Major League Baseball
Between the seams: Beat writers walking on eggshells

By Liz Halloran
The Hartford Courant

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USA Today baseball writer Chuck Johnson has had a professional rapport with All-Star outfielder Barry Bonds since the player's early days with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and through the years they have spoken often as Bonds' on-the-field feats dazzled.

"I've had the occasion to talk to him many, many times on the milestones of the year," Johnson said. "I've had a relationship with Bonds."

But this spring, Johnson and other reporters covering major-league baseball found those working relationships with Bonds and other players a bit trickier to navigate as the specter of a steroid scandal clouded training camp.

It forced reporters to alternately ask tough questions and tread cautiously around players like Bonds, now a San Francisco Giant, whose names have been linked with the ongoing federal investigation into the distribution of performance-enhancing drugs to professional athletes.

"Back at USA Today, it's a big subject and a major story going into the year. The questions have to be asked," Johnson said. Bonds, whose home-run records would be tainted if he tests positive, has denied taking steroids.

"It's an awkward situation," Johnson said. "Most sportswriters try to tiptoe around the subject; it's not like they want to hit it head-on."

Though the days are gone when sportswriters routinely socialized with athletes, delving into controversial issues can be difficult for baseball beat reporters, who essentially have to live with the players day after day for nine months a year.

With the new baseball season underway and no new public developments in the investigation, the scandal has receded from view.

That wasn't the case earlier this spring, when training camps hummed with rumors about a federal investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, alleged to be involved in an international doping scandal.
 
When Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi, who has testified privately in the BALCO investigation, showed up weighing less than he did last season, reporters pounced on it as a story. The issue quieted until March 2, when the San Francisco Chronicle reported that unnamed sources identified Bonds, Giambi, Yankee Gary Sheffield and three other players as having received steroids from BALCO.

"When that leak happened, all the reporters were walking around on eggshells," said Cecelia Tan, who attended the Yankees' Tampa training camp to report a book she's writing. "It was very painful for everybody."

Sportswriters have taken their lumps for not trying to get to the bottom of the steroid problem in baseball sooner. But Johnson of USA Today defended the profession.

"We don't make the rules of the game, and the rules of the game had no drug-testing policy," he said. "We're baseball beat writers, and we cover the game as the game is presented."

Johnson said he's like most beat reporters: He wants to concentrate on covering the game. That being said, he added, "I don't think I've asked my last steroid question."

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