House Government Reform Committee members profess their love of baseball, question attack the sport's new drug policy and hear chilling testimony from parents whose sons killed themselves after falling into steroids' grip.

01:45 AM EST on Friday, March 18, 2005

BY JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- Sparks flew in Congress yesterday as Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling and other Major League Baseball stars took to a witness table to decry the use of steroids and let fly at former slugger Jose Canseco, who alleges in a new book that many players -- including onetime home-run king Mark McGwire -- used the drugs.

"He's a liar" who "grossly misrepresented" the scope of steroid use in order to make himself look less bad, Schilling said of Canseco.

McGwire fought tears as he told a House committee, voice cracking, that he knows the drugs can be harmful and pledged to do whatever he could to keep young athletes from using them. "My heart goes out to every parent whose sons or daughters were victims of steroids," McGwire said.

"My message is that steroids is bad. Don't do them," said McGwire, who broke Roger Maris's 37-year-old seasonal mark for home runs in 1998. But McGwire refused several times to say whether he had used steroids, saying his lawyer had advised him not to comment on that question.

McGwire generally ducked specific questions about the extent of baseball's steroid problem and the adequacy of the new drug-testing program that is baseball's chief solution.

But Schilling and the rest of the active players on hand said they don't know firsthand about the rampant steroid use that Canseco has reported. In 19 years as a big-leaguer on five clubs, "I've never seen a syringe," said Schilling, who estimated that 5 to 10 teammates used steroids over the course of his career.

Players speculate about steroid use, Schilling said, but they have no way of knowing about it for sure, "unless you were Jose and you were actually using."

Besides Schilling, the active players testifying were Chicago White Sox slugger Frank Thomas, a fellow critic of steroids, and Baltimore Orioles Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro, both of whom hotly denied allegations of steroid use.

All four spoke in support of the sport's current testing program to combat the drug use. Schilling cited league statistics to the effect that from 2003 to 2004 the proportion of players using steroids has dropped from between 5 percent and 7 percent to 1.7 percent. "I see that as progress," Schilling said. "It troubles me when I hear the program being identified as a joke, a travesty and a program not designed to rid baseball of steroids," he said.

"I've heard that it's a complete joke," Canseco said later of the baseball testing program.

"Steroids were part of the game, and I don't think anybody really wanted to take a stance on it," Canseco said. "If Congress does nothing about this issue, it will go on forever."

He was not alone in his criticism.

Committee Chairman Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican, said Major League Baseball is "a little late coming to the table" with an anti-steroid policy weaker than that imposed on minor leaguers.

The testing program "seems to be full of holes," said the panel's ranking Democrat, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, of California, a driving force behind the hearing. He noted, for example, that a player summoned to take a urine test for drug screening can be excused from supervision for up to an hour before submitting the sample -- ample time, drug experts testified, for a steroid-using player to tamper with the test.

Rep. Stephen F. Lynch, a Boston Democrat who pointed out that Republican Schilling lives in his congressional district, criticized baseball's penalty for players caught using steroids for the first time. One option, a $10,000 fine, "is not even a slap on the wrist" for a well-paid major leaguer, Lynch said.

"We are getting this hear-no-evil, see-no-evil and don't-know-what's-going-on," said Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., adding that she was "very disappointed" by the ballplayers' testimony and the shortcomings that medical professionals pointed out in the testing program.

But the jousting by the ballplayers and the House members' attacks on the loopholes in baseball's new drug testing system were far from the most dramatic exchanges during yesterday's hearing before the House Committee on Government Reform.

That distinction went to the impassioned testimony by the parents of sons who killed themselves after succumbing to steroid abuse.

Donald M. Hooton Sr. described how his son Taylor felt pressure from a junior-varsity coach to "get bigger" when he was a junior at a suburban Dallas high school. The boy responded by taking steroids, which helped him put on 30 pounds, plunge into depression and kill himself before the start of his senior year, according to his father.

Too late, Hooton testified, he learned that Taylor's symptoms -- rapid weight gain, bad breath, acne, puffy skin and extreme moodiness and aggression -- were "right out of the medical textbook on steroids."

Hooton said his son was responsible for his own actions, but he excoriated steroid users in pro sports for sending a message that kids hear loud and clear: "If you want to achieve your goals, it is OK to use steroids to get you there because the pros are doing it."

Hooton had his own message for such ballplayers: "You are cowards. You are afraid to step out on the field, compete for your positions and play the game" without the aid of illegal drugs.

"You are cowards," he added, "when it comes to facing your fans and our children. Why don't you behave like we teach our kids to behave?"

Baseball's response to the steroid problem is "pathetically unresponsive," said Hooten, "designed to silence the critics, not to solve the problem." He said the game should adopt the tougher Olympics testing program and permanently ban drug abusers from the game. "You shouldn't be putting an asterisk next to these guys' records," Hooton said of stars found to have used steroids. "You should be throwing them out of the big leagues." As the hearing dragged into its eighth hour last evening, Rep. Bernard Sanders, an independent from Vermont, asked the panel of players to say whether they would return to the House in a year to call for tough federal laws against steroid use, if baseball's solution to the problem doesn't work.

Schilling answered, "That's a hypothetical and I don't believe it's going to happen."

Sanders drew laughs when he shot back, "You sound like a politician."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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