Bill of Goods (1999)

A journeyman pitcher, steroids, and the culmination of a quarter-century of lies.

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Another quick reminder: Here’s a link to the showpage for the reported podcast I wrote and narrated about San Francisco’s complex political system, One Party Town. You can also find it on ITunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts—you can listen to the first episode for free and binge the rest with a free seven-day trial of Wondery Plus to listen to, which is easy to sign up for (and, ahem, easy to cancel).

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I.

Three in the morning in New York City, October, 1999, a few hours after the Yankees defeat the Braves to win the final World Series of the 20th century, and a journeyman Yankees pitcher named Dan Naulty sits in the backseat of a limousine as the reality of his deception slowly dawns on him.

I’ve been trying to think about how we got here, 25 years later—to a moment where, as the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel writes, “a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.” And I realize there’s no easy answer to that question. But this seems like as good a place to start as any, because while baseball was no longer America’s most popular sport in 1999, up to then it had served as kind of a bellwether, a measure of how the country viewed itself. And in that moment, baseball had dissociated itself from reality. Steroid use was rampant, but no one wanted to confront the truth.

That night, Naulty told his limo driver to stop the car. He spoke to a man he’d never met and debated leaping off a bridge. Winning meant nothing to him. Baseball meant nothing to him. He had been lying for so long that he had no idea who he was anymore. He’d disassociated himself from himself.

Naulty had been taking steroids for years in order to prolong his career. He had gone from 180 pounds to 248, and his fastball had gone from a pedestrian 87 miles per hour to a big-league level 97 miles per hour. He was willing to do whatever it took to reach his goals, even if it led to self-destruction. He had been so desperate to succeed—so desperate to make it, and so desperate to be right—that he cared little about anything or anyone else, he later told Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci.

“I had sold myself that bill of goods so long that I believed it,” Naulty said.

Naulty, driven by a conversion to Christianity, was one of a handful of athletes who eventually came clean, though it took him decades and most of the money he made in the major leagues to forgive himself. Meanwhile, others who started using steroids right around the time that Naulty gave them up are still living in denial. And 25 years later, they still can’t bring themselves to admit to what they did, perhaps because they’ve spent all that time convincing themselves the alternate reality is true.

I don’t know if you can draw a direct line to the early repercussions of the steroid era to this moment where millions have come to believe in an alternate reality. But if nothing else, over the course of a quarter century, you can trace the line of history.

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The Last Gasp of the Longball (April 2000)

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II.

One of the first articles I wrote for this newsletter (above), some four years ago, was about that moment in the year 2000 when Barry Bonds began hitting home runs at a new ballpark in San Francisco while all around him, the dot-com boom took hold. Both of those stories were, of course, carefully constructed on a bed of lies, but we didn’t know that yet. In 1999 and the summer of 2000, Bush v. Gore had yet to leak the its poison into the political discourse; the Internet—and the disinformation machine it unleashed—had yet to become the center of our lives; 9/11 and its odious conspiracy theorizing was over a year away; and baseball, as far as knew it, was in the midst of a cultural renaissance.

The only hint of a potential scandal came from the reporting of the Associated Press journalist Steve Wilstein, who had spotted a bottle of something called androstenedione in Mark McGwire’s locker the year before. No one paid much attention. It was all happening under the surface, at least until a new century dawned and it wasn’t under the surface at all anymore.

I was thinking about this other day; I was thinking about how it feels like we still haven’t come to terms of the moral quandaries of the steroid era, and how it’s clear we still don’t know what to do with the people who clearly broke the rules and refuse to admit it. And I wonder if part of the reason why the steroid era feels so unresolved is because we’re still living through the repercussions of that moment and all that followed. We’re still processing the weight of the lies.

The first quarter of the 20th-century has challenged our grip on reality like few other eras in human history. There were signs of what was coming: There is rarely a day that goes by these days that I don’t think back to an October 2004 story in The New York Times Magazine by the reporter Ron Suskind, about the faith-based presidency of George W. Bush, which relied more on feelings than facts.

“We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” one Bush aide told Suskind. “And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities.”

I imagine even that aide could not have contemplated what that fabricated reality would look like, precisely two decades later, in the wake of a pandemic and the toxic presence of the most capable liar in modern American history. Hopefully, these next few weeks will mark the last throes of that era, but it’s hard to know. The lie—the same lie that caught hold amid the narcissism of the steroids era—has gotten so big that it’s hard to contain it anymore. America has been sold so many lies for so long that some of us have come to believe that reality itself is a lie.

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