And I agreed. A pitching phenom for the Cards in 2001 as a 20-year-old rookie, Ankiel had one of the most precipitous rise-and-fall careers in baseball history. In that year he went 11-7, and Cards manager Tony LaRussa was so confident in the kid’s talent that he—to his everlasting regret—threw him right into the pressure cooker as St. Louis’s first-game starter in the playoffs.
Ankiel’s meltdown that October day in Atlanta was brutal to watch. It must have been unimaginably painful to endure. He not only couldn’t throw the ball over the plate, he had trouble getting it into the catcher’s glove. Over two and two-thirds agonizing innings, he walked six men and uncorked a record five wild pitches. He would start one more game that October but didn’t survive an inning, walking three and throwing two more wild pitches. The following year he pitched in just 11 games, walking more than one man per inning as his ERA skyrocketed above 7. In 2004 he made an abortive comeback that lasted just five games. At age 25, he appeared washed up.
Ankiel was hardly the first star athlete to lose the ability to perform what had once been a routine task. In baseball it is known as Steve Blass Disease, after a standout Pittsburgh Pirates hurler who won more than 100 games—including two complete-game victories in the 1971 World Series—yet two seasons later couldn’t throw a strike. By the time that became Ankiel’s problem, the sports media explosion assured that he would become one of the most psychoanalyzed players in modern sports.
While writers were still speculating over whether it was a case of an overly sensitive kid, an overly driven father, an unfamiliar catcher or a misguided manager, Ankiel returned to the minor leagues and began playing the outfield. He had been a good hitting pitcher, but sportswriters saw this shift as nothing more than a sop to the kid from the Cardinals organization for putting him through the wringer and a way to bridge his return to civilian life. But it turned out that Ankiel had game. And, last month, with the sagging world champion Cardinals riddled by injuries, he finally got the call back to the big club. With nine home runs and a .303 average, Ankiel helped propel the Cardinals back into the N.L. Central division chase.
A feel-good story indeed. But last Friday, less than 24 hours after my editor and I shared our delight in this tale of redemption, it became a very different breed of yarn: the scandalous kind that makes fans feel very, very bad. The New York Daily News reported that in 2004 Ankiel had received a year’s worth of human growth hormone from a Florida pharmacy that is at the center of the latest sports drug scandal. Ankiel has been vague in his response to the allegation, but, while not specifically admitting HGH use, has said that whatever drugs he used were on doctor’s orders.
The public tends to view reporters as rather cynical creatures. But over my long career I have found quite the opposite to be true. We tend to play the role of cynics because it is a requirement of the profession, but at heart most of us are romantics. In sports, no matter how many times we insist we won’t get fooled again, we desperately want to believe in old-fashioned notions of sportsmanship and fair play. And so we inevitably get fooled again. While HGH is not illegal with a prescription, nor was it banned by baseball until 2005, the revelation took much of the glow off Ankiel’s comeback tale. So far a handful of pro athletes—with more names sure to come—have been connected with the same pharmacy, which appears to have been a prescription mill for performance-enhancing drugs. If we scorn Barry Bonds for what we believe to be his involvement with steroids and HGH, how can we to turn around and embrace Ankiel—no matter how compelling his tale is, no matter how much hardship he has endured?
My hometown of Boston hosted Bonds at Fenway Park for the first time this summer, and fans there, for the most part, booed and mocked him relentlessly. But last week, when New England Patriots safety Rodney Harrison became ensnared in the same pharmacy scandal as Ankiel and admitted to taking HGH, it proved to be another case of just whose ox is getting gored. Fans here were quick to praise Harrison for fessing up, for saying he had erred and for accepting his four-game NFL suspension. And they seized on the distinction that Harrison made, that he had taken the drug only to help his recovery from injury, rather than to enhance performance.
There are genuine distinctions between Harrison’s case and that of Bonds, who, despite considerable evidence arising from the federal investigation of the BALCO lab, has never stopped insisting that he is and has always been clean. Harrison has also, according to the feds, cooperated fully with their investigation, while prosecutors believe Bonds lied to a federal grand jury. Still, let’s not get carried away by Harrison’s character and integrity in this matter. His confession did not arise out of a kismet moment of moral clarity but because he was nailed. The bottom line is that he cheated and, because of NFL prohibitions on HGH, had no wiggle room. By contrast, baseball, having turned a blind eye for so long, has too often provided its drug cheats with all the space they could possibly want.
Harrison’s use of HGH may be a very good tradeoff, given that the drug assumedly hastened, perhaps even enabled, his recovery from serious injuries. A suspension is unlikely to damage his reputation as a fierce, team-first competitor—no more than it did Shawne Merriman’s last year when the San Diego Chargers’ superstar linebacker tested positive for steroids. Indeed, Merriman might have been awarded the NFL’s Defensive Player of the Year had not the eventual winner, Miami’s Jason Taylor, lobbied so vociferously against Merriman, insisting that it would be inappropriate to honor him. (The NFL subsequently changed its rules so that players suspended for drugs are ineligible for postseason honors the same year.)
There is something so very different about the nature of the two games, football and baseball. We love football and may even see its stars as heroic, but its primal nature, its raw violence, colors our expectations of what players might do to compete. No saints on the field anywhere, except in New Orleans. Baseball is caught up in an entirely different mythology, a strange mix of romantic poetry and geeky stats obsession. Nobody in the NFL is going to suggest not counting some of the tackles Harrison made, because nobody really knows or cares how many he had last season. Harrison will ultimately be measured by his reputation as a player and those two Super Bowl rings. Baseball, by contrast, makes stats the measure of the man, and Bonds’s stature, his place in the game’s pantheon, depends on the respect accorded his numbers.
I received a note from a friend, a longtime New Yorker but not a Yankees fan, who said he hoped Alex Rodriguez finishes the season with 62 home runs, one more than Roger Maris’s 61, which stood as baseball’s magic number for 37 years. Then, he said, he would regard A-Rod as the legitimate record holder, erasing from his memory first Mark McGwire’s 70 and then Bonds’s 73 home runs. “But how do you know A-Rod is clean?” I asked. Now, let me make it absolutely clear: I have no reason to suspect A-Rod of any wrongdoing. But there has been—and apparently continues to be—an epidemic of cheating with drugs in baseball and other sports. More names are expected to be forthcoming soon in this latest scandal, and, most likely, I will have had no particular reason to suspect any of those players, either. I would love to believe in A-Rod, but I hesitate to cast my lot with him or anyone else. Won’t get fooled again!
