It’s Not McGwire We Should Care About
I don’t really care all that much about Mark McGwire admitting that he did steroids and human growth hormone — he pretty much told us so back at the Congressional hearings in 2005, and anyway, if you saw the transformation his body made, and still believed he was clean, well, you have issues beyond whether some 90’s baseball star was injecting something in his ass.
And to be honest, I didn’t care much back then, either. Steroids get me mad not because of the giant, hulking, faux Hall of Famers like McGwire, but because of the way they altered the lives of so many honest ballplayers.
I spent three summers working for the Somerset Patriots of the independent Atlantic League, which was chock full of fringe Major Leaguers just trying to get one more shot at the bigs. These were guys who were often first round draft picks, prized for their baseball skills and work ethic. But not their muscles. They were too honest to be prized for their muscles.
In particular, my best friend for three summers on that Patriots team was Ryan Radmanovich. Rad was just about the greatest guy in the world. He was a tall, skinny guy, but had that whip-like power, using a flawless swing and bat speed to launch balls out of ball parks all throughout the tri-state area.
Radman was a former top prospect in the Seattle system, having had a cup of coffee in the majors in 1998. He was competing, at the time, to be the ‘right fielder of the future’ in Seattle, but he was blocked by a guy named Jay Buhner. You may remember him — bald, powerful and built like a shit brickhouse. I’m not going to make any accusations as to Buhner’s integrity, but he did mysteriously jump from 21 homers to 40 and then 44 in the mid-90’s years before Rad came up to the Majors.
Buhner got hurt, and the Mariners called Rad up for his first Major League experience. Here was his chance to prove himself in the majors — bulk up then, hit some homers, be the cheap hotshot rookie, and he’d be stamping his pass for a potentially long Major League career.
But regardless of others’ relationship with the needle, Rad didn’t use. He didn’t get super bulky and didn’t heal extra quickly. He tried to do it the honest way, but was soon crowded out, after just 25 games. Buhner recovered and hit 26 homers the next year. And so Rad, blocked out, bounced around the minor leagues, hitting homers but continuing to be blocked by big, bulky guys who took the easy way to the top.
I spent a lot of time in the outfield with Rad during those summers. He invited me out to play catch during BP, taught me the proper way to read and track balls off the bat in the outfield (Rad also had great range and a rifle arm) and just spent a lot of time shooting the shit with me. I guess he saw me as a smart kid with an interesting story, sometimes moreso than his goofball teammates (whom we both loved, of course).
During those unforgettable days on the outfield in the summer sun (this probably meant nothing to him, but patrolling the outfield, even diving for balls, with a former Major Leaguer was a thrill of a lifetime and the closest I’d ever get to playing in the bigs), Rad opened up a bit about the way steroids affected his career. This was during the big PED summer of 2005, just months after McGwire ruined his Hall of Fame chances by insisting on talking about the future with Congress.
It had gotten to the point of inequity that even some guys in our league were starting to juice, in hopes of evening the playing field with the guys who were taking the stuff and taking all the jobs in well-paying Triple A and the Majors.
But Rad told me that he had never done steroids, which, looking at him, was plainly obvious. He was just about the most honest guy you could meet, so I had no doubt he was telling the truth. But the story ran deeper than that.
I’m not sure when he said the chance came up — maybe in Mexico a few summers back, where steroids are like cough medicine — but Rad had been offered the juice, and with it a chance to impress scouts and statheads and make one more run at the majors. After weighing the options, he declined. I don’t know if it was out of concern for his health or the integrity of the game, but he shot down a chance to make it back to the Majors, for more than that short, 25 game cup of coffee in 1998.
That summer, in 2005, Rad hit .319 and set the Somerset single-season homerun record, with 28 in 129 games. When that record-breaking homer left the park, the crowd stood in ovation as he circled the bases, to be met by a mob of teammates back in the dugout. It was a brief moment of glory, and to let yourself get lost in it made baseball seem good and pure, the way all the indignant purists want to pretend it really is.
In a career of just misses, Rad was the king of that ballpark, the slugger his team depended on and the fans paid to see. Then he carried his own bats back to our small clubhouse, dressed in front of his small metal locker and watched big league highlights on a loop on ESPN.
Rad never mad the Major Leagues again — he spent the 2009 season with another Atlantic League team — and Cooperstown will not be chronicling his exploits. Unless you lived in certain mid-sized cities throughout the 90’s and 2000’s, you won’t remember him, either. But Ryan Radmanovich is symbolic of the true crime that performance enhancing drugs perpetrated on baseball — killing the dream that if you’ve got talent and just work hard enough and long enough and want it enough, you can be a star.
