Tag Archives: actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances

Fernando’s pride away

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Fernando Tatis, Jr.

Tatis drydocked for actual/alleged PEDs the rest of this year and part of next. Did he really get it unknowingly?

Whether you saw it happen live or you had only to read about it, you couldn’t get it out of your head. Manny Machado—who’d been suspect of immaturity often enough in his Baltimore years—being the adult in the Padres’ room when Fernando Tatis, Jr. still couldn’t or wouldn’t shake off a pitch he thought was a ball but plate umpire Phil Cuzzi called a strike last September . . . correctly.

It wasn’t enough for Tatis that he gestured with pronouncement, though he faced away from Cuzzi, while his then-manager Jayce Tingler hustled out of the dugout to protect him and take up the argument and get himself tossed from the game. Tatis kept it up in the dugout, banging a bench a few times, grumbling all inning long while Jake Cronenworth’s one-out double ended up fruitless.

Finally Machado had enough. The wealthy veteran third baseman could be heard loud enough bawling the kid out. Go play baseball! You play baseball. You can’t worry about that sh@t! You go play baseball! [Fornicate] that sh@t! At that point, Tatis must have tried pleading about the disputed pitch. Machado didn’t bite. No, it’s not. It’s not about you! It’s not [fornicating] about you! Go [fornicating] play baseball.

The Padres ended up losing to the Cardinals, some of whom were almost as frustrated with Cuzzi’s shifting strike zone as Tatis. But the Cardinals didn’t let it cave them in, either. In the eighth, Tyler O’Neill smashed a 2-2 cutter from Padres reliever Emilio Pagan into the left field bullpen. Two innings earlier, O’Neill was frustrated visibly over a Cuzzi pitch call or two. He just didn’t melt down over them.

He also earned Adam Wainwright’s admiration while he was at it. “That was a great job by him not getting too animated there,” the veteran Cardinal righthander said postgame. “If we lose him right there, we probably lose the game . . . That was a lot of maturity by him to not get thrown out right there on some tough calls.”

Maturity. The word’s being thrown around a lot in San Diego now, since Tatis—who’s missed all season so far rehabbing a shoulder injury—was handed a mandatory eighty-game suspension after a routine required drug test turned up positive for clostebol.

After the Padres hogged the trade deadline headlines by landing outfielder Juan Soto from the Nationals and relief ace Josh Hader from the Brewers, but still looking like paper tigers after getting manhandled by their up-freeway National League West rivals in Los Angeles, this was the last thing they needed when they thought they were on the threshold of Tatis’s return.

The shortstop who can and so often did electrify crowds with his bat and his derring-do on the left side of the infield said he discovered the hard way that a medication he took to fight a case of ringworm had clostebol in it.

“I should have used the resources available to me in order to ensure that no banned substances were in what I took. I failed to do so,” he said in a formal statement Friday, after pondering but choosing not to appeal his suspension. “I am completely devastated. There is nowhere else in the world I would rather be than on a field competing with my teammates.”

Once you shook off the shock of Tatis being drydocked for the rest of this season, the postseason if the Padres get there, and part of next season, your first question—other than, perhaps, what on earth this kid was thinking or not thinking—had to be just what the hell clostebol is.

A former professional bodybuilder named Greg Doucette was more than happy to discuss that, as he has on YouTube: Clostebol is a synthetic, anabolic/andreogenic steroid “that essentially mimics testosterone.” Several countries use it medically to treat ringworm, a common fungus in professional athletes, but neither the United States nor Canada are known to prescribe ringworm relief with medications including the substance.

By itself, says the San Diego Union-Tribune, clostebol is “[a]lso known as 4-cholortestosterone [and] is a synthetic derivative of the muscle-building steroid the body naturally produces in larger amounts in men than women.” Blended with another substance, as the former East Germany did under state sponsorship to create then-undetectable Oral Turinabol, it becomes potent enough to turn athletes into record breakers.

“The doping advantage of injectable clostebol,” says U-T writer Mark Zeigler, “is that, while less potent, it mimics the muscle-building properties of testosterone without the estrogen buildup that counteracts them.” You’d have to make a very assumptive stretch to determine that Tatis knew any of that about what was in his ringworm medicine.

Doucette accepts that somebody did indeed prescribe something with clostebol in it when Tatis complained about ringworm. Bear in mind that, during last off-season’s owners’ lockout, Tatis and the Padres lacked much direct communication between the club’s staff and Tatis’s home in the Dominican Republic. Was he prescribed the now-suspect medication there, in a country that may allow clostebol’s prescription to treat ringworm?

“Either somebody needs to get fired,” Doucette says emphatically, “or Fernando Tatis needs to be the picture boy for Major League Baseball . . . How do you know, when getting medications, whether or not [they include] a banned substance or not? You don’t. So what do you do? Ask an expert.”

Tatis didn’t ask. Prideful youth that he still is, it didn’t cross his mind to ask. Maybe this will prove the blow that trims his pride down to the level where it’s a virtue more than a vice.

Essentially, Doucette says, Tatis trusted his doctor and didn’t think to question what he was prescribed. He’d be far from the only human being who goes in with the assumption that his doctor knows it all and wouldn’t hand him something believed to be harmful medically or otherwise.

Baseball may have its list of banned substances, and enough of those substances may not do what they’re thought (feared) to do for a player, but even veterans aren’t likely to visit their doctors carrying that list to ask whether their forthcoming prescriptions include any of those.

Sports medicine has long been a dubious proposition in the first place. Even today, with so much more known about sports injuries now than in the so-called Good Old Days, too much sports medicine remains meatball medicine to get them back on the field as soon as possible regardless. (Preferably, yesterday often enough.) And athletes are not always trusting of team doctors, with reason enough.

Likewise, for all we know now that we didn’t decades ago, Joe and Jane Fan continue believing injuries equal character flaws and fragility. Who really knows what a cocktail of dubious meatball medicine plus a public that thinks getting hurt exposes a player as weak does to an athlete’s thinking when he has a real injury or another medical issue, never mind one while rehabbing from another?

Padres general manager A.J. Preller, whose wheeling and dealing to bring Soto and Hader aboard made him the star of the trade deadline, sounded as though he didn’t necessarily want to know. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet about it,” he told reporters after the Padres squashed the Nationals Friday.

I think the biggest thing just from our standpoint, just from (MLB’s) standpoint, there’s a drug policy in place. He failed the drug screen, and ultimately he’s suspended, he can’t play, and that’s the biggest thing. It’s the player’s responsibility to make sure that he’s within compliance of that. He wasn’t, and ultimately we’re supportive of that.

Tatis can be called for not quite being mature enough to ask questions of his doctor before accepting any kind of prescription? It’s not exactly unfair to call Preller and other Padres staff for just such a dismissal, without being mature enough to keep real communication lines clear with their player, asking questions of their own when a medical issue arises even during rehabilitation for a different issue.

Practical baseball terms tell us Tatis was on the threshold of finishing his shoulder rehab (this wasn’t the first time he dealt with shoulder issues in his career) and providing the postseason-aspirant Padres a truly incendiary plate threat joining Soto, Machado, and Brandon Drury in the lineup. The kind of deep threat that often makes the difference between a mere postseason aspirant and a prospective World Series champion.

Now the threat is to Tatis’s eventual baseball legacy and to the Padres’s World Series aspirations. (They’ve been there twice without winning since they were born the year man first walked on the moon.) The previous weekend, they were swept in style by those ogres from Dodger Stadium, losing three straight and being outscored 20-4 including surrendering eight Dodger runs each in the first two games.

“He hasn’t been part of the team all year,” said Machado after the 10-5 win over the hapless Nats Friday. “We’ve gotten to this point so far without him. We were waiting to get him back and hopefully be a spark plug for the team.”

“You hope he grows up and learns from this and learns that it’s about more than just him right now,” said pitcher Mike Clevinger, echoing last year’s Machado-Tatis confrontation over the third-strike call. “It would be nice to have somebody else, but we don’t need anybody else. We’ve got everyone we need right here.”

Without Tatis, and until they can really hang with the big boys, the Padres sitting seventeen games out of first in the NL West may not have everyone they need right there now. What they have can get them to the postseason. It can’t necessarily get them to a World Series the likely path to which runs through Los Angeles.

“Friday’s stunning revelation,” writes The Athletic‘s Dennis Lin, “did not paint anyone in a positive light.”

Tatis had been busted for, at best, gross negligence or, at worst, cheating and dishonesty. If the Padres fail to make the postseason, he will end up missing more than half of his first 578 opportunities to play a major-league regular-season game. The team, meanwhile, has suffered a thorough embarrassment just eighteen months after characterizing Tatis’ [fourteen-year, $340 million contract] extension as a slam dunk. Preller has long prided himself on knowing the makeup of players, but his most prized asset has joined James Shields, Will Myers, and [now-departed] Eric Hosmer on a list of questionable contracts.

Tatis is now the biggest name in baseball to have drawn a suspension for actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances since Álex Rodríguez’s war against baseball over the Biogenesis scandal turned into a 211-game suspension. (It proved ultimately to be a 162-game suspension, since A-Rod appealed the original starting in August 2013.)

Whether he walked into it eyes wide shut or just made a reputation for self-centricity a little less small remains to be seen, in full and in final.

Ortiz in Cooperstown: Now, about that (ahem) other stuff

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David Ortiz

Boston’s 21st Century king of swing wasn’t as tainted as you still might think.

It almost figured that I’d see at least one person only start reminding us of now-Hall of Famer David Ortiz’s “taint” by noticing he’d hit only 20 home runs in his final Minnesota season, 2002, then 37 in his first Boston season, 2003. Heaven forbid such people do their homework. So I did it for him, and for anyone else who cares.

As a Twin in 2002, Ortiz hit fifteen home runs on the road but only five in the Metrodome, which was still the Twins’ home playpen. (Calling the Metrodome a park is like calling Itzhak Perlman a fiddler.) As a Red Sox in 2003, Ortiz hit fourteen homers on the road and seventeen in Fenway Park.

In other words, Ortiz—who signed with the Red Sox as a free agent after the Twins released him—went from a home stadium that was killing him to a home park that was great for him at the plate. He didn’t need actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances for that.

Now, about that 2003 positive for actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances? The one that marks Ortiz as a “steroid cheat” for life, in the eyes of only too many? Can we shoot that one down once and for all?

1) Those 2003 tests were supposed to be anonymous, done to determine whether the problem of actual/alleged PEDs was indeed rampant enough to begin mandatory testing. Well, they were anonymous . . . until somebody leaked the results to the New York Times six years later.

2) The 2003 tests turned out to be very problematic and even tainted. (Not to mention seized improperly by the federal government.) Even Rob Manfred himself has said of them, “it was hard to distinguish between certain substances that were legal, available over the counter, and not banned under our program.”

Ortiz was never even told the substance in question. Not even the Major League Baseball Players Association would tell him what it was. The last I looked, if you were accused of something horrible but never once told just what you were accused of doing, you’d have grounds to dismiss your accusers as bloody fools at minimum—and targets of defamation suits at maximum.

Manfred even said it couldn’t be confirmed for dead last certain that Ortiz actually did test positive for such a substance. That may have been the case with several other players testing positive in that supposed-to-be-anonymous test.

3) Mandatory testing for actual/alleged performance-enhancing substances began in MLB in 2004. Ortiz was tested regularly, several times a year, over the final thirteen years of his career . . . and never. once. tested. dirty.

4) By contrast, of course, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were suspect prior to the mandatory testing era and starting around 1999-2000. They’ve fallen off the BBWAA ballot now, after failing to be elected in their tenth and final tries and despite getting their highest vote percentages yet. (Bonds: 66 percent; Clemens: 65.2 percent.) Yes, their records prior to 1999-2000 said Hall of Famers both. Hall of Fame writer Jayson Stark says, simply, “They just ran out of minds to change.”

Maybe not quite. Both their cases, the good, bad, and ugly, go to the Era Committees. The Today’s Game Committee could take them both up as soon as next fall. That’ll be small comfort to those excoriating the Baseball Writers Association of America for saying OK to some who’ve been suspected but never proven and no to others suspected and suspected and suspected again.

Saying no to those absolutely affirmed is different. Manny Ramírez tested dirty twice during the mandatory-testing era and put paid to himself. He didn’t help his own cause, either, by having been one of baseball’s biggest pains in the rump roast. What they used to call “Manny Being Manny” was Manny graduating from a fun-loving nutbag to a self-centered jerk who often wounded his teams with his antics.

Aléx Rodríguez, who was a first-timer on this year’s BBWAA ballot as well, got nailed stone cold in the Biogenesis probe, of course. That probe had its own issues, unfortunately, but A-Rod’s self-immolating bid to sue his way out of that jam until he was forced to sit an entire season out under suspension took care of him.

My own ambivalence about the actual/alleged PED question comes down as well to the following: It was and remains genuinely impossible to prove for dead last certain that using them did or didn’t give someone a performance or statistical edge. You can even look at a considerable majority of such suspects and discover their stats actually dipped, not rose, during the periods they were believed to indulge. (Jason Giambi was one such candidate, in fact.)

You can also find considerable research to suggest very plausibly that the substances which inflated arm and shoulder strength weren’t really going to help for one good reason: nearly all power hitters generate their power from the lower body, from the torso and thighs.

There were enough players, too, who dipped into the actual/alleged PED well not because they thought it would give them an edge at the plate or on the mound but because they thought—foolishly enough—that they could recover from injuries quicker and without consequences. If they learned the hard way about the consequences, could you blame them for trying? Really?

Baseball doctors aren’t exactly chock full of Nobel Prize for Medicine candidates. In enough cases they could be tried by jury for malpractise, if not quackery. You can remember how many players with careers compromised or ended for rushing it back, being rushed back, or playing foolishly through injuries?

And don’t get me started on how many injured players were denounced as “quitters” for not wanting to risk the long term and play through injuries that might have become worse. (Were, and still are. Carl Crawford had Hall of Fame talent but was sapped by injuries—including one or two he was foolish enough to try playing through, for fear that his manager might call him a quitter, too.)

As a member of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, I participate in an annual vote for the Hall of Fame. Symbolic regarding the real Hall of Fame, of course. But we elected Bonds and Clemens a couple of years ago. I’d like to think we, not just me,  knew Bonds and Clemens were Hall of Fame worthy by their careers before they were suspect.

(We also figured, I’m sure, Clemens having been acquitted of lying to Congress’s Committee for the Dissemination of Great Messages to Kids [thank you again, Mr. Will] when he denied using actual/alleged PEDs.)

I’d like to think we also knew the tainted 2003 anonymous test shouldn’t taint a David Ortiz who burned to play in the biggest of the big, shone in the biggest of the big, and has three World Series rings to show for it, but never tested dirty in thirteen seasons to follow of playing in the mandatory testing era.

But it’s easier to clean up an oil spill than it is to change minds made up before or despite the real evidence coming before it. That’s something that even ironclad evidence has a tough time overcoming.