The Dark Side of the Diamond

The Trial That Should Have Changed Baseball

I’ve been digging into the 1985 Pittsburgh Drug Trials for Dark Side of the Diamond. This wasn’t a part of the game that got talked about growing up. No highlight reels. No documentaries. No Cooperstown plaques with a footnote. But the more I read, the more it feels like one of the most important and quietly buried moments in baseball history.

The trial took place in a federal courtroom in Pittsburgh. The players weren’t on the field—they were in suits, testifying under immunity. Names I knew: Keith Hernandez, Dave Parker, Tim Raines, Lonnie Smith, John Milner. Not being celebrated, but explaining how deep the cocaine problem in baseball ran. This wasn’t about one or two wild nights. This was about everyday usage. In the dugout. In the locker room. In uniform.

Milner said he got “red juice,” a liquid stimulant, from Willie Mays. Said he got green pills from Willie Stargell. Willie Mays. Willie Stargell. That’s royalty. That’s myth. That’s Americana. And here’s a guy, under oath, saying they were handing out amphetamines. He also said greenies were sometimes just left in his locker anonymously. Whether Mays and Stargell were knowingly enabling anything or just doing what everyone else was doing isn’t even the point. The point is that this stuff was woven into the routine.

Greenies—amphetamines—weren’t some dirty little secret. They were part of the rhythm in most clubhouses. Some players later said they were as easy to get as aspirin. Sometimes handed out by trainers. Sometimes passed around on team flights. Mike Schmidt, years after his Hall of Fame career ended, put it bluntly: “Amphetamines were widely available in major-league clubhouses… amphetamine use in baseball is both far more common and has been going on a lot longer than steroid abuse.”

Phil Garner echoed the psychology behind it: “It becomes a psychological addiction and a crutch… Some guys get on amphetamines and think they can't play without them.”

And I get it.

I used Adderall for three years. Prescribed. Legal. Controlled. It was powerful. It focused me. I got shit done. I could lock in for hours. But it also messed with my memory. It changed the rhythm of my thinking. I lost the thread of who I was a little bit. When I came off it, it took six months to feel clear again—like coming out of a fog. So yeah, I can understand why players used greenies. It wasn’t just about performance. It was about coping. Surviving. Trying to get through 162 games in 180 days, half of them on the road, playing hurt, chasing incentives, trying to keep your job, keep your edge. It wasn’t performance enhancement as science. It was performance maintenance as necessity.

Tim Raines didn’t try to sugarcoat it when he testified: “I kept cocaine in the back pocket of my uniform pants during games… I only slid headfirst when stealing bases so as not to break the vial.”

Keith Hernandez estimated that 40% of players were using cocaine in the early ’80s. That number wasn’t a scandal. It was a shrug.

Brian McRae, years later, painted a picture that’s almost absurd in its normalcy: “There were always two pots of coffee brewing in the clubhouse, one conventional and the other laced with stimulants. I had to make sure I got the unleaded.”

And yet, when all of this came out—in court, in public—Major League Baseball barely flinched. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth handed down suspensions to a dozen players. Then quietly commuted them. Community service. A fine. A public apology. No one missed time. No careers were derailed. No rule changes. No long-term plan to address addiction or accountability.

The league’s priority wasn’t justice. It was containment. Optics. Clean up the headlines and move on.

What gets me is how quickly the story faded. The steroid era came along and got all the fire, the hearings, the shame, the asterisks, the moralizing. Guys got locked out of the Hall of Fame for bulking up. But this? Cocaine in the dugout? Amphetamines passed around by legends? Just a few uncomfortable months in 1985 that everyone moved on from.

Bud Selig, years later, even admitted it: “In the ’80s we had a terrible cocaine problem. Did we have a policy? Did anything happen? No.”

So why didn’t this stick? Is it just because it wasn’t physical? Because it didn’t add visible bulk or show up in home run totals the way steroids did?

Let’s sit with that a minute.

Because if a player could lock in, stay hyperfocused for nine innings, react a fraction of a second faster, have just enough edge to lay off a slider low and away—that’s enhancement. That’s not marginal. That’s meaningful. And over the course of a season? That changes stats. That affects careers.

So what’s the difference?

Is it that steroids are seen as unnatural, while greenies were “tradition”? Is it because amphetamines were passed down from generation to generation like superstition—just part of the game’s fabric? Or is it because mental enhancement is harder to quantify? You can’t measure alertness. There’s no stat line for clarity.

But clarity changes everything. Focus is performance.

If I’m being honest, I think about how much Adderall changed me—not physically, but mentally. I was sharper. I could work longer. I could push through distractions and fatigue. But there was a cost. My memory suffered. My ability to rest and just be suffered. I was functioning, but I wasn’t really present. And it wasn’t until I got off of it that I realized how much I’d lost in the process.

So again—if players were popping greenies, or using Ritalin or Adderall later under a “therapeutic use exemption,” to get through the grind, and it helped them lock in, how is that not a performance edge? And if everyone was doing it, does that make it okay? Or just more deeply embedded in the culture?

Maybe it’s not about fairness. Maybe it’s about what fans can see. Steroids reshaped bodies. They broke records. They disrupted nostalgia. But amphetamines? They were invisible. Quiet. Baked in. They didn’t change the scoreboard—they just helped keep the machine running.

But that’s still a machine built on something artificial.

If you’ve got guys grinding through 162 on stimulants because it’s the only way to survive the schedule, and you’ve got a league that’s fine with that because it protects the product… is that any more “pure” than the home run era?

Or is it just easier—for the league, the media, the fans—to protect the illusion than to reckon with the truth?

You grow up thinking the game is one thing. Then you look back and realize how much of it was running on fumes, powder, pills, and denial. I’m not judging the players. Most of them were just trying to stay afloat. It’s the culture around them that failed. The league that looked the other way. The press that didn’t want to dig too deep. The fans who, maybe, didn’t want to know.

That’s what this series is about. Dark Side of the Diamond isn’t about taking shots. It’s about looking at the corners the camera never lingers on. The 1985 Pittsburgh Drug Trials should have been a reckoning. Instead, they were a dress rehearsal—for a league that’s always been better at managing scandal than confronting it.

Everyone knew. And no one really cared.

And maybe the scariest part of all?

It worked.