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"Ball Four" author Bouton saw steroid mess coming

Ellis Henican

December 14, 2007

There's a scene in "Ball Four," Jim Bouton's unvarnished diary of the 1969 baseball season.

Bouton, then playing for the short-lived Seattle Pilots, is sitting at dinner with veteran first baseman Don Mincher. The talk turns to pep pills. Pitcher John O'Donoghue has just received a season's supply of "greenies," 500 amphetamines. "They ought to last about a month," Bouton says with a shrug.

He writes:

"Mincher was a football player in high school, and he said, 'If I had greenies in those days, I'd have been something else.'"

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"Minch, how many major-league ballplayers do you think take greenies?" I asked. "Half? More?"

"Hell, a lot more than half," he said. "Just about the whole Baltimore team takes them. Most of the Tigers. Most of the guys on this club. And that's just what I know for sure."

Wait a second!

Performance-enhancing drugs? In major-league baseball? Thirty-eight years ago? Any of this sound familiar?

Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn didn't find much to like in Bouton's book, least of all his descriptions of the greenie use. But like the commissioners who followed him, Kuhn saw the evidence not as something to act on but as something to hide.

"They could have instituted drug testing right then," Bouton was saying yesterday from his home in western Massachusetts, just as George Mitchell was preparing to speak in New York. "They could have said, 'Where does this lead? Maybe we better draw some lines here.' They didn't. They just tried to keep a lid on it. And every time you try to keep the lid on something, you make it worse."

It's fun catching up with Bouton. He's just as plain-spoken as ever. He's still writing. He's still asked to speak. These days, Bouton also is chairman and chief executive of the 1800s-style Vintage Base Ball Federation, celebrating baseball the way it was played in the pre-steroid days.

He's even made his peace, sort of, with the Yankees, although some old-time sportswriters and dewy-eyed baseball nostalgists will never forgive what he wrote.

"I happen to think amphetamines are not in the same category as steroids," he said yesterday. "Amphetamines, at best, allowed you play up to your ability. They did not change your physical stature."

No sport can tolerate that forever.

"Steroids, human growth hormones and who knows what's coming along next," Bouton said. "It's a race with chemists, an unfair hidden advantage against players who are not using them. You have a high school or a college kid trying to get into the big leagues. If he's a marginal player, he says, 'I'm not going to make it with my current body. If I cheat, I have a chance of making it. If I get caught, I'm no worse off than in the first place.'"

Yet all this time, baseball refused to act - and still wouldn't be acting if it weren't forced to.

Bouton said he doesn't buy the idea that fans secretly crave the pumped-up hitters and their superhuman home runs.

"A handful of fans will say, 'I don't care if these are freaks,' the same people who like professional wrestling. They always get quoted. It is so bizarre."

But most fans, he said, really do want an honest game.

"You want more home runs?" he said. "Bring in the fences."

Bouton has his own ideas about effective drug testing. He said he'd require all players to submit blood samples at the start of their careers, samples that could be retained for years and compared against drug combinations that haven't even been invented yet.

"Baseball is already two or three years behind HGH, 15 years behind steroids," he said. "And you know they're behind the XYZ thing that people are using now but no one else knows about. The whole concept of performance-enhancing drugs has to be banned, the known and the unknown ones. If you can't buy it in a grocery store, don't put it in your body."

It's issues like this one that make Jim Bouton remember the ideals at the core of the game he still obviously loves. It's one of the reasons he's gotten so drawn into the Vintage Base Ball Federation, where the teams adhere to the rules, uniforms, equipment and competitive play of baseball's 19th century roots.

"No batting gloves, helmets, wrist bands, elbow pads, shin guards, sunglasses, logo shoes, pajama pants, gold chains or earrings," Bouton said, ticking off some of the changes in the game. "No arguing with the umpire. No stepping out of the batter's box, calling timeout, charging the pitcher or posing at home plate. No curtain-calling, trash-talking, hot-dogging, chest-bumping, high-fiving, pointing to the sky or kissing jewelry."

Bouton took a breath there.

"And no performance-enhancing drugs," he said.

"Just baseball."