthritis pain, and the clear, which he took for fatigue, because they weren't doing anything for him.

That was not the case with New York Yankees slugger Jason Giambi, whose vivid description to the same jury of the outlaw apothecary available to athletes also made its way into the Chronicle. Unlike Bonds, Giambi said he knew what he was taking and told of injecting the steroid Deca Durabolin in 2001. Giambi said Anderson had provided him with the clear, or THG (tetrahydrogestrinone), a then undetectable synthetic steroid that's absorbed with a few drops under the tongue. Anderson also gave him the cream, a mixture of testosterone and epitestosterone that's rubbed into the skin. Giambi also described injecting human growth hormone (HGH) into the fat in his stomach. Steroids and HGH are used to promote muscle mass, increase strength and shorten recovery time.

The ballplayers' testimony was part of a case being built against Anderson and Victor Conte, founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO), who have been charged with supplying the illegal drugs to athletes and with money laundering. Both have pleaded not guilty. Dozens of elite athletes have been paraded before the grand jury to discuss BALCO's steroid program, which included detailed schedules for taking the banned substances, plus blood and urine tests to help avoid detection.

Bonds said he had never asked Anderson, a longtime friend, what was in the potions Anderson had given him: "When he said it was flaxseed oil, I just said, 'Whatever,'" the Chronicle reported. "It was in the ballpark ... in front of everybody. I mean, all the reporters, my teammates. I mean, they all saw it. I didn't hide it." Yet it is also uncharacteristic behavior for Bonds, a meticulous man known to be a perfectionist about training and diet.

So how did Major League Baseball's problem stay under the radar for so long? On ABC's 20/20 last week, Conte ridiculed baseball's drug-testing policy, which is just two years old and precludes off-season testing: "They're not in contact with reality. I mean, the program that they put together is a joke." Players are tested once during the season. First-time offenders are placed in treatment programs but not sanctioned. Former major league catcher Don Slaught, who played from 1982 to 1997 and with Bonds in Pittsburgh from 1990 through 1992, insists that even in the '90s it was common knowledge in locker rooms that steroid use was rampant. "But there was no animosity," he says of the relationships among those who cheated and those who didn't. "Some guys chose to do it; some guys didn't. I was one of those guys who chose to do nothing." In those days, he says, so was Bonds.

Bonds has always been an All-Star player, but his power numbers, as well as his physique, didn't balloon until he turned 36. A year later, in 2001, he hit 73 homers, breaking the single-season record of 70. Before he began working out with Anderson in 1998, he hit one home run in every 16.1 at bats. Since 2001, he has hit a dinger in every 7.9 at bats. This past season, at age 40, he remained a feared hitter, belting 45 homers. Pitchers and managers got so gun-shy that Bonds walked a record 232 times. He won his seventh Most Valuable Player award last month.

Giambi's numbers are by no means as legendary, but the progress of players like him has inflamed the steroid debate. He hit 33 homers in 1999 and by 2002 was going long 41 times with the Yankees. He says he met Anderson while he and Bonds were on a postseason tour of Japan in 2002. "So I started to ask him, 'Hey, what are the things you're doing with Barry? He's an incredible player. I want to still be able to work out at that age and keep playing,'" Giambi testified, according to the Chronicle. "And that's how the conversation first started." Buster Olney, a baseball writer for ESPN the Magazine who has a vote in Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame elections, calls Giambi's court appearance the "Mount Everest of steroids and baseball testimony. Nothing else is going to come close to it."

The 2004 season was not kind to Giambi, 33. He had obviously lost weight when he reported to Yankees preseason camp in February, and by July he had lost bat speed and 65 points against his .302 career average. He lost the month of August to a mysterious ailment that was later diagnosed as a benign tumor. (The tumor, which the New York Daily News reported was near his pituitary gland, could be linked to Clomid, a women's fertility drug that boosts testosterone production and that Giambi has admitted he might have used.) And last week it seemed possible he could lose his job, worth $82 million over the next five years, as a first baseman for the Bronx Bombers. Giambi was granted immunity for his testimony, so he won't be charged with any crimes as long as he was truthful. The New York City tabloids have nonetheless pronounced him guilty (BOOT THE BUM; DAMNED YANKEE) of conduct unbecoming a Pinstriper. The Yankees would love to unload him if they could prove that he violated his contract.

Bonds, in the meantime, will get back to the gym. Like most players who enjoy an extended career, he has exemplary work habits. And unlike many players, he has extraordinary talent, whatever the taint of the BALCO boys. But in a sport that treats its statistics with almost biblical deference, the Bonds record has been permanently tarnished and won't sail cleanly into the history books. --Reported by Sean Gregory/New York

With reporting by Sean Gregory/New York