Should admitted cocaine users enter the Hall?
Tim Raines is now manager of the Atlantic League's Newark Bears.
Other Columnists
As a Hall of Fame voter, Midweek Insider has wrestled greatly with the issue of illegal performance-enhancing drugs like steroids and human growth hormone. Should it be a disqualifying factor for candidates, even if no legitimate ban against these drugs existed at the time?
It hasn't been an easy question to answer, at least for me; I have voted "no" on Mark McGwire each of the past three ballots, based on myriad evidence that McGwire used illegal PEDs, but continue to reassess that thinking.
Cocaine, though? That has been easy: Of course it shouldn't be a disqualifying factor. No athlete takes cocaine to get better at his sport. You take the drug to "get high," after all, not to stay grounded and perform.
But then MI read "War as They Knew It," a fantastic book by Great Neck native Michael Rosenberg of the Detroit Free Press, and found an exception to that rule. Not a baseball one, but an athletic one.
The book documents the "Ten-Year War" between the Michigan and Ohio State football teams, when the coaching reigns of Bo Schembechler and his mentor Woody Hayes intersected. Among the most compelling accounts is those of Rod Gerald, the Ohio State starting quarterback in 1976 and 1977 and then a wide receiver in 1978.
On Jan. 1, 1977, Gerald tried cocaine for the first time in his life, he told Rosenberg, and he proceeded to win the Orange Bowl Most Valuable Player award that day. He proceeded to use cocaine before every game in the 1977 season that fall, during which he led the Buckeyes to a 9-3 record and an appearance in the prestigious Sugar Bowl.
"My primary usage for cocaine was to play and to perform at a high level of intensity, a high level of quality," Gerald told MI in a telephone interview "It worked, it really did. It just got to be too much. ... Where it took one line, probably, for the first game of the season, it grew to probably half a gram before a game near the end."
The cocaine, Gerald said, made him feel more confident and nimble. Whereas he had drug sources in Columbus, Ohio, he had no such contacts in New Orleans, and he failed to find cocaine in time for the Sugar Bowl. Ohio State lost to Alabama, 35-6.
Armed with this interesting anecdote, MI went to two well-known former ballplayers who admitted to using cocaine: Tim Raines and Dwight Gooden, both of whom now work for the independent Newark Bears. Raines is the team's manager, while Gooden just became a senior vice president last week.
Raines' case is more relevant, since he's an active Hall of Fame candidate; he received 22.6 percent of the vote in the most recent ballot and 24.3 percent in 2008. He started using cocaine during the 1982 season, and toward the end of the campaign, he proactively went to the Expos and told them of his problem. The organization stood by him and helped him get through the addiction, and he never had a problem again, he said.
"Football is just one game a week. In baseball you play every day," Raines said, when MI informed him of Gerald's story. "As for cocaine helping you to perform, I don't see it."
Raines admitted that, toward the end of the 1982 season, he played a few games high. His cocaine usage had grown so out of control, he said, that "I didn't sleep for four or five days in a row." The only way to stay awake for those games, he said, was to do more cocaine.
He said he couldn't remember the specific games, either the opponents or how he did. What he remembered, he said, was being up at bat, jumping back from a pitch right down the middle and the home-plate umpire asking him what in the world was wrong with him.
"I'm surprised how well I played that year," given his drug usage, Raines said. Yet if you look at Raines' career line, you'll see that, while he managed to play in 156 games, 1982 marked the worst season -- by far -- of his first 10 full years in the major leagues.
As for Gooden, his struggles came to light because he failed multiple drug tests with the Mets, the first one in spring training of 1987. He said that he never pitched high.
"For me, cocaine made me very paranoid," he said. "I couldn't have pitched like that." We all remember that Gooden's career slipped after his 1984 and 1985 brilliance, and he has said he started using after the 1986 season.
So should Raines and other cocaine users -- say, for instance, the names of Gooden, Keith Hernandez or Darryl Strawberry come up in a future Veterans Committee ballot -- be penalized for their activities? My inclination is no. Yet Gerald's interesting story, even from another sport, further clouds how we should continue analyze the entire issue of drug usage in professional sports. It's not black and white, for sure.
Managing Just Fine
Raines, during his playing days, was widely regarded as a future coach and/or manager in the major leagues. He served three years as a big-league coach -- 2004 with the Expos, then the next two seasons with the White Sox -- but hasn't found work since.
He's in the first year of a two-year deal with the Bears, and he said he's not viewing his job as a springboard for anything else.
"I came here because I wanted to give back to baseball. Not so much try to find a way back to the major leagues," he said. "If something comes up, I'll look at it. But this is not a situation of coming here and trying to get a job in the big leagues. Big-league jobs don't come along like that for coaches. It's who you know."
Now 50 -- today, as a matter of fact, is his birthday -- Raines is under contract to manage the Bears again next year. This season, the Bears have employed a number of well-known players, including former Met and Yankee Armando Benitez (who signed a deal with the Astros) and former Yankees pitcher Ramiro Mendoza
