by Tim Elfrink
But in other regards—and especially in contrast with those other sports—baseball has cracked down emphatically. A guy like Kirk Radomski, providing steroids to “boatloads” of MLB players while working as a Mets clubhouse attendant, would have a hard time existing in today’s baseball culture. So would Jose Canseco.
So maybe the clubhouse hotline set up for players to report PED use—called only twenty times, according to Dan Mullin’s 2012 deposition—hasn’t helped much in nosing out such cheaters and enablers. But during his testimony in Rodriguez’s arbitration, Manfred revealed the league’s policy to investigate any claims, no matter how dubious, involving PED use by its players. “Certainly since the issuance of the Mitchell Report there has not been a public allegation of player involvement with performance-enhancing drugs that we have not investigated in some way, shape, or form,” Manfred said. “It always happens. It is standard operating procedure. Nothing needs to be done to initiate that investigation. It’s literally automatic under our procedures.”
As an illustration of how willing MLB is to investigate these days, Rob Manfred testified that two marquee stars were being—or had been—investigated solely on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations. In August 2013, St. Louis radio host and former big-leaguer Jack Clark had aired PED allegations against Los Angeles Angels superstar Albert Pujols and Detroit Tigers ace pitcher Justin Verlander. Clark said that a trainer of the slugger had told him Pujols used steroids, but he had less concerning Verlander. Clark pointed out the pitcher’s dipping fastball velocity and remarked: “It’s just the signs are there.”
In his cross-examination of Manfred, Tacopina brought up those allegations, asking the league executive whether he was familiar with “recent reports of one former Major League ballplayer accusing Pujols and Verlander of using PEDs.”
When Manfred answered in the affirmative, Tacopina asked: “Have you commenced an investigation on those two players?”
“The allegations about Albert Pujols have been previously investigated,” Manfred replied. Pressed for when that investigation occurred, he said: “I can’t give you an exact time, Joe, but there has been a prior investigation of these specific allegations, involvement with the particular individual alleged in the story. The Verlander report is new and is in the process. I was not aware of that one previously.”
Both Pujols and Verlander have already emphatically denied Clark’s allegations. Pujols sued the radio host in October 2013, causing Clark to publicly apologize and retract his claims, saying in a statement: “I have no knowledge whatsoever that Mr. Pujols has ever used illegal or banned PEDs.” (Pujols then dropped the suit.) Verlander called Clark’s statements “moronic.” MLB has taken no action against either player.
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MLB’s new policy is a 180-degree reversal from the pre-Mitchell days, when the league was not interested in even strong accusations concerning player steroid use. In Canseco’s case alone, FBI agent Greg Stejskal had attempted to share evidence about the player’s doping with baseball security chief Kevin Hallihan, Canseco had tested positive for steroids in a Miami-Dade County jail in 2003, and a newspaper reporter for the Washington Post had written about Canseco’s reported steroid use, causing the slugger’s dad to challenge the reporter to a fight.
Canseco wasn’t ever punished by baseball for steroid use. But if each of those cases happened today, Manfred’s office would investigate. And under the existing Joint Drug Agreement, those investigators likely would have gathered enough evidence to suspend him for at least fifty games.
But the most notable change since the pre-Mitchell days is that baseball has developed the most aggressive and expensive drug-testing policy in American pro sports. MLB players are randomly screened not just via epitestosterone-to-testosterone ratios, but with more exacting carbon isotope tests as well. And starting in 2013, the league was the first among American pro sports to test players’ blood for HGH.
In its first year, the testing was implemented only during the season—not the off-season—and detecting HGH is still nearly impossible unless the player used the substance only hours before the test. But ten years earlier, when the players union was still insisting there was no PED problem in baseball at all and only begrudgingly agreeing to “anonymous” testing with no consequences for those who tested positive for banned substances, it would have been difficult to foresee baseball now carrying the drug-testing flag further than the other sports leagues.
As a result of Biogenesis, MLB’s standards have now gotten even stronger. Weeks before the 2014 season, the union and owners agreed to a new drug testing program. Penalties have been toughened, with a first positive test now triggering an eighty-game ban, a second a season-long suspension, and a third a lifetime away from baseball. In a direct answer to Jhonny Peralta’s 2013 postseason heroics after serving a fifty-game ban, players caught cheating will now also be barred from the full playoffs.
The frequency of tests has also increased, with in-season random urine tests more than doubling. More HGH tests will be done in-season, and DHEA—the mild steroid claimed as a defense by Manny Ramirez and cannily mixed into “pink cream” by Tony Bosch—is now finally illegal in MLB. Every player will also be subject to carbon isotope testing, the method that catches synthetic molecules in the bloodstream, once per season.
The 2014 changes did soften the policy in a few areas; instead of a “zero-tolerance” rule, players will now be able to reduce suspensions by proving to an arbitrator that they took a drug accidentally, as was the case in reliever Guillermo Mota’s failed drug test after apparently drinking his kid’s cough syrup. And the suspensions for DHEA use are markedly lower, leaving the door open to using the drug as an excuse.
Still, the changes are the clearest sign yet that Clark, who was confirmed as the new union chief during the off-season, has the support of most players in going hard after PEDs. The new rules move MLB even further into the lead among American sports for PED testing.
In his prophetic 1969 Sports Illustrated survey of athletic doping, Bil Gilbert wrote that drugs that fundamentally change how players can perform on the field “menace the tradition and structure of sport itself.” It’s one thing to have bigger, faster, stronger players because nutrition has improved, and longer careers because doctors can repair ligaments and mend tears. It’s another to see middling outfielders belting enough homers to be a Hall of Famer in another era. PEDs tear the baseball space-time continuum, the fabric of stories that links father-to-son-to-grandfather at every ballpark.
It’s the notion that statistics can no longer compare the performances of generations of ballplayers—unless you believe, based on single-season records, that the three best home run hitters in history all played in the late 1990s, and Babe Ruth is not among them—that makes cheating in that sport so irksome to fans.
But the pro football and basketball seasons, despite being shorter than the baseball schedule, arguably present for those sports’ players a greater demand for the effects of PEDs. The eighty-two-game NBA campaign is notoriously arduous and physically exhausting, and players could certainly benefit from substances that boost stamina and recovery. And football is, well, football—a bone-crushing sport where bodies and brains are sacrificed, injuries both severe and lingering are common, and massive bulk rules all. PEDs are a perfect fit.
It’s difficult to gauge how big of a problem PEDs are in those leagues, mostly because—especially in the case of basketball—testing and enforcement measures have lagged behind those of baseball. Between 2010 and May 2013, fifty NFL players were suspended for PEDs. In the span of those three years, 339 major league and minor league baseball players were suspended for PEDs. In the NBA, a total of eight players have been suspended since 2000. But there could be an ongoing PED era in football and basketball, and we wouldn’t necessarily know it.
As the saga of Dr. Anthony Galea makes clear, there will always be a fine—and moving—line between top physical conditioning and athletic medi
cal care, and banned performance enhancement. After all, NBA superstar Kobe Bryant makes no secret of his periodic trips to Germany to visit a doctor, Peter Wehling, specializing in “biologic medicine.” On his friend Bryant’s recommendation, Alex Rodriguez traveled to Germany for the same treatment in December 2011. It’s a field—including Galea’s trusty platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections—in which the patient’s tissue is manipulated and reintroduced into his body. It’s also a science that both athletic and medical regulators appear to regard as murky: PRP treatments were banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency—but currently are allowed pending further findings—and few American doctors will perform biologic medicine because of FDA laws stating that patient’s tissue can only be “minimally manipulated” before being reclassified as a drug.
Bryant has the resources to pioneer this medicine’s mainstream athletic use by chartering a private jet to Europe for treatments that give him an edge by allowing him, he believes, to recover faster from a troublesome knee. Five to ten years from now, these treatments could be legal and common among athletes. Or they could be considered outright doping.
The same murkiness surrounds HGH, according to one of the sports world’s most opinionated figures. Growth hormones have long been banned in all professional sports and are approved for medical use only in rare circumstances, though reports are mixed as to whether they actually unfairly enhance performance, or just speed recovery from injury. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has called for more research into the substance’s potential role in professional athletics and recovery. “The issue isn’t whether I think it should be used,” Cuban said in November 2013. “The issue is that it has not been approved for such use. And one of the reasons it hasn’t been approved is that there have not been studies done to prove the benefits of prescribing HGH for athletic rehabilitation or any injury rehabilitation that I’m aware of. The product has such a huge . . . stigma that no one wants to be associated with it.”
To a longtime ambassador of America’s other major sport—football, where players and fans are only now beginning to understand the devastating and lasting physical toll of the game—there’s hypocrisy in not allowing players to heal themselves using HGH. “We gotta stay hurt forever?” Mike Ditka, a former player and head coach legendary for his tenure at the helm of the Chicago Bears, says in an interview for this book. “If it helps you recover from injuries, I have no idea why it would be a bad thing. You’re paying players all this money, wouldn’t it help to get them back on the field where they can earn that money? If I owned a football team, I’d want my guys to play every week.
“I don’t see a damn thing wrong with it,” Ditka says of HGH. “I’m sorry.”
To Ditka, it’s the same thing—only more effective, less risky, and with long-term healing benefits—as shooting yourself full of dulling agents to cope with Sunday violence. He says that as a player, he subsisted on a cocktail of Cortisone and Novocaine.
“I was taking three shots of Cortisone a week for my hips,” says Ditka. “You’re supposed to get Cortisone shots at most once every few months. Back in the ’60s, nobody knew what the side effects were.”
Former players, from Bosch clients Bernie Kosar and Julio Cortes to the unnamed retired NFL player listed in Galea’s federal indictment, have discovered HGH’s healing effects after a crippling career.
Ditka’s open to the substance as well. “I don’t think anything can help you if you’ve had your hips replaced,” he says. “But hell yeah, I’d try it if it’d help me feel better.”
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Baseball may be on the forefront, among professional team sports, of the testing arms race against dopers. But there’s still plenty of wiggle room for innovative cheaters.
Bosch, an unlicensed doctor self-taught in the dark science of athletic performance enhancing and testing, bragged that beating urine and blood samples was “almost a cakewalk, actually.” His record at backing up that braggadocio is mixed, considering three of his clients were busted by tests in 2012. But his star customer, Alex Rodriguez, passed at least a dozen drug tests while on Bosch’s regimen, and baseball’s own experts believe that Bosch helped him do so.
The techniques on display at Biogenesis, in fact, remain at the cutting edge of cheating. In cycling, the Silicon Valley for all doping innovation, Lance Armstrong and his teammates also evaded punishment for years by “microdosing” testosterone and other treatments to stay below the radar of blood and urine tests. In Bosch’s case, these were the chewable troches he dispensed to Rodriguez and others.
The science is catching up to that problem. Starting in 2013, MLB became the first league to adopt a “biological passport” program to catch dopers. The idea is simple: Each player establishes a baseline reading for his hormone levels, and the league tests them throughout the season to look for any variation. The program is so tough to fool that when cycling adopted similar protocols in 2008, Lance Armstrong decided to stop cheating, later telling Oprah Winfrey that the test scared him straight “because it really worked.”
Even tougher tests are on the horizon; scientists are studying a process that looks at an athlete’s RNA and might be able to detect variations caused by chemical enhancement. The tests show great promise in catching the use of HGH. As a New York Times writer described the new technology, “Rather than trying to find the drug itself, a new generation of tests would gather evidence from the doper’s own body.”
Still, it’s a sure bet that even now there’s another Tony Bosch out there plotting equally ingenious solutions to evade or confuse those new tests, and that more than enough professional athletes will be happy to try his methods.
That’s why for all the evolving science, an agency like the DOI will always play a key role in convincing the bulk of professional baseball players that it’s not worth the risk to try to beat the system. MLB has now shown that it’s willing to spend millions of dollars to gather evidence to punish cheaters. That’s a powerful disincentive, even if you’re sure you’ve got the best science in the world in your corner.
But as Bud Selig drowned for months in bad press about his lead investigator’s affair with a witness and Alex Rodriguez’s accusations concerning a conspiracy between the league’s front office and the Yankees to bring him down, the commissioner might have wondered if there was a way to squelch the cold war leaks between opponents in such a doping case.
The US Anti-Doping Agency, which runs drug-testing programs for the Olympics, experienced similar turmoil over the years. During BALCO, the motives of the agency’s leaders were assailed, in the same manner that Selig had weathered during his battle against A-Rod. In part because of such blowback, the World Anti-Doping Agency changed its codes in 2009 to kill confidentiality in doping cases. Instead, if an athlete discusses the case to the press, agencies like USADA can respond.
Such transparency in pro baseball might be a hard sell for both sides. Since the advent of testing in the sport, the MLBPA has maintained its greatest concern is confidentiality of its members. And evidence surrounding a player’s doping can be just as damaging to the league as the individual. In Rodriguez’s case, for example, that he was permitted to use testosterone in 2007—information that would be confidential if not for arbitration transcripts obtained by these authors—is a potentially embarrassing bit of decision making on the independent program administrator’s part.
Selig could also consider a more radical step: turning baseball’s testing and investigations programs over to an outside agency, as is the case with policing PEDs in the Olympics. Losing control might seem anathema to the commissioner’s office and union alike, but Rodriguez’s and Braun’s strategies—publicly sliming everyone connected to the case—shows the danger of keeping such programs in-house. It’s a lot tougher to claim that Bud Selig has a personal agenda to destroy your career when the commissioner doesn’t control the anti-doping program.
“This case could be the best single example of why the testing program should b
e fully independent,” Travis Tygart says. “If you’re Bud Selig, why would you want to deal with this again? . . . Even though he did the right thing, in this world you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
In a 2012 deposition, Selig called baseball a “quasi-public institution in which people count on the integrity of the sport.” That integrity, he said, “is sacred to the sport and one that you must on a daily, hourly basis protect.” As he retires at the end of the 2014 season, the commissioner who wanted to be a history professor must hope that future generations of baseball fans will judge him for the historic crackdown on PEDs in response to Biogenesis—and not the questionable manner in which the suspensions were secured.
And if he doesn’t want to be forever known as the commissioner who enabled rampant steroid use, Selig will also have to hope that future fans remember only the increased doping penalties, cutting-edge testing, and dogged investigations that followed the Mitchell Report—and not the way the game was infiltrated by drugs for decades.
The owners of the thirty MLB teams vote on the next commissioner, and there has been no official word on who is in the running to be anointed baseball’s next pope. But the logical heir apparent is Manfred, Selig’s longtime consigliere, who was named chief operating officer of the league in 2013, during Rodriguez’s appeal.
Manfred’s appointment would be a fascinating departure, in terms of the battle against PEDs, from the reign of Selig. Manfred, who was hired by MLB in 1998—the same year that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa had their home run race, which was later viewed as an embarrassment—was weaned in the fallout from the Steroid Era.
Selig’s main defense of his blindness to steroid use during that time is ignorance. When a reporter exposed Mark McGwire’s use of the steroid androstenedione, banned in the Olympics but not by baseball, Selig had never heard of the substance, and asked his Milwaukee pharmacist and George Steinbrenner if they had any insight.
