To Cheat Or Not To Cheat

The cops hauled him away and, after emptying his pockets and taking his mug shot, threw him in a cell. Naulty sat there weeping, his head in his hands, convinced he had just blown his chance to pitch for the Yankees. Suddenly one of the cops walked toward the cell, holding up a card.

"Hey, is this real?"

It was Naulty's Major League Baseball player identification card. The cop had found it in his wallet.

"Yeah," Naulty said. "I just got traded to the New York Yankees."

The cop immediately unlocked the cell and let him out. Other cops printed four copies of his mug shot and asked Naulty to autograph them. They slapped him on the back, shook his hand and sent him on his way. No charges were filed.

"I barely graduated high school," Naulty says. "I probably graduated college with about an eighth-grade reading level. And when you play major league baseball, society is at your beck and call.

"They don't care if you have character. They don't care if you ruin your life. They care about performance. Nobody once ever told me anything because I was performing. I was getting bigger, and I had always been thin; and now they're telling me I look great, and I'm playing for the New York Yankees."

Naulty, though, realized he had become too big. Steroids had built up his body, and now they were destroying it. Before he threw his first pitch for the Yankees, he made a decision: He would stop using steroids.

On his first day of spring training with the Yankees, Naulty watched David Wells walk out and Roger Clemens walk in, the result of a trade between New York and Toronto. "I was like, 'How can we possibly get better, but we just got better!'" he says. " 'I'll get the water, you guys just win the World Series. This will be great!'

"[Manager] Joe Torre called me into his office to say, 'I know you've had it rough.' He was very kind and gracious to me. I wasn't used to that in Minnesota. He said, 'There's eight guys trying to make one spot. You're one of them. We'll see how you do in six weeks.'"