The game Inside the secret world of major league baseball's power brokers

IT WAS THE most tumultuous time in baseball history. Between 1992 and 2010, a commissioner was forced out, there was a 234-day strike, home run records were completely obliterated and an entire generation of stars was tainted by steroids. Now that much of the drama has passed, it's time for armchair historians to determine how the sport got through it all, and to begin doling out praise and blame. (It's sports, after all. We want to know who the winners and losers are, even if it's the executives who control the game off the field.) Jon Pessah's "The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball's Power Brokers" takes the first real crack at it. In 650 pages, Pessah uses Commissioner Bud Selig; Donald Fehr, the head of the players union; and the Yankees owner George M. Steinbrenner to bring us inside the boardrooms, front offices and hotel conference centers where baseball's leaders confronted issues that nearly shattered the game. Pessah was a founding editor of ESPN the Magazine, and his book's strength is its comprehensiveness. In clear and accessible prose, it covers strikes, steroids and everything in between. Given all that happened, it's not an easy task. The most memorable sections are the ones about Steinbrenner. Pessah deftly captures the man's heavy-handed - and often underhanded - leadership. The Boss's lifetime ban for having a shady character dig up dirt on his star player Dave Winfield was lifted in 1993. In the years that followed, Steinbrenner's domineering style helped the Yankees re-establish themselves as the game's premier franchise. For younger fans who aren't aware, the depictions of Steinbrenner's behavior serve as a vivid lesson that before the Yankees started winning again in the mid-1990s, he did a lot of awful things. The Steinbrenner stories are spliced between ones about Selig and Fehr. After a few hundred pages of this back and forth, it feels as if you have to eat your turnips - chomping through labor relations with Selig and Fehr - to get to dessert, which is the drama of Steinbrenner. But there are more significant problems. It's not clear who the intended audience for the book is. It is not nearly as absorbing as Michael Lewis's "Moneyball," with its little-engine-that-could story of how the Oakland Athletics, a smallmarket team, managed to compete with juggernauts like the Yankees. That statistics fairy tale appealed to sports fans and nonfans alike. And "The Game" does not have as much new information as "Game of Shadows," by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, which exposed in incredible detail how sluggers like Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, and a slew of track and football stars, doped their way into the record books. What's more, Pessah gives us far too much baseball minutiae - for example, how Selig and other owners cajoled local governments into paying for their new stadiums. Baseball insiders are probably the group most likely to enjoy "The Game." But they too will be disappointed, because there isn't enough that's fresh to keep them entertained. Since it covers the labor negotiations in such detail, perhaps the book may be best suited for freshmen entering Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations - the undergraduate program that has produced sports commissioners and some of the industry's most accomplished labor lawyers. Pessah's most glaring misstep, however, concerns the praise and criticism he metes out on the issue of steroids. He casts Selig as a thin-skinned, image-obsessed executive who looked the other way when the question arose. He writes that Selig hid behind players' privacy rights to avoid drug testing as home run records fell and the game's popularity soared. When Selig realized a few years later that he needed to burnish his legacy, he then became an anti-steroid crusader, Pessah says. EQUAL CRITICISM IS not cast on Fehr - the union chief charged with protecting the players. In Pessah's account, Fehr was late to tackle the issue, but he gets far more sympathy than Selig. It was just too hard, Pessah says, for Fehr to educate his players about why they shouldn't cheat or break the law. "How can you tell players to stop taking legal supplements, even though you know some of them may contain illegal substances?" he asks. "What do you tell the many Hispanic players who grew up using steroids - which are legal in their countries - when they return home to play winter ball?" The truth was that everyone, from Selig to Fehr to the news media, was slow to realize that steroids were taking over the game. Perhaps it was naïveté. Perhaps we all loved the home run too much. So yes, Selig deserves criticism. If you are in charge of the factory, and the factory puts out a faulty product, that's your responsibility. But once the severity of the problem became clear, Selig and Fehr went in different directions. Selig pushed hard for robust testing, while Fehr fought it at every turn. One of Fehr's deputies, Gene Orza, even tipped off players - including the slugger Alex Rodriguez - before they were to be tested. Whatever motivated Selig, you have to acknowledge that what he did made the game fairer and cleaner. And by reducing drug use, he made the game safer and healthier for players - something more often associated with unions than with owners. Pessah's contempt for Selig is matched at times by his ire toward the Justice Department, which led the groundbreaking Baleo investigation into steroids. The attention that inquiry received was the main reason the public's view of the issue changed. Yet Pessah writes that the pursuit of players' drug tests during the probe into Baleo, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, was "the first indication that the government's investigation is more about punishing baseball players than stopping the distribution of steroids - and it won't be the last." That's the kind of statement that leaves me wondering if Pessah is an accurate and impartial reporter. Here are the facts: At least five men pleaded guilty in the Baleo case for distributing drugs and three of them went to prison. The only players who were charged were ones the government determined had lied in the course of the investigation. Ignoring the truth to ding the government and baseball owners smacks of the same pro-union sentiment that pervaded sports coverage of doping during the socalled steroid era. That coverage didn't help to educate the public then, and now it certainly doesn't help us better understand what actually happened. MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, a Washington correspondent for The Times, formerly covered performance-enhancing drugs and labor issues for the paper's Sports section.

The action is in the boardroom, not the ballpark, in this dramatic account of the business side of baseball. Journalist Pessah follows the 23-year reign of retiring baseball commissioner Bud Selig. During his tenure, the sport wrestled with labor conflicts over ballooning player salaries, including a work stoppage that cancelled the 1994 World Series; a split between large-market and small-market teams over revenue-sharing; and the simmering scandal of steroid abuse, which threatens to wreck the game (after helping rescue it by fostering crowd-pleasing home run hitters). Pessah sometimes styles Selig as the man who saved baseball, but that judgment is belied by the hard-hitting substance of his narrative, which often shows the comissioner using underhanded tactics and making ill-considered decisions in pursuit of the narrow interests of owners (especially himself). Depicted as more heroic are Don Fehr, the players' union chief who parried Selig's maneuvers, and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, the always entertaining tyrant who built great teams while improving the sport's finances. Pessah includes engaging play-by-play from key games, but his focus is on contract negotiations, revenue models, politics, deal-cutting, and the commercial calculations behind moving a team or injecting steroids. The resulting account of off-field strategizing is as engrossing as any stadium showdown. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.