The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (37 page)

OLD TIMER’S GAME

Modern sports—professional and amateur—have had headaches dealing with performance enhancing drugs.

But they ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

* * *

“He’s making a travesty
of the game!”

White-haired Alistair Bragg was quivering with righteous wrath as he leveled a trembling finger at Vic Caruso. I felt sorry for Vic despite his huge size, or maybe because of it. He was sitting all alone up there before the panel of judges. I thought of Gulliver, giant-sized compared to the puny little Lilliputians. But tied hand and foot, helpless.

This hearing was a reporter’s dream, the kind of newsmaking opportunity that comes along maybe once in a decade. Or less.

I sat at the news media table, elbow to elbow with the big, popular TV commentators and slick-haired pundits. The guys who talk like they know everything about baseball, while all they really know is what working stiffs like me put up on their teleprompters.

Old man Bragg was a shrimp, but a powerful figure in the baseball world. He owned the Cleveland Indians, who’d won the American League pennant, but then lost the World Series to the Dodgers in four straight.

Bragg wore a dark gray business suit and a bright red tie. To the unsophisticated eye he looked a little like an overweight one of Santa’s elves: short, round, his face a little bloated. But whereas an elf would be cheerful and dancing-eyed, Bragg radiated barely-concealed fury.

“He’s turning baseball into a freak show!” Bragg accused, still jabbing his finger in Caruso’s direction. “A freak show!”

Vic Caruso had been the first-string catcher for the Oakland Athletics, one of the best damn hitters in the league, and a solid rock behind the plate with a cannon for an arm. But now he looked like an oversized boy, kind of confused by all the fuss that was being made about him. He was wearing a tan sports jacket and a white shirt with a loosely-knotted green tie that seemed six inches too short. In fact, his shirt, jacket, and brown slacks all appeared too small to contain his massive frame; it looked as if he would burst out of his clothes any minute.

Aside from his ill-fitting
ensemble
, Vic didn’t look like a freak. He was a big man, true enough, tall and broad in the shoulders. His face was far from handsome: his nose was larger than it should have been, and the corners of his innocent blue eyes were crinkled from long years on sunny baseball diamonds.

He looked hurt, betrayed, as if he were the injured party instead of the accused.

The hearing wasn’t a trial, exactly. The three solemn-faced men sitting behind the long table up in the front of the room weren’t really judges. They were the commissioner of baseball and the heads of the National and American Leagues, about as much baseball brass (and ego) as you could fit into one room.

The issue before them would determine the future of America’s Pastime.

Bragg had worked himself into a fine, red-faced fury. He had opposed every change in the game he’d ever heard of, always complaining that any change in baseball would make a travesty of the game. If he had his way, there’d be no interleague play, no designated hitter, no night baseball, and no player’s union. Especially that last one. The word around the ballyard was that Bragg bled blood for every nickel he had to pay his players.

“It started with steroids, back in the Nineties,” he said, ostensibly to the commissioner and the two league presidents. But he was looking at the jampacked rows of onlookers, and us news reporters, and especially at the banks of television cameras that were focused on his perspiring face.

“Steroids threatened to make a travesty of the game,” said Bragg, repeating his favorite phrase. “We moved heaven and earth to drive them out of the game. Suspended players who used ’em, expunged their records, prohibited them from entering the Hall of Fame.”

Caruso shifted uncomfortably in his wooden chair, making it squeak and groan as if it might collapse beneath his weight.

“Then they started using protein enhancers, natural supplements that were undetectable by normal drug screenings. All of a sudden little shortstops from Nicaragua were hitting tape-measure home runs!”

The commissioner, a grave-faced, white-haired man of great dignity, interrupted Bragg’s tirade. “We are all aware of the supplements. I believe attendance figures approximately doubled when batting averages climbed so steeply.”

Undeterred, Bragg went on, “So the pitchers started taking stuff to prevent joint problems. No more rotator cuff injuries; no more Tommy John surgeries. When McGilmore went twenty-six and oh we—”

“Wait a minute,” the National League president said. He was a round butterball, but his moon-shaped face somehow looked menacing because of the dark stubble across his jaw. Made him look like a Mafia enforcer. “Isn’t Tommy John surgery a form of artificial enhancement? The kind of thing you’re accusing Vic Caruso of?”

Bragg shot back, “Surgery to correct an injury is one thing. Surgery and other treatments to turn a normal human body into a kind of superman—that’s unacceptable!”

“But the fans seems to love it,” said the American League president, obviously thinking about the previous year’s record-breaking attendance figures.

“I’m talking about protecting the purity of the game,” Bragg insisted. “If we don’t act now, we’ll wind up with a bunch of half-robot freaks on the field instead of human beings!”

The Commissioner nodded. “We wouldn’t want that,” he said, looking directly at Caruso.

“We’ve got to make an example of this . . . this . . . freak,” Bragg demanded. “Otherwise the game’s going to be warped beyond recognition!”

The audience murmured. The cameras turned to Caruso, who looked uncomfortable, embarrassed, but not ashamed.

The commissioner silenced the audience’s mutterings with a stern look.

“I think we should hear Mr. Caruso’s story from his own lips,” he said. “After all, his career—his very livelihood—is at stake here.”

“What’s at stake here,” Bragg countered, “is the future of Major League Baseball.”

The commissioner nodded, but said, “Mr. Bragg, you are excused. Mr. Caruso, please take the witness chair.”

Obviously uncertain of himself, Vic Caruso got slowly to his feet and stepped toward the witness chair. Despite his size he was light on his feet, almost like a dancer. He passed Bragg, who was on his way back to the front row of benches. I had to laugh: it looked like the Washington Monument going past a bowling ball.

Vic settled himself gingerly into the wooden witness chair, off to one side of the judges, and stared at them, as if he was waiting for their verdict.

“Well, Mr. Caruso,” said the commissioner, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

“About what, sir?”

The audience tittered. They thought they were watching a big, brainless ox who was going to make a fool of himself.

The commissioner’s brows knit. “Why, about the accusations Mr. Bragg has leveled against you. About the fact that you—and other ballplayers, as well—have artificially enhanced your bodies and thereby gained an unfair advantage over the other players who have not partaken of such enhancements.”

“Oh, that,” said Vic.

Guffaws burst out from the crowd.

“Yes, that,” the commissioner said, glaring the audience into silence. “Tell us what you’ve done and why you did it.”

Vic squirmed on the chair. He looked as if he’d rather be a thousand miles away or maybe roasting over hot coals. But then he sucked in a deep breath and started talking.

It all started with my left knee—he said. On my thirtieth birthday, at that. The big three-oh.

I’d been catching for the A’s for four years, hitting good enough to always be fifth or sixth in the batting order, but the knee was slowing me up so bad the Skipper was shaking his head every time he looked my way.

We were playing an interleague game against the Phillies. You know what roughnecks they are. In the sixth inning they got men on first and third, and their batter pops a fly to short right field. Runner on third tags up, I block the plate. When he slammed into me I felt the knee pop. Hurt like hell—I mean heck—but I didn’t say anything. The runner was out, the inning was over, so I walked back to the dugout, trying not to limp.

Well, anyway, we lost the game 4-3. I was in the whirlpool soaking the knee when the Skipper sticks his ugly little face out of his office door and calls, “Hoss, get yourself in here, will you.”

The other guys in the locker room were already looking pretty glum. Now they all stared at me for a second, then they all turned the other way. None of them wanted to catch my eye. They all knew what was coming. Me too.

So I wrap a towel around my gut and walk to the Skipper’s office, leaving wet footprints on the carpeting.

“I’m gonna hafta rest you for a while,” the Skipper says, even before I can sit down in the chair in front of his desk. The hot seat, we always called it.

“I don’t need a rest.”

“Your damned knee does. Look at it: it’s swollen like a watermelon.” The Skipper is a little guy, kind of shriveled up like a prune. Never played a day of big-league ball in his life but he’s managed us into the playoffs three straight seasons.

“My knee’s okay. The swelling’s going down already.”

“It’s affecting your throwing.”

I started to say something, but nothing came out of my mouth. In the fifth inning I couldn’t quite reach a foul pop-up, and on the next pitch the guy homers. Then, in the eighth I was slow getting up and throwing to second. The stolen base put a guy in scoring position and a bloop single scored him and that’s how the Phillies beat us.

“It’s a tough position, Hoss,” says the Boss, not looking me in the eye. “Catching beats hell outta the knees.”

“I can play, for chrissakes,” I said. “It don’t hurt that much.”

“You’re gonna sit out a few games. And see an orthopedics doc.”

So I go to the team’s doctor, who sends me to an orthopedics guy, who makes me get MRI scans and X-rays and whatnot, then tells me I need surgery.

“You mean I’ll be out for the rest of the year?”

“The season’s almost over,” he says, like the last twenty games of the year don’t mean anything.

I try to tough it out, but the knee keeps swelling so bad I can hardly walk, let alone play ball. I mean, I never was a speed demon, but now the shortstop and third baseman are playing me on the outfield grass, for crying out loud.

By the time the season finally ends I’m on crutches and I can imagine what my next salary negotiation is going to be like. It’s my option year, too. My agent wouldn’t even look me in the eye.

“Mr. Caruso,” interrupted the commissioner. “Could you concentrate on the medical enhancements you obtained and skip the small talk, please?”

Oh, sure—Vic said. I went to the surgeon that they picked out for me and he told me I needed a total knee replacement.

“An artificial knee?” I asked the guy.

He seemed happy about it. With a big smile he tells me by the time spring training starts, I’ll be walking as good as new.

Walking and playing ball are two different things, I say to myself. But I go through with the surgery, and the rehab, and sure enough, by the time spring training starts I’m doing okay.

But okay isn’t good enough. Like I said, catching beats the hell out of your knees, and I’m slower than I should be. I complain to the surgeon and he tells me I ought to see this specialist, a stem cell doctor.

I don’t know stem cells from artichokes, but Dr. Trurow turns out to be a really good-looking blonde from Sweden and she explains that stem cells can help my knee to recover from the surgery.

“They’re your own cells,” she explains. “We simply encourage them to get your knee to work better.”

I start the regular season as the designated hitter. Danny Daniels is behind the plate, and boy is he happy about it. But during our first home stand I go to Doc Trurow, let her stick a needle in me and draw out some cells, then a week later she sticks them back in me.

And my knee starts to feel a lot better. Not all at once; it took a couple of weeks. But one night game against the Orioles, with their infielders playing so deep it’s like they got seven outfielders on the grass, I drop a bunt down the third base line and beat it out easy.

The crowd loves it. The score’s tied at 2-2, I’m on first with nobody out, so I take off for second. The Orioles’ catcher, he’s a rookie and he’s so surprised he double clutches before throwing the ball to second. I make it easy.

By Memorial Day I’m behind the plate again, the team’s number one catcher. Daniels is moping in the dugout, but hey, you know, that’s baseball. The Skipper’s even moved me up to the three slot in the batting order, I’m so fast on my feet.

One day in the clubhouse, though, Daniels comes up to me and says, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“You’re Danny Daniels, you’re hitting two-eighty-two, seven homers, thirty-one ribbies,” I tell him.

“That’s not what I mean.” Danny’s a decent kid, good prospect. He thought he had the catching slot nailed until my stem cells started working.

“So whattaya mean?” I ask him.

“You talked at my high school when I was a fat little kid,” Danny said. “All the other kids bullied me, but you told me to stand up to ’em and make the best of myself.”

Suddenly it clicks in my mind. “You were that fat little kid with the bad acne?”

He laughs. He’s so good-looking now the girls mob him after the game.

“Yeah. That was me. I started playing baseball after you talked to me. I wanted to be just like you.”

I never thought of myself as a role model. I get kind of embarrassed. All I can think of to say is, “Well, you did great. You made the Bigs.”

“Yeah,” he says, kind of funny. “I’m a second-string catcher.”

Bragg interrupts, “I don’t see what all this twaddle has to do with the issue at hand.”

The commissioner, who looked interested in Vic’s story, makes a grumbly face, but he sighs and says, “Mr. Caruso, while we appreciate your description of the human aspects of the case, please stick to the facts and eschew the human story.”