Players deliver major league spin
WASHINGTON -- The House hearing on steroid use among baseball players yesterday was high drama that fused the spin-doctoring of politics with the storybook heroism of baseball: The athletes were spinning and the politicians were drawing on myths.
The televised hearing confirmed that in the media age athletes and politicians must draw on each other's skills: Politicians aspire to an athlete's image of strength and connection to America's grass roots, while professional athletes must call upon on a politician's communications skills to handle the ethical questions that attach like barnacles to big-money sports.
So the hearing featured House members waxing about the romance of baseball -- reminiscing about childhoods spent watching Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris -- and offering up jock cliches such as comparing the inquiry to the first frame of ''an extra-inning game."
''Over the past century, baseball has been part of our social fabric," said Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California. ''It helped restore normalcy after the war, provided the playing field where black athletes like Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and inspired civic pride in communities across the country."
While the politicians dreamed of sandlots and the heroes of their youths, the five baseball players showed up looking like lawmakers with aides in tow. They seemed as fully coached and prepared for their moments in the congressional spotlight as Condoleezza Rice defending the Bush administration before the 9/11 Commission.
Each player offered his version of a classic Washington communications strategy.
A visibly shrunken Mark McGwire, who as recently as 1998 was chasing the home run record, was tearful in offering the Clinton-era specialty: an expression of contrition that did not acknowledge any actual wrongdoing.
''I'm not here to discuss the past," he said multiple times, adding that any comments about steroid use by himself or other big-league stars would only hurt his friends, teammates, and family. But he wanted to impart a lesson to children: ''I will use whatever influence and popularity I have to discourage young athletes from taking any drug that is not recommended by a doctor."
Red Sox star Curt Schilling, who is not suspected of steroid use, was free to be a consensus-builder, friend to both the athletes and their inquisitors.
Quickly expressing his distaste for whistle-blower Jose Canseco, Schilling so ably managed to appeal to all sides that at times he seemed ready to hop into the seat of chairman Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia, and lead the hearing himself.
By the end of the hearing, the only question for Schilling was from which state he would launch his post-baseball political career.
Sluggers Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa had a different agenda. Suspicions of steroid use hung over them like a haze, and their goal was to clear the air. Each came in wanting to establish his innocence beyond all question, and so each answered almost every question the same way: by reasserting that they never used banned substances.
Campaign strategists advise candidates never to stray from their message, and to make sure that any TV sound bite buttresses their point. By that measure, Palmeiro and Sosa were successful, whether or not their fans believe them.
Canseco, in the difficult position of avoiding making self-incriminating statements while blowing the whistle on the locker room culture of steroid use, said more with his body language than with his words. His incredulous looks while others tried to exonerate themselves carried more authenticity than the tales of rampant steroid use in his ghost-written autobiography.
By the end, most of the House members seemed pleased just to be part of the action. A few others probably agreed with Vermont's Bernard Sanders, who wondered aloud why so many people cared about a hearing about baseball while meetings about poverty and hunger sometimes get little attention.
Sanders, seeing the satisfied looks on his colleagues, could probably answer his own question.
