BALTIMORE ORIOLE RAFAEL PALMEIRO---500 HOME RUNS, 3000 HITS, CONTROVERSY
Rafael Palmeiro Corrales (born September 24, 1964) played two different stretches with the Orioles (1994-1998, 2004-2005). Palmeiro was an All-American at Mississippi State University before being drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1985. He also played for the Cubs (1986–1988) and the Texas Rangers (1989–1993, 1999–2003). He was named to the MLB All-Star Team four times, and won the Gold Glove three times. He is a member of the 500 home run club and the 3,000 hit club and is one of only five players in history to be a member of both. Days after recording his 3,000th hit, Palmeiro was suspended for testing positive for an anabolic steroid.
Palmeiro was recruited and enrolled at Mississippi State University, where he played college baseball for the Bulldogs in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). He is the only SEC player to have ever won the triple crown. A teammate of Will Clark, the two were known as "Thunder and Lightning". Clark and Palmeiro were known to dislike each other, dating back to their time at Mississippi State. On June 11, 1985, Palmeiro signed with theChicago Cubs as the 22nd pick in the 1st round of the 1985 draft.
During his tenure with the Cubs, he normally played left field, though occasionally he would play other outfield positions or first base. Palmeiro was the runner up to National League batting champion Tony Gwynn in 1988 with a .307 batting average, only six points below Gwynn's. During that year rumors spread about a relationship between Palmiero and Ryne Sandberg's wife, Cindy. This led to issues in the locker room and after the 1988 season, Palmeiro was traded by the Cubs to the Texas Rangers along with Jamie Moyer and Drew Hall in exchange for Mitch Williams,Paul Kilgus, Steve Wilson, Curtis Wilkerson, Luis Benitez, and Pablo Delgado.
Upon moving to the American League, Palmeiro was primarily used as a first baseman or designated hitter. Palmeiro blossomed as a hitter while with the Rangers, leading the league in hits in 1990 and doubles in 1991. In 1990, he was third in the American League in batting.
Prior to Palmeiro's 1995 season, he had hit more than 30 home runs only once (37 in 1993). Starting in 1995, Palmeiro began a streak of 38+ home run years that continued through the 2003 season. He hit 373 home runs during this nine-season span, while also driving in over 100 runs in each of these seasons. However, Palmeiro never led the league in home runs, and is history's most prolific home run hitter to have never won the home run crown.
On May 11, 2003, Palmeiro hit his 500th home run off David Elder in a game against the Cleveland Indians. Two years later, Palmeiro joined Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Alex Rodriguez, and Eddie Murray as the only players in major league history to get 3,000 hits and 500 home runs when he got his 3,000th base hit off Joel Piñeiro during a game against the Seattle Mariners on July 15, 2005. Because most of Palmeiro's home runs came with the Rangers and Orioles, he is one of only four players in history to hit at least 200 home runs for two different clubs.
Palmeiro played in 2,831 major league games, the most by any player who never played in the World Series.
Palmeiro won three straight Gold Glove awards as a first baseman in the American League from 1997–1999. His 1999 award was highly controversial because Palmeiro had played just 28 games at first base, compared to 128 games as the designated hitter.
Former Rangers teammate José Canseco identified Palmeiro as a fellow steroid user in his 2005 book, Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big, and claimed he personally injected Palmeiro with steroids. On March 17, 2005, Palmeiro appeared at a Congressional hearing about steroids in baseball and, while under oath, denied ever using steroids and stated, "Let me start by telling you this: I have never used steroids, period. I don't know how to say it any more clearly than that. Never."
On August 1, 2005, Palmeiro was suspended for ten days after testing positive for a steroid. The Washington Post reported that the steroid detected in Palmeiro's system was a "serious" one. According to The New York Times, Palmeiro tested positive for the potent anabolic steroid stanozolol. In a public statement, Palmeiro disclosed that an appeal of the suspension had already been denied. He released a statement saying, "I have never intentionally used steroids. Never. Ever. Period. Ultimately, although I never intentionally put a banned substance into my body, the independent arbitrator ruled that I had to be suspended under the terms of the program." According to Palmeiro, all of his previous tests over the two years including the 2003 sealed test were negative, and a test he took just three weeks after his positive test was also negative. The House Government Reform Committee would not seek perjury charges against Palmeiro, although they were not clearing him.
Palmeiro returned to Camden Yards following his 10-day suspension on August 11, 2005, although he did not play in the lineup until August 14. Coincidentally, this was the date that had been planned as "Rafael Palmeiro Appreciation Day" in celebration of his 500-home run, 3,000-hit milestone. It was canceled after Palmeiro's suspension. The Baltimore Sun reported that Palmeiro never offered an explanation for his positive test to the MLB arbitration panel, which ran contrary to his public statements. ESPN later reported that Palmeiro implicated Miguel Tejada to baseball's arbitration panel, suggesting a supplement provided to him by Tejada was responsible for his positive test. This supplement was supposedly vitamin B12, though it could have been tainted. Tejada and two unnamed teammates provided B12 samples to the panel, which did not contain stanozolol. However, the committee did say they found "substantial inconsistencies between Mr. Tejada's accounts and the accounts of players A and B." Tejada, who said he received shipments of B12 from the Dominican Republic, was later implicated for steroid use in the Mitchell Report.
Palmeiro continues to strongly deny ever having used steroids intentionally, telling The Baltimore Sun in June 2006, "Yes sir, that's what happened. It's not a story; it's the reality of what happened", and "I said what I said before Congress because I meant every word of it." Palmeiro passed a polygraph test in which he was not asked if he ever used steroids, but in which he did state that he unknowingly ingested them via a B12 injection. A 2005 New York Times article expressed one writer's belief that Palmeiro's story could perhaps be the truth.
In December 2007, Palmeiro was included in the Mitchell Report in which it was alleged that he used performance-enhancing drugs during his career. The report did not provide any new evidence and only recapped allegations made by José Canseco, Palmeiro's appearance before Congress, and his subsequent failed drug test. The report also details a conversation Larry Bigbie alleges he had with Palmeiro where he claims "Palmeiro asked him about his source of steroids and human growth hormone (the source was Kirk Radomski) and how the substances made him feel." Bigbie also stated that "Palmeiro denied in those conversations that he had ever used performance-enhancing substances himself." On December 20, 2007, Palmeiro was also named in Jason Grimsley's unsealed affidavit as a user of amphetamines prior to their being banned by MLB.
RICK on RAFAEL PALMEIRO
The steroids issue that snared Palmeiro brought a sad and unfortunate finish to what was otherwise an outstanding career. His first five-year stint with the Orioles is still statistically the best five-year run of anyone who ever wore the uniform. His arrival in the 90s was reminiscent of Frank Robinson’s back in the 60s in that he made a good Baltimore team great. Despite finishing his career as one of only four players to hit 500 plus home runs and get over 3000 hits, Raffy was underrated and overlooked for most of his career as Mark McGwire, Frank Thomas, Jim Thome, Cecil Fielder and Mo Vaughn drew more attention. He did have a miserable 1997 ALCS, hitting just one home run and two RBIs while striking out ten times in the six game series. The fan reaction to his positive test results for anabolic steroids was even more negative because of his finger-wagging testimony before Congress that he “never used steroids—Period!” His connection to steroids was particularly disappointing to me as I always admired his talent and professionalism and I was looking forward to another Oriole bound for Cooperstown.
THE RISE AND FALL OF RAFAEL PALMEIRO by Flinder Boyd, FOX Sports
He’s sitting with a North Carolina State hat dipped downward. He’s aged well. Still handsome, the black mustache of his playing days is gone, replaced with a salt-and-pepper beard. When he stands up, his shoulders are muscular, and he looks a decade younger than 51.
“I could still do it,” Rafael Palmeiro says. “If I had to play a full season, I could probably hit .270, with 25 home runs. It’s between the ears, man.”
The restaurant is half-full for lunch, and the pop music on the speakers drowns out any noise. A lanky, 30-something waiter comes by every five minutes, pauses and asks if he wants water, or if he’s OK. Each time the waiter leaves, he glances back at Palmeiro.
It’s awkward, but it's not quite celebrity gawking -- he doesn’t want a photo. His curiosity is more academic. He studies him. He knows this man, of course. We all do. He was once a sure-fire baseball Hall of Famer. Now the waiter is attempting to fold together the two defining points in this man’s life and make sense of it -- the 500th home run followed by his name stamped onto the wall in what was then called the Ballpark in Arlington a few miles down the road, and the announcement he was a cheater two years later.
Palmeiro smiles politely. For nearly 11 years, besides the occasional phone interview and a documentary produced about his college baseball team, he’s disappeared from public life. But now he wants to empty his soul. When the waiter leaves he turns his shoulders to face me.
“This isn’t how I envisioned my life to be.”
Palmeiro’s story really begins at the point where his life, as he knew it, ended -- inside Rayburn House on Capitol Hill. In March 2005, steroids had moved from a baseball problem to a national dilemma. Federal prosecutors were prepping for trial in the BALCO laboratory case, involving, among others, Barry Bonds’ personal trainer. Reports surfaced that Mark McGwire was also linked to a steroid ring during an FBI investigation in the 1990s. And a month earlier, Jose Canseco released his tell-all memoir, claiming some of the biggest names in the game -- including Palmeiro -- were users. So far, however -- at least to the public’s knowledge -- not a single star had tested positive for steroids, but trust was eroding.
Up until the day of the hearing, Palmeiro’s career had been one long direct path toward baseball immortality. Well-respected in the game and lauded for his charitable work, each year he’d scribble his goals for the upcoming season into a spiral notebook. As he entered likely his final season, the 40-year-old craved something more than statistics.
“I wanted to be celebrated for my career, the same way (Derek) Jeter was,” he says. “I’m not saying I’m on his level, but I wanted Major League Baseball to say, ‘This guy did it the right way. This is the guy we want for the face of baseball.’”
During Spring Training, he flew to Washington, D.C. from Florida, where the Orioles were based. Under oath, alongside McGwire, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa, he emphatically wagged his finger (“That was one of my biggest mistakes,” he later said) and told a roomful of Congressmen, “I have never used steroids. Period.”
It wasn’t just a denial. Palmeiro, with his relatively average build, positioned himself as the antithesis to the scientifically cultivated baseball superheroes. Congressman Tom Davis, who organized the hearing, felt Palmeiro was so believable he invited him to join the newly formed Zero Tolerance committee to speak to kids about the dangers of steroids. But just six weeks later during a routine screening, Palmeiro received a call from the Players Association that he’d tested positive for stanozolol, a steroid commonly known as Winstrol and widely available underground in fitness clubs across the country.
Palmeiro was adamant he was innocent and ordered an appeal. He claimed the positive result was likely from a tainted B-12 vitamin vial injected by his wife and given to him by teammate Miguel Tejada. News of the test wasn’t released to the public, while an appeal and then a grievance was filed. Palmeiro said, according to later testimony, that he hadn’t confided in his teammates or even his wife. “I was living on an island,” he says.
He played on, marching toward a historic milestone. But a fuse had been lit. Just after the All-Star break, in a game in Seattle, he worked the count, then slapped a double the opposite way to left -- it was classic Palmeiro. He became just the fourth player in major-league history -- alongside Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Eddie Murray -- to reach both 500 home runs and now 3,000 hits. The baseball world paused. Fans in Seattle stood to pay their respects, while his teammates rushed onto the field to encircle him.
“When I got to second, I didn’t feel like a person who just got 3,000 hits,” he says. “I felt like, OK, now I have to prepare for the destruction.”
Behind closed doors, his case was heard by an arbitration panel. The Players Association produced results of another test, three weeks after the initial sample, that came back negative (along with tests in 2003 and 2004 that were negative), and the result of a polygraph test they claimed proved his innocence. Major League Baseball’s lead counsel Francis Coonelly called Palmeiro “arrogant” and “desperate” and his denial “far-fetched.” And MLB couldn’t find a single instance of a B-12 vitamin vial tainted with stanozolol. The panel found Palmeiro’s protestations “compelling,” but without any evidence debunking the positive test his grievance was denied on Aug. 1.
With no other options before his suspension was announced, Palmeiro scrolled through his Rolodex -- he was close with the two most powerful baseball men in the country. His first play was to call then-Commissioner Bud Selig. After Palmeiro’s 3,000th hit, Selig had taken out a full-page ad in USA Today: “Congratulations Raffy, you never cease to amaze us,” the ad said. Selig, of course, was intimately familiar with Palmeiro’s situation and knew well the effects that revealing a positive steroid test would have on the public’s faith in the game.
“I called Selig and begged for my life,” Palmeiro says. But Selig, Palmeiro remembers, was dismissive. “He shit on me. ‘You know, man, I can’t do anything for you. After your suspension -- I’ll be here for you, anything you need,’ he told me.”
Palmeiro hung up the phone and, hoping for a stay at the 11th hour, called an old friend from his days with the Texas Rangers. George W. Bush was a minority owner during Palmeiro’s first stint with the team, and they’d talked about two weeks earlier, after Palmeiro’s 3,000th hit. He dialed the former President’s personal number.
“You and me go back a long ways,” Palmeiro remembers saying, then stating his case. “Baseball is going to suspend me on Monday, and I want you to know so you don’t look at me any differently.”
The President responded, as Palmeiro recalls, “Be strong. Whatever happens, you’ll be able to survive.” When Palmeiro put the phone down, he knew he was a dead man walking.
In the bottom of the ninth on July 31, Palmeiro hit a meaningless single to left field in a meaningless home game against the Chicago White Sox. For months, he’d quietly been consumed with trying to reverse the test and preserve his reputation. With the suspension looming, after the game, and without a word to his teammates, he collected his belongings and jetted off to Teterboro, New Jersey, with his wife Lynne and two sons, who were now aware of his situation.
When he woke up the next day, the explosion, and subsequent damage, was cataclysmic and total. Selig announced a 10-game suspension, making Palmeiro the first star to be suspended for steroids. Every news outlet in the country covered the story -- and baseball fans’ reactions ranged from shock to anger.
When his suspension finished, he returned to the field on what was supposed to be Rafael Palmeiro Appreciation Day in Baltimore. Instead he was greeted with a mix of boos and chants of his name. Over the next few games, one of the great hitters of his generation was a shell of himself. “I crawled the rest of the way,” he says. “I was barely functional.” He slogged through a 2-for-26 slump, then in September, after he’d missed several games due to injury, the Orioles advised him to take the rest of the season off.
“That’s how it ended – no announcement, no celebration. That was my retirement,” he says. “I got sent home.”
After the Orioles let him go, Palmeiro tried to stay in shape, hoping for an offer the next year, but no one was willing to take a flyer on a 40-year-old with a steroid past. When he knew his agent wasn’t going to call, the full force of shame struck him head on, and he retreated inside his palatial estate in the Dallas suburbs. His TV would flicker in his room, but he rarely watched it.
“I was done with baseball. I hated it,” he says. “It wasn’t like I had a void, like ‘what do I do now,’ it was, ‘let’s see if I survive today.’” When he achieved his first major milestone by belting home run number 500 while playing for the Texas Rangers in 2003, his two sons rushed onto the field and helped him tug down a tarp revealing a mural of Palmeiro plastered onto the right field wall. “They thought I hung the moon, man.”
In the days after the positive steroid test was announced, the Palmeiros flew from New Jersey to hide away at a friend’s house in Pebble Beach, California. Palmeiro turned the TV off, hoping to shield his sons from the public’s wrath. He agonized over how to tell them what was going on. But his boys, now 15 and 10, didn’t need to know the details to recognize their father was a broken man. “My kids never saw me the same,” Palmeiro says. “I was someone who didn’t care about anything.”
Inside his estate Palmeiro was struggling to understand how he’d strayed so far off his predestined path toward baseball’s highest honor. He told his wife he couldn’t leave Dallas, instead he’d turn off his phone, get in his car and drive around the city for hours. Since he was growing up in Miami, hitting a baseball was a solvable equation -- his mind was structured to decipher it. But this was different. He’d fixate on conversations during that final year and turn them inside out, replaying every word as if watching himself in a movie, trying to figure out some way back in time.
“You should talk to someone,” his wife would tell him. But who could possibly understand? The man she married, the quiet, determined man, was now mostly catatonic, “like a zombie,” she says.
Meanwhile, Congress had opened up a perjury investigation against Palmeiro from his testimony in March 2005. Ex-teammates, fear of guilt by association, all but avoided him, and baseball fans had begun to wonder if his entire persona was contrived. One evening, former Oriole Brian Roberts texted him. They hadn’t spoken in a while and Palmeiro picked up the phone and called his old friend. Roberts, though, said he had mistakenly texted Palmeiro instead of another teammate. They spoke for a couple minutes anyway -- it was cordial, nothing more.
As the days melted into months, Palmeiro’s anger began to show. In the car, or alone in his room, he’d rage against the permanence of his reality. Then at a youth summer league game, he exploded. His sons were now local stars. Patrick was a hard-hitting third baseman at Heritage High School, while Preston was a left-handed first baseman in local youth leagues with the same sweet swing as his dad. Palmeiro’s only real connection to the outside world was through their games. He’d perch near the dugout, wearing wraparound sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low.
During a summer tournament, Preston had been struggling through a slump, before doubling off the fence. Then, in the next at-bat, he belted the ball clean over the fence and over the trees directly behind center field. As he was trotting around the bases, one of the opposing moms muttered, “He’s probably on steroids like his dad.”
Palmeiro, who was near the dugout when someone told him what the parent said, turned and bounded up the steps to confront the woman, leaning over her. “That’s bull,” he screamed. “If you got something to say about my son, you say it to my face.” Lynne stood up next to her man and her own repressed anger burst out. Frustrated at her husband, at baseball, at her own crumbling family, she too screamed at the parent.
The crowd was silent, the game stopped. Palmeiro looked around, then slunk back down to the dugout.
“You know what was hard?” he asks. “Going back to Baltimore and being booed and having signs at the ballpark -- liar, steroid monster. I could see that happening on the road in Boston or Toronto. People are bad, throwing (stuff) at me. But I couldn’t see that from the fans that two weeks before were embracing me. I’ve never been back to Baltimore.”
It was 11 years ago, but it’s yesterday. He speaks quickly, trying to get every thought out, then he’ll pause for long stretches as if focusing on a particular memory. He reaches down and takes a sip of sweet tea, then a burst of defiance comes over him.
“If I would have cheated this game, the way some of these guys cheated, I would have hit 700 home runs.” He laughs, a tight-lipped, half-hearted laugh.
By 2007, he found out Congress’ three-month perjury investigation ended with no charges being filed. In a 36-page document, investigators could find no “specific evidence that Mr. Palmeiro took steroids” before his testimony on Capitol Hill. The findings weren’t an exoneration, but he felt a sense of relief.
He began to see the possibility of a new life, and continued plans on a 92-acre mixed development plot that he invested $53 million of his own money. Shortly after, though, it all fell apart. The economy collapsed, the project was scrapped and he filed for bankruptcy. “He put himself in a situation he wasn’t ready for,” Lynne says. Palmeiro avoided financial ruin, but now fell back into depression.
Throughout everything, Palmeiro always had one hope of redemption. He’d always wanted to be in the Hall of Fame. It wasn’t just a whimsical dream. The statistical goals that he wrote down before each season were yearly projections he needed to be enshrined amongst the greats.
“Based on my credentials, what I did on the field equals first-ballot Hall of Famer, end of story,” he says.
The first year he was eligible, in 2011, he watched the results from his couch. Reporters were calling asking what he thought his chances were and how much the steroids would affect the Hall of Fame voting. But really they just wanted to know if he was a steroid user and unrepentant cheater, or a naive sap, or maybe an innocent man. He was polite and, if asked, he’d repeat that his positive test was a result of a tainted B-12 vial. Needing 75 percent of eligible baseball writers to vote him in, his heart sunk as he watched his name scroll across the bottom of his TV screen with just 11 percent of the vote, less than even admitted long-term steroid abuser Mark McGwire.
“That was like a knife in the back,” he says. “I knew I wasn’t going in the first year because of what happened, but I’m thinking 50 or 60 percent. They’ll punish me, then the second year I’ll get in.” The following year it increased slightly to 12.6 percent, but in 2013 he dipped down to 8.8 percent. “The writers said, ‘What happened to you at the end, nullifies everything you did.’” He put on a brave face, but he was devastated.
Since he had stopped playing, he’d kept his trophy room closed, as if to keep the memories he wanted to avoid locked inside. One day he decided he wanted to go in and hold the ball he’d been given for his 3,000th hit. For years it represented all the shame, all the anger and sadness. Now, for once he wanted to feel a sense of accomplishment again. But there was a problem, he couldn’t find it anywhere. He searched his room, the kids’ rooms, the garage. He needed that ball.
A short time later he sold his 1937 Cadillac convertible and when the buyer came to pick up the car, Rafael went outside with Lynne and popped the trunk -- and there it was, in bubble wrap with a sheet attached explaining its historical significance, along with the ball from his 3,008th hit, the one that allowed him to pass the great Frank Robinson in career total bases. He picked it up, held it for a moment, then tossed it aside and shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he told his wife.
For so long, Lynne had placated Palmeiro. She quietly watched as he had used his depression as a “crutch for any sort of behavior.” She had begun to see a therapist herself. You can’t try to change him, she was told. And she didn’t, but watching him flip the ball away, after she’d been by his side through every single one of those hits, struck a nerve.
“No, Rafael.” She said, looking up at him. “It does matter. I don’t give a shit what anyone says. You did that.”
She took the ball out of the wrapper and placed it in the trophy room. When the Hall of Fame vote came up again in 2014, his worst fears were realized. He received only 4.4 percent of the vote and fell off the ballot completely, ineligible for another 12 years, his fate in the hands of the Veterans Committee. Reporters stopped calling. For so long, he repeated his defense of the positive test. Now there was no one left to plead with. Whether he took steroids or not no longer seemed to matter. Because the only thing worse than people not believing you is apathy -- it’s people not even caring.
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