Juiced (21 page)

What could I tell him? All's fair in love and steroids.

I can't give chapter and verse on Roger's training regimen.

But I'll tell you what I was thinking at the time: One of the classic signs of steroid use is when a player's basic performance actually improves later in his career. One of the benefits of steroids is that they're especially helpful in countering the effects of aging. So in Roger's case, around the time he was leaving the Boston Red Sox-and Dan Duquette, the general manager there, was saying he was "past his prime"-Roger decided to make some changes. He started working out harder. And whatever else he may have been doing to get stronger, he saw results.

His fastball improved by a few miles per hour. He was a great pitcher long before then; it wasn't his late-career surge that made him great. But he certainly stayed great far longer than most athletes could expect. There's no question about that. The media were clueless, for the most part, about steroids.

It was all happening behind closed doors, and they weren't privy to what happened in the privacy of the clubhouse. They didn't know that steroid use was so open that nobody really cared-that it had become integrated into the physical therapy regimen, so you didn't ever have to hide. It was as casual as taking a greenie-that is, amphetamines. It was simple: "Oh, I need to jack up my program. Who's got something in his locker?"

"Here's a needle. Go and inject yourself."

Or you just asked a trainer: "Do you know anybody who can get me a new supply?"

"Yeah, here, call this guy."

By the time the owners decided to crack down, it seemed like every player was holding steroids in his locker. If the guys in the media had ever gone into a locker and looked in a shoebox, they'd have found a stash: a couple of vials containing a week's supply of steroids, and a needle. If I had to guess, I'd say eight out of every ten players had kits in their lockers filled with growth hormones, steroids, supplements-you name it. A lot of the guys even set up informal little cliques to inject each other, the way you'd go out drinking with a bunch of guys after work.

For that matter, if someone had done a thorough search of the clubhouses back then, oh my God, the shit they would have found in there: greenies, steroids, little black books, vibrators, sex toys, women's underwear, and more. There was no telling what you might find.

None of us ever really never worried much about getting caught, though, or about the media reporting on what was going on. We didn't see it as a big deal. We didn't see using steroids as being in the same category as cocaine, marijuana, crack, or ecstasy. As a matter of fact, I still don't believe they should be categorized the same way as those drugs. According to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, anabolic steroids are a Schedule III substance, characterized by a "moderately high" abuse liability, which is only one category removed from Schedule II substances like cocaine and amphetamine, which are characterized by a "high" abuse liability.

People are always saying that steroids make you break down, and shorten your career. But with my back problems, they only lengthened mine. I've had back pain ever since I could remember; once, when I was in high school, I was at home when my back just went out and left me paralyzed, flat on my back on the floor, for twenty minutes. That experience was incredibly scary, even after the effect wore off and I could stand up again. There's always been a part of me that feared I'd one day be sidelined permanently by back trouble.

In 1996, while Jessica and I were married, I developed a disc problem that was so severe that I actually had to have back surgery. Three years later, in July 1999, I had a second back surgery to repair a herniated disc; that operation caused me to miss the All-Star Game, even though I was leading the American League with thirty-one homers going into the break.

Those two back surgeries were well publicized. But I actually had a third back surgery-and went to great lengths to keep it secret, because I knew that if it became public the owners might decide I was damaged goods and not give me another look.

Until the publication of this book, no one in Major League Baseball has never known that I had that operation. I didn't think I had any choice but to hush it up.

Back surgery is nothing to mess around with. It's serious business. To some people, it might seem crazy even to try coming back to baseball after three back operations. After all, I can think of some guys who decided they were done with the game after just one.

Even I was surprised at how quickly I was able to come back after that third back surgery. I was on steroids and growth hormone at the time, so I guess they accelerated the natural healing process. Two weeks after the surgery, my back felt great. The key was my workout regimen: I'd been working out for a long time prior to the surgery, and I was in tremendous shape. Then, as soon as I could after the operation, I started lifting right away. I recovered so quickly, it was as if I'd never had the surgery-and that made it a lot easier to keep my secret.

Not long after that, in February 2000, I went to Las Vegas for the Big League Challenge home-run hitting contest at Cashman Field. I had figured there was no way I could make it to Vegas for this contest that soon after back surgery, even though they'd offered me $100,000 just to show up and $600,000 if I won. But my quick recovery meant I could go. I showed up at Cashman Field, went in to the locker room to change, and took off my shirt.

Barry Bonds was nearby, and when he saw me, he just stood there and stared. I weighed about 255 at that point, and I was just shredded with veins. Barry couldn't believe what he was seeing.

"What the hell have you been doing?" he asked me, slowly and dramatically, for everybody to hear.

Then we had the home-run hitting contest, and I showed everyone that I wasn't just big-I was more powerful than ever. I went against Mike Piazza in the first round. He hit nine homers; not bad, but I hit eleven. Barry went up against Shawn Green and hit nine homers, just like Piazza, but Green hit twelve and Barry was eliminated. Next I went up against Mark McGwire; that was close, but I got the better of him. Then, against Chipper Jones, it went down to the end.

"I'm too old for this," I joked to Chipper. "I'm about to have a heart attack."

The last two left were me and my old friend from Miami, Rafael Palmeiro. Raffy put on a real show, but I was fortunate enough to get on a roll, and hit some real moon shots. One of them flew completely out of the stadium and landed on Washington Avenue, maybe 550 or 600 feet from home plate. I wound up winning the whole contest-and, believe me, that made an impression on the other players there. It just went to show that I still had a lot to offer as a player.

So what did Barry Bonds do that next off-season? He showed up in spring 2001 with forty pounds of added muscle. As soon as he set foot on a field in Scottsdale that spring, he was all anyone could talk about.

"My God, look at how big he is," everyone was saying. "He's monstrous. Look at him."

Barry added all that raw muscle, and then he went out that season and hit seventy-three home runs and destroyed the home-run record. But if you look at his numbers, he had never hit more than forty-nine home runs over fifteen seasons in the major leagues before that. Suddenly he's hitting seventy-three?

In late 2004, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Bonds had told a grand jury he used a cream form of steroid. So everyone finally knew for sure what was obvious all along even if Bonds did the smart thing and insisted he never knew the cream was steroids. Maybe he didn't know, or he wasn't sure.

But the simple fact is that Barry Bonds was definitely using steroids.

And it's no scandal, or at least it shouldn't be. People take medications for all sorts of things. The big drug companies spend huge amounts of money on television commercials telling you that your kid needs one drug because he can't sit still in school, or you need another because you've been feeling a little unhappy. But when it comes to accepting the simple fact that steroids and growth hormone can reshape the body in amazing ways, people seem to have this childlike need to cling to ignorance and fear. The future is here, so why fight it?

20. Clean Living

Heavily muscled bodies like Canseco's have now
become so common that they no longer invite scorn.
Players even find dark humor in steroid use. One
American League outfielder, for instance, was known
to be taking a steroid typically given by veterinarians
to injured, ill or overworked horses and readily
available in Latin America. An opposing player
pointed to him and remarked, "He takes so much of
that horse stuff that one day we're going to look out in
the outfield and he's going to be grazing."
-
TOM VERDUCCI,
Sports Illustrated, June 3, 2002

People insist on thinking of steroid use in negative terms, as though it's a sickness, when in fact most people who use steroids properly end up a lot more healthy than when they started. Here is something to think about: When I first came into the league, major league baseball players partied a whole lot more than they do now. Back then, in the late 1980s, a lot of guys were doing recreational drugs, and of course drinking a lot.

That has changed drastically.

As the years went by, and the players got more into steroids, weight lifting, and good nutrition, for most players the other drugs went by the wayside-liquor, cocaine, marijuana. When the guys realized that steroids worked, that was all they cared about. They looked better, they were stronger, they could perform at a higher level and land that big contract everyone wanted. So if there were certain sacrifices to make-like cutting back on drinking-that was no big deal. It was just one of those things that happened naturally. There are still exceptions, like that amazing partier Jason Giambi, but for most baseball players, the steroid era meant a new focus on clean living.

There are health considerations, obviously. You don't want to put too much stress on your liver with your steroid regimen.

You have to look out for dangerous combinations, because your liver can't handle being stressed in three different ways at once.

If you are overusing steroids, and you're also using cocaine and liquor, you've got a big problem.

So what does the smart athlete do? He uses no cocaine, no marijuana, no ecstasy, no liquor, and only a moderate amount of steroids, administered properly-and, ka-ching, he's on his way to those million-dollar contracts. That's a smart player. He lets the liver work at its normal pace, filtering out the steroid residue, and he ends up healthy, wealthy, and wise. The one other drug that's still hanging on in baseball is amphetamines, which have always been a big part of the game. Call them what you want-pep pills, greenies, dextroamphetamine sulfate-they've been around a long time. In Jim Bouton's famous 1980 book Ball Four, he was the first one to talk about greenies in public. He quoted the player named Tommy Davis, saying, "How fabulous are greenies? The answer is very," Bouton continued. "A lot of baseball players couldn't function without them."

Elsewhere in the book, Bouton describes a player who had recently received a supply of 500 greenies. "That ought to last about a month," Bouton wrote. Greenies were everywhere when I first came into the league.

I would say that at least eight out of ten players were taking greenies back then; they may have been as widespread as steroids are now. They were as acceptable as popping aspirin. Some guys would mix greenies with Excedrin or another caffeine-laced product. That's old school. It goes all the way back to the early days of baseball. Especially when they had a day game after a night game, players would need a little boost waking up. They'd take a pep pill an hour or so before the game, and by first pitch they'd have some extra spring in their step.

Greenies are still around, but now the guys who take them are the exceptions. Why the big change? Again, the number one reason is steroids. I never took a greenie. I just didn't see any point.

Steroids get you going. They accelerate your heart rate to the point where you don't need a stimulant to pick you up. A few players may have used a combination of both, but that's really just a few guys who like to be incredibly wired. When steroids became widespread in baseball, I think most everybody realized that mixing them with amphetamines can have an adverse reaction on you. That's when you saw greenies start to disappear from clubhouses.

The decline in amphetamines was part of the general trend toward better fitness that came with steroid use. With salaries getting so high-and even utility players bringing in $3 million a year-the smart players realized that the better care they took of themselves, the more they kept their bodies strong with steroids and good nutrition, the more years they'd be able to play-and the more money they'd make. For a while everybody was on the fitness kick, eating right, taking steroids, getting the right amount of sleep. So you saw bigger, stronger, faster, and healthier athletes, instead of those raggedy, run-down, pot-bellied ball players of previous eras. If you were to take a few contemporary major-league teams, and strip down all the players, you would find that most ballplayers have pretty good bodies. They're strong and fit, compared to thirty or forty years ago. It'll be interesting to see how that changes if more players start backing off of steroids.

Even though major-league baseball hasn't done anything serious to discourage players from using steroids, there's still a lot of concern about what's going to happen in the next couple years.

So there's been a movement of guys changing how they use steroids-some of them using less, some quitting altogether.

For those guys who decide not to use steroids any more, it's still possible to maintain about 80 percent of the muscle mass they have gained, if they go about it the right way. And the smart ones will consider using a low dose of steroids all year round.