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  The sweep was above all a vindication for the Haas family and all the resources—and time and talent—they had pumped into rebuilding the team. The farm system had been a shambles, and with a lot of painstaking work, they turned it into a rich source of talent that could produce three straight American League Rookies of the Year. The Haases spent heavily to make the Coliseum a far more enjoyable place to see a game, and they built a community relations department to get involved in lives as a force for positive change and hope. The East Bay had suffered more from the earthquake than San Francisco itself, and the celebration of the A’s victory—though muted, given the natural disaster—was a balm to many. “The earthquake was unquestionably a tragedy for the Bay Area, and it took years to rebuild after destruction on that scale,” Alderson says.

  One year later, the A’s were back again for their third straight World Series appearance, a feat matched in the last century only by the New York Giants, the Philadelphia A’s, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Baltimore Orioles, the Finley-era Oakland A’s, and—repeatedly—the Yankees. The A’s in 1990 won 103 games and once again they were loaded, with McGwire (39) and Canseco (37) leading the home-run attack, and Rickey Henderson adding twenty-eight from the leadoff position to go with a batting average of .325 and on-base percentage of .439. Dave Stewart and Bob Welch, both thirty-three that year, anchored the pitching staff, and Welch finished 27-6 to win the Cy Young Award. The A’s swept the Red Sox in the ALCS, Stewart winning Game 1 at Fenway and Game 4 in Oakland, both against Roger Clemens, to garner MVP honors.

  They were on a roll when they arrived at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati for Game 1 of the World Series against the Reds, and just as Stewart had stifled the Red Sox, now Jose Rijo, who’d been with the A’s from ’85 to ’87, overpowered them. They lost Game 1 7–0 and were swept in four with no A’s hitter other than Rickey Henderson (.333) getting going. Canseco had one hit, a homer, to bat .083 in the Series and was benched for Game 4. Rijo won the first and fourth games and was named MVP. “Hershiser beat us twice in the ’88 World Series and was clearly the dominant pitcher,” Alderson says. “And in ’90 we got beat by Jose Rijo. One guy dominated.”

  That A’s era came to a dramatic end on the night of August 31, 1992, during a home game against the Orioles. Shortly before his first at bat of the game, Canseco was called back from the on-deck circle and Tony La Russa gave him the news that he had been traded to the Texas Rangers for power hitter Ruben Sierra, pitchers Bobby Witt and Jeff Russell, and $400,000 in cash. No one was more stunned than Canseco, who did not believe the A’s would actually trade him, despite the rumors. It seemed hard to believe a run of futility was in store, but such are the rhythms of the game. The A’s lost the ’92 ALCS to Toronto and did not make it back to the postseason until 2000. Walter Haas, the benevolent team owner, had decided that he wanted to sell the team before he died, rather than passing on yearly losses to other family members, and as his health worsened, so did the team’s chances of reloading in the style that marked those back-to-back-to-back World Series teams.

  Most peopled assumed that Juiced, the steroid tell-all memoir that I wrote with Jose Canseco, was his first book, but actually, it was his second. Canseco and McKay coauthored a paperback called Strength Training for Baseball, published in February 1990, that was a practical guide for ballplayers wanting to add strength, complete with cheesy cover photo featuring Canseco in a muscle shirt showing off his biceps. The book contains a warning on page 159 that takes on added interest in retrospect. “A word about steroids, don’t use them,” Canseco and McKay wrote. “Steroids may create the illusion of great gains in short periods of time, but they have a debilitating effect on your body chemistry, and in the long run you will be much worse off for having used them.”

  The passage offers a strange kind of time capsule from that era. As late as early 2005, when Juiced was published, the standard position on steroids in baseball, even among a lot of smart and informed fans and a lot of skeptical, well-meaning journalists, was: We just can’t know what these guys do to themselves behind closed doors. The book was widely attacked the week it came out, especially its claim that a majority of active ballplayers had used performance-enhancing drugs, despite former Padre slugger Ken Caminiti’s assertion in a groundbreaking Sports Illustrated article by Tom Verducci that not only had Caminiti “won the 1996 National League Most Valuable Player award while on steroids he purchased from a pharmacy in Tijuana, Mexico,” but that “at least half the guys are using steroids.” Then came the bombshell events that followed: Mark McGwire was among the players who showed up in Washington for nationally televised hearings before a congressional subcommittee and seemed to shrink before the eyes of a nation, talking with numbing repetition about not ­being there to talk about the past. Rafael Palmeiro jabbed his finger for emphasis as he asserted with soap-opera drama at the hearings, “I have never used steroids! Period!” Within a few months came his suspension after reports he’d tested positive for the steroid Winstrol, a Canseco favorite. Palmeiro was a juicer, just as Canseco had said he was. Finally, perceptions were shifting toward a more accurate reflection of reality, helped along by the excellent reporting of the San Francisco Chronicle Balco team of Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, the New York Daily News investigative unit under Teri Thompson of T.J. Quinn, Michael O’Keeffe, and Christian Red, and, finally, Howard Bryant’s book Juicing the Game.

  In retrospect it probably makes sense that denial held on as long as it did. The fact is, drug use is a very private affair. Through most of the Steroid Era in baseball, the widespread use of needles to inject steroids or human growth hormone was in fact kept under tight wraps. Pedro Gomez, now an on-air reporter for ESPN, has been a vocal critic of steroid use in baseball. He’s known as one of the leading “hawks” arguing that any former steroid user should be banned from consideration for the Hall of Fame. Even Gomez had to admit that when he was covering the Oakland A’s for the San Jose Mercury News from 1990 to 1994, including covering the 1990 World Series, the mind-set was that steroids simply did not exist in the game.

  “That was a football thing,” he said. “I don’t remember a single conversation where we talked about this guy is on steroids or that guy—not one,” he said. “It just wasn’t on our radar. And I never remember fans saying, ‘This guy’s on steroids.’ That didn’t happen either. Guys talked about spending the whole offseason lifting weights and coming back bigger, and you took them at their word. Years later we knew we had made a mistake, but not then. Players went to extraordinary lengths to hide this.”

  I was startled to hear a similar point being made by Ray Karesky, who spent years in the A’s organization counseling ballplayers—all under the cover of confidentiality—on drug issues and other problems. “Players would share with me some amazing things they wouldn’t share with anybody,” he told me. “Nobody ever came up to me and talked about steroids. They knew that this was something to not talk about.”

  Alderson says that in the days of the Bash Brothers in Oakland, no one was inclined to take at all seriously any rumors of steroid use that might have circulated here and there. “At the time there wasn’t any concern at all about what else might be going on other than physical training,” he says. To the extent that steroid use in sports was gaining attention, the focus was on the National Football League. A New Jersey congressman, William Hughes, had been hearing alarming reports of growing steroid use among high school athletes, and introduced the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990, which classified anabolic steroids as a so-called Schedule III drug, making steroid use without a prescription illegal. The Act was signed into law in November 1990 by President George H.W. Bush.

  The following season, Commissioner Fay Vincent cracked down on steroids as well, sending a memo to all teams declaring that Major League Baseball now included steroids in the category of dangerous illegal drugs: “The possession, sale or use of any illegal drug or controlled substance by Major League players and personnel is s
trictly prohibited. Major League players or personnel involved in the possession, sale or use of any illegal drug or controlled substance are subject to discipline by the Commissioner and risk permanent expulsion from the game… . This prohibition applies to all illegal drugs and controlled substances, including steroids.”

  Up to that point, steroids were neither illegal nor banned by baseball; by 1991 they were both. Vincent himself—ousted in 1992 as commissioner—had not been greatly concerned about steroids in baseball, but wanted baseball to take a proactive approach to all drug abuse. Vincent had first been alerted to the issue during the 1988 postseason when fans at Boston’s Fenway Park taunted Jose Canseco with cries of “Steroids!” Canseco turned it all into his usual high theater, flexing his muscles for the crowd, and denied steroid use. Everything to do with Canseco was such a sideshow, it was hard for anyone to know what to make of the charges, which had started with Washington Post columnist Tom Boswell’s October 1988 assertion on a television program that Canseco had used steroids. Boswell had tried to publish allegations about steroid use by Canseco in his newspaper, but higher-ups quashed the idea on the ground that he had no proof.

  A’s owner Wally Haas remembers being surprised when the fans at Fenway Park cried out “Steroids! Steroids!” to taunt Canseco during the American League Championship Series shortly after Bos­well made the accusation, struck that one accusation should inspire that kind of reaction. Alderson was starting to wonder by then if it might be a case with Canseco of where there was smoke there was fire. But he had no notion of how to assess the validity of such speculation. He was a man who loved information, accurate, detailed, credible information, and when it came to suggestions of steroid use, all he had was hazy conjecture. On a personal level Alderson liked Canseco, and had trouble believing he had it in him to inject himself with steroids. Talking about the issue now, Alderson was especially adamant on two points: Team officials never factored in rumors about possible steroid use in discussions about trading Canseco, and never in Mark McGwire’s time with the A’s did Alderson suspect him of steroid use. Even when revelations about McGwire later came out, all indications were that he only started using steroids later in his career when back trouble kept him out of the lineup, not in the Bash Brothers era.

  “We know a lot more now about PEDs than we did twenty years ago,” Alderson told me. “But what do we really know even today? We don’t know shit. How can players test negative and then be caught with one performance-enhancing substance or another? When I answer these questions it’s like, ‘OK, color me stupid.’ Did I suspect McGwire of using steroids? No. Does that make me stupid? Maybe. His brother was in the NFL. He hit forty-nine homers as a rookie. We were all about creating stronger players through weight training, there’s no question about that. But the possibility that steroids were involved never came to my mind until later.”

  T.J. Quinn, a former Mets beat writer for the New York Daily News who went to work the steroid beat for years as part of the News investigative team and in recent years on ESPN, has broken as many stories on PEDs as anyone. Quinn thinks it’s important to avoid revisionism in talking about steroids in baseball more than twenty years ago. “There definitely was a naiveté in baseball at the time, and anytime anyone wants to hold Bud Selig or anyone else accountable, they have to remember that,” Quinn says. “There was no real anti-doping movement then. WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, was not created until November 1999. There is this real revisionism that somehow everybody should have done more and said more in those late ’80 and early ’90s. That said, the Oakland A’s of that era clearly benefited from steroid use, and you cannot look at their accomplishments without an asterisk, whether you hold someone accountable or not.”

  Focusing on Alderson, Quinn was at a loss to know where to come down on the legacy of his Oakland years. “Sandy was just so much smarter than anyone else in baseball that if anyone was going to get it, it was going to be him,” he said. “There is a higher standard for him. He’s not your average guy. That said, at the time there was no testing and there was no punishment. Baseball had no PED policy. If he did have suspicions, what was he supposed to do?”

  8

  PASSING THE TORCH

  Back in his early days as a highly touted Mets prospect, a 1980 first-round pick impressing everyone with his raw physical gifts, Billy Beane started thinking he’d love to be a general manager. He was eighteen, his first year in the organization, when general manager Frank Cashen came out to meet the minor-leaguers wearing a bow tie and monogrammed shirt. Beane was blown away by the aura Cashen had, the aura of a decision maker, a creative thinker, a man who built things. Out in the outfield, he told his fellow prospects, “This is the guy you want to be, right there.”

  Beane had kicked around by early 1989 and spent most of the previous season playing Triple-A ball for the Toledo Mud Hens. Now he was getting a shot with the A’s, taking batting practice at Scottsdale Community College that spring training, when he looked up to get his first glimpse of the architect of that year’s powerhouse A’s. “I’m out on the field hitting and here comes this guy with a Panama hat and shorts on,” Beane told me. “Nobody did that back then. No GM wore shorts. That was a position where it was still your Sunday best in spring training. If somebody told you this guy was a Harvard Law graduate who went to Dartmouth, the first time you see him you would expect completely different dress. It was very unpretentious. Being from San Diego, I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. That alone was enough inspiration to want to be a GM so I could choose if I wanted to wear shorts to work.”

  Old-school general managers like Cashen had impressed Beane, but he had trouble relating to older guys with paunches, “old bow-tied East Coast lawyer types,” as he put it. Alderson was a new breed. “It wasn’t like he chatted with me,” Beane remembers. “But I found myself drawn to this guy. His presence had a very self-assured casualness that I thought was fascinating.”

  Beane won one Cactus League game with a walk-off hit in extra innings and broke camp for the big-league club, but saw only limited duty with the A’s that season, missing some time with a wrist injury and getting sent out to Triple-A Tacoma before being called up again in late August. “Where you been?” Rickey Henderson asked him, not knowing he’d been sent down. Beane was not on the postseason roster, but earned a ring when the A’s beat the ­Giants in the World Series. One number that jumps out, looking at Beane’s stats now, is: eleven. That’s his career total in major-league walks, over 315 plate appearances, and all the walks came in 1986 when he played eighty games for the Twins.

  “Billy was not a player that anybody would really want today,” Alderson says. “He never walked. He didn’t hit for power. Putting aside his talents, which were considerable, he just didn’t have an approach. He didn’t get it at that time, which he would admit today.”

  Beane came to his second spring training with the A’s, 1990, looking for a way to feel better about his future. “One of the things about baseball that’s challenging, if you’re somewhat restless intellectually, is there’s a lot of down time,” Beane says. “Friends from high school were finishing college, some on their way to law school, and here you are. Even when I signed, I never thought that playing was going to be the end-all.”

  Beane’s breakthrough moment came on the back diamond at Phoenix Municipal Stadium, midway through a morning that started out with a chill in the air that soon gave way under the bracing desert sunlight. The clack of bat on ball was reverberating from different points around the practice field in that comforting ritual of spring. Beane started asking Ron Schueler, Alderson’s special assistant, what exactly his job entailed. It was a good question, since Schueler wore a lot of hats with the team: throwing batting practice, serving as sounding board for Alderson, and also doing a lot of advance scouting for the team by going ahead to observe the tendencies of its next opponents.

  “I’m the advance guy, though we’re looking for someone to free me up to
do some other stuff,” Schueler told him.

  Beane back then had a fresh-faced eagerness and a ready grin, and up until that moment he’d been talking just to talk, one of the rituals of spring, like stretching, dinner at the Pink Pony, and late-night cocktails at the Downside Risk. But this conversation had turned meaningful.

  “As I sat there talking to him, I was thinking, ‘One thing I love about the game, I love evaluation,’” Beane told me. “I had a lot of admiration for Sandy and I’d already decided I wanted to be a general manager.”

  When most fans think of baseball scouts, they picture a variation on the traditional “bird-dog” scout, freelance talent evaluators forever on the lookout for future big-leaguers in out-of-the-way places, eager to earn a commission for any prospects they found. Branch Rickey worked as a bird-dog scout from 1910 to 1913 when he coached baseball at the University of Michigan. John McGraw built the New York Giants into a powerhouse with his vast network of scouts trolling different geographic regions. Over the years, as baseball grew into an ever-larger business and fewer surprise talents lurked out in the sticks to be discovered, the real action in scouting turned to what might be called tactical scouting: studying opponents to gain an edge. Teams came to rely more often on the evaluations of special-assignment scouts, as they were sometimes called, or simply pro scouts, who would study upcoming opponents with the cold, appraising eye of a butcher looking for a good place to start slicing. In one famous story, the Dodgers sent three scouts to analyze the A’s before the 1988 World Series, Steve Boros, Jerry Stephenson, and Mel Didier, and in a scouting report now on display at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, the trio sized up closer Dennis Eckersley this way: “Likes to ‘backdoor’ slider to LH hitters with 3-2 count.” Kirk Gibson found that information very interesting.