A Baseball Career Without Steroids

Sal Fasano refused performance-enhancing drugs and watched rivals grow bigger -- and richer. But, he asks, who's the real ballplayer?

A Tough Decision

There was, once, temptation. The year was 2000, and Salvatore Frank Fasano was a struggling major-league baseball player batting .214 as a reserve catcher with the Oakland Athletics. All around him, he saw players suddenly, well, growing. Bigger. Stronger. More powerful. They had left at the end of the '99 season with pretzel-thin arms and twiggy legs, then returned as members of some sort of Incredible Hulk tribute band. Fasano, meanwhile, was as lumpy and fleshy as ever -- a saggy belly, water- balloon triceps, a mashed-potato physique. "In this game, people notice how you look," says Brian Johnson, a former major-league catcher. "Sal didn't look too good."

So it was that Fasano found himself on the phone with his younger brother Mike, a former professional power lifter who knew a thing or two about the effectiveness of performance-enhancing drugs. "I never used, but they were all over the sport," says Mike. "Well, there was this guy in the gym where I was working out who was selling this undetectable steroid that made people really big."

Ever since Fasano was selected by Kansas City in the 37th round of the 1993 June amateur draft, friends and family members have watched in dismay as he's been bypassed and overlooked. The routine became mind-numbingly familiar: Fasano would put up great minor-league numbers, sniff a promotion -- and then hear that another player was getting the nod. "It frustrated Sal, but it really frustrated me," says Mike. "All I wanted was for him to get a legitimate shot." Hence, the phone call:

Mike: "Sal, I think you really should consider taking stuff."

Sal: "I just don't know …"

Mike: "Look around you. I know a lot of guys are doing it -- it's obvious. Why not make yourself better?"

Sal: "It doesn't seem right."

Mike: "Right? You can be either a mediocre player or a great player. You can make either $200,000 a year or $10 million a year."

For the ensuing couple of minutes, Sal Fasano thought about it. Really, really thought about it. He grew up in Hanover Park, Illinois, dreaming of one day reaching the major leagues. While other kids were chasing girls or hanging out on the corner, Sal could be found at the nearest sandlot, his clothes coated in dirt, his smile as wide as Lake Michigan. He was nine years old the first time he picked up a bat. When he heard of this thing called Little League, he begged his parents to sign him up. To Vincenzo and Nella Fasano, fresh-off-the-boat Italian immigrants from Calabria, if their little Sammy (as Sal was nicknamed) needed to partake in this odd ritual with a stick of wood, so be it.

"My first team was the Hanover Park Braves," he says. "The very first game I ever played in, I hit a home run." Fasano had watched his father work as a carpenter, his mother as a custodian. As he honed his skills on the baseball diamond, he began to crave the golden ring -- the fame and fortune that accompanied major-league success. He wanted … the dream.

Sal: "Mike, ten years from now, I'm gonna have to look at myself in the mirror, and I'm gonna ask myself whether I did it the right way. I might be a fool, but I have to be true to myself."

And that was that.

Eight years later, Fasano is here, sitting at a table inside Bethlehem Brew Works in Pennsylvania, picking over a slab of grilled chicken with his right hand and twirling a canister of Copenhagen in his left. He is a large man, six-two, 265 pounds, with brown eyes, puffy lips, and cheeks coated by three-day-old scruff. In a couple of hours, he will report to nearby Coca-Cola Park, where he will sit on the bench and chew tobacco as his Richmond Braves take on the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs in a remarkably unremarkable Triple-A baseball game. He is, at 36, a backup minor-league catcher, traveling via bus from one small town to another, lodging in Comfort Inns and Howard Johnsons, playing before small crowds in poorly lit stadiums and spreading out the allotted $20-per-day meal money on Burger King breakfasts and KFC lunches.

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Soldiers' combat clothing is not supposed to be ironed, according to an unwritten rule. That, however, did not prevent one sergeant from slightly massaging the regulation. "Gentlemen," said the sergeant to his troops, "I cannot order you to press your combat dress. Nevertheless, for tomorrow's parade, uniforms will be allowed only four wrinkles, with one wrinkle running directly down the center and rear of each leg."

-- Capt. James Fisher