Billy Smith: Cocaine Prevalent on '79 Team

[BillySmith]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E5D61439F930A35750C0A9629482 60

According to Billy, the use of cocaine was prevalent on the '79 WS team. Don Stanhouse was known to use, and since Billy himself testified under immunity, we can guess what his involvement must have been.

It's hard for me to wrap my head around my heroes snorting lines of coke. I guess we should never presume that these guys are any different from the rest of us.

[Boy Howdy]

I remember when that story broke, and there were a couple other names involved. A few weeks later, the Colts moved away in the middle of the night in Mayflower vans. I was 13 and, in a way, it was the end of my childhood.

Since then, I've done a lot of research about baseball's 1985 cocaine trial for a book I'm working on. While that case was focused on the National League, it confirmed what pretty much anybody that was of age around 1979 (I only turned 9 that year) will tell you - Cocaine was just a fact of life for an awful lot of young adults at that time. Especially if they had a some extra $$$.

From my Maryland & sports-biased (no pun intended) view of the world, it pretty much remained that way until Maryland Terps basketball star Len Bias dropped dead days after being drafted #1 overall by the NBA Boston Celtics in 1986. Cocaine got a lot less cool after that.

[BillySmith]

I had forgotten the whole cocaine scandal in baseball, if that's what it can be called. Your post is bringing it back quite a bit.

[NewMarketSean]

I had forgotten the whole cocaine scandal in baseball, if that's what it can be called. Your post is bringing it back quite a bit.

Everyone and their mother was doing coke in the 1980's, so it only makes sense for baseball players to be doing it too. This is nothing huge IMO.