In 2007, the Mitchell Report shocked traditionalists who were appalled that drugs had corrupted the "pure" game of baseball. Nathan Corzine rescues the story of baseball's relationship with drugs from the sepia-toned tyranny of such myths. In Team Chemistry , he reveals a game splashed with spilled whiskey and tobacco stains from the day the first pitch was thrown. Indeed, throughout the game's history, stars and scrubs alike partook of a pharmacopeia that helped them stay on the field and cope off of it:

In 1889, Pud Galvin tried a testosterone-derived "elixir" to help him pile up some of his 646 complete games.

Sandy Koufax needed Codeine and an anti-inflammatory used on horses to pitch through his late-career elbow woes.

Players returning from World War II mainstreamed the use of the amphetamines they had used as servicemen.

Vida Blue invited teammates to cocaine parties, Tim Raines used it to stay awake on the bench, and Will McEnaney snorted it between innings.

Corzine also ventures outside the lines to show how authorities handled—or failed to handle—drug and alcohol problems, and how those problems both shaped and scarred the game. The result is an eye-opening look at what baseball's relationship with substances legal and otherwise tells us about culture, society, and masculinity in America.| Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. The Last Pure Place Part 1. This Is Your Game 1. Time in a Bottle 2. Tobacco Road 3. Where's the Dexamyl, Doc? Part 2. This Is Your Game on Drugs 4. Pitching around the Problem 5. This Is Not Just a Test 6. Summer of the Long Ball Frauds Epilogue. Brave New Game Notes Bibliography Index | "Stimulating. Clearly the most comprehensive 'baseball and drugs' book that I've read or am aware of. There are other books that cover specific scandals, such as BALCO, but none that dig as deeply into the history of the relationship between baseball and drugs."—Mitchell Nathanson, author of A People's History of Baseball
"Nathan Michael Corzine goes past the mythology and digs deep to reveal a game splashed with spilled whiskey and tobacco stains from its origins, where substances of various stripes were valued for the supposed ability to help athletes play better."—Alternet
"Corzine presents a more nuanced meaning of professional baseball's post steroid era. . . . Books like this one can help guide both scholars and fans toward appreciation, understanding, and perhaps even reconciliation with the game's past."—Journal of Sport History


|Nathan Michael Corzine is an instructor in history at Coastal Carolina Community College.