Jackie, Rickey, & the Death of the Black Baseball Player ft. Howard Bryant

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to All the Smoke Baseball Today. We have a very special guest, someone that is actually a friend of mine were and we're doing some cool work together behind the scenes that you guys know about soon. But welcome to the show. Howard Bryant, what's up man? How are you appreciate your time? Best selling author? You've done a lot of different things, documentaries, but let's start with baseball used to be behind the scenes and that writing. Baseball season is in full swing. Jackie Robinson day is right around the corner. When I'd say, Jackie Robinson, what's the first thing that comes to mind for you?

00:00:39
Speaker 2: No, the first thing that comes to mind is, I mean, obviously legend, But really I think the thing that gets me most about Jackie is just the timelessness of it. That he's he's so present and he played well. Let me really, two things hit me. One is that he retired in nineteen fifty six after the fifty six seasons crazy. But the other is that Rachel, his widow, is still alive. She'll be one hundred and four in July, and just that spirit of Robinson is still out there. All the players are wearing forty two on April fifteenth, which was a day Jackie integrated the big leagues Sanpril fifteenth, nineteen forty seven. And it's just I think the thing that hits me is we always talk about baseball and where, you know, where African American players are, where everybody's at in the sport right now, Just the fact that you can still he's not old dusty history, He's still present. Yes, a lot of stuff you can tie to him to this day.

00:01:35
Speaker 1: Speaking of the black player, there's been a heavy decline in the game, and we've asked some greats like Bonds and Sheffield, the Mookie Bets and more about why they feel that is, from your point of view, why is there such a lack of black baseball talent in the major leagues.

00:01:51
Speaker 2: Well, it's by design, I think that most importantly we spend I think the thing that has bothered me the most whenever we have these conversations, the default has been, well black players, you know, black kids just don't want to play. They'd rather play basketball, they'd rather play football. And it's nonsense. It's money. It's it's money. It's it's not just priced out. It's historically baseball.

00:02:16
Speaker 1: The black player became.

00:02:20
Speaker 2: Ten twenty five percent in the game because starting with the Negro League, started with starting with Jackie, black players were the cheapest commodity you could get. You know, Jackie signed for five thousand dollars. Really May signed for five thousand dollars, Hank Aaron signed for six thousand dollars, and so for a time, those players were the cheapest commodity you could get great players at a low price. Baseball as a sport, baseball is a white suburban game reinforced by foreign labor. That's the sport. It's not an American game per se. It's a white, suburban American game. But thirty five percent of the game is Latino. And so when you look for players, where do you find them? Where does baseball look for players? They've got facilities in the Dominican all the teams have academies down there, right, And then the American players, where do they get those players?

00:03:13
Speaker 1: College?

00:03:14
Speaker 2: College is one percent black, So the black players in college are scholarship players. Baseball's a non revenue sport, so it's by design that if you're getting your players from college, they're going to be white. And if you're getting the rest of your talent from the Dominican or from Venezuela or from Mexico at Cuba, they're going to be Latino. So you're not developing black players the way you used to.

00:03:41
Speaker 1: Pipeline or no pipeline.

00:03:43
Speaker 2: And you know, I remember talking to Dusty and Dusty Baker about this, and when you really start looking at how the numbers shifted, they replaced essentially black players with the Latino players. It's all money. If you put a ball in front of a kid, they're going to play with it, right. I mean, that's always been my thing. If you look at the numbers, Latino players are not part of the draft. So a black American kid who's a first round pick, you got to pay him first round American dollars. You can buy one hundred Dominican kids two hundred for the price of one American. That's the difference, you know. And so whenever I hear, oh, well, we just don't want to play the game, everybody knows that the relationship between Black Americans and baseball is the deepest of all the sports, and it goes back the longest.

00:04:38
Speaker 1: For our viewers and our fans, kind of tell them your background in particularly the baseball.

00:04:45
Speaker 2: Baseball, Well, I started. I started my career at the Oakland Tribune back in nineteen ninety one. And it's funny because when I got there, I was covering perhaps like everybody else. And so back then, Jake Kidd was at Saint Joe and he was a baseball player, and he was one of the guys that people we knew he was going. Everyone thought he could play in the NBA when he was coming out of high school, but there was also this piece of him that maybe he was going to play baseball too, because he was a great player. My first year on the beat was nineteen ninety eight with the Oakland A's. I was working at the San Jose Mercury News, and then I started covering the Yankees and then the Red Sox, and I've been doing baseball for a long time. Wrote my first book in two thousand and two about the history of integration in the Red Sox shut Out. Wrote another book about steroids in baseball. Two biographies, one on Hank Aaron called the Last Hero two thousand and six, and then another in twenty twenty two on Ricky Henderson.

00:05:39
Speaker 1: I got a quick story about Ricky, and it's funny because we just sat down to see him punk and he was telling me how this newer generation of wrestlers are more outspoken and kind of appreciative of greats and they come up to him and talk and they take pictures and all this kind of thing. And Ricky Henderson was my favorite baseball player and I got a chance to meet him finally at Reggie Jackson had a softball game at the coliseum, which was the last baseball It was a softball game at the Coliseum and Ricky Henderson was there, and I was to the mind, I just want to come from the old school, so we don't really ask for pictures and that kind of thing. But I was just like as a kid, twenty four was everything lead off better for the aid all.

00:06:26
Speaker 2: I just leaving.

00:06:29
Speaker 1: Ricky died like a month after that, and it broke my heart that I didn't sit. But when I tell you, like there was so many big Canseco was there, LaRussa was there. There's so many guys there. But in the locker room, like Ricky was in his corner just telling stories and he had everyone can up came around them just listening, and I was kind of it was Ricky's locker, and then it was the bathroom to where the Sharweran shit were, and then I was right there, so I wasn't in the campfire standing up, but I was still kind of ear hustling over here, and he was just telling some of the dopest stories and people were just such an awe and I was just like, damn, I was really sitting there like what am I going to go ask him? What am I going to go ask him? Stop being a bitch golass for Yeah, And I just didn't do it. And then he passes one month later. You wrote a book on him. Tell me about just Ricky. I hear a bunch of a maiden stories with herold Renos tells a story about how he won the stolen base the base crown and Ricky hit him up and whatever his number was at the times, like Ricky gets that before all Star breaking, exact true story. Yeah.

00:07:32
Speaker 2: The thing about Ricky, one of the reasons why I wanted to do Ricky was because one there you're dealing with just larger than life character, right, I mean, everybody wants to be Ricky, and I think about it. I thought about the post free agency athlete. That was really where Ricky started to hit me where it was like everybody in your in your profession spent a lot of years apologizing for your money, like when the money got really big, especially baseball players because there was so much labor strife. Ricky was really the first athlete in the modern era, the TV era. It's not newspaper anymore. Now it's TV, and now that money is real free agency money. I remember talking to Dusty Baker about it when Dusty and Hank Aaron were teammates in seventy four, when Henry broke the record he was the highest paid player in the game at two forty two hundred and forty thousand in April of seventy four. When Dusty hits free agency in seventy eight, couple of years later, Dusty's making five ninety five. Ricky's the first guy who's not afraid to say pay me. I'm not gonna apologize, I'm I'm You don't compare me to the electrician, compare me to the guys and head of me making my money. And so I really thought he was like this this great character who was who was indicative of this new era of the thing that love hate relationship that the fans have with the players. They love you for what you give them, but they also hate you for all the money that you make and your talent. And also the stories about Ricky were they true? Were they not true? All the third person stuff and everything else. And also he was to me, he was one of those guys. When he was playing, people couldn't stand him, and then that next generation they started to love him, and then the next generation they loved him even more. And so it was really this sort of this combination of Satchel Page and Yogi Bearra are the first person third person stories? Are they really true? And then how when he was playing there were people who didn't think he was a Hall of Famer when he was playing Wow, because they couldn't stand his brashness, They couldn't stand his blackness, they couldn't stand the fact that Ricky was so unafraid to be proud of his ability. And also you talk about load management the way we talk about it today, the way they used to call Ricky a malingerer, and Ricky was jaking it. Ricky didn't want to play. Ricky knew his body, Ricky knew his body and Ricky would tell you, you know, he and Tony LaRussa used to go. Ricky would say, you know, you know, I can't know if I can go today, And Ricky was like, well, I mean, Tony would say, yeah, but seventy five percent of you is better than one hundred percent of the other guys I got. And Tony had to admit that he was wrong about Ricky. And Tony was the one who said it nineteen eighty nine, Ricky's not a great player. And the reason why he said Ricky wasn't a great player was because great players play every single day. But when you go back and look at the record, nobody's breaking his record still, you know, I mean, it's just it's I just thought. I just thought it was fascinating how time shifts stuff. And now you add the analytics into it, he's better now than you thought he was when he was.

00:10:41
Speaker 1: Playing interesting and he also brought that flare. I mean, I mean he had the first neon gloves and the style of Ricky style to steal the bases, how pop his caller hitting the home run coming out of the box, doing a lot of different shit that that wasn't necessarily Now it's no. I mean, well, we saw a lot of the WBC, which I loved, just the energy of the game, but like popping your collar out the home run box back when he was doing it, wasn't.

00:11:05
Speaker 2: That's why they hated him because once again, baseball is all so steeped in tradition. Baseball doesn't know how to adapt. Like one of the biggest differences, especially in basketball, and we were talking about this before basketball adjusts to the people who play it. You watch basketball, you'll play music during basketball, like during the game some general you can hear music, right, and so basketball adapts. You know, in the twenties and the thirties, it was a Jewish game, Jewish urban game in the fifties, and becomes a more Midwestern white game pretty much since the nineteen early seventies and absolutely after the merger seventy six. It's a black urban game. It's a black game, right, It's a black game culturally, it's a black game demographically, and basketball adapts to that.

00:11:52
Speaker 3: Right.

00:11:53
Speaker 2: Baseball still plays baseball style is still Jim Crow segregation nineteen hundreds game. They still play by those same rules, right. They don't play like that in Japan. They have fun in the Dominican as we saw it during the World Baseball Classic, they have but American baseball, you hit a home run, I hit you in the back, right. I mean, they still have all those old school rules. You hit a home run, I'm not supposed to celebrate. I'm not supposed to be happy. I'm not supposed to you know, look at all the grief they gave Ken Griffy Junior for having a hat on backwards hitting during bating practice, and so Ricky style is something that they would look at and go. But then the next generation loved him. And that is the thing that baseball has all that difficulty adapting to the new game, adapting to TV. You're supposed to have style. One quick thing about Ricky. Everyone knows that Ricky snap catch, right, Ricky ketch golf snap on it. The first Ricky snap catch was the final out of a no hitter?

00:12:53
Speaker 1: Was it really nineteen eighty three?

00:12:56
Speaker 2: And he would talk about how it was an optical illusion, like, Ricky, what have you dropped that ball? He was like, that would have been my ass. But just shows you how much confidence he had that he was going to introduce the legendary snap catch and that Mike Warren nineteen eighty three, no hitter, Carlton Fisk, pop flight. Look it up, it's on YouTube.

00:13:12
Speaker 1: I remember a friend of mine. I'm not going to embarrass him tried to snap catch in high school and the shit didn't work and it broke his nose his baseball practice. Yeah, you know who you are. It's funny new book. King of Ponds Jackie Robinson and Paul Roverson. We got it right here. Explain to the audience what this book is about.

00:13:35
Speaker 2: The book is all about two gigantic black figures that one of them people don't don't even really remember. Paul Robson is one of the greatest Americans country's ever produced. He was one of the greatest football college football players of all time.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: He was a lawyer. He was a.

00:13:52
Speaker 2: Cock concert singer. He's an opera singer. He was an actor. He played in this little startup called the National Football League. And because of his political views, because he was left wing, because he was a socialist, because he was not willing to disavow his friends in the Communist Party, this country went after him, went after his career, went after his money, took his passport away, wouldn't let him travel and in nineteen forty nine, the Brooklyn Dodgers of Brooklyn, Yeah, Brooklyn Dodgers' president branch Ricky had essentially encouraged or coerced Jackie Robinson to testify against him in front of the House an American Activities Committee, and at the time, Jackie didn't want to do it, but there was a real conversation about whether African Americans were loyal to this country. And here's Jackie felt he had a responsibility. Reminds me a lot of what's happening today. There were a lot of people who were saying that black people need to sit this one out. We didn't elect Donald Trump, we didn't elect him once or twice, and so we need to sit this one out. Why this isn't our fight, this is your fight. And there were a lot a lot of people at that time in nineteen forty nine who said, to Jackie, why would you testify against another black man as great as Robeson, Why would you testify in service of this committee that doesn't want you to have egal rights and wouldn't shake your hand. And Jackie's response was was because this country's mine too, and it's important to me that if people are questioning my loyalty, you're questioning our loyalty, that maybe the very people who support civil rights are going to abandon us, and he felt a responsibility. So in a lot of ways, he was caught in between these two poles. And that's really what the book is about. It's about this idea of tunness about you know, is it possible to be patriotic and also fight segregation at the same time, And how these two guys both ended up fairly disillusioned at the end of their lives.

00:15:48
Speaker 1: Would they get a chance to meet talk?

00:15:51
Speaker 2: And that's what's wild. You got these two guys at that fame level, both of them in Harlem as well, never met really, they had never met each other. But these political forces put them in the same, uh, put them in the same and pitted themselves against each other. And that was one of the things that also reminds me as we know today, you know, Jackie being in that position that he didn't really want to be in. But as i'm you know, as I've said you know before, the from a more contemporary standpoint today, you know, the black person who was willing to publicly criticize other black people they'll have a job for life, and so in a lot of ways, Jackie was used to testify against against Robesen.

00:16:31
Speaker 1: What do you think around the momentum with the with the baseball the last few years. I think the WBC was a big success. Obviously, the pitch clock, the attendance ratings are up. I feel like there's a new energy around baseball. And I'm not just saying that because we're covering it now, but I got I really feel that there's kind of a different outtake the bread, almost their breath, the fresh air.

00:16:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm really glad that y'all are doing baseball because I think you can you can help and and and bring a different energy to baseball, especially as a former NBA player, because the one thing that the NBA has is partnership. Baseball hates each other and they've been hating each other for a really long time, and baseball is Baseball has a moment going right now.

00:17:12
Speaker 1: Baseball.

00:17:13
Speaker 2: Baseball is a thing. I mean, that World Series is one of the greatest World seraias I've ever seen. Yes, right, you've got a world superstar with Otani, You've got you know, Toronto is back. You know you've got an international team that's back in the World Series for the first time in thirty plus years. And what are you going to do right now? You're gonna shut the game down next year over labor. Now you've got a there's a real possibility, more than fifty to fifty that baseball is going to, you know, cancel the entire season unless they get a salary cap, unless they get some other relief that they want, which would be a colossal, colossal mistake. And I got to tell you I was wrong about the WBC. I didn't like it. I didn't like it. I thought it was sort of gimmicky when they first started it, you know, twenty years ago. And part of the reason was is that it's really really difficult to ask athletes to go max effort game mode batterally in the season. Yeah, boy, it was fun this year, and it was fun and it was and the Americans were the ones who didn't quite know how to have fun with it. And so baseball it has a moment and you really really hope and don't blow this moment. You got a shot right now to be something that you haven't been in a really long time. You know, let labor mess it up.

00:18:22
Speaker 1: And their deal is up at after twenty seven. Yeah, hopefully they did that.

00:18:29
Speaker 2: No, it's twenty sex after this season, after this season, yeah yeah, And so we're going to find out about negotiation and about whether or not they understand the moment. And what's really fascinating about all of this is is that baseball has spent so much time fighting and I get it from the owner's standpoint. In some ways, the owners are upset that because baseball doesn't have a salary cap the other sports, their valuations are going up. I mean, the Lakers went for ten billion. Baseball franchises are not growing at the same clip. They're not growing at the same rate. And the reason why they're not is because they don't have the same cost controls that the other sports have. You know, if you buy a team, you know what the costs are going to be. Not with baseball, you're going to give one Soto seven hundred and sixty five million. But on the other hand, parody does not come from salary caps. I mean, the fans, the players are the game, and it's really interesting. It's going to be interesting to see what they do. It's going to be interesting to see how it's covered because everyone is talking about the players. You have to get in line. Basketball has a salary cap, Football has a salary cap. Hockey has a salary cap. But people also don't look at it the other way, which is give these players some credit for standing together in labor solidarity, that they understand that they do make the game and that the superstars aren't going to fold the way the NFL did back in eighty seven. That these guys have an idea of their worth. You don't go to the games to watch the owners. And right now baseball is in a moment, and let's hope they don't blow it.

00:20:02
Speaker 1: The Yankees did it, the Dodgers are doing it when they just open up these blank checkbooks and go out there and get the Is this bad, I mean, obviously this is the reason why they're going to go into negotiations. Is this bad for baseball?

00:20:14
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, here's how I look at it. And basketball is in a way different position than baseball because basketball is the best player wins sport. You've got to get one of them. You got to get one of the great players in order to you know, you can go from twenty nine wins to sixty one wins. If David Robinson's on your team, right, that can happen. But the thing that hits me is how hard are you trying to win? If you're the Pittsburgh Pirates, are you actually trying to win? Are you telling me that you're doing the very best you can do. Part of the narrative that bothers me is I'm not saying that the finances are out of control. I mean, if you're the Minnesota Twins and you're not going to be able to get certain guys. And it is true that the Dodgers are off the charts in terms of payroll. However, how much money do you actually need to win? You don't need the Dodgers payroll to win games. The Brewers last year, they beat the Dodgers during the regular season, lost to them during the playoffs. The Dodgers were back to back nights away from losing, They were one play away from losing. You don't have to match them salary for salary dollar for dollar, And I feel like, yeah, do you need some sort of cost control? You probably do at some level, But do you actually need a salary cap for baseball to be good?

00:21:27
Speaker 1: No?

00:21:27
Speaker 2: And the reason why I say that is because go back and look at all the teams who have won over the past twenty years. More baseball teams if you go back to the last to the Yankee dynasty back in two thousand, the last time they had won back to back championships. More teams in baseball have won the World Series than any other sport. So what does that actually really tell you. I think what's really happening is is that people there's an anti labor feeling in this country. There's an anti player movement in this country. It's always been there, and they just want baseball players in line, and the players won't do it good.

00:22:02
Speaker 1: The Athletic wrote a story about baseball has overtaken basketball as the second most popular sport in America.

00:22:10
Speaker 3: Thoughts based on what I don't know, based on like what's the what's what's what's the measure? Yeah, so they we all know that people love to argue and complain about basketball. We know that no matter what if the sport is fun, people say, oh, well the ratings are down right, they always find a way to complain about basketball, just as well as baseball. People always find a way to complain about baseball.

00:22:32
Speaker 1: So I don't hard to tell.

00:22:34
Speaker 2: Hard to tell.

00:22:35
Speaker 1: I think especially too, because you've got to take in consideration how big basketball is on social media. That's how a lot of people consume instead of like, my kids love basketball, but they'll rarely watch a game, but they'll catch the highlights on social media.

00:22:50
Speaker 2: So you were born in nineteen eighty, Yeah, right, So I got you by a few years. So when I was a kid, Reggie Jackson was our guy. Even though I'm in Bostonian that baseball had national stars. You know, you wherever you went, somebody knew when they saw Pete Rose or when they saw Reggie. You know, you knew who those guys were. The last time baseball really had a national guy. But no matter where you were, if you were in Iowa, La, Miami, everybody knew. Probably Ken Griffy Junr. Probably King Griffy Junior, right right around ninety three ninety four when he was really really cranking. Baseball made a conscious decision to be a regional sport. And that's a that's a decision that that that they made. And you're really going to tell me that you don't believe that a baseball player can capture the country the way they used to. The argument in baseball is that is that, no what we're a regional sport. So our guys have very very high Q ratings in our individual cities, but we don't have a Lebron, we don't have a Kobe, we don't have a Tom Brady. But I don't really think that's the case. I think you've got you've got, you've got shoey Otani really going to tell me that you cannot have him be a national super.

00:24:03
Speaker 1: So you feel that it's the effort behind him or behind these players pushing it because I remember in my teenage years, I mean, there was a ton of guys you just met my teenage years are in the you know, mid nineties to late nineties, and there was Griffy Maguire Bond so they exactly name him, and these were all recognizable faces no matter where you were household in the country.

00:24:23
Speaker 2: Now baseball decided it was regional. And obviously you've got some language barrier stuff with Tani's not speaking English. Member Sammy Susid when they were doing the Pups commercials back in the nineties, he would just smile it. He would just smile at the camera. So you do have to have some sort of star power. You could to decide that you want to be a superstar. But I've just always rejected the idea that because it's baseball, you can't be national, because we remember that that that was not the case.

00:24:51
Speaker 1: The steroid era. He wrote a whole book on the beginning of it. I think steroids save baseball at a certain point. Am I crazy to know that? But I said, that's the best time I remember my teenage years. I'm reminiscing again. Forgive me, y'all, but this was the best time. I mean, obviously, I'm a football baseball basketball player. Football and basketball my two fair sports. But I couldn't wait to get home to watch that raceball.

00:25:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true, and it can you make the argument that the steroid eraror saved the game one hundred percent.

00:25:23
Speaker 1: And the MLB played into it. I mean, chicks dig the long ball. There was commercials and all kinds of other ship that went along with it, and they did.

00:25:30
Speaker 2: They didn't as a Hall of Fame voter, they left it to us. And this is one of the reasons why I stopped voting for the Hall of Fame was because it was like, wait, a minute. You didn't give us any rules on this. You gave us rules on Pete Rose, we couldn't vote for him. He gave us rules on Jackson he couldn't. He's not on the ballot, we couldn't vote for him. Right, But you profited off as steroids. Your managers are in the Hall of Fame. Who managed these guys? Tony the ruses in the Hall of Fame. He had, he had Maguire, he had Conseko, you know he had you know, Ruben Sierra, all the others guys who were a key used to using steroids. Right, Joe Tory is in the Hall of Fame, and Roger Clemons isn't in the Hall of Fame. Alex Driguez isn't in the Hall of Fame. So you're gonna punt and leave that to me. You're gonna make me the management stooge for not voting for these guys when you put all your guys in. Bud Selig has a statue in front of Miller Park in Milwaukee, so you have you erect a statue to yourself, but you leave it to us to keep these guys out. So I didn't think that was very fair.

00:26:27
Speaker 1: When you say, leave it to us. Is it kind of like a a consensus or what's understood doesn't need to be explained, Like everyone knows not to vote for that, I mean because very Bond. No.

00:26:38
Speaker 2: Because what I used to do with my Hall of Fame vote was I would always call the Hall of Famers. I would call guys. I would call Jill Morgan, I would call Dennis Secresley. I would call a lot of guys and say, what do you think? Because once again, like we cover the game, right, but we see the game differently than the way you see the game. And so what I was always trying to do with my ballot was to try to make it a panorama, try to get every Here's what his peers thought about him, Here's what I saw, Here's here are all the different layers and ways. Here's the way, Here's the way the fans saw it. And I would ask all those questions. The Hall of Famers didn't want us to vote for the steroid guys either. Really, In fact, there had always been a movement that if Bonds or some of those guys got in, we're not coming as a protest. So you know, try to blame the writers all the time, and it's a massive thing.

00:27:25
Speaker 1: I was just going to ask that. I was going to say what that could because I mean, I feel like as former players, like whether you get the recognition or not from the media or the fans or whatever, I think you really hang your hat on what your peers think about those old schools.

00:27:38
Speaker 2: Those guys were old school, and those old school guys are like, no drugs. Even though they were using drugs. They were using greenies and they were using you know, weed and whatever else they were using. And some of those guys would say, hey, would I use steroids if I had the chance. I don't know, but they were very very clear you cheated. And so my attitude has always been if Bonds gets into the Hall of Fame, he earned it. If he doesn't get into the Hall of Fame, he earned it. Did over a Rod, you know, did over all those guys. You can't look at them and say, there's no reason why you're not in, right, we all know why they're not in. It's not like the writers or the now the Veterans committees now that they don't know they're making a decision. They're making a judgment, and they're making a call but here, Matt, here's the other thing. I think I've softened on this because I look at it this way. There is the death penalty, or there's parole. That's kind of how I see it. You know, there's life without parole or life with parole or whatever. Right, and so from a parole standpoint, if we're going to do it from illegal, you know, use the legal jargon. If you put Barry Bones in the Hall of Fame right now, twenty years after he retired, and he's the greatest baseball player I've ever seen, right, we all know that he paid the price for that. We all know. It's not like, oh man, we don't know why Barry didn't get in in twenty twenty seven. So to me, it sort of feels like, even if you do put these guys in now, they've all paid a pretty haven't they paid a pretty good price?

00:29:13
Speaker 1: Well, my question enough to cut you off the I mean, you look at some of these guys that you know, and my thing is it was it was it against there was no rules on it. That's the time correct against the law. But it wasn't a rule in MLB right now.

00:29:29
Speaker 2: It wasn't a rule in MLB at the time. However, my counter that had always been if there was no rule and we were all acting ignorantly because there was no rule, why'd you hide it? Would youly for? I mean, everybody knew you're not supposed to be doing it.

00:29:44
Speaker 1: We all knew what.

00:29:45
Speaker 2: Everybody knew what was happening.

00:29:46
Speaker 1: So then my second question to that is, you look at Marco Wires rookie year where he hits forty plus home runs, and Barry Bonds had about two or three MVPs before he even was accused of so you know, these guys can play the game at the highest level.

00:29:59
Speaker 2: I don't believe that this is part of the question. I don't think anybody is looking at Barry Bonds and go I wonder if he was talented enough to be That's not the that's the question. The conversation is the drugs. We're talking about drugs. And I remember when I did Juice in the game in five and I was on sixty minutes with Mike Wallace and had to run down to spring train. In the next day, Derek Jeter comes by and hits me on the leg with the bat and he goes, hey, sixty minutes, We're not all doing this, you know, so they all had the same conversations, and I felt and I do feel like when people say, oh, you can't have a Hall of Fame without Barry Bonds. Yeah, I mean there's this is the price when people talk about legacy, this is the price everybody lost. I mean the players got to keep their money. You know, sure there's that, but really, this whole generation of players, Maguire, Palmerow, Gay, Rod Sosa, Clemens, Roger exactly, you know all of them, and you're looking at this and you're going, was it worth it? Were talking to Jason Giambi about this and I and I covered g and he's one of my all time favorites. And if you ever have he y oh you know he As I always say, there are guys who make the job easy, guys who make the job hard. Jason made the job very, very, very easy. And I'm sure you had it on your side as a players. There are writers who walked in the room who made the shit easy, and there were guys who were like, come on now, I won't to deal with you. And I remember Jason was the only guy. And I remember this like it was yesterday. Were sitting there at Legends at Steinbernerfield when Jason had finally got cornered in the subpoena and the Balco grandurated and it was all and he looked in the camera and somebody said, Jason, did you use steroids? And Jason looked at the camera and he said no. And everybody there who knew and who had covered Jason, nobody was trying to get him. Nobody was out again, and we all felt terrible because we knew what a good dude he was. And Jason the next year, after all the grand jury stuff went down, he was the only guy who just walked over to me and he shook my head and he said, I apologize for lying to you, really, and he said I was stuck. There was nothing I could do. They all the cameras from me, and I was like, gee, you apologized to me. Like we all knew what was going down, and it was a very difficult situation for everybody. So this whole idea that everybody is like, yeah, fuck these guys, it's.

00:32:21
Speaker 1: Not really like that. I wish there was a way, obviously, but I wish there was a way that we could have seen if steroids didn't hit baseball. What happened to baseball? What would have happened to baseball is I think a huge question because it was trending downward when this probably because it was strike No. I mean, you know, they canceled the World Series. Yeah, I mean, what happens to basketball if you cancel the NBA Final? Yeah right, I mean the fans are like, we're not coming, you know, we don't have to come back to this, and so yeah, so immediately you get Ripkin, and Ripkin's out there shaking hands with everybody and really bringing that good will back, and then you get then you get Sol to maguire ninety eight, and then you get all of it, and it does It made you feel good about the sport. It made you want to watch the sport, and you're looking at the you know, did Sosa hit one tonight?

00:33:05
Speaker 2: Did McGuire hit one? And all of a sudden, you got a whole generation of people. The game is back. And there's no question about what that moment in time was like. But at the same time, very soon after that, when Bonds hit seventy three in oh one, everybody in the game was like you know what I mean, it was like, all right, enough, all right, But because Barry Barry was so good that you looked at him and you're like, this isn't basically, I mean, he's too good. He's literally better. He's beating the averages of you know, it's a video game now. And so that was when everybody's like, Okay, you know, we we got to do something right, we got to do something. And so that's when sort of the jig was up. But I mean, I still look at that time period and.

00:34:00
Speaker 1: It was so.

00:34:03
Speaker 2: Uncomfortable. You would walk in the doug I remember I was in Seattle one day. We're in Seattle, the A's are playing the Mariners in the year the Mariners won one hundred and sixteen games, and I'm sitting on the rail in the dugout and the some of the A's coaches are watching Brett Boone take grounders and Brett Boone, I think had like one hundred and forty one RBIs that you just some crazy steroid e round numbers. And they're all tapping their hip the whole time. He's sticking the needle in his ass, right, I mean, they're all just accusing each other of everything. And the reason why I wrote that book was O two. We're in San Diego Yankees are playing the Padres Inner League and we're just hanging out, you know, three o'clock in the afternoon. Nothing happening, right, and here comes Reggie, and Reggie walks over to me, and he walks over to the group, a bunch of beat writers, and he's all salty, and I'm like, what are you mad about? Gaming started yet? Like, you know, we should wake up on the wrong side of the and he's like, no, because your motherfuckers ain't doing your jobs. I'm like, what did we do? And he's like steroids. He's like, you guys aren't writing about it. Everybody knows what's happening interesting and he said he said, of course, because it's Reggie.

00:35:13
Speaker 1: It was personal.

00:35:14
Speaker 2: He's like, I'm sixth on the home run list. I'm going to be tenth in ten years and he is. And so you know, he was like, protect my legacy, right, all right, you guys are protecting these guys, protect me too.

00:35:28
Speaker 1: And so this was the climate in the sport's heavy man.

00:35:31
Speaker 2: And I said to people. I was like, hey, and then you know, you have a whole bunch of fans going, well, how come you didn't write about this because I don't want to get sued. That's why, if you got it, you better have the goods on this. You can't just accuse people of stuff. So this is the climate of the sport.

00:35:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a heavy class you know what I mean.

00:35:46
Speaker 2: And it's like people just like, oh, you know, you guys are writers and it's a witch hunt. No, this was an industry wide failure. Everybody failed.

00:35:54
Speaker 1: Interesting, well, they bounce back and we love to see it. I want to ask you about a couple guys before we get out of here. One of my favorites, obviously was on trajectory to be one of the greatest players of all time. Injuries caught up with him. But what what stands out when I say King Griffy from me personal? Yeah, I don't know.

00:36:12
Speaker 2: He hates me for some reason? Does I don't know why I never interviewed him.

00:36:15
Speaker 1: I don't get it.

00:36:15
Speaker 2: That's the first thing that sticks out to me. His talent is tell okay, his talent, oh man, Like, let's put it this way. The national superstar thing we were talking about that Nintendo video game Kinn Griffy Baseball once again brings everybody into the sport. It was a fun game. It was like, you know, the Griffy for President commercials, the Nike commercials and the Who Superstar, Superstar off the chart, Superstar, joy to watch Superstar six three, you know, two hundred pounds run, runs like a deer and center field Superstar, all the things, most beautiful swing and like you watch him and you go, oh right, people who make you want to do this, make you want to be part of it. And and you know, Junior had his own demons about being a child star and the whole thing about being the son of a of a of a great player as well with you know, with Ken Griffy. But for the fans watching in the seats, he's one of those guys you stop what you were doing when he was coming to bat, and if you had ten dollars in your pocket and a ticket to see him was nine, you would give your money.

00:37:19
Speaker 1: To watch him play. Absolutely.

00:37:21
Speaker 2: Bo Jackson interesting character. Bo Jackson as a baseball player is one of the great what ifs. I mean both he and Dion one of the two of the great what ifs, because either one of them, I think Bo was a better football player than baseball player and was probably going to be an infinitely better football player than baseball player. Dion is obviously Hall of Fame, but Dean could have been Hall of fame in both. I mean, Dion was that good business as a baseball player. I mean you watch him play and watch him round the you know, watch him round the bases, watch him, I mean all of it. And he he says it. You know, if he had just decided to give to baseball, well, obviously you don't take away that football talent at cornerback. If I were him, I would have made the same choice. But boy, as a baseball player, he could have been I mean everything. And I was going to say, and that is the other reason when people say, oh, yeah, you know black you know, black kids don't bullshit, right. I remember sitting there when I was covering the politically incorrect Washington Redskins before they were the Commanders, when I was at the Washington Post. I remember sitting there when a Rod re upped his deal and he had he had gotten two hundred and seventy five million, And I was sitting there. It was me, Sean Taylor, Phillip Daniels, Ronaldo Wynn, and Andre Carter. We're all just sitting there talking to and we're talking about a Rod's contract and we're going back and forth and they're not in in. Sean nods his head and goes, damn, he better not get hurt two hundred and seventy five million. And I was like, well, his contract's guaranteed. He's like, well, not if he gets hurt. I'm like, guaranteed. Now you say to a football player where you just get cut? You know, at any time they were like this. I mean, they were so stunned. They didn't know that those contracts were one hundred percent guaranteed. And what was the reason why this was interesting was because Sean Taylor grew up Liberty City, right, all these guys, all the guy all the Miami guys, because Santana Moss was on the other side of the of the of the clubhouse. Same thing. They all came up playing baseball. Ronaldo win in Chicago came up playing baseball. They all played baseball. And then they made a business decision because college was either paid for if you played football, were not paid for if you played baseball. So once again when people say that that that baseball just doesn't appeal to black people, is nonsense. It's the money, right. If you look for players, you'll find them. Where does baseball look for its talent. Baseball looks for its talent in the Dominican, in Latin America, and in suburban America. That's where you find your players. And that's why when you look at the number of black players now, a lot of those black players are sons of former players. Money came from it.

00:40:04
Speaker 1: Well, Howard, thank you for your time, Good luck with your book. Look forward to continue to build with you and and and soaking up stories and and and game from you.

00:40:13
Speaker 2: Man.

00:40:14
Speaker 1: All right, thanks for your time. That's a wrap. You can catch this on all the Smoke Productions YouTube and the Draft Kings Network. See you guys,