QOTD:
“Shoot, greenies got mentioned at least as far back as the Pittsburgh drug trials of the 1980s, when players testified they received the stimulants from Willie Stargell, Bill Madlock and even Mays. All three men, who denied either using or supplying, later were cleared of wrongdoing by the commissioner’s office. (The current commissioner, Selig, has said he first heard about greenies in the old Milwaukee Braves clubhouses of the late 1950s.)
The stimulants have been steadily mentioned ever since, too — but almost never by anyone in the midst of his career. A retired Tony Gwynn spoke openly of baseball’s amphetamine problem in 2003, estimating for The New York Times that 50 percent of position players were using them routinely, many of them before almost every game. (Gwynn subsequently was blasted by those in uniform at the time for, in their opinion, speaking out of school.) Chad Curtis spoke after his retirement about the pressure on fielders not to play the game “naked” — that is, not to play without speed.
This is, on some levels, a straight-up medical concern for MLB and its policymakers. Amphetamines are widely understood to be much more commonly used in clubhouses than steroids, and “they are way, way more dangerous,” professor — and stimulant expert — Charles Yesalis told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in May. “They can stone-cold kill you on the spot.”
Yet baseball routinely has ignored their existence in the sport. In hindsight, it’s amazing that MLB would move to ban the herbal stimulant ephedra in 2003 (after the death of Baltimore pitcher Steve Bechler) but leave amphetamines untouched.
