<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nJason Giambi showed up for his press conference at Yankee Stadium on February 10 looking ruddy and glowing, his hair still wet from the shower. It was as if he'd just come from the gym, and maybe he had. Maybe he wanted us to know how hard he was working to win us back. As he took his seat, the men beside him\u2014his agent, Arn Tellem; his GM, Brian Cashman; and his manager, Joe Torre\u2014appeared shrunken and pale in comparison, with their thinning hair and drawn faces. But then Giambi began to speak, and his massive size took on a different aspect. Suddenly, he was vulnerable and exposed.\n\n For ten weeks, Giambi had occupied a sort of purgatory, tormented daily by a moralizing media that demanded he \"come clean\" and by powerful personal exigencies that forbade him from doing precisely that. Today the reporters in attendance knew very well he wasn't going to confess to anything\u2014his contract, with $82 million more still to be paid, was at stake. And yet there Giambi was, apologizing in his hoarse tenor for using steroids. He didn't say the word (or in fact confess to anything), but you couldn't possibly mistake his meaning.\n\n At Giambi's right, Torre did his best imitation of an Easter Island statue, staring at the ground and tightly gripping a small bottle of water with both hands. Beside him, Cashman had the detached attitude of a guy doing somebody a favor. (You were reminded that the Giambi acquisition had been George Steinbrenner's idea.) Only Tellem, to Giambi's left, seemed to be fully inhabiting the moment. At one point, he scolded a reporter who had inquired whether Giambi thought he could, minus steroids, be an MVP-caliber player again. Before Giambi could respond, Tellem snapped: \"That's like asking, &#145;When did you stop beating your wife?'\"\n\nJason Giambi showed up for his press conference at Yankee Stadium on February 10 looking ruddy and glowing, his hair still wet from the shower. It was as if he'd just come from the gym, and maybe he had. Maybe he wanted us to know how hard he was working to win us back. As he took his seat, the men beside him\u2014his agent, Arn Tellem; his GM, Brian Cashman; and his manager, Joe Torre\u2014appeared shrunken and pale in comparison, with their thinning hair and drawn faces. But then Giambi began to speak, and his massive size took on a different aspect. Suddenly, he was vulnerable and exposed.\n\n For ten weeks, Giambi had occupied a sort of purgatory, tormented daily by a moralizing media that demanded he \"come clean\" and by powerful personal exigencies that forbade him from doing precisely that. Today the reporters in attendance knew very well he wasn't going to confess to anything\u2014his contract, with $82 million more still to be paid, was at stake. And yet there Giambi was, apologizing in his hoarse tenor for using steroids. He didn't say the word (or in fact confess to anything), but you couldn't possibly mistake his meaning.\n\n At Giambi's right, Torre did his best imitation of an Easter Island statue, staring at the ground and tightly gripping a small bottle of water with both hands. Beside him, Cashman had the detached attitude of a guy doing somebody a favor. (You were reminded that the Giambi acquisition had been George Steinbrenner's idea.) Only Tellem, to Giambi's left, seemed to be fully inhabiting the moment. At one point, he scolded a reporter who had inquired whether Giambi thought he could, minus steroids, be an MVP-caliber player again. Before Giambi could respond, Tellem snapped: \"That's like asking, &#145;When did you stop beating your wife?'\"\n\n Later, alone on the podium, Giambi was asked to gauge the extent to which steroids had shaped his career. He turned to his right, to where Tellem was apparently standing off camera, and exchanged a fleeting, complicit smile with the agent. \"That's like, that's a question that, you know, that's like asking me if I beat my wife.\" He chuckled incredulously, then paused, as if sensing he'd muffed the line.\n\n Giambi's a ballplayer. Bons mots aren't his thing. Tellem is one of the shrewdest agents in sports, a man who says he learned everything he knows about his business from watching The Godfather. The lingering glance Giambi had given him had meant \"We know how to answer this question, don't we?\" In that one look, you saw all the qualities that had brought Giambi to this difficult day: his eagerness to please, his lack of sophistication, and his propensity for identifying closely with the men he admires.\n\n For the occasion, the Yankees had made a show of welcoming back a prodigal son, but somewhere out of view their lawyers were hanging on Giambi's every syllable for ammunition they could use in their efforts to void his contract. Media in front, lawyers behind: Jason Giambi, who wants only to be loved, had enemies everywhere.\n\n It was his adulation of the major league's home-run king that led Giambi to Barry Bonds's trainer, Greg Anderson, who in November 2002 reportedly introduced him to the muscle-building elixirs of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO). A year later, at a grand-jury hearing, Giambi admitted what no active Major League Baseball player had ever before admitted: that he had used illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Last December, when what was believed to be his testimony was leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle, Giambi became the poster boy for baseball's biggest debacle since the Black Sox scandal in 1919, when eight players threw the World Series.\n\n At the press conference, Giambi asserted, \"I'm a man.\" In interviews, his friends echo these words, but you sense they fear he may be too sensitive\u2014too earnest, too nice\u2014to deal with what lies ahead. Ultimately, Giambi lacks Barry Bonds's formidable self-sufficiency, his ability to say \"fuck you\" to the world, and while this may be his saving grace as a man, it is his tragic flaw as a professional athlete under such harsh scrutiny.\n\n Consider the testimony Bonds and Giambi gave before the BALCO grand jury, as reported in the Chronicle. Bonds, baseball's greatest hitter and its most sophisticated student of nutrition and conditioning, claimed he'd thought the steroid drops he used were flaxseed oil. (\"Flaxseed oil,\" muses the Toronto Blue Jays' Ted Lilly, who has pitched against Bonds. \"That's comedy.\") Asked why BALCO had been testing him for steroids since 2001, the Giants slugger shrugged: \"I have no idea.\" Confronted with evidence that his testosterone level was excessively high, he said, \"I don't understand this piece of paper.\" Each time the prosecutor mentioned the name of a performance-enhancing drug, he replied, \"I've never heard of it.\" Throughout his testimony, he bobbed and weaved, at times self-righteous, at times facetious.\n\n Giambi, on the other hand, proffered dutiful yeses and nos to questions. \"So you would [inject testosterone] in your arm?\" the prosecutor inquired. \"No, you wouldn't,\" Giambi explained. \"You'd put it in your ass.\" He obligingly named the muscle-building drugs he'd taken\u2014human growth hormone, plus two steroids: Deca Durabolin, available only by prescription, and tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), undetectable and manufactured by BALCO\u2014and iterated specifically when, where, and how. Mark Fainaru-Wada, one of the two Chronicle reporters who broke the grand-jury leaks, has read Giambi's testimony in its entirety. \"I came away feeling that here's a guy who was clearly telling the truth, which I found to be admirable,\" he says. \"He's a guy who doesn't hem and haw but tells you how he feels and what he thinks.\"\n\n Days after the press conference, in a written exchange with GQ, Giambi affirmed, \"This is a chance for me to show the type of person I am.\" He may not have been the BALCO witness with the most to lose\u2014that would be Bonds, chasing Aaron\u2014but he's surely the one who feels his loss most acutely. \"He wants to be well liked by everybody,\" says Jim Bastion, his former coach at South Hills High School. \"There are stars out there who couldn't give a rat's ass what we think of them, but Jason truly cares.\" It's a refrain you hear from nearly everyone who knows him.\n\n His sins may make him an ignominious figure in the annals of the game, but his na\u00EFvet\u00E9, his eagerness to please, and his unconquerable love of baseball make him a heartbreaking one. If Bonds is on some level BALCO's Chick Gandil\u2014the player at the center of the Black Sox scandal\u2014then Giambi is its Shoeless Joe.\n\n It's worth going back to the beginning\u2014to the father who wanted to raise a baseball star and the son with the talent to be one\u2014to understand the place Jason Giambi is in now. In the family backyard in West Covina, California, John Giambi built a batting cage and set out to mold his son into the Major Leaguer he himself had once hoped to be. Shrewdly, he began by transforming the right-handed-hitting Jason into a lefty (any hitter enjoys an advantage against an opposite-handed pitcher, but a lefty can exploit it three times as often: In 2004, nearly three quarters of big-league pitchers threw right-handed). Year by year, he gradually polished away every tiny hiccup and hole from his son's stroke.\n\n During the '80s, John would instruct Jason from the stands at Little League games. During the '90s, he'd do the same thing at Network Associates Coliseum, home of the Oakland Athletics. During the 2003 postseason, there he was on the infield grass at Yankee Stadium, conferring with his boy. \"At every game, you could hear him in the upper deck,\" says Giambi's teammate in Oakland, Doug Johns. \"Everything from what the pitcher was trying to do to what Jason should try to do.\" Of course, you'll find well-meaning but overbearing fathers wherever young men compete\u2014but Jason Giambi was unusual in that he never broke free of his. \"He still has a real dependence on what his dad thinks,\" says Bastion. \"They have a private jet, and whenever Jason feels like he's struggling, John flies back to New York.\"\n\n So Jason played baseball and left the decisions to his father. \"John Giambi is a hitting instructor, he's a banker, and he's a part-time agent,\" says Bastion. \"He took a very aggressive, ambitious path toward what he wanted Jason to do and knew how to talk to the right people. Jason was very lucky to have a father like that.\" The boy grew up sweetly oblivious to anything that lay beyond the chalked boundaries of a baseball diamond.\n\n In 1992, the A's drafted Giambi in the second round and dispatched him to their Single A Modesto club. His teammates marveled at his plate discipline. \"He was like Barry Bonds to me,\" says Terance Frazier, who was Giambi's closest friend and confidant in Modesto. \"I'm sitting there like, &#145;How can he not swing at those pitches?'\" In an A's minor league system that had already, a decade before Moneyball, begun to stress on-base percentage, Giambi should have been a crown jewel. But the big club apparently wanted more. \"He was getting pressure from the organization,\" says Frazier. \"He said they were telling him he needed to hit home runs. He was getting frustrated.\"\n\n By the time of his promotion to the majors in 1995, Giambi had remade himself. Formerly an inside-out doubles hitter, he had become a slugging pull hitter\u2014\"an excellent prospect,\" good for twenty-eight home runs a year in the big leagues, according to projections by Baseball Prospectus sabermetrician Clay Davenport. But in his early years in Oakland, Giambi continued to rebel against those expectations. \"I'm not a home-run hitter,\" he explained to the Chronicle in June of his first full season, 1996. It seemed to be a sore subject.\n\n As a big league rookie, Giambi spent off days hanging around the shop of the Bay Area's legendary custom-motorcycle builder, Ron Simms. \"Jason didn't really know anybody up here,\" says Simms, and when Giambi mentioned one day that he was looking for a place to live, Simms offered to put him up in his 8,000-square-foot, $4 million home. Simms told him to park his Toyota pickup (which he'd been driving since he was 16) somewhere far away and loaned him his Ferrari. Somehow Giambi never got around to looking for his own place.\n\n Over the next six years, under Simms's influence, he radically transformed his wholesome image. \"When Jason first moved in with me, he said, &#145;I'd like to get a reputation that I'm a little bit of a bad guy,'\" Simms tells me. Giambi bought his first Harley from Simms, grew a goatee and long hair, and got his first tattoo when Simms's 16-year-old son got his. In July 2000, Sports Illustrated put him on its cover in a sleeveless Simms T-shirt, hair hanging in his eyes, skull tattoo on full display. THE NEW FACE OF BASEBALL read the headline: HOW THE HOME RUN HAS CHANGED THE GAME. They were building Jason as the rebellious new wave of player, and that was the image he wanted,\" says Simms. \"If the pitcher stares down at you and sees a little ink on your shoulder, maybe he's going to think a little differently about you.\" Giambi took to wearing a T-shirt that read PARTY LIKE A ROCK STAR. HAMMER LIKE A PORN STAR. RAKE LIKE AN ALL-STAR.\"\n\n Giambi also idolized his teammate Mark McGwire. Susan Slusser, who covered the A's for the Chronicle, says, \"People imitating Jason would say, &#145;Like I was telling Mark\u2026,' or, &#145;Mark told me\u2026.' An awful lot of his stories started off that way.\" Long before BALCO, under the tutelage of Big Mac and A's resident chemist Jose Canseco, Giambi began injecting steroids heavily, or so Canseco claims in Juiced, his tell-all book. (McGwire strenuously denies that he has ever used steroids, and Giambi has called Canseco's charges \"delusional.\") If true, these allegations would mean Giambi had used performance-enhancing drugs at least four years earlier than the first date he cited in his grand-jury testimony. When McGwire was traded in mid-1997, Giambi made himself into a faithful copy of him on the baseball field, just as he had made himself into a faithful copy of Ron Simms off it. Previously a third baseman and left fielder, he assumed McGwire's old post at first base, then started bashing: forty-three homers in '00 (his MVP year) and thirty-eight in '01.\n\n These may have been the best years of Giambi's life. What Ken Stabler had been to Oakland a generation earlier, he had now become. \"He was an icon. He was the Person,\" says Simms. By day Giambi prowled the infield, by night the bars and nightclubs. When he strode to the plate, the Coliseum's PA system played the sound of a wolf howling. \"He knew he was a stud,\" says Oakland pitcher Barry Zito. \"He was the guy that all the young guys looked up to and wanted to be.\" Reporters found themselves laughing along with Giambi when he joked about overindulging the night before. \"It's just so unusual to run into a marquee type of player who is so outgoing to everyone,\" says Slusser. \"He's impossible not to like.\" One evening, while driving at \"outrageous speed\" across the Bay Bridge in Simms's car, Giambi and a teammate were pulled over by the police. \"The cop looks at 'em and says, &#145;Just follow me,'\" recalls Simms. \"Gets in front of them and escorts them all the way home. Jason walks in, and he's laughing.\" Life was good in a city with no Page Six.\n\n By midseason of 2001, his contract year, Giambi knew he wouldn't be back in Oakland. Talks with the A's had exasperated him. No \"legitimate offer\" was ever made, Simms claims, and at the time, he chastised Giambi for not saying so publicly. Negotiations with Oakland supposedly ran aground on Giambi's demand for a no-trade clause, but it has since been reported that A's owner Steve Schott was made skittish by his player's steroid use. Reportedly, Yankees boss George Steinbrenner also knew Giambi was juicing but couldn't resist the lure of a marquee slugger. \"That's what Steinbrenner loves,\" says Don Zimmer, ex\u2013bench coach of the Yankees. \"Home runs.\"\n\n John Giambi had grown up adoring Mickey Mantle and the Yankees. That meant Jason did, too\u2014even if he was born too late to see the Mick play. At the press conference announcing his signing, Giambi declared that the Yankees had been \"my only choice.\" From behind the lectern, he sought out his father. \"Pop,\" he called out, holding up his number 25 jersey. \"It's not [Mantle's retired] number 7\u2014but we got the pinstripes.\" Then he wept. It was a glimpse into the relationship of father and son, the \"we\" expressing not just the indivisibility of the dream the two men had shared, but also the sometimes problematic absence of boundaries between them.\n\n The New York papers immediately questioned whether Giambi could adjust to the corporate atmosphere of Jeter's club. Obliging as always, Jason cut his hair, shaved his goatee, and traded in his purple Lamborghini for a Benz. But he may have given up too much of himself, says a member of the New York media, speaking on condition of anonymity. \"Do I think he was the most comfortable player in the clubhouse? Absolutely not. I think he was always trying to please everybody, as opposed to just being himself.\" What Giambi found especially frustrating during that first year, Bastion says, was the clubhouse's joylessness. \"He said that everyone has his own agenda. When the game's over, they shower and they leave\u2014boom! Jeter's the first one out almost every time.\"\n\n The tabloids had hyped Giambi as a descendant of Maris and Mantle, but he slumped during his first six weeks in pinstripes and was booed. \"He was really hurt,\" Simms says. \"He would call me all the time.\" Giambi temporarily silenced his critics with an excellent season in 2002, batting .314, with forty-one homers. But he also set a personal high for strikeouts. Enticed by the stadium's short right-field porch and craving the approval of the hometown fans, he seemed to be pressing.\n\n That November, during a barnstorming tour of Japan, Giambi had his fateful encounter with Bonds's trainer, BALCO defendant Greg Anderson. \"Hey, what are the things you're doing with Barry?\" Giambi asked him, according to excerpts from his testimony. Back in the States, Anderson had BALCO test Giambi's blood and urine and told him he'd tested positive for Deca Durabolin. With baseball's first-ever random drug survey set to commence in 2003, he urged Giambi to stop using the steroid and began sending him \"the cream\" (a testosterone blend) and \"the clear\" (THG). \"I didn't know what they were,\" Giambi told the grand jury. \"He didn't really explain them. He just told me to take them.\" (Anderson has pleaded not guilty to steroid-distribution charges.)\n\n As the 2003 season began, Giambi's body started breaking down. \"I have everything,\" he ruefully told a reporter in May. Inflamed tissue in his problematic left knee compromised his balance at the plate, and strange ailments\u2014staph infections, calcium deposits\u2014plagued his eyes. Somehow he managed to hit forty-one home runs again, but he batted only .250, his lowest-ever average, and led the league in strikeouts. He had never before even cracked the top ten.\n\n All season long, the press, sensing his vulnerability, assailed Giambi for his \"unnatural\" attachment to his private strength coach, Bobby Alejo. Before signing with the Yankees, Giambi had secured a promise from the team that Alejo (formerly Oakland's trainer and his closest friend) would have access to all team facilities. Thus began what Yankees GM Brian Cashman would later call \"a never-ending saga.\" For three years, Cashman struggled to navigate between the numerous Yankees irritated by Alejo's constant, jocular presence and Giambi, who was determined to observe what he called his \"routine\" and to hold the front office to its pledge. \"He doesn't need someone to make him Jason Giambi,\" Cashman pointedly told reporters. There was a sense that the Yankees brass wanted to separate the two men; as to whether steroids had anything to do with this (last December, the New York Daily News seemed to hint that they did), no one will say.\n\n A partial list of the bizarre ailments Giambi endured during the 2004 season would include inflammation of tissue in his left knee, back spasms, bursitis, a sprained ankle, a mysteriously unidentified intestinal parasite, a respiratory infection, a strained groin, exhaustion, and, of all things, a pituitary tumor. Under the shadow of his BALCO subpoena, he played in fewer than half of his team's games. In September, attempting belatedly to earn a place on the postseason roster, he came off the disabled list and went four for thirty-three, with thirteen strikeouts. It was a terrible thing to see\u2014a diminishment so complete that it evoked thoughts of another Yankees first baseman brought low, Lou Gehrig. (With steroids in the background, no one was inclined to make such a sympathetic comparison.) Alone in the dugout during his team's historic collapse against the arch-rival Boston Red Sox, an exhausted-looking Giambi uselessly gnawed at his fingernails. \"It was a huge disappointment not being there for my teammates,\" he told GQ. \"I was very weak from my illness, which was very frustrating.\"\n\n All year long, Giambi and the Yankees sidestepped naming the parasite or specifying the tumor's location. The team claimed, falsely, to be constrained by medical-records-disclosure regulations; reportedly, what was really constraining them was John Giambi, who had threatened to sue them if they released any information on Jason's condition.\n\n \"Jason wanted to be the best player that he can be, and he was willing to do whatever it takes to get there,\" says Ted Lilly, who played with him in New York. \"Obviously, as we all know now. What makes it a little different is he's willing to admit it.\" In his testimony before the BALCO grand jury, 2001 was the first\u2014though not necessarily the earliest\u2014year in which Giambi acknowledged injecting himself with steroids.\n\n Playing in 154 games in 2001, mostly with a torn hamstring, Giambi had injected himself with Deca Durabolin. \"He was concerned about staying productive,\" says Simms. \"And whatever he could do to maintain his health, he was gonna do.\" The notion that steroids hasten healing has made the rounds of gyms for years. Patrick Panico, a private strength coach who worked in the Arizona Diamondbacks system from 2001 to 2003, says, \"A lot of guys take steroids as they get older because injuries take a toll on them. They can't recover. They can't play 140 games anymore.\"\n\n Giambi told the grand jury he \"didn't actually notice a huge difference\" in his performance on steroids. His ex-teammate Tony Phillips says, \"Probably a lot of guys who took that shit are still at .220.\" Giambi himself told a reporter in 2002, \"The biggest thing that people don't understand is that it doesn't matter in baseball what you're taking or what you're doing if you can't hit.\"\n\n The nagging issue here, however, is Giambi's remarkable metamorphosis between 1995 and 1998 and between 1999 and 2003. In his first four seasons in Oakland, his numbers closely corresponded to his minor league performance, says sabermetrician Clay Davenport. Over the next four years, however, Giambi boosted his home runs by 50 percent, from an expected twenty-nine per year to forty-three, and significantly raised his average, from an expected .297 to .329. The difference in both cases? Fourteen fly-outs converted into home runs, says Davenport.\n\n Panico tells me, \"With steroids and an aggressive, intelligent approach to training, I could take a guy like Giambi, who can hit for average, and maybe add eight to twelve feet to a ball that he's gonna hit properly.\" In terms of EqA, the widely used metric Davenport created, the discrepancy between Giambi's expected performance and his actual one has been exceeded by only three players since 1990: Edgar Martinez, Barry Bonds, and Mark McGwire. And no other player in Major League history has ever increased his EqA six years running, as Giambi has.\n\n Considering all this evidence, no reasonable person can deny that steroids affected Jason Giambi's career. And yet something rankles about the way we talk about him now. The game's recent past is all about the tacit acceptance of steroid use, and its immediate future, if we're to believe Commissioner Bud Selig, is all about zero tolerance. Caught in between is Giambi, whom the press has made into a public whipping boy. Why isn't every clubhouse being scrutinized? The press has attacked Giambi for not telling the whole truth\u2014but are they? And why doesn't Giambi call them on it? \"He's really concerned about what people think,\" says Ron Simms. \"I'm sure it'd be easy for him to say, &#145;Do you really think I'm the only one?' He could shift the blame so quick if he wanted to. But you'll never hear that from Jason.\"\n\n The leak of Giambi's testimony has paved the way for Canseco's book\u2014which couldn't find a publisher two years ago\u2014to become a best-seller. And now it threatens to blow apart baseball's code of silence regarding the use of performance-enhancing drugs. \"You have players letting other people outside the game know what's going on,\" says Tony Phillips. \"That's really disheartening to me, and that's why you're running into all these problems. It was an unwritten rule: What you see, what you hear, stays here.\"\n\n In the twenty years since then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth declined to propose a policy to address steroid use\u2014\"It is not an illegal substance,\" he declared\u2014performance-enhancing drugs have infiltrated the game at every level. Yet both the owners and the union have chosen to look the other way. To do so benefited baseball; think 1998, McGwire outstripping Sosa. (Says former commissioner Fay Vincent, \"Everybody knew McGwire was taking andro, and everybody sort of winked.\") In this sense, BALCO and a scapegoat like Giambi were inevitable\u2014the government acting where MLB wouldn't. \"The more we found out about it,\" says the Chronicle's Fainaru-Wada, \"the more we felt the story was not about the four guys who've been indicted, but about which of these athletes were cheating.\"\n\n Steroids appear to be nearly as pervasive in the minors as they are in the big leagues. Panico, the trainer, describes a culture in which steroids are used \"to get over the hump\" separating Single A ball from Double A, Double A from Triple A, and Triple A from the bigs. Imagine, he says, a Double A pitcher facing the premature end of his career. He's 23, he's got no college degree, and he's carrying $40,000 in debt because he's driving a car he can't afford. He doesn't care about breaking rules or jeopardizing his health. \"All he knows is one guy was throwing ninety and now he's throwing ninety-five, and rumor is he did a cycle of Winstrol.\" (While the players and trainers interviewed for this story disagreed as to whether steroids will help an elite hitter, they all believed the drugs can benefit pitchers considerably.)\n\n In the random drug tests Major League Baseball conducted during 2003, 5 to 7 percent of 1,438 samples came back positive. Of course, as Fay Vincent points out, \"Anybody that got caught probably wasn't terribly bright, because you can get 'em out of your system if you know the testing's gonna take place.\" He suspects the actual percentage is higher, as do many others. Among them is Ozzie Timmons, a thirteen-year veteran, who estimates that \"about 50 percent\" of big leaguers have tried steroids. That would mean that some 375 active players besides Jason Giambi are currently juicing or have done so in the past.\n\n Ted Williams called hitting a baseball the single hardest act in sports; in no other sport do players so desperately crave any advantage. Panico, the trainer, says: \"If some guy who played for the Royals shot up some goose fat in his ass and now is throwing one mile an hour faster, the players know about it. If somebody rubs lizard vomit on their fuckin' third finger and all of a sudden the guy is hitting two more bombs a year, they know about it. And they'll sit in the bull pen and they'll say, &#145;What do you think about rubbing lizard vomit on your penis?'\"\n\n In the aftermath of BALCO, Giambi has kept out of sight, which has pained him acutely, Simms says. Giambi grew up with a sentimental idea of the slugger as a sort of heavyweight champ of the diamond\u2014a lion in the arena and a lamb in visits to hospitals and schools. In Oakland, he was the team's go-to guy for community service; he thrives on pleasing his fans, and it may be the loss of his public life that's hurt him most. Simms describes picking him up at the Oakland airport the day after the grand jury leaks broke and proposing that they grab dinner at one of their usual places. Giambi quietly pleaded, \"Can we just get it to go?\"\n\n On a visit to Yankee Stadium a couple of years ago, Bastion, Giambi's high school coach, toured Monument Park with an usher: \"He raved about Jason\u2014how he wasn't a complete asshole like Reggie Jackson and Barry Bonds. He said Jason is one of the nicest guys who's ever come through Yankee Stadium.\" Bastion falls silent for a moment. \"And I really liked hearing that,\" he says softly. Former A's ecutive and current Blue Jays general manager, J. P. Ricciardi, says, \"If you don't like Jason Giambi, you don't like M&amp;amp;M's.\" Indignant at the way the press has treated him, many of Giambi's friends came forward for this story to defend him. Tony Phillips: \"He was a good guy before he did steroids, he was a good guy when he was doing steroids, and he's a good guy after he's not doing steroids.\" Mike Thalblum, Oakland's visiting clubhouse manager: \"There's a handful of great players who are even better people. We named our first son after [former A's pitcher] Dave Stewart, and I would name a kid after Jason Giambi in a heartbeat.\" Barry Zito: \"I can't say enough about who he is as a man. He did something that our former president didn't even have the balls to do, which was to come clean and admit to his mistakes. He knew that all the stuff that's happening was gonna happen, and he still did it. I fear the day when we find out that people possibly perjured themselves just to save their name when G didn't.\"\n\n Several weeks after the grand jury leaks, Derek Jeter spoke out on Giambi's behalf. They later saw each other in Vegas, during Super Bowl weekend. \"Jeter's support throughout the off-season has been something I will never forget,\" Giambi told me. \"I know that he didn't have to take a stand publicly, but he did, and I can't thank him enough.\"\n\n Giambi is under enormous pressure in 2005 to prove that his power didn't come out of a syringe. Of course, the more he strains to hit home runs, the greater the likelihood he'll fail. Giambi told me that he and Yankees hitting coach Don Mattingly discussed this during the off-season: \"We both agree that if I focus on on-base percentage and batting average, the home runs will take care of themselves.\" Giambi says he wants \"to get back to being the hitter I once was.\" It sounds like he's remembering the kid he was in Modesto\u2014the lanky 21-year-old with the precocious opposite-field stroke\u2014before the pressures of delivering power forced him to change his swing. \"The way he used to hit!\" Bastion recalls. \"Christ, he could hit .400 if he'd go back to that.\" Of late, Giambi told me, he's been working out harder than ever. \"I realize that this year, it is important for me to do everything I can to get off to a good start,\" he says. A slump at the beginning of this season could be a hole Giambi will never climb out of. \"He's my biggest question mark this spring,\" Joe Torre has said.\n\n For all their talk of pride and tradition, the Yankees' stance on Giambi is all about the bottom line. \"If he had hit .350 last year, they would be embracing him and defending him,\" says former commissioner Fay Vincent, who contrasts Giambi's case with that of former Yankees pitcher and seven-time drug offender Steve Howe, whom Vincent tried unsuccessfully to ban from baseball in 1992. \"Steinbrenner and the union fought to put him back on the field. And won. I mean, seven violations aren't enough? It's ludicrous. If you can pitch or hit, these guys will overlook everything.\" Think of Gary Sheffield, Giambi's Yankees teammate and fellow BALCO witness, who, after his near-MVP regular season, spent the recent winter unmolested by the media. Don Zimmer says it's simple: \"One had a big year, and the other one had a bad year. If Jason Giambi comes back healthy and hits forty homers, Steinbrenner will have both arms wrapped around him.\"\n\n At his press conference in February, Giambi insisted, \"I'm not a bad person.\" It was a strange thing for a grown man to say. Giambi sees himself chiefly in the gaze of others, it seems, and that day, what he saw was a guy who had lied and cheated. It must have been intolerable, and you wonder how he'll endure this reflection of himself over hundreds of days, absorbing the boos of thousands of fans. He will play his first road game of 2005 on April 11\u2014at Fenway Park. That day, the Red Sox will hoist a championship banner earned partly at the expense of a Giambi-less Yankees team. During his first at bat, 34,000 Red Sox fans will chant, \"STE-ROIDS!\"\n\n Giambi trusts that if he works hard enough, he can make things go back to the way they used to be. But that's a little boy's dream, and he has to be a man now. \"I hope that there will be a time when I can answer everyone's questions,\" he says, and you can tell he means it. That day\u2014and Jason Giambi's future\u2014is unimaginable, because no other athlete has ever gone through anything like this: \"I really haven't thought about what it would be like.\" On his retirement day, he wants people to say \"that I gave the Yankees my best and that I came back from a disappointing '04 season and was an important part of the team for the remaining years of my career\u2014and that we won several World Series.\"\n\n \"I know this negative stuff is really, really bothering him,\" Simms says. \"He's being crucified.\" To win the approval of his father, Giambi, a natural righty, made himself into a left-handed hitter. To win the approval of the A's, he made himself into a pull hitter\u2014one of the most extreme in the game\u2014when he'd been taught to go the opposite way. Now, to win the approval of the fans, he will, like a penitent, travel from stadium to stadium to be mocked and jeered. He seems convinced something better lies on the other side of all this.\n\n \"I am not a quitter,\" Giambi wrote to me.\n\n Of all the players who ever cheated this way, how strange that Jason Giambi is the first to be exposed. How troubling that he, the star least suited by temperament for this turbulent moment, must learn to bear it. And, finally, how sad to realize that it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/jason-giambi-baseball>