That includes the Boston Red Sox, but ESPN's favorite team has largely received a pass on the scrutiny since George Mitchell, a fan of the team and a director of the franchise's board, was put in charge of the MLB's steroid investigation.
This obvious conflict of interest was ignored by most of the mainstream media but things have started to break in the wake of Manny Ramirez’s PED suspension. The thought that Manny started using steroids in Los Angeles is ludicrous.
Other neon signs in Beantown were also ignored and still are to this day. It was almost as if the Red Sox were baseball's version of Lance Armstrong. Everybody else was cheating but they heroically overcame it all with nothing but hard work and persistence.
You can officially add needles to that formula now...
Former Red Sox infielder Lou Merloni told Comcast’s The Baseball Show that he attended a spring training meeting with the BoSox where a doctor taught the players about how to properly use steroids.
Merloni told the Boston Globe that the doctor was not endorsing PEDs, but advising against improper use.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s totally unfounded,” said then-GM Dan Duquette. “Who was the doctor? Tell me who the doctor is? If there was such a doctor he wasn’t in the employ of the Red Sox. We brought in doctors to educate the players on the major league drug policy at the time at the recommendation of major league baseball. This is so ridiculous I hate to even respond to it.”Classic plausible deniability from Duquette. What's rididulous is that Duquette and Theo Espstein claim to be unaware that some of their best players are steroid abusers.
1 comment:
This is a myth. Boston fans and media long suspected Nomar of steroid use, for example. We know the Manny Alexander story. The team had Canseco for three seasons, and that was enough to put fans on notice. Mitchell was wrong not to resign from the Sox board to eliminate the appearance of bias...that said, there's no reason to believe he was protecting the club.
Merloni's story is plausible, but he has given no date or specifics to allow the story to be checked. If it happened, another player has to be able to substantiate it before I'll be certain that Lou, who is not the brightest bulb on the tree, didn't just misinterpret a standard anti-steroid talk. Or it could have been one misguided trainer, taking a cue from the people who distribute clean needles to heroin users or condoms to teenagers. In any case, nobody will be shocked to discover that one or more of the Idiots were cheats. It's still unfair to presume any one of them was.
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