The national debate about steroids in baseball hit Duke this weekend, but players, athletic officials and experts reflecting on revelations in Duke’s program paint a picture of a larger phenomenon across college baseball.
Over the past three years, allegations and questions about steroid use have swirled around Major League Baseball. Former MVP Ken Caminiti admitted in 2002 that he used steroids, and reports have surfaced that Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi confessed to using designer steroids. Jose Canseco called out himself and others in a bestselling book, and a Congressional hearing in March addressed post-steroid suicide and the league’s new enforcement policy, which has since resulted in the suspension of two major leaguers.
But the same players who admitted to using or knowing of steroid use at Duke in a report published in The Chronicle Friday said the failing Blue Devils program was never the epicenter of a pervasive, career-advancing practice throughout the NCAA. Players said the rise and subsequent decline of steroids in college baseball parallels the major leagues and still has not stopped completely.
“We think it’s funny,” said former Duke baseball player Aaron Kempster, who told The Chronicle he used steroids and later attempted suicide. “The baseball players that are out of the baseball circle now just laugh at the fact that people are just now finding out about it. You go to any college campus, and I guarantee you will find people doing steroids. It is much more prevalent than people are aware of.”
In the report about the Duke baseball program, current and former players said steroid use reached its peak in the summer of 2002. Kempster and former teammate Grant Stanley said they had discussions about their steroid use with top Athletic Department officials, who increased drug testing of baseball players after Stanley was arrested for steroid possession in Fall 2002.
The steroid issue on Duke’s baseball team likely mirrored what was transpiring across the ACC and the nation, said Charles Yesalis, a professor of health policy and administration and exercise and sport science at Penn State and a leading expert on steroids in sports.
“Strength training has been in segments of college baseball starting in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Steroids came into pro baseball in the ’80s, and we started to pick it up in college baseball in the early ’90s,” said Yesalis, who has written several books on the culture of performance-enhancing drugs. “I think it parallels to a great extent because of this cascading-down effect, and steroids in baseball is no secret unless someone lives in a cave.”
A 2001 NCAA survey of college athletes’ substance abuse habits reported 2.3 percent of baseball players said they took anabolic steroids, up from 1.9 percent in 1997 and 0.7 percent in 1993.
Still a pit stop?
As a result of Duke’s increased testing of baseball players and the program’s inability to recruit as many potential major league prospects as it once did, current players said that if steroid users remain in the Duke program, they are quiet about their use.
One current player, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he thought two of his teammates might be using steroids. He declined to identify them, but he said there are “definitely a lot less” than earlier in his Duke career. Another current player, who also asked not to be named, said the makeup of the team had changed since the height of steroid use at Duke.
“The steroids are on their way out. There’s going to be a couple of guys using them every year, but that’s just how it is everywhere,” the second player said. “There’s a bunch of smart, hardworking, soft kids. Smart, soft kids don’t want to do steroids.”
Earlier in head coach Bill Hillier’s term, however, his emphasis on strength training and alleged implicit encouragement of steroid use—an accusation he denied—may have resonated more soundly with a group of top recruits who saw Duke as a means of building their major league résumés.
Larry Broadway, a star first baseman at Duke from 2000 to 2002, said Hillier told him to take protein supplements to advance his big-league potential.
“I was a skinny kid, so they said, ‘We’re going to give you this to gain weight. Take it, and make sure you take it a lot. You’re not going to play pro ball and hit for power or average over a long season. You’re not going to stay healthy,’” said Broadway, now a top prospect with the Washington Nationals. “They tried to get me to a healthy weight so they could get me [to the professional level], to win games [at Duke] and push me on to my career.”
Stanley, who looked at Duke as a stopping point before the major leagues, said he injected himself with synthetic testosterone for just two weeks in 2002 while playing in an Ohio summer league. “For me it was an experiment,” he said. “But it was kind of a thing where well, ‘Hey, we’re not going to be too great anytime you’re here, just put yourself in a good position for the draft.’”
A summer syndrome?
Another former player, who left the program and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the use of steroids at Duke was far from isolated. “If steroid use is going on here, Duke is not the only school,” the player said. “There is a whole country out there where people may be taking steroids at D-I programs elsewhere.”
In town for a weekend series against the Blue Devils, Maryland catcher Chad Durakis said he did not know of steroid use on the Maryland roster but that he had heard stories about other players in other leagues.
“Basically we just feel cheated,” Durakis said of steroids’ prevalence in college baseball. “Any time you hear of somebody that’s doing something illegal to get an edge—especially in a conference like the ACC, where it’s so tight every year, where a few hits here and there make a big difference—you just really feel cheated. You feel like your chance is taken away a little bit.”
Stanley said he felt pressured to gain weight; he took steroids because it was “pretty rampant” in college and high school baseball and because—like Kempster—he had no fear of being caught.
“It’s not only Duke,” Stanley said. “You go to probably any other team in the ACC, and you know they’ve got a lot of guys doing it.
“It’s not like it’s a huge problem at Duke—it’s going on all over the place,” he added. “They can’t really do anything about it.”
Players said the summer is the preferred time for baseball players to use steroids because it gives ample time for complementary weight lifting and because the threat of being drug tested is minimal—and used to be almost non-existent.
The NCAA tested only at its postseason championships until August 2004, when it expanded sporadic, year-round testing from just football and track and field to all sports. Duke began its own scheduled testing in 1999 or 2000 but has not invoked its ability to test while athletes are not in school, said Brad Berndt, assistant athletic director and Duke’s testing coordinator.
“They all go and play summer baseball, mixing with players from other programs, some of whom apparently are pretty heavily into various kinds of performance-enhancing drugs,” said Chris Kennedy, senior associate athletic director, who met with groups of Duke baseball players on several occasions to investigate problems including substance abuse. “I got a sense out of [meeting with players] that there is, as there is in other sports, sort of what’s in the water is: If you want to compete, this is what you need to do at this level.”
The second unnamed current player estimated that other teams had more extensive steroid use than Duke. “Just from my experience in baseball, I know all the steroids are done over the summer,” said the player, who has participated in summer leagues with other ACC players. “I know that this last summer a dozen on my baseball team were doing steroids.”
Fear at the top?
The next step for ambitious college baseball players is the minor leagues, where Major League Baseball instituted steroid testing in 2001; 11 percent of players tested positive during that season. The number dropped to 1.7 percent last season, the same year anonymous testing without enforcement began in the majors. This season, a first-time offender in the minor leagues receives a 15-game suspension, compared to 10 games in the majors and zero at Duke.
“You can’t do anything,” said Broadway, currently starting for the New Orleans Zephyrs and heir apparent at first base for the Nationals. “We’ve been tested eight or 10 times during the season for every single drug. Guys are clean, or guys get banged for it.”
Despite a heightened national consciousness regarding steroids in baseball, Stanley said “it kind of boggles my mind that people are so shocked” about the prevalence of steroids across all levels of the sport and particularly about the 41 minor leaguers suspended in the past two weeks. He said that, while frustrated, he does not blame Duke for failing to see the scope of the problem earlier.
“I don’t know if they were trying to brush it under the carpet,” Stanley said. “They didn’t know how entrenched it was in baseball. They probably didn’t have an idea how entrenched it was in Major League Baseball and how it trickled down to college baseball.”
Kennedy, Berndt and Athletic Director Joe Alleva repeatedly said Stanley’s September 2002 arrest for possession of testosterona was the first time suspicions of steroid use were seriously considered, and Alleva said the arrest was an “isolated incident” not indicative of a larger issue.
“I didn’t think there was any bigger problem, but I wanted to make sure,” Alleva said. “We just thought we had one get caught, so let’s check it out and let’s make sure we’re doing everything that’s right to make sure that these kids aren’t using any performance-enhancing drugs.”
Stanley said he understood the Athletic Department did not suspect anything beyond his arrest, but he still felt the department was pinning a pervasive culture on just him and Kempster as “the bad apples of the program.”
“It sometimes gets frustrating because it’s easy and convenient for people to blame it on you,” he said. “And I’ve accepted that.”
John Taddei contributed to this story.
ORIGINAL STORY: STEROID CHARGES ROCK DUKE BASEBALL
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