Long Shot (28 page)

I also took greenies a couple times. A lot of guys couldn’t play without them, but I didn’t care for the feeling they gave me. Raul Mondesi would snap off a couple of greenies in a big cup of coffee and say, “Mike, take this!” They left me too jittery. I preferred Dymetadrine, which is a very light asthma medication that sends more oxygen to the brain. Dymetadrine made me alert and focused, which helped for day games after night games. Occasionally I used ephedra for that purpose. It was a fat burner, like drinking ten cups of coffee, and another supplement you could easily buy at GNC. Nobody was concerned about the propriety of it until an autopsy revealed that Steve Bechler, a young pitcher for the Orioles who was trying to lose weight, had ephedra in his system when he died of heatstroke after a spring training workout in 2003. It was then added to the banned list.

The banned list keeps growing, which I suppose is not surprising. In some fashion or other, aren’t all modern medicines performance-enhancing drugs? Johnny Bench told me he’d get a cortisone shot every two weeks in his thumb. Is cortisone a PED? No, not officially. You get a cortisone shot so you can go out and play, and that’s being tough; that’s manly. But if you take a PED before you go out and play, that’s cheating. I’m not making excuses for guys who do steroids; that’s not my point. My point is, there’s a drug culture in sports.

As to when our collective consciousness was actually raised in regard to PEDs, it’s hard to say. The Caminiti article in
Sports Illustrated
(2002) by Tom Verducci is generally credited for opening the game’s eyes. It certainly spoke loudly to a lot of players. But I think the impact of steroids was impressed upon me by Mark McGwire—although, when he came over to the National League in 1997, I really didn’t know what I was looking at, other than raw, mind-boggling power that absolutely blew me away. Like everybody
else, I’d make sure to be out on the field when McGwire was taking batting practice, just to get my world rocked. He was hitting balls in places where I’d never seen them hit. Freaking Scud missiles. My only thought was, holy shit! Whether his capacity to crush a baseball was artificially flavored or not—the guy did hit forty-nine home runs as a
rookie
, back in 1987—it was fucking impressive. I was awestruck.

Not long ago, I saw an interview with Reggie Jackson in which he said that players used steroids even in his day, but that not much was made of it because those guys weren’t changing the game. When home run records started to fall, it was a different matter. That’s what brought on all the scrutiny and led, eventually, to McGwire’s admission that he was taking them when he hit seventy home runs in 1998. Maybe the PEDs helped him break Roger Maris’s record; I can’t say for certain. But I can say this: Mark McGwire knew how to hit. He understood the strike zone and had a clear idea of what he was trying to do at the plate. He was an unbelievable low-ball hitter. When I was catching and he laid into one, it sounded to me the way that twenty-ton howitzer must have sounded to my dad when he was standing next to it back in Germany.

I wasn’t sure exactly what, other than great technique and incredible strength, allowed McGwire to hit a ball so astonishingly hard and far, but I knew it wasn’t andro. I also knew that there was a buzz going around the game, and I had a pretty good idea that, real soon, I’d have to make a call—either cross a line or don’t. I chose not to.

In the meantime, I had no problem telling Bob Nightengale I was clean. I was also in great shape after another winter of hard training, and ready for the best season of my career.

• • •

We expected a lot out of 1997. So, by midseason, when we were playing .500 ball, trailing the Rockies and losing sight of the Giants, there was some explaining to do.

I was not a politically correct kind of guy and never sought the position of clubhouse leader. My pattern was to leave my heart on the field and pick my spots with the press. But after four good seasons that kept jacking up my profile, my locker had become a gathering place for the local and even national media. Whether I liked it or not, I had become a spokesman for the ball club. As its catcher, that was part of my job description, anyhow. What’s more, I was having a big year, hitting around .360 and competing again for a batting title. For a variety of reasons—among them, relative health, better mechanics, and my sessions with Mike Scioscia—I was also throwing out base stealers with more frequency than any time since 1993. I was leading
the voting for the National League all-star team. The platform was mine.

The subject was team chemistry. We’d never been known for it, but the ’97 season was feeling less lovey-dovey than most. In late April, we’d aired everything out in a team meeting that ended in a team scuffle. As usual, we were divided between hitters and pitchers, but the splits went deeper than that. Several of us, including me, had our differences with our manager, Bill Russell. (To start with, he’d made me catch the full nine innings of the first televised spring training game, presumably because he wanted so badly to win it. My blood was boiling by the sixth.)

And then there were the cultural fractures that resulted from a global roster. When we ate in the clubhouse after road games, for example, the American players sat at one table, the Caribbean guys at another, and the Mexicans at a third. That was right there for the writers to see; but the underlying language differences had less conspicuous, more problematic effects. Once, after Chan Ho Park suffered through a rough outing, our pitching coach, Dave Wallace, instructed him to control his emotions. The next day, Chan Ho, ever dutiful, was off by himself practicing his
motion
. Sometimes, when our communication broke down, Park would throw a two-seam fastball when I was expecting a four-seamer. I’d get ticked off and vent it in a snippy Philadelphia manner that offended his Korean sensibilities. Our backup catcher, Tom Prince, had a similar situation with Nomo. One night, when they couldn’t get their signs straight, an interpreter had to walk them through it after the game.

Meanwhile, from where I stood, the most significant cultural difference might have been the one in competitive spirit. I’ll admit that I took losing harder than most guys, American or otherwise, but it seemed to me that the overseas players weren’t as hell-bent on winning as I expected a good teammate to be.

Those were the points I was trying to make in an interview with Ross Newhan of the
Times
in the last week of June. Newhan had come to me to write a fairly lengthy profile, but in the course of our discussion he asked if I thought the Dodgers’ unusual multinational makeup had an impact on our performance. I said, “Without a doubt, because you really don’t know what guys’ agendas are. You would like to think that everybody has that same common goal to win, but there may be guys just interested in staying here, guys just interested in putting certain numbers up.” That became the focus of the article, which was printed under the headline
OPEN MIKE
.

It was a frank discussion—probably
too
frank, in retrospect—about the dynamics of diversity on a ball club. “The backgrounds are so different on this team,” I told Newhan. “I mean, you’ve got Nomo from Japan, Chan Ho
from Korea, you’ve got guys from the Dominican Republic and Mexico . . . so what do people expect? That all of a sudden we’re going to be one big happy family? Of course not . . . Sure, I hang out with Mondesi once in a while, but for the most part, you’re going to gravitate to the guy you have most in common with . . . and I don’t think there’s anything anybody can do or say to change those cultural or background differences.

“ . . . I have to say that’s where not only Peter (O’Malley) but the fans should realize that because of the (diversity) there’s going to be problems just as far as guys being able to relate to each other on a daily basis. It seems like that’s the way Peter’s direction has been the last couple years . . . .”

There was a deluge of fallout from the “Open Mike” story—so much, so immediately, that I had to hold a press conference the next day to set some things straight. I was furious over the fact that my comments were being construed and discussed as racial. What I said in the interview was that the game was changing and we, as a team on the leading edge of that change, were having a little difficulty dealing with some of the very human issues that had come along with it. But what people heard was something on the order of, what are
these
guys doing here? I was only two generations removed from Sicily, the son of a high school dropout who had to fight his way through Norristown and was denied a chance to own a major-league ball club basically because he was Italian. Why would I, of all people, discriminate against somebody from a different kind of background? (Hell, at the time I was dating an actress named Lisa Barbuscia—she went by Lisa B—who was an Irish–Italian–Puerto Rican from Brooklyn who considered herself British.) How could my meaning get so distorted? I had simply addressed the challenges of trying to win baseball games in the National League when the catcher has to talk to his pitcher through an interpreter.

In any event, the little firestorm didn’t set back the ball club. We entered July eight games out of first place and left it tied at the top with the Giants, with a couple of nice winning streaks in between.

• • •

Pennant races were hard on me. They meant that I couldn’t get the rest a catcher craves and genuinely needs. My performance had suffered in the final weeks of 1995 and 1996, and I badly wanted to turn that around. By 1997, I was determined to dominate the last couple of months of the season and will my team to the World Series.

It helped tremendously that we began interleague play that year. In those games, I was able to stay in the lineup as a designated hitter without having to catch. It felt like a few days in the Bahamas, and it got me through
the schedule much fresher. Another source of relief was the best lineup I was ever a part of. Karros, Mondesi, and Todd Zeile, whom we had signed as a free agent, all hit thirty or more homers, the most impressive being one that Zeile hammered into about a forty-mile-an-hour gust of wind one night at Dodger Stadium. We were loaded and dangerous.

In August, we traded for Otis Nixon. By September, we were thanking him for coming on over. Delino DeShields was off to St. Louis and Brett Butler, while back in action, wasn’t up to the workload he’d once carried, so Nixon brought a needed blast of speed to the lineup. A week after he arrived, we traded Pedro Astacio to the Rockies to bring back my old minor-league teammate Eric Young, who added another great set of legs. We also signed Eddie Murray for a month. He was forty-one years old and had just been released by the Angels; but still, he was Eddie Murray. Meanwhile, our pitching was second only to the Braves. We thought it was our year.

For that matter, I thought it was
my
year. Tim McCarver—leave it to a catcher—touted me as the MVP choice on national television, and it pleased me that Fred Claire and Billy Russell spoke up for the cause, as well; not to mention Karros, of course. At the same time, Don Baylor, the Rockies’ manager, lobbied hard for his own guy, Larry Walker, who was putting up huge numbers in Coors Field. Baylor described me as one-dimensional. Mike Scioscia—another old catcher, naturally—answered by saying that we wouldn’t be in first place without me, and Russell told Ross Newhan, “Our guy might not have the numbers that (Walker has), but he’s more valuable to our team than Walker is (to the Rockies). They could win without Larry, but we couldn’t do that here. For us, the game doesn’t start until Mike starts it.”

I’d waited a long time to hear words like that from my own organization. They gave me the sense that everything was coming together. It sure seemed that way on September 16, when, in the top of the first inning at St. Louis—after we’d won in fifteen the night before, the opener of a two-game series—I cracked a two-run homer to put us ahead. Then, in the bottom of the inning, Mark McGwire made me feel like a skinny backup shortstop.

The Cardinals had traded for McGwire at the end of July but weren’t expected to re-sign him. That day, however—on his way to fifty-eight home runs for the season (he had thirty-four in Oakland)—there had been a press conference before the game to announce that he had agreed to a four-year contract. The deal included the creation of a foundation to combat child abuse, to which he would donate a million dollars a year. It was a cause that McGwire felt strongly about, and the weight of the moment moved him to tears. When he came to bat against Ramon in the first inning, the St. Louis
fans were already on their feet. They were still standing on the fifth pitch, which McGwire lofted over the scoreboard high in left-center field, at the time the longest home run in the history of Busch Stadium. It seemed almost superhuman that he could crush a ball like that in those circumstances. When we got back to the dugout, Karros walked up and said, “Are you shittin’ me? We should have given him high-fives when he went by.”

We trailed, 6–3, going into the ninth, with Dennis Eckersley on the mound to close for the Cardinals. I led off with a single, Karros followed with a double, and Mondesi and Zeile kept the rally going with singles. We tied the game on an error and went ahead on a sacrifice fly by Eric Young. Scott Radinsky struck out the side in the bottom of the ninth—McGwire wasn’t involved—and we headed off to San Francisco with a two-game lead over the Giants.

It was another two-game series, but this time we lost the first one, 2–1, as I went 0 for 4 and Barry Bonds hit a two-run homer in the first inning off of Chan Ho Park. We all noticed that Bonds did a little pirouette on his way to first base, possibly because we’d plunked him a couple of months before—Antonio Osuna got him in the ribs and the Giants had charged the field. Anyway, a series split would serve our purposes just fine.

The second game was 5–5 in the tenth inning when I singled on a tough pitch by Rod Beck and Karros followed with a solid hit that moved me up a base. It was a great chance for us to go in front and get back our two-game lead. Mondesi was next, and he proceeded to hammer a screaming line drive to right field. It froze me for a moment or two. The ball fell in for a single and Joey Amalfitano held me at third, which was the right move with no outs and my dial-up speed. The bases were loaded and life was getting good. But Zeile struck out looking and then Murray, pinch-hitting, tapped into a home-to-first double play. Brian Johnson won the game for the Giants with a leadoff home run in the twelfth. The race was tied.