Shoeless Joe and the Art of Knowing

by Adam Dorhauer

Shoeless Joe Jackson is more famous for what he did off the field than what he did on it. (via Mears Auctions)

Pinned to the wall of every major league clubhouse, in English and in Spanish, are the following words: “THIS IS PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL RULE 21, REGARDING GAMBLING, etc. Read It Carefully.“

What follows is a full page of mostly et cetera, including, in large font at the bottom of the page, the simple edict “DO NOT ASSAULT UMPIRES.” But the best-known part of Rule 21 is section (d):

(d) BETTING ON BALL GAMES. Any player, umpire, or club official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has no duty to perform shall be declared ineligible for one year.

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Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.

This might seem harsh. And, well, it is harsh. But the reason Rule 21(d) comes down so emphatically is that gambling once nearly ruined baseball.

When I say that, surely something crept into your mind. Perhaps it was John Cusack or David Strathairn from the film Eight Men Out, or maybe Ray Liotta pushing his way through the stalks of Kevin Costner’s cornfield. Maybe it was Kenesaw Mountain Landis with his white, wavy hair and black necktie framing his ever-present scowl. Possibly even just the words “Black Sox.” Whatever it was, almost certainly it had something to do with the 1919 World Series.

Indeed, the content of Rule 21(d) does come from Commissioner Landis. But if you look at it, nothing there directly pertains to the Black Sox scandal, which involved players taking bribes but not placing bets themselves. That’s because the text stems not from that scandal, but from a completely separate incident Landis ruled on several years later.

In truth, baseball’s gambling problem ran much, much deeper than the Black Sox. Dating back even further than the National League itself, gamblers had been a fixture of ballpark grandstands, and keeping their influence from seeping beyond the confines of the bleachers remained a consistent thorn for decades.

Why, then, are the Black Sox so singularly held as the pariahs of their era? And why is it even relevant today if the influence of gambling has long been all but eradicated since then?

The reason I find this question so interesting is that the history of gambling in baseball gives us insight into how we document other scandals, and in particular into baseball’s more recent steroid scandal.

The Breadth of the Problem

In the autumn of 1926, AL president Ban Johnson received two letters, one from Ty Cobb and one from Smokey Joe Wood, both addressed to Dutch Leonard seven years prior. The letters contained references to a bet on Detroit and an undisclosed “business proposition,” which Leonard claimed was an agreement among Cobb, Wood, himself and Tris Speaker for Cleveland to throw a game to Detroit while those four placed bets on the Tigers.

This was the incident that inspired Rule 21(d). Landis found no evidence of match fixing but ruled that, going forward, even just betting on games was suspicious enough and would no longer be tolerated.

This was far from the only other headache caused by gambling. When asked to chronicle the history of gambling in baseball, Rob Neyer offered that the subject could be cleanly split into two simple eras:

  • 1865-1920: Stinking Cesspool of Greed
  • 1989-present: Pete Rose

That’s more or less the historical consensus, if perhaps in somewhat less magnanimous terms. The Black Sox scandal set off sweeping changes that quickly made the mixing of players and gamblers taboo, but before that, it was one of many incidents that mostly received little attention. Things even reached a point where Landis, having already banned multiple players for associations with gambling or match fixing dating to before his time as commissioner, declared a statute of limitations that put any pre-Black-Sox incidents outside his jurisdiction so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the endless stream of old scandals resurfacing.

Even the Black Sox scandal itself only came to light to the extent that it did because of another incident the following year. Before a late-August game in 1920, Cubs president Bill Veeck Sr. (father of the more famous Bill Veeck Jr.) received several tips that the game would be fixed. Veeck reported the allegations, and shortly thereafter Cook County impaneled a grand jury to investigate. It was only after this grand jury broadened its focus to include the 1919 World Series that the scandal really blew up.

There have been allegations or suspicions about games being fixed in every World Series from 1917 to 1922, as well as at least a couple others before then. (Sean Deveney’s book The Original Curse: Did the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series to Babe Ruth’s Red Sox and Incite the Black Sox Scandal? gives the most detailed look into the possibility of a fixed World Series outside 1919.)

It didn’t even take until the World Series technically existed for it to be targeted by gamblers: Ahead of the first World Series in 1903, Boston catcher Lou Criger was offered $12,000 (several times his annual salary) to throw the Series to Pittsburgh. When the Black Sox were discussing plans to fix their own Series, one of their inspirations was the idea that the Cubs had done the same thing a year earlier, and they were told by one of the gamblers that it had already been successfully pulled off in the past.

Similarly, the steroid scandal has engulfed a broad sample of players, but an overwhelming amount of the focus has been directed at a handful of targets.

This narrow focus has manifested in two distinct ways. There’s the obvious attention paid to highly visible power-hitting or power-pitching stars like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire, but there is also the reduction of baseball’s steroid problem to a self-contained Steroid Era spanning the mid-1990s and the 2000s. Both of these approaches have distorted the historical context of the problem and placed the scapegoating of clear villains over a more complete understanding of the impact steroids have had on the game.

The Economics of Corruption

The first known instance of match fixing in baseball occurred on Sept. 28, 1865, in a game between the New York Mutuals and Brooklyn Eckfords. Baseball was still strictly amateur at the time, but betting already was rampant among the game’s spectators. This was not a particularly good combination.

In 2003, economics professors Ian Preston and Stefan Szymanski developed a model outlining the financial incentives for match fixing in a paper published in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. In their model, the amount of money necessary to incentivize a player to throw a game depends on the player’s salary (among other factors, like how likely he is to get caught), and more specifically how much higher his salary is compared to what he could make in another industry. The amount gamblers can afford to offer while still making a profit, meanwhile, depends on how much betting activity they can attract.

The combination of low wages and heavy gambling therefore created the ideal conditions for corruption. Preston and Szymanski connected this concept to scandals in cricket, soccer and baseball. For example, they note that when England’s Football League limited player salaries to near industrial wages in the early-1960s, the league ran into a major gambling scandal, including cases where players were winning as little as £100 betting their own money on fixed games.

During baseball’s amateur era, there was virtually no financial deterrent to taking bribes, be they from club officials or from gamblers. Allegations of match fixing or under-the-table payments were relatively common, and a number of players ended up banned from baseball’s governing association for their involvement.

While the shift to professional leagues helped mitigate this somewhat, wages remained too low to effectively deter corruption. Most players did make more than the average worker, but they would still have to find a new career after leaving baseball, and many worked second jobs in the offseason. Joe Jackson himself said one reason he never pushed for reinstatement was that he was making pretty good money in his business ventures outside baseball.

To a large extent, the gambling problem flourished because the league’s owners were far more concerned with keeping these wages down. Preston and Szymanski estimate that player salaries in this era may have been as low as 20 percent of team revenues.

If you follow trade talks, you may have heard the term “surplus value,” which basically means the difference between a player’s value to a team and the salary the team has to pay the player to provide that value. Free agents typically don’t have much, if any, surplus value, because teams offer them a salary roughly equal to what they think the player is worth. Arbitration-eligible and especially pre-arbitration players tend to have much more surplus value because their salaries are usually well below what they would be offered on the open market. This is why, for example, the Marlins could probably get more in a trade for Christian Yelich than they got for Giancarlo Stanton even though Stanton is the better player.

When the league is limiting player salaries to 20 percent of revenues, pretty much every player has surplus value. Everyone is essentially a pre-arbitration player. Which means that losing a player, especially a star, would cost a team a lot more value than it saves in salary.

Now consider that the owners and executives profiting off these players were by and large the people responsible for enforcing discipline against them. Banning a player for match fixing or gambling meant losing all of the surplus value that player generated, not to mention the revenue lost to the negative PR a scandal might bring. As a result, teams were reluctant to allocate resources to investigate gambling incidents. Conversely, the league was much more aggressive in pursuing and disciplining reserve clause violations, which were a threat to the league’s profits rather than to the integrity of the game on the field.

In other words, in the decades preceding the Black Sox scandal, professional baseball built up a system that:

  • Kept a high financial incentive for players to take bribes; and
  • Disincentivized teams from investigating or disciplining players involved in match fixing.

By the time baseball’s drug culture was forming, the financial incentives had changed, but similar concepts helped create the same problem: The players were incentivized to dope, and the league was disincentivized from investigating or publicizing the problem.

In fact, the problem was even worse for the drug epidemic because, in this case, the incentives for the players and owners aligned. With gambling, teams were incentivized not to investigate whenever fixing occurred, but they were still hurt when their players did it. With PEDs, where the goal is explicitly to improve on-field performance or availability, teams and players alike benefited. As a result, teams not only looked the other way but in some cases actively encouraged drug use via trainers or team doctors.

Major League Baseball also repeated its mistake in focusing too heavily on player costs over the game’s integrity. Bud Selig and his predecessors have argued that one reason they didn’t do more is that their hands were tied by the union—drug testing was a matter of collective bargaining, and the MLBPA wouldn’t budge.

The MLBPA’s reluctance to implement mandatory testing is a well-documented and undeniable factor in the growth of baseball’s drug culture, but there is also no evidence that MLB ever made a serious push to negotiate a more comprehensive PED policy over the decades leading up to the 2002 agreement that finally allowed for testing. Instead, the game’s commissioners decided to press the union on their own pet issues rather than engage in productive negotiations over drug policy.

This was especially true of Peter Ueberroth and Bud Selig. Ueberroth oversaw and helped coordinate the collusion scandals of the 1980s, and Selig’s attempts to unilaterally impose a salary cap led to the 1994-95 player strike, both of which bred significantly more distrust and pushback from the union than PED testing would have.

The Narrative of Scandal

The Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is really two things. There’s the Hall itself—the list of players and other figures enshrined in bronze plaques beneath the skylights and vaulted ceilings of the building’s main gallery—and then there’s the museum—a trove of artifacts and memorabilia steeped in the presence of baseball throughout the years.

It is in the museum where you will find the stories of Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, of Curt Flood and Marvin Miller, of Joanne Weaver and Jean Faut. It is there you’ll see the game’s influence in vaudeville, music and film, or its role in the civil rights movement. Regardless of what the BBWAA and Veterans Committees ultimately decide, it’s where you’ll find Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.

If the museum tells the story of baseball, the Hall tells the story as the game’s custodians have wanted it told. In 1939, the year the museum was set to open to the public, that story necessarily excluded Joe Jackson.

That year’s Hall of Fame class, anticipating the grand opening, was a large one. Among others, voters elected Albert Spalding, a former pitcher who made his career as an executive by stamping out the game’s earliest labor movements and lowering player costs for the owners. They elected Cap Anson, Chicago’s star first baseman and manager who had refused to play against a team with a black catcher and who helped institutionalize the color barrier. And they elected Charles Comiskey, owner of the Black Sox.

These were the heroes of baseball’s establishment, men who had created and upheld the game’s institutions. They all had serious flaws, but on the whole they represented the story that baseball wanted to proudly display, at least at the time they were inducted.

I bring this up not to argue for putting Jackson in the Hall of Fame or kicking Comiskey out, but because sifting through the historical details requires an understanding of how these narratives formed. Who shapes this story, and why? This question is critical to understanding the role of both gambling and steroids in the game’s history and how they’ve been perceived.

In an editorial written for the National Sunday Magazine five years before the Black Sox scandal, Ban Johnson declared baseball to be “free of that destroying element, gambling–the bane of so many sports.” He continued:

[T]o fix a ball game…would be harder than drawing water out of an empty well…there is little danger that the sinister shadow of the gambler will ever fall across the diamond.”

Reading Johnson’s editorial now feels a bit like Hamlet’s mother watching The Murder of Gonzago. And yet, Johnson’s words are not all that different from the general sentiment throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s that steroids were a football problem, or a track-and-cycling problem, or an anything-but-baseball problem.

Johnson’s words did not emerge from a vacuum. He knew gambling was a problem, that it had shaken other sports, that there were questions about his own game. Yet he insisted, quite forcefully, that baseball and possibly baseball alone was above such transgressions. Likewise, the game’s modern stewards repeatedly dismissed concerns that baseball itself could be affected even as drug scandals roiled the sporting world around it.

Within months of Bowie Kuhn taking office as commissioner in 1969, anabolic steroids appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. The accompanying article by Bil Gilbert opened with an anecdote about how the previous World Series “at times seemed to be a match-up between Detroit and St. Louis druggists,” and went on to list a series of amphetamines, barbiturates and other drugs described to him by St. Louis’ team surgeon. Gilbert later quoted former Dodgers physician Robert Kerlan as saying:

The excessive and secretive use of drugs is likely to become a major athletic scandal, one that will shake public confidence in many sports just as the gambling scandal tarnished the reputation of basketball.”

(Kerlan is most likely referring to the 1951 college basketball point-shaving scandal.)

A few years later, when a Congressional subcommittee reported that an investigation had uncovered “alarming” amounts of illegal amphetamine and steroid use across professional sports, Kuhn responded with a press release stating, “I don’t think it’s a serious problem in baseball,” and speculated that the game’s less violent nature exempted it from such concerns.

Kuhn’s successor, Peter Ueberroth, specifically called out drugs as an area of potential improvement at the press conference announcing his hiring. With a background as an Olympic organizer for the 1984 Games, Ueberroth would have been well aware of the IOC testing procedures and concerns about PEDs. Yet over his tenure, he, like Kuhn before him and Fay Vincent after, was far more focused on recreational drugs like cocaine and marijuana than performance-enhancing drugs. (The at-times antagonistic stance the league took with the union on recreational drugs may have also been a contributing factor to the MLBPA’s resistance to cooperate with MLB to implement mandatory drug testing.)

In 1985, 15 years after pitcher Jim Bouton first detailed amphetamine abuse in his book Ball Four, a federal drug trial produced evidence of widespread amphetamine abuse in baseball. In the 1988 ALCS, fans in Boston taunted Jose Canseco with chants of “Steroids!” The following spring, just over a week before Bart Giamatti officially replaced Ueberroth as commissioner, reports surfaced that Canseco’s personal assistant had been arrested with steroids in his possession while traveling with Canseco.

Around the start of the 1994 season, when whispered suspicions were starting to spread a little more loudly, baseball’s owners met privately to discuss the potential issue of PED use. They decided there was no reason to be concerned.

The following year, Bob Nightengale asked some of the game’s leading figures about the growing rumors. One GM told him he knew steroid use was a problem and that it seemed to be growing. Another said he wouldn’t be surprised if 30 percent of players were using something. Frank Thomas and Tony Gwynn both expressed concern. Meanwhile, Selig insisted, “If baseball has a problem, I must say candidly that we were not aware of it.”

Perhaps there was some genuine naiveté to their comments. Within Johnson’s editorial, though, we get a glimpse into another motivation. Johnson writes, “Considered from a business angle, a fixed baseball game would be commercially suicidal.”

That is, if the public truly knew the extent of baseball’s gambling problem, the loss of confidence in the on-field product would be disastrous to the league’s bottom line. This, as Kerlan predicted, was exactly the issue with PEDs. Rather than address the problem head on and risk that kind of negative exposure, it is safer for MLB, at least in the short term, to simply reassure the public and keep any evidence or suspicion of wrongdoing private.

This is what Gene Carney insinuates in his book Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. Carney notes, for example, that despite Comiskey’s public assurances that his investigation had turned up no evidence of wrongdoing in the Series, he later testified under oath that he had learned of the fix, including the names of the players involved, by the start of Game Three. When Chicago reporter Hugh Fullerton reported rumors of the fix to the game’s magnates ahead of the Series, he was rebuffed.

Similarly, when rumors emerged the previous year that the 1918 World Series might be fixed, the owners declined to fund an investigation. When Reds manager Christy Mathewson suspended first baseman Hal Chase that same year for attempting to bribe other players to fix games he’d bet on, the National League exonerated him in its investigation. The Giants, whose manager John McGraw had testified on Chase’s behalf at his league hearing, traded for him that offseason only to suspend him the following year for doing the same thing again.

Decades later, as PEDs became more and more accessible, we again saw teams withholding their reservations and keeping quiet their questions about what their own players were doing. And, just like with the game’s earlier gambling problems, the story continued to grow out of sight until it became so big it could no longer be ignored.

The Art of Knowing

I’m going to ask a relatively simple question with a not-so-simple answer, and then I’m not going to answer it. Not fully, anyway. But the question itself is important.

How do we know the Sox threw the 1919 World Series?

The shortest meaningful answer we can give, believe it or not, is “We don’t.” Of course, that’s not a very satisfactory answer, and certainly it’s far from a complete answer. We obviously know something was amiss with the 1919 World Series. We know players conspired to throw the Series, that at least some of them took payments to do so, and that they lost.

Again, the full answer goes much deeper than this, but the gist of it is we know this much because three of the players involved confessed in their grand jury testimony to either conspiring or taking money to fix the Series, and a fourth admitted as much to a newspaper reporter. Later in life, some of the other participants gave interviews confirming their involvement.

That seems like a simple enough answer. We know they did it because they confessed to doing it. But then the question becomes, why did they confess? Why were they investigated so thoroughly when similar allegations from past years had not been? Why was it so easy to get so many players on a World Series favorite to agree to throw the Series in the first place? You can keep digging and digging, and before long you begin to feel like you’re asking Richard Feynman to explain how magnets work.

While there are many facets to this question, the Sox’ actual performance in the Series isn’t really one of them. Not that that isn’t an interesting topic in its own right, but it has little to do with how the fix was discovered or confirmed. After all, the Sox’ two best hitters in the series (Jackson and Buck Weaver) both either conspired to throw the Series or took money for it, and their biggest disappointment (Eddie Collins) wasn’t involved. Even Chick Gandil, the player who organized the fix in the first place, drove in the winning run in the closest game of the Series.

This is actually one of the reasons gambling grew to become as big a problem as it did–so many people in baseball were convinced that it would be impossible to throw a game without it being obvious. They were sure that if someone tried, they’d be able to tell just by watching, and the fact that they couldn’t tell became proof it wasn’t happening. This overconfidence made it relatively easy for gamblers to operate without being investigated.

This is also why, for all we know about the scandal, we don’t know with complete certainty that the Sox actually tried to lose. The players all maintained that they played to win in spite of their previous agreement. We can have our suspicions about their level of play, but in a world where Willie Aikens can hit .400 with four home runs, a triple, and six walks in one World Series, and Derek Jeter can go 4-for-27 without drawing a walk in another, there is very little we can know for sure from a player’s performance over a Series.

Hugh Fullerton is a big part of the answer to this question. For nearly a year after the 1919 World Series, Fullerton almost single-handedly kept the story of a possible fix in the news as he chased down leads. He was ridiculed for it. He had to publish his stories in the New York Evening World when the local Chicago papers refused to print them.

Ahead of the Series, when rumors were already starting to spread, Fullerton decided to test whether you really could throw a Series without anyone noticing. Together with Christy Mathewson, he scrutinized every play of every game from the stands. Over the eight-game series, the two marked a total of seven plays they found suspicious. Of these seven plays, Fullerton wrote:

Any one of those plays could be explained on the theory that the mistakes were honestly made, as well as on the theory of dishonesty. Plainly the outsider cannot tell to a certainty.”

The day after the Hall of Fame announced that Jeff Bagwell had been inducted, the New York Daily News ran the headline: “Jeff Bagwell dances around PED issue day after being voted into Hall of Fame.”

There is to date no evidence Bagwell took steroids or any other PEDs, but that became the defining question of his candidacy. For seven years, one of the best first basemen in the history of the game languished on the ballot as voters struggled to balance his credentials against their doubts.

Bagwell fit precisely the Platonic mold of a steroid user to the average fan—a line-drive hitting prospect who became one of the game’s best power hitters; a skinny college third baseman who shifted to first and bulked up as a professional; a guy who kept hitting home runs well into his 30s right up until his body failed him. Even his batting stance looked like he was in the gym doing squats.

It was the same mistake all over again: We were sure we could tell. At first, baseball players didn’t look like steroid users. Then, suddenly, they did.

But, as Hugh Fullerton and Christy Mathewson discovered, it’s not so easy to tell by looking. Bagwell looked like he could maybe be a steroid user, in the same way Eddie Collins must have looked to someone who’d gotten wind of the fix like he could easily be involved.

Without solid evidence, though, any of the concerns writers have expressed about Bagwell, or any number of of his contemporaries, could be explained on the theory that they were honest, as well as on the theory of dishonesty. Without evidence to corroborate our suspicions, we cannot tell to a certainty.

To many of the writers voting on Bagwell’s candidacy, the failure to uncover baseball’s steroid problem remains their industry’s biggest error. In attempting to reconcile these past shortcomings, some have swung completely the other way and begun openly speculating. Whose acne cleared up at the wrong time? Who had his breakout year with the wrong teammates in the clubhouse? Who injured the wrong body parts at the wrong age?

This is not really any healthier for the industry than the paucity of reporting in the scandal’s earlier decades. Part of the issue is that the story revolves so heavily around naming names—discovering the identities of dishonest players and uncovering what specifically they did to cheat the game—that when there are no names to report, we don’t know what to do.

This is the challenge of unraveling these types of scandals. How do you report on a story without knowing the actors involved? Fullerton’s contemporaries were not necessarily wrong not to print their suspicions when they couldn’t back them up with evidence, but there is also a middle ground between leveling accusations and ignoring a story entirely.

Looking backward, we face the same problem in trying to understand the historical scope of these scandals. We may never know the names of most players who used steroids or amphetamines or HGH, but there are still important questions we can ask beyond simply who did what. I would even argue that a better understanding of what factors contributed to the rise of the problem, how prevalent it was at various points in time, and what concrete effects can be traced to different drugs are much more valuable than simply learning more names without this broader context.

A Shift in Focus

Sometime between the 1969 Sports Illustrated exposé and the point at which MLB started treating PED use as a serious problem, the primary concern shifted from the medical risks to the impact on statistical records. The question was no longer, “What effect will these drugs have on the athlete’s future health and quality of life?” but “What effect have these drugs had on the record books?”

This shift in focus has largely re-written the history of baseball’s drug problem and, in many ways, distorted it.

On Jan. 6, 2008, the CBS program 60 Minutes aired an interview with Roger Clemens. On national television, Clemens defended himself against accusations of steroid use by claiming his drug regimen consisted only of prescription numbing injections (administered by trainer Brian McNamee) and painkillers, the latter of which he said he was “eating…like it was Skittles.”

When Gilbert wrote his SI piece, that was the story, just as much as steroids were. Improper use of prescription drugs, particularly when self-administered or administered by an athletic trainer without medical supervision, is not healthy. If you have kids, you don’t want them following the regimen Clemens described as he proclaimed his innocence any more than the one Brian McNamee described in the Mitchell Report.

Many of the concerns expressed in Gilbert’s reporting center on the uncertain effects of abusing drugs for purposes and in quantities other than their stated medical use. The hope was that these drugs would give athletes some kind of boost—a couple extra ticks on the fastball, an extra jolt of energy and alertness in the field, a more explosive frame without the excess bulk, even just the ability to force one’s body through a few extra games over a long season. The reality—whether and how well they actually worked, and what other ugly stuff they also did to your body–was unknown.

In the years since, we’ve identified a number of these risks. Some of the drugs (including the one Clemens compared to candy) have been outlawed completely due to the dangers of even responsible medical use. But the overall effects, both positive and negative, are still not understood nearly as well as the average fan assumes.

Despite this, the narrowed scope of the modern perspective has excluded from the problem nearly every drug that is not an anabolic steroid (or a similarly conceived drug, like HGH).

A lot of this has to do with the way the steroid problem became a public scandal. In the late 1990s, the game was in the midst of an offensive renaissance. Home run records that had stood for decades were suddenly falling, and then falling again, year after year. The men who were doing it looked like nothing the game had seen before, like someone had crossbred Ted Kluszewski with an oak tree.

On Aug. 22, 1998, in the thick of the first of those successful chases of Maris’ 61*, a reporter asked about a bottle sitting in Mark McGwire’s locker. Suddenly, things started to make sense. Andro itself was, at the time, legal and allowed under MLB’s drug policy, but the idea that chemicals and drugs were behind the changes in the game started to take root.

This idea led, eventually, to the public outrage that forced MLB to begin its testing program, just as the Black Sox scandal led to Landis’ crackdown on gambling.

It also did two other things that mimicked the reaction to the Black Sox scandal. One, it created clear scapegoats who could be held up as the face of the scandal. It is much easier, after all, to get worked up over a barroom debate about a home run record than to try to sort out the effects of Winstrol versus Dexamyl versus Vioxx versus somatropin. And so McGwire became a villain. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens became villains, just like Eddie Cicotte and Chick Gandil did.

Just as importantly, it vindicated the childhood heroes of most of the game’s paying fans by setting a clear starting point to the Steroid Era. Whatever drugs the contemporaries of Willie Mays and Tom Seaver and Hank Aaron had access to, they fall outside this revised view of PEDs, just as the singular focus on the Black Sox preserved the idea that 1919 was an aberration in an otherwise clean game.

MLB has endorsed this interpretation of the steroid scandal, most notably with the Mitchell Report, which explicitly excluded amphetamines from its directive. Explaining why he accepted this restriction, George Mitchell wrote:

“The allegedly widespread use of amphetamines in baseball, rumored for decades, is a problem distinct from more recent allegations that players have used steroids and other substances with anabolic or similar effects to gain an unfair competitive advantage.”

Mitchell goes on to draw a clear line in the chronology detailing the scope of the steroid problem. Outside some discussion of baseball’s historical drug policies, the earliest era explored is in the section titled “Early Indications of Steroid Use in Baseball (1988 to August 1998).”

There are some problems with this interpretation, even when focusing only on how drugs affect on-field performance and not future or current medical health. Because there is no real medical value to testing drugs for improving athletic performance, and because the drugs themselves continue to evolve in an effort to stay ahead of testing procedures, there isn’t much scientific research on the effects of steroids, amphetamines, and other drugs on athletic performance in healthy adults. Without scientific evidence justifying the clean split into “steroids” and “everything else,” the distinction relies heavily on anecdotal evidence and marketing claims about the effects of each drug.

That doesn’t mean we know nothing about the effects of steroids, but in the rush to tie the changes seen in the 1990s to PEDs, we inadvertently conflated the drug issue with other legitimate causes. Things like the revolution in weight training in the 1980s and ’90s and potential changes to the liveliness of the baseball reinforced the popular conception about steroids because they looked like what the general public thought steroids were.

The uncertainty that has always surrounded the issue was replaced with an assured overconfidence. Later, we learned new things that should have shaken this confidence. Testing and federal drug investigations started showing that the players using PEDs didn’t look so different from the rest of the major leaguers. Doping scandals in cycling and other sports showed that PED use could look even less like we thought it did. One of the most common reasons for dismissing the possibility of steroid use in baseball before the 1990s was that players back then didn’t even lift weights out of concern that the added bulk would interfere with their swing or throwing mechanics, but one look at Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis and that dismissal seems naive.

Then, in 2005, Tom House told the San Francisco Chronicle that he had used steroids during his career in the 1970s. He also claimed that steroids and HGH were common among pitching staffs in the 1960s and ’70s, especially since most players didn’t understand the medical risks they were taking. Reflecting Gilbert’s line about the contest of druggists, House recalled that the joke in his day was, “We didn’t get beat, we got out-milligrammed.”

The Mitchell Report, commissioned in 2006 and published the following year, makes no mention of House or his claims.

…

The Black Sox scandal and the narrative tying baseball’s home run records to steroids both served as important catalysts for change when MLB had long failed to act. Without the public scrutiny each attracted, the game could not have moved on. In the wake of these scandals, however, the broader histories from which they emerged too often remain obscured.

In particular, MLB’s own investigations cannot be taken as a complete historical accounting. In addressing both the gambling and drug problems, it has limited its official findings to what the public already suspected and made little effort to push beyond that scope, especially when doing so would further damage the public’s confidence.

To establish a full history of these issues, we need to consult additional sources, such as Tom House or Jim Bouton or Robert Kerlan. Stories like Bil Gilbert’s and Bob Nightengale’s, which didn’t name names but nonetheless explored the extent of the scandal, should have been paid far more attention, both by fans and especially by MLB. These represent positive examples of reporting on the drug issue well ahead of the public outcry, much like Hugh Fullerton’s work over the year following the 1919 World Series, and give us valuable historical insight into how the problem developed and evolved.

With the Black Sox scandal, many historical details took decades to emerge. Some of the players spoke publicly about the scandal only near the end of their lives. Eliot Asimof’s book Eight Men Out, by far the most famous detailed account of the scandal, wasn’t published until 1963, and even then there are significant documents and resources that have emerged only after Asimof’s research was completed.

Likewise, our final understanding of the PED scandal may be far from complete. Who knows what private correspondence or clandestine record keeping will one day emerge, or what aging players, coaches or trainers will one day want off their conscience? Scientific advancements may give us further insight into what drugs did what, much like we now consider the testosterone injections Pud Galvin took in the 1880s to be essentially nonsense.

By treating these scandals as isolated events in the game’s history, we ignore the factors that created and contributed to the problem in the first place, and by extension lose sight of how to prevent them in the future. To regain that perspective, we need to explore the full extent of the problem, including the players involved, but also the role played by league and team officials, gamblers, doctors, trainers, reporters and fans, as well as the financial incentives and medical repercussions.

Baseball, in all likelihood, has not seen its last major scandal. One thing the game’s past scandals have shown is that, as long as there are strong incentives to corruption, there will be no shortage of people, both inside the game and out, willing to succumb. If baseball is to learn from its past mistakes, it needs to be proactive about identifying and addressing these incentives rather than reactively waiting for scandals to boil over. After all, if the past is any indicator, we may end up waiting for decades.

References and Resources


Adam Dorhauer grew up a third-generation Cardinals fan in Missouri, and now lives in Ohio. His writing on baseball focuses on the history of the game, as well as statistical concepts as they apply to baseball. Visit his website, 3-D Baseball.