Schmidt an Open Book on Greenies, By: Murray Chass
February 28, 2006, New York Times
IF the use of steroids enhanced the power-hitting abilities of players, as the untested but commonly held belief goes, then we have already seen the effect of the elimination of steroids use. Last season, when fewer than 1 percent of major league players tested positive for steroids, home runs declined by 8 percent.
Skip to next paragraThis year, another chemical aid, amphetamines, will be eliminated. For the first time, players will be tested and face sanctions for the use of those little green pills — greenies in the vernacular — that have been a staple in baseball longer than hot dogs and beer.
Amphetamines "have been around the game forever," the Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt writes in his new book, "Clearing the Bases," which HarperCollins will publish next month. "In my day," he says, they "were widely available in major-league clubhouses."
That Major League Baseball chooses to act against amphetamines in 2006 is farcical. You almost have to cover your face when you snicker at the thought.
Better late than never? It depends on how late you're talking about. If you were to put Commissioner Bud Seliq under oath, he would have to admit that he has known about amphetamines for 36 years, ever since he took a baseball team to Milwaukee in 1970.
His predecessors knew about them, too, but they didn't want to do anything about them, either. At a drug trial in Pittsburgh in 1985, Dale Berra and Dave Parker testified that Willie Stargell and Bill Madlock dispensed greenies to their Pirates team mates. John Milner told the jury that Willie Mays had a bottle of red juice, or liquid amphetamines, in his locker when they played for the Mets.
Peter Ueberroth, then the commissioner, opted not to believe their testimony. But the pills were readily available in all clubhouses, often dispensed by team trainers and other medical personnel.
"They were obtainable with a prescription," Schmidt writes, "but be under no illusion that the name on the bottle always coincided with the name of the player taking them before game time."
The pills energized players, helped get them through a tough series of games, a 162-game schedule played in 182 days. The only thing a player had to do was make sure he didn't take a pill prematurely. Players like to tell of teammates who took pills before games, then had the games rained out and spent the rest of the night climbing walls.
Schmidt doesn't acknowledge in the book that he used greenies, but in a telephone interview Sunday, he said, "A couple times in my career I bit on it."
He added: "There were a few times in my career when I felt I needed help to get in there. I'm a victim; I admit to it. I'm not incriminating myself or players I played with to say we were on amphetamines our entire careers. I just wanted to see what they would do. It was a lack of willpower. You had an impressionable young kid, and someone says, 'Man you want to feel good?' If I had to do it over, I probably wouldn't do it. You can't put a 56-year-old head on a 28-year-old kid."
But if steroids testing drove power production down, how will testing for greenies affect players and, by extension, the game?
Will it sap speed out of players' swings? In some games, will they have to stop at second base on a double instead of bursting around the base and trying for third? Will they come up short on a diving attempt for a line drive in the gap? Will a whole bunch of players play lethargically?
In the book — in which Schmidt also discusses Barry Bonds, the legacies of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and Pete Rose — Schmidt writes that the elimination of amphetamines could have "possibly far greater implications for the game than the crackdown against steroids."
He explains in the book that "amphetamine use in baseball is both far more common and has been going on a lot longer than steroid abuse."
In the interview, Schmidt, a former third baseman for the Phillies who hit 548 home runs, said he didn't have firsthand knowledge of the extent of amphetamine use today.
"I don't have any sense of what's going to happen," he said. "Will there be more days off? Will there be more lethargic games? But my guess would be that there will be nothing we'll be able to visibly see. We're not going to see a big drop in performance. I don't think we'll see any marked difference in the game."
What if baseball had acted to rid the game of amphetamines in his playing days?
"I think you would have learned to face that game," Schmidt said, "where you probably didn't have the energy to go on the field in St. Louis when it was 115 degrees and the game went into extra innings the night before and you had played every day for a couple weeks. You might have had a couple cups of coffee. You'd adapt."
