Team Chemistry: The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Major League Baseball
240
Team Chemistry: The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Major League Baseball
240eBook
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Overview
- In 1889, Pud Galvin tried a testosterone-derived "elixir" to help him pile up some of his 646 complete games.
- Sandy Koufax needed Codeine and an anti-inflammatory used on horses to pitch through his late-career elbow woes.
- Players returning from World War II mainstreamed the use of the amphetamines they had used as servicemen.
- Vida Blue invited teammates to cocaine parties, Tim Raines used it to stay awake on the bench, and Will McEnaney snorted it between innings.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252097898 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 01/30/2016 |
| Series: | Sport and Society |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 521 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Team Chemistry
The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Major League Baseball
By Nathan Michael Corzine
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09789-8
CHAPTER 1
Time in a Bottle
As long as I could pitch a little, no one cared that I was getting drunk.
— Don Newcombe
Alcohol is tied in with masculinity — the more you drink, the better man you are.
— Ryne Duren
Mickey Mantle was dying. It was clear to everyone who saw him in those last few weeks, a gaunt figure in an ill-fitting All-Star Game cap, his face ravaged by hard living, pain, and no small measure of regret. Five weeks after the most controversial liver transplant in American history, this Mantle seemed a hollow shell of the legendary Mick. At a moment when baseball needed good memories, Mantle was taking his leave, offering only a solemn elegy for the golden days of his sport and the men who played it. Baseball, which Mantle had dominated with his violent swing, once peerless speed — peerless, at least, before repetitive leg injuries slowed him — and humble "aw shucks" smile, was struggling through the aftermath of a devastating labor stoppage, a strike that had led to the first cancellation of the World Series since 1904. Like Mantle, it seemed as if baseball itself were slowly passing. Fans from Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue lamented the creeping corporatism, greed, and stupidity that had overtaken Major League Baseball in the summer of 1994. Now, scarcely a year later, seeing Mickey Mantle ravaged by the liver cancer that had first been diagnosed just that May was almost too much to endure.
In the age of the skeptic, nostalgia is no shield. That didn't stop some from using Mantle as a diversion from baseball's mounting troubles. Misty-eyed baseball writers mourned the passing of an era (not yet the passing of the game) and found an endless array of ways to work the word "hero" into print or televised commentary. Considerably less time was given by the cognoscenti to a discussion of the uncomfortable elephant in the room: Mantle's lifelong battle with alcoholism. Mickey's disease was acknowledged, of course, but almost always in a manner that suggested the man's fatal attraction to the bottle actually made his baseball accomplishments even more laudable. The hangovers made the homers seem longer and more majestic. After all, a man in such physical pain surely needed to take the edge off. Who could or would blame him? It was not what the bottle kept Mickey from accomplishing, but what he accomplished despite the bottle. Few writers at the time proffered the starkly honest assessment of John Anders in the Dallas Morning News: "The first great disappointment in joining the sports staff here in 1967," he wrote, "was learning that my boyhood idol, Mickey Mantle, was a big drunk."
Oddly enough, nobody did more to counter the hero talk and bring the saddest aspect of Mantle's life to the fore than Mantle himself. After checking into the Betty Ford Clinic in early 1994, he gave numerous interviews highlighting the high cost of decades of excessive drinking. Having come so late to sobriety, he endured the highly contentious debate over the legality and morality of his liver transplant with admirable stoicism. He emerged from that struggle determined to redefine his legacy and, in doing so, to begin redefining an entire baseball era.
Weakened and sick as he was, Mantle started revising his legacy almost immediately, beginning at the posttransplant press conference. "I owe so much to God and to the American people," he told the assembled reporters that day. "I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to make it up. It seems to me all I've done is take. Have fun and take. I'm going to start giving something back. I'd like to say to the kids out there, if you're looking for a role model, this is a role model." Mickey thumbed his own chest. "Don't be like me. God gave me a body and an ability to play baseball. God gave me everything and I just ..." His final words were overwhelmed by raw emotion. It seemed clear that Mantle meant to say that he had squandered his many physical gifts for love of drink.
Later that summer, Mantle was unable to be on hand for the annual Old Timers' Game at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. He appeared instead in a taped segment on the stadium scoreboard. There he once again sought to recast his image while targeting baseball's young audience. "To all my little teammates out there," he pleaded, "please don't do drugs and alcohol. God only gave us one body, and keep it healthy. We really need it."
Throughout his final weeks, Mickey Mantle lamented to all who would listen the high cost of the lifestyle he had chosen. His was too many mornings greeted with the "Breakfast of Champions" (a cloying concoction of Kahlua, brandy, and cream). His was a wrecked marriage, the loss of a son (Billy Mantle in March 1994) and of his dearest friend (Billy Martin on Christmas Day, 1989) to demons too much like his own. In the end, and though he might not have known it, Mantle's were the shared regrets of a century of baseball men very much like him. "I know it should have been so much better," he said of his life and career, as those other players surely would have said of theirs, "and the big reason it wasn't is the lifestyle I chose, the late nights and too many empty glasses."
In eulogizing Mantle in August 1995 it was time to remember those long nights. Understanding them is a more difficult proposition. Baseball was born wet. Alcohol, the drug that, if it did not lead to an early grave, had wrecked many a baseball man's career, retirement, or marriage, was, with nicotine (by way of tobacco), an ubiquitous presence throughout the formative years and during the Golden Age of professional baseball. Despite a few weak reform efforts, alcohol remained an accepted, even essential, element in the game's masculine subculture. Eventually, alcohol became an integral part of baseball's economic system as well as a component of the game's rich mythology. The myths were perpetuated by writers who relied on friendly teams for support, who sometimes lived vicariously through the athletes they covered, and who celebrated displays of athletic prowess despite inebriation as evidence of masculine excellence. If baseball's endless binge was hidden from the public, or given a glossy veneer, it was because writers simply could not afford to expose the worst excesses of the game. The ethos of the time was simple: "Drink Hard, Play Hard."
From time to time in recent years players and writers have questioned Major League Baseball's relentless assault on ergogenic drugs while the league seemingly ignores the long history of alcohol abuse and excess of beer money in the game. The response to these concerns is typically something along the lines of "but alcohol is legal — steroids are not." That misses the point. The influence of alcohol on baseball cannot be measured by resorting to the concept of legality alone. Peer through the fog of nostalgia, and you will find that alcohol both shaped and misshaped baseball, in myth and in reality. For the better part of a century many players were victims of an ill-informed tradition that actually celebrated drunkenness. For decades, the purity of the game was a surrogate, in the ad copy of Madison Avenue, for the purity of barley, hops, and water. The history of baseball and alcohol runs deep into the past and well beyond the neon-illuminated New York skyline of midcentury. Nevertheless, this hard-drinking world reached its apotheosis in New York, center of the baseball world, during the 1950s when Mickey Mantle, young and vibrant, was the brightest star in the brightest constellation in the baseball firmament.
* * *
It was a little after 1:00 in the morning, and a man was sprawled on the floor at Mickey Mantle's feet. Chaos ruled the cloakroom of Manhattan's Copacabana night club as several men, most of them blurry-eyed and uncoordinated after a long evening of drinking, awkwardly swung their fists at opponents they could barely see. Or maybe it was that everyone was trying to restrain everyone else, giving the impression that fists were flying, or were about to fly — Yogi Berra later summed up the episode in his own inimitable style, insisting that "nobody did nuthin' to nobody." Somewhere in the confusion was Mickey's teammate, Billy Martin. It was Billy's birthday. Outside the cloakroom, in the dining room of the Copa, guests mingled under electric blue and pink palm trees, sipped cocktails, and listened to music. Opening in 1940, the Copa, on East 60th Street in New York City, had become a regular watering hole for mobsters and celebrities, a place to see and to be seen, where "every night was New Year's Eve." In the early morning hours of May 16, 1957, however, the scene was closer to something out of Gillette's Friday night fights.
Concerned that the man at his feet might be Martin, Mantle leaned down to check. It was not Billy, so Mantle dropped him back to the floor and waited. Months later the man on the floor, a Bronx delicatessen owner, sought damages before a grand jury. Mantle would tell the New York City courtroom that "it looked like Roy Rogers had ridden by, and Trigger had kicked the man in the face." Mickey had not thrown a single punch. In fact, the only thing he had laid a hand on was scotch and soda. He would have been surprised to know that Billy Martin had not thrown any punches either. Nevertheless, the man on the floor was no Yankee. And someone had decked him.
The evening had started innocently enough. Mantle, Whitey Ford, Hank Bauer, Yogi Berra, Johnny Kucks, and Martin, along with the wives of the first five, had arrived at the Copa to celebrate Martin's twenty-ninth birthday. Sammy Davis Jr. was headlining that night, and the Yankees were eager to see him perform. While Davis worked, a raucous group of bowlers, apparently intoxicated, started hurling increasingly nasty racial slurs toward the stage. Mantle recalled that they called the singer "Little Black Sambo and stuff like that." Others insisted that the bowlers had referred to Davis as a "jungle bunny." This behavior incensed the Yankees, who recalled the daily struggles of their teammate, Elston Howard, the first black Yankee. Yet another account suggests that the drunken revelers had approached the Yankee table for autographs, thrown insults at Davis, and then been invited outside by Billy Martin for a "talk." No matter what version of L'Affaire Copa one finds, the end result was a cloakroom full of people eager to confront each other, if not yet trading blows. For his part, Mickey Mantle was so drunk he could barely remember what had happened. Whitey Ford stayed at the table and, as he later lamented, was stuck with the check for the evening's festivities.
The confrontation was broken up quickly, but as the Yankees were attempting a quiet escape out the Copa's back entrance, they were spotted by a reporter for one of New York's major newspapers. Joe Trimble of the Daily News, possibly the reporter in question, rang Yankees manager Casey Stengel, pulling the aged skipper out of bed for his reaction. The next day headlines across the city blazed with some version of "YANKEES IN COPA BRAWL." Hank Bauer, when confronted with reports that he had allegedly hit a drunken Yankees' fan, pointed to his less-than-robust .255 batting average. "Hit him? Why I haven't hit anybody all year."
If the players seemed barely fazed by the party-gone-wrong, the fracas was an embarrassment for the Yankees brass, who felt the players should be concentrating more on clinching the pennant. Their team had a well-earned reputation for excessive nightlife, and although manager Stengel was generally accepting of his player's off-the-diamond behavior, he had to make a stand. "We have twenty-five birthdays on this club, not to mention wedding anniversarys [sic]," explained Stengel. No club, he was suggesting, could survive too many Copa-like celebrations. To further drive the point home, Ford, Bauer, Berra, Mantle, and Martin were each fined $1,000. The struggling Bauer was dropped to eighth in the batting order for the next day's game against the Detroit Tigers, but Mantle remained ensconced in the third spot. "I'm mad at him, too, for being out late," said Stengel, "but I'm not mad enough to take a chance on losing a ball game and possibly the pennant." As Mantle went, so went the Yankees. Besides, the punishment was paternalistic farce. The Yankees would get the money back after playing in (and losing) the World Series that fall. There was, however, one significant result stemming from the Copa escapade.
If Mantle was the Yankees' offensive engine, Billy Martin, the team's plucky second baseman with a reputation for expressing his competitive fire with his fists as often as his sharp tongue, was the team's soul. George Weiss, the Yankees' general manager, tended to believe that the light-hitting Martin was a chronic troublemaker and, more distressingly, a bad influence on Mantle. The Copa incident was a perfect excuse to excise a potential cancer, and Martin knew it. "I'm gone," he told Mantle and Ford the day after the fight, "George Weiss is just looking for an excuse to get rid of me."
Martin had not even thrown a punch at the Copa. Still, the blame would be his since everyone knew that "Billy the Kid" was eager to resort to punches at even the slightest provocation. More than any other Yankees player, Martin got aggressive when deep in the bottle. And he was often in the bottle. In that, he was seldom alone. He was fast friends with the young, impressionable Mantle and the urbane Whitey Ford. Together, these nocturnal "Dead End Kids" ruled New York City's nights, and although Ford would later insist that they didn't actually drink all that much, almost everyone else acknowledged that their diet was often more liquid than solid. Even Ford himself admitted that those who roomed with Mantle "said [Mickey] took five years off their career."
Billy Martin, who would eventually become the sacrificial lamb in George Weiss's hopeless crusade to impress prudence on his troublesome ballplayers, was shipped to the baseball Siberia of Kansas City on June 15. When news of Martin's trade was announced, the "Dead End Kids" hit the bars once again, drowning their tears in an endless round of drinks, one more night on the town like so many nights before. Mantle and Martin remained close friends even after the trade. Recalled Mantle, "We used to tease each other about whose liver was going to go first."
Sundered partnerships aside, it was a great time to be a baseball player. In New York, the "National Pastime" ruled the daytime, and a vibrant nightlife turned the evening to neon. In those days there was no pastime more beloved within the National Pastime than drinking. Before the game or after the game, it was just what you did. Bob Lemon, who pitched with the Cleveland Indians in those heady days, once summed up the attitude of the era. "After my team wins, I drink to celebrate," he said. "After my team loses, I drink to cheer up."
* * *
A troubling fondness for the bottle was not unique to the "Dead End Kids" of the 1950s. In fact, alcohol abuse had been the doom of a long line of ballplayers stretching back to the professional game's nineteenth-century inception. The casualty list is a "Who's Who" of star-caliber players, not to mention a host of lesser-known athletes whose on-field accomplishments were never significant enough to have their tragic off-field escapades elevate them into baseball's curious pantheon of bacchanalian icons.
Concerned that well-to-do fans might be put off by baseball's association with alcohol, the game's owners had once tried desperately to cut booze out of the game. If the players, usually of a different class or ethnic background than their employers, wanted to imbibe, management's appeal to middle-class Victorian moral codes and the temperance crowd did little to deter them. In fact, although progressive reformers bemoaned demon rum, an obtuse argument could be made that alcohol was actually the first, and most revered, of performance-enhancing drugs to take root in the game of baseball. The sport's history is littered with stories of players who claimed that they performed better after a few drinks. Leo Durocher once incurred the wrath of the teetotaler Branch Rickey when he administered brandy to minor league castoff Tom Seats, who suddenly turned into a serviceable pitcher. When Rickey forbade the special tonic, Seats's career quickly petered out. Numerous other players swore by the remarkable effects of a few nips (or more) just before game time. Smiling Mickey Welch, an ace screwballer who won over three hundred games playing in New York in the 1880s, ascribed his pitching success to beer and offered a paean to malt beverages, singing: "pure elixir of malt and hops / beats all the drugs and all the drops."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Team Chemistry by Nathan Michael Corzine. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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