Congress Flexes Its Muscles

Davis’s hearing will also provide more than a glimpse of Curt Schilling, the Boston Red Sox’s ace pitcher, Frank Thomas, the Chicago White Sox’s designated hitter (via satellite), Baltimore Oriole Rafael Palmeiro, Sammy Sosa, another Baltimore Oriole, and retired St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire. The men who make up this constellation of baseball stars have a lot in common. They are all famous. They are all here because they’ve been issued subpoenas. They are all here, too, because they are mentioned in a book written by another star witness, former ballplayer Jose Canseco.

The book is called Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, and in it Canseco says that Palmeiro, Sosa, and McGwire took steroids in the 1990s. Currently Juiced is number three on the New York Times bestseller list. Since it was released in early February, Canseco’s book has been the focus of extensive media coverage, and representatives of the media are here today too–fistfuls of them. They squawk into cell phones and look in vain for the baseball superstars. They will have to wait.

Chairman Davis warns us that today isn’t just about the ballplayers. Today is about the children. So Davis invited a whopping 19 witnesses to testify before the committee, in four expert panels. The all-stars won’t show up until panel three. Allan “Bud” Selig, Major League Baseball’s commissioner, is scheduled to testify in panel four, but he has to spend the entire day in the hearing room as the congressmen beat up on him, his star players, and his steroid policy. It’s grueling. Sometimes it’s gruesome. When I catch a glimpse of Selig toward the end of the day, he is slumped in his chair, a pitiful furrowed brow lost in a rumpled suit.

The morning’s first witness is Kentucky senator Jim Bunning. Like Davis, Bunning is a Republican, but unlike Davis, Bunning has played in the major leagues. He spent 17 years as a pitcher, mostly with the Detroit Tigers. He is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is a panel unto himself. Literally. For some reason the committee’s staff decided to have Bunning testify alone, perhaps out of concern for his safety or, knowing Bunning, for the other witnesses’.

Bunning launches into a superb Grandpa Simpson imitation, loudly longing for the days of yore. “Maybe I’m old fashioned,” he croaks. “I remember when players didn’t get better as they got older. We all got worse. When I played with Hank Aaron and Willie Mays and Ted Williams, they didn’t put on 40 pounds of bulk in their careers, and they didn’t hit more homers in their late thirties than they did in their late twenties.” What’s going on in baseball “isn’t natural.” What’s going on “isn’t right.”

His former colleagues in the House are touched. John J. Duncan Jr., Republican from Tennessee, says, “My colleague’s statement was one of the finest I have ever heard.” Others agree. But they want to make sure: Steroid use in Major League Baseball is an issue on which Congress must act, isn’t that correct, Senator?

“Congress should take action at any time.”

And what should happen, retroactively, if it’s revealed that a player used steroids in the past?

Bunning’s pale face contorts into a sneer. He extends his left arm in a sweeping motion, like an ancient king pronouncing sentence on a wretched peasant.

“Wipe all their records out.”

The congressmen lean back in their chairs, satisfied looks on their faces.

The congressional staffer who organized today’s hearing was clever. She put the stars on the third panel so reporters would have to sit through the first two. She put Jim Bunning in solitary confinement. And she’s arranged the second panel in classical style, pitting Emotion against Reason, Dionysus against Apollo. The Emotion is provided by some grieving parents: the Garibaldis, who say that their son Rob committed suicide after he used steroids, and the Hootons, who say the same thing about their son Taylor. The Reason comes from some physicians.

At least it’s supposed to. For the most part, the Garibaldis and Hootons tell their stories in measured voices. But the physicians–there are four of them–are loud. Their speech is flowery, their calls for government action impassioned. More, their speech is littered with dirty words: clenbuterol and Dianabol and stanozolol and nandrolone and methandrostenolone and 19-norandrostenedione.

Fortunately, the congressmen’s ears are mostly spared. During the second panel they flutter in and out of the hearing room, occasionally casting a wary eye at the witnesses. Only rarely are more than a half a dozen of the 39 members of the committee present at once. The congressmen have to cast a series of votes before they take a two-week vacation, committee staffers tell reporters.

The testimony concludes, and the question-and-answer period begins. The Republicans ask the parents and doctors whether it was appropriate that “Congress should act.” The unanimous answer: Yes. Rep. Davis has left the proceedings, and California Republican Darrell Issa is acting chairman. Issa listens to the witnesses urge Congress to action, nods his head, mops his brow, and turns to his Democratic colleagues, extending the opportunity, in a gesture of bipartisanship, for the honorable representatives to ask questions of the distinguished panel. Unfortunately the Democrats have all left.

They return soon enough, however, when it’s time for the third panel. Every seat is filled. TV camera crews peer intently from both sides of the chamber. The superstars march in: first comes Schilling, then Palmeiro, then McGwire, then Sosa, then Sosa’s translator, then Sosa’s lawyer, and finally Canseco and his lawyer. Canseco’s biceps are as thick as tree trunks–tree trunks that have been fed a steady diet of 19-norandrostenedione. Rep. Davis grins fiendishly, staring at the players’ hulking frames. He lets the athletes make their opening statements. And then, cameras flashing, the temperature in the room rising, Davis purses his lips and calls for . . . a two-and-a-half-hour break.

When the hearing resumes, all eyes are on Mark McGwire. In 1998 McGwire broke Roger Maris’s single-season home run record, and doping rumors have plagued him ever since. Canseco and McGwire were teammates on the Oakland Athletics in the 1980s. In Juiced, Canseco writes of McGwire, “What we did, more times than I can count, was go into a bathroom stall together and shoot up steroids.”

It’s clear that the congressmen want McGwire to admit he used steroids, or deny he used them, or invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, which in the eyes of the public would amount to an admission of guilt. McGwire does exactly that–taking the Fifth–but as he struggles under the lights and the leering glances of the legislators, his voice choked with tears, I can’t help but notice the strange deference with which the Republicans and Democrats treat Jose Canseco.

In his book Canseco writes he isn’t “the type of guy to brag about anything,” although he “personally reshaped the game of baseball.” Canseco is also a troublemaker. In 1989 he was arrested in California for carrying a loaded semiautomatic weapon in his car. In 1992 he was charged with aggravated battery. In 1997 he was arrested and jailed for beating his wife. In 2001 he was arrested after he and his twin brother Ozzie beat up two tourists in a Miami nightclub. In 2003 he spent three months in jail for violating his probation. He has dated Madonna.

He is often in need of money. Canseco has auctioned off his baseball equipment and other memorabilia online. When he was under house arrest, he charged fans $2,500 to spend a day with him. Reports are that he was paid a $500,000 advance for his new book.

It is a sequel of sorts. Canseco’s previous effort, written with (“by” is probably more accurate) Dave McKay, was called Strength Training for Baseball: Avoid Injuries and Improve Your Stats by Increasing Your Strength. In it, Canseco wrote: “A word about steroids: don’t use them. . . . Steroids have virtually no value even in the short term, if you are serious about baseball.”

Almost 15 years later, Canseco tells Congress the same thing. He says that steroid use is “wrong,” that Major League Baseball can’t be “trusted” to test its own players, that Congress “must act.”

The congressmen stroke their chins and nod in agreement.

They might have tried reading the book. Because, while Canseco writes in a preface that Juiced “does not intend to condone or encourage the use of any particular drugs, medicine, or illegal substances,” he has changed his mind about steroids by the first page.

Some examples. “By the time my eight-year-old daughter, Josie, has graduated from high school, a majority of all professional athletes–in all sports–will be taking steroids. And believe it or not, that’s good news” (page one). “Yes, you heard me right: Steroids, used correctly, will not only make you stronger and sexier, they will also make you healthier. Certain steroids, used in proper combinations, can cure certain diseases. Steroids will give you a better quality of life and also drastically slow down the aging process” (page three). “I hope this book will help you get over any biases you may have about steroids. I will do my best to help you unlock your own potential, so that even if you are not a professional athlete, you can look like one and feel like one and, in some ways at least, perform like one” (page ten). “The challenge is going to be demonstrating to people that steroids can be a good thing” (page 283).

It is odd, to say the least, to see Canseco appear before Congress as an expert witness. It is odd to see this expert witness refute what he wrote in Juiced, by which logic, one supposes, his accusations against players such as McGwire and Palmeiro and Sosa are also thrown into doubt.

Yet no member of Congress except Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings points out this gaping flaw in Canseco’s testimony. And even then Cummings rolls over when Canseco says steroids are “bad.”

Curt Schilling shakes his head. Suddenly Jose Canseco is Congress’s favorite ballplayer. This may be less surprising than you’d think.

He is, after all, sympathetic to its aims:

Jose Canseco is against smoking and stress. He’s for the environment. He’s a liar. He’s a criminal. He’s a tattletale. He changes his story from audience to audience.

Why isn’t this guy in Congress?

Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.