Maybe they were disappointed with the decision; maybe they were just asleep at the copy desk. But the news media last week virtually ignored a significant news development about baseball and steroids, a highly popular topic in recent years.
The news media ignored the story so thoroughly that it took a news release from the Major League Baseball Players Association, a.k.a., the players’ union, four days later to wake up editors and induce at least some of them to put the story in the pages of their Wednesday editions.
It took yet two more days for the story to appear in the pages of one of the two newspapers that have most aggressively covered baseball and steroids in recent years.
I thought that paper’s steroids sleuth might not have had time to write the story because he was off chasing more names from the illegal list of players who tested positive in 2003, but his editor offered a different reason.
The story that just about everyone ignored was the decision by the Justice Department not to go to the United States Supreme Court with the ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that federal agents acted illegally when they seized test results and identifying data from two labs in 2004.
Under terms of the collective bargaining agreement between Major League Baseball and the players’ union, the tests in 2003 were to be conducted anonymously to determine if disciplinary testing should proceed beginning in 2004.
Federal agents, seeking results of 10 players who had testified before the Balco grand jury, seized results of all players’ tests and compiled a list of about 100 who had tested positive. The union sued to get the tests back, and ultimately the circuit court of appeals upheld lower court rulings that the government violated the Fourth Amendment with an illegal search and seizure.
That’s the background. The government had until last Monday midnight to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. The previous Friday evening the Justice Department announced that it would not appeal. It was a wise decision, but the timing was awful.
From the Justice Department’s perspective, however, the timing was good. No better time than late Friday evening to announce something you want as few people as possible to see.
A Justice Department spokesperson, Tracy Schmaler, did not return a telephone call seeking comment on the timing of the announcement.
First word of the decision came on the Associated Press wire at 9:54 p.m. Eastern time. The complete story moved at 10:38 p.m. The time was late for Saturday newspapers to do much with it, but there was time to get the story into papers. Nevertheless it made not even a handful of papers.
An exhaustive search of Nexis, the comprehensive repository of newspapers, found only four newspapers that used even a single paragraph of the story. Nothing appeared in the two New York newspapers that have pursued steroids stories most aggressively, the Times and the Daily News.
“What a disgrace,” Gene Orza, the No. 2 union official, said in an e-mail, commenting on the lack of coverage. “They beat the crap out of us because it seems so easy to do so (‘they should’ve burned the records’) and then when we’re proven absolutely right UNDER THE CONSTITUTION, they are nowhere to be found. Just disgraceful.”
The Daily News made a quick comeback, running a comprehensive story in its Sunday edition. The Times finally ran a story in its Friday edition.
Michael S. Schmidt, the Times’ steroids specialist best known for inducing lawyers to violate a court seal and name protected names, did not respond to e-mail requests for comment, but Jay Schreiber, the Times’ baseball editor, did.
Schmidt’s efforts incidentally in outing three players looks even worse now that the list of names can never be revealed. If there had been any good reason for the publication of those names or any names I might feel differently, but it served no purpose other than to serve some readers’ prurient interest and perhaps the reporter’s ego.
“When the Justice Department made its decision to drop the appeal, Mike Schmidt was directly involved in the coverage of the Cliff Lee negotiations,” Schreiber wrote in an e-mail. “That was his priority – and a major one – right through the first part of this week. When he was finally free of the Lee story he turned his attention to writing about The List.”
He added in a second e-mail: “It’s probably worth noting that when the appeals court in California reversed lower courts and ruled on Aug. 26, 2009 in the union’s favor, we ran a story on our dress page. After an appeals court once again reaffirmed that decision in September, we ran a story in the paper.”
But those stories do not justify waiting nearly a week to report the Justice Department decision. A reporter’s working on the Cliff Lee story doesn’t justify it. A reporter should be capable of working two stories simultaneously. And if he isn’t, a newspaper should assign the second story to a second reporter.
The Times didn’t even run a story when the union issued a statement the Tuesday after Justice’s announcement. I initially thought the union issued the statement to call attention to the decision, but Michael Weiner, executive director of the union, explained that the timing was important.
He said the A.P. had previously asked for comment on the end of the case, but he said, “We weren’t going to issue statement until the deadline had passed.”
In the statement, Weiner called the decision “a significant victory” and said, “We are pleased that the government has decided not to pursue this case any further and to let this long legal battle end.”
The union, on the other hand, was not pleased with aspects of the story the Times finally published. For one thing, Weiner noted its incomplete use of something he said in the statement. He said, “This is a significant victory for our members and for our collectively bargained Joint Drug Program.”
The Times ended the quote after “members.” The Times has a rule against abridging quotes in that manner.
ROTATIONS, WE’VE GOT ROTATIONS
With Cliff Lee joining Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels, the Phillies are poised to have one of the great pitching rotations of all time. But great rotations of the past haven’t always lived up to their notices.
For example, after Bob Feller died last week at the age of 92 and Lee signed with the Phillies, a friend asked which rotation was better – Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi, Eddie Lopat and Whitey Ford of the Yankees or Feller, Bob Lemon, Mike Garcia and Early Wynn of the Indians.
Yankees’ fans and Indians’ fans could answer that question quickly and with pronounced partiality, but what we find when we check the records is not what we think we remember.
For example, the Yankees’ quartet pitched together for only one full season, 1953, in which they combined for 60 wins. The next season was the last that any of the others pitched with Ford.
The Yankees sold Raschi to the Cardinals for $85,000 before the 1954 season, Reynolds retired after the ’54 season and the Yankees traded Lopat to the Orioles in July ’55. Ford pitched for the Yankees into May ’67.
In Cleveland, Feller had four seasons in which he won 24 games or more and a fifth season in which he won 20 by the time the others joined him in 20-win seasons. Unlike these days, when new-age experts dismiss 20 as an important number, 20 was a measure of success in those times.
Lemon won 20 seven times in a nine-season stretch, Wynn won 20 four times in that time frame and Garcia won 20 twice in the same period, giving the Indians three 20-game winners each of those two seasons.
Feller, Lemon and Wynn are in the Hall of Fame. Of the Yankees’ quartet, only Ford made it into the Hall.
In more recent decades, the Braves had as good a trio of pitchers as there has ever been, but they lacked a consistent fourth.
In only three seasons, 1993, ‘97 and ’98, did Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz have an equivalent fourth starter. In ’93, Maddux’s first year with Glavine and Smoltz, Steve Avery won 18 games. In ’97, Denny Neagle led the others with 20 wins, and in ’98 Neagle won 16 and Kevin Millwood 17.
Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz have retired too recently to be eligible for the Hall of Fame, but all are virtually certain to be elected on the first ballot.
One other quartet merits mention, but the pitchers weren’t together long. In 1971 Dave McNally, Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar and Pat Dobson became only the second rotation to have four 20-game winners. But they didn’t stay together long, pitching in the same rotation only one more season.
THOSE ANONYMOUS PHILLIES
If for no other reason, John McMullen will live in Yankees’ lore for his 1979 remark that there was nothing so limited as a limited partner in George Steinbrenner’s Yankees.
McMullen, my all-time favorite owner, knew whereof he spoke because until he bought the Houston Astros he was a limited partner in the Yankees. But as such, he and his fellow limited partners were at least identified in the Yankees’ media guide. The guide listed the changing names of Steinbrenner’s limited partners from day one, and it has kept track of the changes over 37 years.
In Philadelphia, on the other hand, the limited partners are also anonymous partners. In fact, they are synonymous with anonymous. They do not speak, and they do not have names, that is, their names do not appear in the media guide.
When I inquired about the owners, Bonnie Clark, the team’s vice president of communications, directed me to page 5 of the media guide, where a note at the bottom of the page says under the heading “ownership,” “The Phillies is a limited partnership formed in 1981. None of the longtime partners owns as much as 50% of the partnership. David Montgomery is the general partner with complete management authority.”
So last week, when general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. decided he wanted to sign Cliff Lee, he went to Montgomery, who said, sure, go ahead and spend $120 million.”
I don’t think so. I think Amaro went to Montgomery, who then went to the partners because they are the ones with the money. Montgomery owns a tiny share of the team, but as much authority as he has, he doesn’t commit $120 million without letting the money men know what he has in mind and getting a nod from them that they are good for the money. Montgomery is not in position to pull $120 million out of his pocket and spend it on a free agent.
Whoever approved the expenditure, we know it wasn’t Alexander Buck, one of three elderly brothers were part of the group that bought the team in 1981. We know that Whip, as he was known, had nothing to do with the signing because he died in October.
How old was Buck when he died, I asked Clark; how old are his brothers and the other owners? “That information I wouldn’t disclose,” she said. Has Buck’s share in the Phillies been assumed by his brothers? “I couldn’t say,” the spokesman said.
Alex Buck, who died at the age of 80, was the youngest of the three brothers. Bill Buck and Jim Buck remain as partners. Claire Betz is approaching 90. John Middleton is the baby among the partners, about 55.
Middleton inherited his share from his father, who was among the original group that bought the team in 1981. The Middleton family has been in the cigar business. The family company, John Middleton Inc., sold for $2.9 billion, last year.
Middleton and the Bucks are said to be the primary partners. The Bucks founded TDH Capital, the Delaware Valley’s first venture-capital firm. Mrs. Betz became a partner when her husband, John, head of Betz Laboratories, a water-purifying company, died.
“They’re not much for being public,” said Larry Shenk, a long-time team official. “They’re silent partners.”