Been There Wrote This
Same Story, Different Era
By John Mehno

Babe Ruth never took steroids, mostly because they weren't available in his lifetime.

Had they been available, who knows what might have happened? Because if you look at the long history of sports, there's ample evidence that players will do just about anything to gain an edge.

That can take many forms, from Ty Cobb's sharpening his spikes to potentially carve middle infielders to Gaylord Perry's loading a baseball with foreign substances to make it dip unpredictably past batters. Those are part of the folklore of the game, though, with Perry effectively casting himself as a cartoonish old country boy, a Jethro who stayed a step ahead of the umpires and slick opposing managers like Billy Martin and Earl Weaver. Perry even titled his autobiography "Me and the Spitter" and will gladly autograph Vaseline jars for a price.

But steroids are chemicals and baseball has experience with those, too. "Greenies," a form of amphetamine, have been as common as bubble gum in major league clubhouses for a long time and consumed about as casually. How long have greenies been around? Hall of Famer Duke Snider, who last played in 1964, recently said he popped them on occasion when he needed a lift.

During the 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials, the late John Milner testified Willie Mays introduced him to a liquid amphetamine called "red juice" while they were teammates on the New York Mets in the early 1970s.

So the next time you're wistfully listening to "Talkin' Baseball (Willie, Mickey and The Duke)," think about this: One of the legendary New York center fielders admits he used amphetamines to play, another has been accused of it in sworn federal court testimony and the third, the Yankees' Mickey Mantle, is remembered for his deathbed plea for others to avoid the destructive booze-fueled lifestyle that wrecked his health.

Athletes in general will take any edge they can get, or those they can imagine are an advantage. Baseball has a long tradition of stealing signs. Sometimes it's just the ability of someone on the bench to decipher the other team's code. That's good espionage. Other times it's blatant cheating.

Harvey Haddix's 12 perfect innings against the Milwaukee Braves in 1959 became even more impressive 25 years later. That was when former Braves pitcher Bob Buhl finally spilled the secret that the Braves were stealing every one of catcher Smoky Burgess' signals with binoculars from a bullpen vantage point and signaling the information to batters.

"Burgess was squatty so it was real easy to get them," Buhl said. "The thing was Harvey was so good with all his pitches that night that it didn't make a difference. We still couldn't hit him."

Hall of Famer Whitey Ford survived on his wits as his career wound down. Part of his repertoire included doctoring the baseball in a number of ways, including loading it with a dollop of mud and scratching cuts in the hide with his belt buckle. When umpires got wise and started watching him closely, catcher Elston Howard helped Ford, scuffing the ball with the buckles from his shin pads.

A lot of people are bent out of shape over the idea that baseball players increased strength through steroids and, theoretically, falsely inflated their home run totals. This ignores the fact that lousy players like Jeremy (not Jason) Giambi took steroids and still didn't accomplish much.

Grandstanding Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), a Hall of Fame major league pitcher, called for the records and statistics of steroid users to be erased from the record books. As long as that hurts Barry Bonds' legacy, a lot of Pittsburghers are all for it.

Yet we have firm evidence that some Steelers from the Super Bowl years used steroids. Lineman Jim Clack, who was on the Steelers' first two Super Bowl champions, admits to steroid use on page 180 of Roy Blount's "About Three Bricks Shy of a Load." Steve Courson, who was on the last two championship teams, wrote an entire book about his experiences with steroids. New Orleans Saints coach Jim Haslett recently said the Steelers started the trend. Dan Rooney angrily denied the charge but surely Clack and Courson weren't the only two Steelers to try steroids.

Funny thing, though, no one is calling for the jeweler to come in and engrave asterisks on any of the Super Bowl trophies.

In Other Matters

¥ Give John Wehner time to master the technical fundamentals of his new job in the Pirates' broadcast booth and he should be fine. Wehner has a sharp eye, he's honest and he has a South Side everyman appeal that should connect with listeners. You could tell he was starting to settle in when he broke out his Jim Leyland imitation during an exhibition broadcast.

¥ Steelers mini-camp just won't be the same without Plaxico blowing it off.

Carlton will publish a new expanded version of John Mehno's "The Chronicle of Baseball" in September. He can be reached at: johnmehno@lycos.com.