King Kaufman's Sports Daily

"We want to burn witches." An interview with Will Carroll, author of "The Juice," who studied baseball's drug problem and found out how much we all don't know.

May 16, 2005 | It's going to be a parade of sports commissioners up Capitol Hill this week. Congress wants to talk some more about steroids.

All four major sports commissioners -- baseball's Bud Selig, David Stern of the NBA, Paul Tagliabue of the NFL and Gary Bettman of the NHL -- will appear at a two-day hearing of the House Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Subcommittee. Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., chairman of that committee, is the author of the Drug Free Sports Act, which would mandate drug testing of all professional athletes and take it out of the hands of the leagues.

Stern will also appear at a separate hearing held by the House Government Reform Committee, which has already talked to Selig and Tagliabue.

"It is clear," Stearns said, "that legislation is needed to establish uniform standards and heavier penalties for steroid use."

If anything connected to the steroids issue is clear, it's that nothing is clear -- including "the clear," the designer steroid THG that's at the center of the BALCO case. "The clear" is brown.

That's one of many surprising things you'll learn by reading "The Juice: The Real Story of Baseball's Drug Problems" by Will Carroll, who writes the unique "Under the Knife" injury column at Baseball Prospectus.

A few others: Amphetamines are a far bigger problem in baseball than steroids; there's no hard evidence that steroids are responsible for baseball's offensive explosion of the last dozen years; and steroids are a small part of the spectrum of performance-enhancing drugs.

Carroll, who employed a squad of co-authors to tackle such complex issues as the chemistry of steroids, genetic doping and drug laws, says he took on the book with no agenda to push, either pro- or anti-steroid. He says he "tried to be a blank slate" about drugs in baseball, and to draw conclusions based only on what he learned as he researched the issue.

I spoke to Carroll, 35, by phone from his home in Indianapolis.

What is it that you learned that surprised you the most?

The fact is, we really don't know. It turns out it wasn't just me that didn't know. It was pretty much all of us.

We don't have good scientific studies. We don't understand what the effects are on the body. We don't have a great understanding of how to use these drugs properly. We don't have a great grip of what we want to do as a society with drugs, and we seem to be expecting more of our athletes than we do of our society. The real big conclusion was this big "I don't know but we need to do more."

Everybody just wants more testing, don't you think?

It seems like that. Myself included, we've all been saying baseball needs a valid steroid testing program for the last 10 years. And now that we finally have it, it seems like it's not enough. It's like, we want to burn witches, but it's got to be a really big witch.

Next Page: Amphetamines, Viagra and genetic freaks

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