Gory Road: The ruinous aftermath of the steroid era

I was ready to do anything to get to the big leagues. . . .So I went to the gym, went over to the biggest gym rat/muscle head guy I could find and said, 'I need to get big.' He said drugs were the way and I said, 'Where do I sign?' —Dan Naulty, Salt Lake Buzz (1995, 97-98)

In 1997, pitchers Dan Naulty, Dan Serafini, Brett Roberts, Shane Bowers, Kevin Legault, and catcher Jeff Horn were members of the Triple-A affiliate of the Minnesota Twins, the Salt Lake Buzz. Only two of them, Naulty and Serafini, managed to make it to the major leagues and stick for more than a handful of games. Naulty even won a World Series ring pitching for the New York Yankees in 1999. As for their teammates, Bowers appeared in five games in 1997 and never returned to the major leagues. Roberts, Legault, and Horn never played higher than the Triple-A level.

Naulty and Serafini shared something else besides major league careers. They used steroids to get there. Naulty regrets his decision. Serafini doesn't.

Most of the discussions about the fall-out from the steroid era focus on how cheating ruined the game of baseball. In Naulty's case, however, the devastation was much more personally damaging. In person and in print, Naulty openly shares the story of his descent into a personal hell that began with being sexaully abused as a child, progressed through steroids, speed, and alcohol, and nearly ended with suicide. The thread through all of this, Naulty explains, was a desperate need for acceptance and love. By the time he hit bottom, he was taking speed to recover from the hangovers, and HGH and testosterone to stay healthy and bulked up.

Miraculously, he made the decision to quit the PEDs and baseball before they killed him. Since his retirement, Naulty has been trying to make amends for the sins of his past. After retiring from baseball, he entered the seminary and became a pastor. And now he uses his life story to preach about the real-life dangers of temptation. When contacted by the Mitchell Committee in 2007, Naulty admitted to using PEDs and spoke candidly about the details of his own usage.

Just because I have become a Christian doesn't mean I can give back all that I took from those so-called friends, as I stabbed them in the back on the way out the door, to another year of chopping rocks in the minors. —Dan Naulty, doctoral candidate in Biblical Studies, 2007

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