| On a quiet street on Long Island early on a December morning in 2005, more than fifty federal agents stood outside a lovely new home waiting for the front door to be opened. When it did, there stood the central figure in one of the biggest scandals in sports history: Kirk Radomski.
Radomski was a regular New York kid who, from the age of fifteen had the amazing fortune of working in the Mets clubhouse. The focus of his job was to give the players whatever they wanted or needed—he got their uniforms ready, packed up their homes at the end of the season, cashed their checks, and helped them beat the drug tests that would have led to suspension. And at the end of the 1986 season he even led the World Champions down Broadway during their victory parade. Eventually, he graduated to helping in other ways: providing them with steroids and human growth hormones. By the time the Feds knocked on his door, he was the main clubhouse supplier of performance-enhancing drugs to almost three hundred baseball players.
Under threat of a long prison sentence—and after being identified by players he’d helped—he cooperated with Senator George Mitchell to produce the Mitchell Report, providing names and dates. Now he’s ready to tell the whole story to the world. Radomski made little money from these transactions, and in this stunning book he will recount what baseball knew about the problem, his life since the report came out, and who took what. This is the tale of a young man seeing his heroes turn into clay, and the degradation of a once great sport into the drug-addicted spectacle it has become.
Annotation:
In his ten years as a clubhouse gopher for the New York Mets, Kirk Radomski was responsible for helping fulfill some of the basic needs of the ballplayers. Whether they required a certain favorite candy bar, a lucky jockstrap, or a case of human growth hormone, Radomski was the "go-to" guy. Eventually, he became a key cooperator in the George Mitchell-led steroids investigation that irreparably tarnished America's favorite pastime. In this tell-all, he names many of the 300 players whom he personally supplied with performance-enhancing drugs, and reveals that the rampant steroid use was no secret to anyone connected to the game.
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