Cecil Harris

An excerpt from Call the Yankees My Daddy

Now that we know Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield and Barry Bonds used performance-enhancing drugs, what should have been done to them? None of them belonged in a major-league game in 2005. All three should have been suspended without pay for the entire season. Surely, the Players Association would have taken legal action to fight the move, but the commissioner should have exercised his prerogative to punish three high-profile cheaters, because to do so would have been in the best interests of baseball.

Suspending Giambi, Sheffield and Bonds would have sent a powerful message to those players as well as to other players and the public at large: Cheating cannot and will not be tolerated and the credibility of Major League Baseball as an institution must never be compromised.

All three players have admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs, either in an interview with a media entity (Sheffield) or in grand jury testimony (Giambi, Bonds). All three should have been made an example of by Commissioner Bud Selig in what would have been the most emphatic indication that baseball was truly serious about ridding the sport of drug cheats.

Do I believe the aforementioned players are the only ones to have used performance-enhancing drugs? Of course not. It would be naïve to think otherwise. Do I believe other ballplayers are still using illegal drugs to gain an unfair competitive advantage? Yes, unfortunately. The other cheaters are simply using suppliers other than the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (aka, BALCO), the San Francisco-area business at the heart of the grand jury case in 2003. Do I believe all those other players would cease using illegal drugs if three of their star brethren were suspended for one year while mandatory periodic drug testing, both in season and after the season, is implemented in the major leagues as it exists now in the minor leagues? Yes, absolutely.

All that Major League Baseball lacks is the will and moral authority to do what is right, to do what the public, the ticket-buying public, says it wants. A nationwide poll of baseball fans conducted from December 7 to 12, 2004, by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut showed that 61 percent of those surveyed want ballplayers who test positive for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs banned from baseball. The poll showed 33 percent of the 865 fans surveyed oppose such action.

Of those questioned, 93 percent consider the use of performance-enhancing drugs by ballplayers "a problem," including 65 percent who consider it "a major problem."

Members of the United States Senate, most notably Arizona Republican John McCain, demanded that the major leagues implement a strong antidrug policy, which includes mandatory testing and stricter penalties, otherwise Congress would act unilaterally to impose such a policy on the sport. (Baseball’s antitrust exemption gives Congress the right to enact legislation pertaining to the sport if it is deemed in the best interests of the sport.)

The Yankees, without question, would have loved to rid themselves of Giambi’s contract before the 2005 season. The Yankees disenchantment with him was evident in their deafening silence in the wake of his leaked grand jury testimony. He admitted to receiving steroids, testosterone, and human growth hormones from Greg Anderson, Bonds’s personal trainer, and using them. He admitted to using syringes to inject human growth hormones into his stomach and testosterone into his rear end. He admitted to using steroids developed by BALCO, including "the clear" -- a liquid administered in drops placed under the tongue -- and "the cream" -- a balm rubbed onto the body. He admitted to using steroids from 2001 to 2003. On December 13, 2001, he left the Oakland Athletics and signed his seven-year, $120 million contract with the Yankees.

Since Commissioner Selig chose not to exercise his authority to suspend Giambi for the season, the Yankees could have rid themselves of the first baseman only be negotiating a buyout of his contract. Such a buyout seemed unlikely unless intiated by Giambi himself, and the player said through his agent, Arn Tellem, that he hoped to clear his name by playing drug-free in 2005 and helping the Yankees win the World Series.

Yankee fans and the New York media condemned Giambi once his leaked testimony became public. FIRE THE BUM was the front-page headline in the New York Post accompanied by a photo of a grungy, scraggly haired, heavily tattooed Giambi, as he looked in his Oakland days. While I heartily agree that he should have been nowhere near the Yankee clubhouse in 2005, Sheffield shouldn’t have been there either. The double standard by the public and media toward the two admitted drug users is troubling.

Sheffield should not have got a free pass just because he finished second in the 2004 American League MVP voting while Giambi’s body deteriorated. How can it be right for Sheffield to use a performance-enhancing drug -- and lie about it publicly from spring training until late in the 2004 season -- but be wrong for Giambi?

Sheffield told Sports Illustrated in September 2004 that he received a steroid-based balm from Anderson. It would strain credibility and logic to believe that Giambi and Sheffield got steroids from Bonds’s trainer yet Bonds himself did not and that Giambi received counsel on what the steroids were and how to use them over a three-year period while Bonds and Sheffield somehow did not know what they were taking.

It certainly appears that Bonds’s defenders on the West Coast and Sheffield’s defenders on the East Coast exist primarily, if not solely, because both players had great years in 2004. Had Giambi hit 45 home runs and driven home 130 runs and led the Yankees past Boston in the playoffs and past St. Louis in the World Series, these same enablers would now be defending Giambi. And that’s wrong.