J. Scott Orr
Newhouse News Service
March 25, 2005
Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling as Baltimore Oriole star Rafael Palmeiro denies using steroids. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON -- Mickey Mantle did it. So did Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Steve Young, Boomer Esiason, Tim Witherspoon and Gerry Cooney.
When the House Government Reform Committee conducts a hearing on steroid use in baseball Thursday, seven current or former major league stars are slated to join the list of professional athletes who have testified before Congress.
Congress' interest in big-time sports is hardly new. "Members tend to be involved in sports themselves, and they have historically had a keen interest in professional sports, particularly baseball," said Donald Ritchie, associate historian of the Senate.
Still, historians have a hard time coming up with precedents for this hearing. Subpoenas have been issued to force testimony from the Yankees' Jason Giambi, the Orioles' Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro, Curt Schilling of the Red Sox, Frank Thomas of the White Sox and retired stars Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. Canseco is the author of a current best-selling book full of steroid allegations.
"Congress has always had an interest in sports, but I can't think of any examples that would compare to this," said Christopher J. Deering, a professor of political science at George Washington University and author of the book "Committees in Congress."
"Congress has stepped in on all kinds of investigations and utilized subpoena power to compel testimony ... of one sort or another. It may not have involved sports figures before, but subpoenaing people on high-profile, headline-grabbing issues is hardly new," Deering said.
Baseball isn't slated to return to the nation's capital until early next month, but the national pastime already is consuming Washington with the intensity of an August pennant race.
Congress will hear Thursday from an all-star lineup of Major League Baseball players and former players on the topic of steroid abuse, a subject that has cast suspicion on some of the game's biggest heroes, threatened the legitimacy of cherished baseball records and soiled the annual bloom of preseason.
It will hear, among other things, steroid-swollen slugger Jose Canseco deliver an indictment of Major League Baseball as a greedy organization that encouraged steroid use and "holds itself above the law."
So intense is the baseball chatter in Washington these days that even President Bush, a former partner in the Texas Rangers franchise, was called upon to comment.
At a White House news conference, the president urged Major League Baseball to make good on its promise to police steroid use and to "deal with those who get caught cheating."
The House Government Affairs Committee hearing convenes at 10 a.m. on Capitol Hill, a short distance from RFK Stadium where the Washington Nationals are set to resume D.C.'s baseball tradition next month after an absence of more than three decades.
Leading off Thursday's hearing: Canseco, the slugger-turned-author who acknowledged in his book "Juiced" that steroids helped him hit 462 career home runs and that his power numbers were not the only ones enhanced by drugs.
Committee staffers initially had Canseco, a former Oakland A and Texas Ranger, slated to appear on a panel with some of the athletes he accused of juicing, but were expected to change that arrangement in deference to other witnesses who feared being photographed with baseball's biggest acknowledged steroid user and tattletale.
Slated to appear are two stars that Canseco has accused: former St. Louis Cardinal first baseman Mark McGwire, who hit 583 career home runs including a single-season record 70 in 1998; and the Baltimore Orioles' Rafael
Palmeiro, who has 551 career homers.
The panel also has summoned the Orioles' Sammy Sosa, who has 574 home runs.
The panel also has called Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling and Chicago White Sox first baseman Frank Thomas, two players who have been outspoken in their criticism of steroids and players who use them.
Jason Giambi, also the target of a Canseco accusation, dodged the hot seat when the committee excused him because he is a witness in a California criminal case involving steroids.
Various baseball officials -- including Commissioner Bud Selig and players union leader Don Fehr -- also are on the roster for Thursday.
While most of the players initially balked at testifying, members of the committee, including its chairman, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., and ranking member Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., are raring to go.
"This will be the hearing of the year," said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. Sabato said the publicity could do for lawmakers' power numbers what steroids did for Canseco's.
"Any time a celebrity appears before a congressional committee, that committee and all its members are guaranteed precious TV time. Visibility equals power in Washington," he said.
While providing congressmen potential publicity, the hearing offers potential ruin for the ballplayers, whose public reputations, careers and places in baseball history could be jeopardized.
Mike Paul, a New York public relations executive who specializes in crisis management for pro athletes, said the worst thing any of the players can do is lie. Refusing to answer by taking the Fifth Amendment, he said, is the second worst strategy.
Paul said he would advise any of the players who might have used steroids to tell the committee the truth, admit to the mistake, promise it won't happen again and offer to head up a committee to fight steroid abuse.
"This is an opportunity for them to come clean, to present themselves as someone who is truly being honest and is ready to be held accountable but deserves a second chance," he said.
Shawn Wright, who has counseled sports figures as a partner in the New York law firm Blank Rome, said she would advise any of the players who have used steroids to either 'fess up or decline to answer.
"It depends on whether or not my client has engaged in the use of steroids. ... If they never used steroids, then there is no problem," she said. If they have used them, perhaps recently, "I'm not going to allow a client to answer that question."
Congress has looked into several major sports, and threatened repeatedly to regulate professional boxing, bringing former heavyweights Witherspoon and Cooney to Capitol Hill in 1994 and 1996.
But it has demonstrated a particular affinity for baseball, which has enjoyed a congressionally sanctioned exemption from federal antitrust laws since 1922.
Congress has examined, for example, plans to start a third major league, the financial health of the sport, the sale or movement of franchises among cities, betting, and labor disputes.
