Baseball's Drug Scandal

"It's terribly disappointing to have faith in someone as a role model and have them turn out to be tainted," complained Gladys Roost, 80, a Dodger fan in Los Angeles. Shirley Murphy, 33, a secretary in Baltimore, agreed. "It is a damn shame that these guys can't depend on their talent to see them through," she said. Declared Ralph Bass, 63, a Texas Ranger booster: "Making that kind of money, they ought to set a better example."

The fan reaction, a mixture of sorrow, regret and anger, followed disclosures in a federal court in Pittsburgh last week that at least l3 major league baseball players had been habitual users of cocaine. The drug abuse itself came as no surprise. Multiple criminal investigations have focused attention on the problem since 1983, when four Kansas City Royals, including a former American League batting champion (Willie Wilson) and a once sensational pitcher (Vida Blue), were sent to prison for cocaine use and other players were implicated but not prosecuted. The impact of last week's disclosures stemmed from the detailed, often poignant, testimony of baseball heroes who told of their own addiction to drugs and, for the first time, ticked off the names of playing buddies with whom they shared the affliction. The / timing could not have been worse. Despite a one-day strike last month, major league baseball was headed for a banner year, drawing more fans than ever before. Three of the four divisions were locked in supertight races with 30 or so games remaining. Baseball's two biggest markets each had a pair of contenders: New Yorkers dreamed of a Subway Series between the Mets and Yankees, while Los Angelenos fantasized about a Freeway Free-for-All between the Dodgers and Angels. Cincinnati's Pete Rose was closing in on one of the game's most cherished records, Ty Cobb's standard of 4,191 base hits; as the weekend began, he needed only three more to break it. The young Met fireballer, Dwight Gooden, a 20-game winner at the age of 20, was prompting comparisons with the greatest pitchers of the past. But the drug disclosures could not help putting the game under a cloud. Not since the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919, when eight Chicago White Sox players admitted taking bribes from gamblers to fix the World Series, has the national pastime suffered such a loss of public esteem.