Email a copy of 'PED Incentives And The Next JDA' to a friend
Loading ...
By Jeff Todd | at
Email a copy of 'PED Incentives And The Next JDA' to a friend
MLB Trade Rumors is not affiliated with Major League Baseball, MLB or MLB.com
hide arrows scroll to top
Getthekingtotheseriesplz
My only problem with making financial hits part of the suspension is what happens if you are a guy like Chris Colabello, who can’t even identify where the stuff he took entered his system? Guys that are getting caught recently aren’t doing it with high traces of stuff in their system, as far as I can tell. These guys are as much a victim of the sports supplement industry, and there is very little you can do to effect that. If something is essentially cross contaminated what are the players supposed to do, especially when they can read the label and still ingest a banned substance? There needs to be something regarding the concentration of the substance, rather than just purely the banned substances. These guys are also getting hit for stuff they took during the off season, and there is very little chance has effected their in season form.
Jorge Soler Powered
You’re really going to believe the “I don’t know how I took them.” excuse?
BoldyMinnesota
If colabello is lying, he’s put on a really good act. Maybe it is my BJ bias coming through, but I wholeheartedly believe he is telling the truth. Why spend 7 years in Indy ball and then use peds in the mlb. Why not use them your first year in Indy ball? I’m sure some players do unknowingly have peds in their system whether it’s from carelessness or something spiked, but others before have already cried wolf so now nobody will believe them
Fenway North
You finally make it and you want to stay, you use PEDs to make sure to perform well enough to stay
chesteraarthur
To the best of my knowledge indy ball doesn’t have drug testing, so who says he DIDN’T use them then?
jaysrock
I am also a Jays fan but do not believe Colabeello at all. The metabolite was in his system. That means that the drug was in his system in the past.. It is a calling card that says he was doping. This substance is not something that can be sprinkled on your Frosted Fakes. You take it orally. He wanted to stay in Toronto and not be making a AAA salary. He all the reasons in the world to do it and he got caught. I like the guy but that doesn’t make him a upstanding player.
dickwinthrop
Even if the player is not intentionally taking PEDs and he gets caught for having something unintentional in his system, that’s still on the player. You’re absolutely right that the sports supplement industry is poorly regulated and that some people may be falling victim to that. But guess what? If you know that the industry is poorly regulated and you know that the list of ingredients may not be accurate, then you shouldn’t be taking those supplements. If you’re willing to take the risk of using supplements that you know might not be 100% kosher, than you deserve to face consequences of those actions.
NotCanon
Of course, we have only Colabello’s own word that he “can’t identify where the stuff he took entered his system.” That’s the same argument made by just about every single person caught taking PEDs (Braun used the less-popular-but-apparently-more-effective: “I’m being framed by some lab tech who’s never met me!” argument), including Freddy Galvis, who certainly hasn’t had much to show for his use.
Given the astronomical sums these guys are getting paid, it behooves them to be incredibly wary of anything they ingest. Fortunately for them, they have more than enough money to ensure that they only eat foods, supplements, and vitamins that are in accordance with MLB policies.
Also, as studies have shown, the effects of steroid use can far outlive the window in which it is detectable (see: Egner, I. M., Bruusgaard, J. C., Eftestøl, E. and Gundersen, K. (2013), A cellular memory mechanism aids overload hypertrophy in muscle long after an episodic exposure to anabolic steroids. The Journal of Physiology, 591: 6221–6230. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.2013.264457). The idea that it could have very little effect on their in-season form is patently untrue. Even a brief regimen (say, the 3 months of the off-season) of steroidal use could easily cause massive, and long-lasting change that would dramatically impact a player’s muscle mass.
22222pete
The point on the benefits of steroids on muscle growth long after the fact is correct. Many players for example using steroids in HS, college or maybe those when in exile after leaving Cuba before coming to MLB may have been juiced up and then even after stopping when signed by a MLB team enjoy the effects years later. Guys like Trout, Harper, etc., who knows one way or another. Or Arod having the year he did last year despite being “clean”, not to mention any player in the steroid era who played another 5-15 years after testing began.
Of course, what those benefits on performance actually are we can’t exactly say, especially of so many of the players have experienced similar benefits
Getthekingtotheseriesplz
But if they are taken in as small a concentration as it sounds like their being taken (very small traces in most cases) does the benefits REALLY come out? I think there would be many professionals that would say it’s likely they don’t.
jd396
Being DETECTED in traces and being TAKEN in traces are two dramatically different things.
Mark 21
You cant sit there and make up excuses for a player and failing a drug test. These guys are told what they can take that is safe and wont trigger a failed test. What MLB should do is provide the players with the supplements that are allowed and call if a day. If you fail it was cause you took something other then what MLB provides and you deserve to be suspended. WHat they should do is if a player fails a test they serve the suspension and have to play the rest of the year at league minimum and the next year as well at league minimum. Perhaps this is the only fair way to handle this as teams get hit with the PR troubles and players act like nothing it wrong when they come back. Hit the wallet and then maybe they will make sure they dont take any funny stuff.
Getthekingtotheseriesplz
But Colabello took ONLY what the team doctors and trainers gave him. He did a offseason workout with Kevin Pillar, and he didn’t even want a protein shake from there because he was worried it wasn’t safe.
dshires4
You buy that he can’t identify where and what he took? He’s got team doctors, an agent, and the banned substance list all at his disposal to see if the supplements he’s taking are legal. It’s literally insane to believe that he doesn’t know what he took.
Getthekingtotheseriesplz
Read the article they did on him a few days ago. That says everything you need to know about just how careful Colabello was. The dude took precautions beyond all his teammates. He ONLY took what team doctors and trainers gave him. He got sick and a doctor gave him a steroid, and he went to the the team doctors to see if he could actually take it. The dude did his due diligence and it wasn’t enough. Just because Ryan Braun was a scum bag doesn’t mean everyone else is.
jd396
If you just take everything from that interview with Colabello at face value, great. I don’t. Yeah, he only took what team trainers gave him, investigated everything he used. Do we have anything other than him saying that to back it up, besides people defending their friend and teammate? No, we don’t. And frankly, if you read through that whole interview critically, note that it’s just him monologuing. He’s obviously not being cross-examined – and that’s fine, he’s just telling his story.
Among the red flags for me: when a guy talks about his due diligence and then says he was too scared to drink chocolate milk you can buy at the gas station, that’s a discontinuity in his story. Everyone who has anything to do with training or working out can tell you chocolate milk is a great post-workout drink. But, he says he was afraid to take it threw it away. True story? Who knows. What it tells us is that despite all of his supposed due diligence missed out on some really basic training advice, or the story is constructed in some way.
I want to believe him. When he was here in MN he really came off as a genuine guy who loved the game, and I’m not saying that something like this completely destroy’s ones character, that’s a conversation for another day. Frankly, I hope they find proof that someone accidentally spilled dehydrochlormethyltestosterone on the communion wafers at church, that left him pissing metabolites in March. But for F’s sake, have we not been down this road enough times in the past ten years? They know what to test for, and they know how to test for it.
Go read about it (steroid.com/Oral-Turinabol.php) and tell me if this sounds like something you accidentally stumble across. It’s not. It’s not something that someone would sprinkle on your corn flakes, and it’s not something that you’d get accidentally contaminating a supplement – or even something contaminating a sketchy supplement from overseas. It’s something you specifically go after for what it does (recovery rate and endurance, versus old fashioned building muscle mass) and even in terms of the shadowy world of obtaining steroids, it’s hard to come across the real thing because it’s only made in back-room labs overseas – unlike many other steroids it is not manufactured anywhere for medical use or even for veterinary use. It’s 100% black market. It would take some research and some connections to come up with it. It’s not something that a legitimate supplement would ever come in to contact with, and not something anyone, even a shadowy trainer, would have just laying around to say “hey, try this”.
22222pete
No system except one with draconian measures will ever be 100% effective, and even then, murder does not end with the death penalty.
Any system that benefits teams financials is just a no-fly scheme as the players will see through this and recognize the dangers. The JDA is rapidly approaching that when you consider most of the positives are from players who make almost noting and can’t afford the good stuff or impending free agents/free agents whose suspension reduces their market value or saves a team some payroll on a player not producing the full value of his salary. Dee Gordon is one of the few exceptions in recent years.
We also have o consider the real possibility a player can be innocent. Drinks or food laced with drugs by gamblers or someone with a grudge, or other financial incentive. Also, player think they are safe using NSF certified supplements, but these certification programs are no 100% guarantee. Contaminated supplements are always a possibility as we know well even from food and drugs under FDA’s umbrella.. Some of these tough measures simply don’t consider the possibility, which is one reason many of us oppose a death penalty
I also don’t think we have proven the effect of steroids benefits on performance. No doubt they can help you get stronger with enough working out in the gym, but which is more important, the workouts or the drugs, and does being stronger always help you in a sport where eye hand coordination and fast muscle reactions are most important. Those who risk suspension and health may simply be more motivated and would have spent the time in the gym to improve performance without the drugs. I remember Yaz going from 20 HR to 44 and winning the Triple Crown at the age of 28 in 1967 due to his spending the offseason doing strength training for the first time
jd396
It boggles the mind how quickly we forget how big of a problem this is for the game, and sports in general. We’re revisiting the old “what’s the big deal” arguments again, like “PEDs don’t make you more aware of the strike zone” and “they could have just been gym rats without the drugs”.
Well, no, they don’t make your coordination better, but you hit the ball harder. You throw a little harder. You recoup from a workout faster, you work out more, you bulk up quicker… it adds up. That’s why they still do it despite all of what’s happened in sports with regards to doping in the last ten, fifteen years.
The idea that they’re just bulking up and could be doing that anyway ignores the fact that PEDs enable you to work out a lot more and a lot harder than you could naturally.
Anabolic steroids are a very specific kind of drug and they’re used in a specific way to enhance one’s performance. They unnaturally jack around with your body chemistry and allow the user to work out in unnatural effective ways. So asking if it’s the drugs or the workouts is pointless. The workouts are enabled by the drugs so it’s pointless to try and separate the two.
Finally, I think we’ve forgotten the magnitude of this problem when we’re so quick to leap to the least probable scenario. We don’t need a convoluted conspiracy theory to explain what has already been established – steroids show up in gyms and the more serious you get with your training, the more likely you’re going to come across them. Face it, no matter what they say, these guys didn’t get set up as part of some conspiracy. They used PEDs. They didn’t have some steroids squirted on their corn flakes. They didn’t accidentally take a little bit of some supplement they got at a “pharmacy” on vacation in Playa Del Carmen that was tainted.
No, they used PEDs because they either thought they wouldn’t get tested, or thought that by the time they got tested it would have worked out of their system. They thought it might give them an edge. Judging by the timing, with so many positives coming at the start of the season, they probably thought they could just hammer on it during the offseason and come in to spring training with a little bit of an edge. But, they got caught. “Trace amounts” in a sample is a positive test. It does not correlate to trace amounts of usage.
jd396
If you just take everything from that interview with Colabello at face value, great. I don’t. Yeah, he only took what team trainers gave him, investigated everything he used. Do we have anything other than him saying that to back it up, besides people defending their friend and teammate? No, we don’t. And frankly, if you read through that whole interview critically, note that it’s just him monologuing. He’s obviously not being cross-examined – and that’s fine, he’s just telling his story.
Among the red flags for me: when a guy talks about his due diligence and then says he was too scared to drink chocolate milk you can buy at the gas station, that’s a discontinuity in his story. Everyone who has anything to do with training or working out can tell you chocolate milk is a great post-workout drink. But, he says he was afraid to take it threw it away. True story? Who knows. What it tells us is that despite all of his supposed due diligence missed out on some really basic training advice, or the story is constructed in some way.
I want to believe him. When he was here in MN he really came off as a genuine guy who loved the game, and I’m not saying that something like this completely destroy’s ones character, that’s a conversation for another day. Frankly, I hope they find proof that someone accidentally spilled dehydrochlormethyltestosterone on the communion wafers at church, that left him pissing metabolites in March. But for F’s sake, have we not been down this road enough times in the past ten years? They know what to test for, and they know how to test for it.
Go read about it (steroid.com/Oral-Turinabol.php) and tell me if this sounds like something you accidentally stumble across. It’s not. It’s not something that someone would sprinkle on your corn flakes, and it’s not something that you’d get accidentally contaminating a legitimate supplement – or even something contaminating a sketchy supplement from overseas. It’s something you specifically go after for what it does (recovery rate and endurance, versus old fashioned building muscle mass) and even in terms of the shadowy world of obtaining steroids, it’s hard to come across the real thing because it’s only made in back-room labs overseas – unlike many other steroids it is not manufactured anywhere for medical use or even for veterinary use. It’s 100% black market. It would take some research and some connections to come up with it. It’s not something that a legitimate supplement would ever come in to contact with, and not something anyone, even a shadowy trainer, would have just laying around to say “hey, try this”.