PED PARTY
Baseball's PED Problem Won't Go Away
By Jonah Keri at
A Miami New Times article reports that six MLB players purchased a variety of drugs from Miami-based antiaging clinic Biogenesis, marking the latest jolt for a sport that's gone from willful compliance to zealotry when it comes to PED suspicions.
The article lists Alex Rodriguez, Melky Cabrera, Bartolo Colon, and Yasmani Grandal among the players who allegedly bought performance-enhancing drugs from the clinic and its former proprietor, Anthony Bosch. These allegations are the result of a three-month investigation by the Miami New Times, where the focal point of the evidence is a spreadsheet kept by Bosch, said to contain a list of his clients, and a stack of notebooks found by Juan Garcia. The article notes that Garcia was a former client of Bosch's who invested in the clinic. Rodriguez admitted in a 2009 press conference that he'd used PEDs years earlier while playing with the Texas Rangers, at a time when said substances weren't specifically outlawed by Major League Baseball. Cabrera, Colon, and Grandal were all suspended last year for violating MLB's drug policy. We'll get to their cases later.
The other two active major leaguers named in the article, Gio Gonzalez and Nelson Cruz, had never been publicly linked to performance-enhancing drugs before publication of the New Times piece. The mention of Gonzalez, in particular, is jarring, given the screaming lack of evidence he did anything wrong and the guilt by association he's now forced to endure.
