Greatest 21 Days Baseball Profiles

Mariners manager Lou Piniella went out to the home plate umpire to complain. Yankees pitcher Jason Grimsley was throwing pitches that were moving the way they shouldn't, Piniella believed - they weren't natural, The New York Times wrote . ''Grimsley was doing something to the baseball,'' Piniella told The Times after that May 1999 game. Whether Grimsley was doctoring the baseball or not, he did do things that weren't natural . Seven years later, Grimsley received a shipment at his Arizona home. Inside were two kits of human growth hormone, as outlined in the Mitchell Report . Following soon behind the shipment were FBI agents. Grimsley soon admitted that his pitching wasn't natural. He used steroids and HGH. As news of the admissions came out, Grimsley's pitching career came to an unnatural conclusion . It was a pitching career that had its beginnings in 1985, when Grimsley was taken by the Phillies in the 10th round of the draft. He...

The Stockton Record asked Ed Sprague directly in 2008 about steroids. He responded that he couldn't condemn all steroid users, because he'd used Andro and amphetamines. "I took Andro, and they banned that," Sprague told The Record . "So, am I the cleanest guy? No, but I tried to be as strong and as healthy as I could as long as I could for my career." However he got healthy, Sprague's career was one that lasted for parts of 11 seasons , one where he hit a game-winning World Series home run and one where he hit 36 home runs in one season. It began in 1988, taken by the Blue Jays in the first round of the draft. He had done well in college, but almost made Toronto question why they'd drafted him. In one College World Series inning, the infielder booted three balls , leading to a Stanford loss. "All I wanted was some redemption for me," Sprague told reporters . "They just kept hitting it to me and I just kept kicking it....

Traded to the Yankees earlier in the summer, Denny Neagle started making connections in his new town, New York. Among those connections, was a man Neagle met at a club . Soon, Neagle called that man, looking to make a purchase. That man was Kirk Radomski. And Neagle was looking for HGH . Neagle, Radomski recalled to George Mitchell, appeared already familiar with the drug . Neagle became a regular customer, of not only HGH, but anabolic steroids, as well. It was a meeting and relationship detailed in the 2007 Mitchell Report on performance enhancing drug use in baseball. The Mitchell Report itself was also the final disintegration of a once great career, but one that had long since self-destructed . It was a career that began 18 years before that report was published, with Neagle taken in the third-round of the 1989 draft by the Twins. Neagle was a virtual hometown product , a Maryland native who played his college ball at the University of Minnesota. Neagle began 1990 at...

Young players can learn a lot from veterans. For Dann Howitt , among the things he learned from a veteran, Jose Canseco , was steroid use, something Howitt admitted in January 2010, according to The Grand Rapids Press . Howitt's experiment with steroids was brief, he told The Press, a three week period in mid-1991. He made the comments after one-time teammate Mark McGuire 's own steroid admissions. "I felt like I had to keep up. Against my better judgment, I started to take them," Howitt told The Press . "I stopped because of how steroids affected me. It was Canseco who stepped in and told me, 'No more.' I had all sorts of personality changes. I wasn’t sleeping well. My body just couldn't handle them." Steroid use or no steroid use, Howitt's major league stat line includes only five home runs in 115 games, one of those home runs coming in 1991. Another, more memorable one, came two years later and involved Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan . ...