Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 883: T.J. Quinn Explains the Latest PED Problems

Episode Date: May 13, 2016

Ben and Sam talk to ESPN investigative reporter T.J. Quinn about the string of suspensions in the ongoing battle between baseball and PEDs.

I want to survive, you better learn how to lie You better cheat, cheat, no reason to prefer Cheat, cheat, I'll come get everybody Cheat, cheat, and you can't win Don't use the rules, they're not for you, they're for the fools And you're a fool if you don't know that So use the rules, use the bread, fool Good morning and welcome to episode 883 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by our Patreon supporters and the Play Index at BaseballReference.com.

I'm Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Howdy. I'm going to do some PED talk today. Not something that comes up that often on this podcast, but we're going to fit it all into one episode and we're going to talk to someone who's been doing a lot of reporting on it lately and really for years, TJ Quinn, who is an investigative reporter for ESPN. You often see him on Outside the Lines. Hello, TJ. Hello, guys. So I don't know if I would call it a wave of PED

suspensions. That seems like it might be overstating it, but I guess we could call it a string of suspensions. I think there have been seven major leaguers who have violated the joint drug agreement and been suspended so far this season, which is the most in kind of a concentrated period since biogenesis. And baseball's kind of in this weird spot where someone getting suspended is obviously a sign that the system is working, that the tests are detecting what they're supposed to detect. But every positive test just sort of brings this collective groan, this collective sigh. We haven't completely eradicated the PED problem. So do you see this as a positive or a negative?

Obviously, it's a little bit of both, but do you see it more as one or the other? You know, I don't know if it's more one or the other, just because the big unanswered question from this is, were the tests catching a higher number of people, or is it simply representative of more doping and it's just the proper percentage of that that they're catching? The drug that caught everybody's attention was Terenobal, which was popular in East Germany in the 70s and 80s. And it was not something anybody expected to see. There've been a handful of positives, Eastern Bloc countries, wrestling has had some, but it just was really

a strange drug to see in the United States, especially a lot of times the people who are caught in baseball, these are Dominican kids who are in a country where you can buy anabolic steroids right off a shelf of a pharmacy. You've got plenty of people who are trying to push these kids to get contracts. You understand why someone would take an unsophisticated drug there that was readily available. But these are middle class guys from the U.S. They don't fit that profile. So why were they taking a drug that's so easy to detect? And then you wonder, well, baseball says the testing got better. And I mean, it's not just them saying it's a fact that testing got better and that's why they're catching them.

But were people getting away with that drug for years before the testing caught up with them? So the kind of doomsday attitude that I think is fairly prevalent when people talk about this topic is the idea that the drugs are always ahead of the drug tests and that there's always some mad scientist somewhere creating something that is more sophisticated. And that is kind of the premise of the rise of Falco. And I wonder if the fact that the players who've been caught recently are using drugs from the 70s, very basic, almost analog kind of performance enhancing drugs. Is that evidence that that's actually not true, that that fear has not come true or isn't currently true? And in fact, the testers are relatively caught up to the drugs themselves. Well, they're definitely not caught up because

one of the things that made this curious was why they chose that drug and not one of the many drugs that can easily evade detection. I mean, one of the lessons of biogenesis was, yes, four people ended up getting caught by testing out of the 20 or so who were suspended. But all four of them, according to people that we spoke to who were connected to Genesis, those guys were caught because they didn't follow directions. You had a case of Ryan Braun where he was taking, Tony Bosch created this thing called trochies. It was like a gummy that had testosterone in it. You're supposed to take a little bit of it after a game called microdosing, just enough to get some benefit out of it, but not enough that you get caught testing. I think he was supposed to take one.

And supposedly the day he was tested, he took five. So it wasn't so much that it was this the testing had caught up. It was just a guy screwed up, didn't follow directions. So, Torino ball is not a sign so much that, you know, the testers are catching up or, you know, who's wearing that race. I think everyone recognizes that the dopers are way ahead. The reality in anti-doping right now is that testing is extremely limited. Don Catlin, who ran the UCLA Olympic doping lab for decades, said to me twice in the last few years, testing doesn't work. It really exists just as a deterrent so that there's at least a baseline you know will get some drugs and basic drugs. But beyond that, anti-doping now is much more about investigation, education than it is about testing. And another way that this kind of comes back to bite baseball is that baseball has been

very aggressive with its testing, particularly lately. And baseball always seems to produce a bigger backlash when anyone gets caught for various reasons than it does in other sports. So when this news comes out about baseball players testing positive, it sort of just is a further stain on baseball's reputation. But really, if players are being caught in baseball, then we have to assume that there are a lot of players in other sports going uncaught, right? Because the testing is not as stringent? No, it's not nearly as stringent.

And every other athlete has as much motivation to dope as a baseball player does. I mean, the NFL, its testing is not nearly as strong. I've had players tell me that the culture within the game is they don't care if somebody else is taking HGH. They don't like if somebody is using steroids. To them, that's a little bit too much. But I've had players tell me, Terrell Thomas, even on the record, said he doesn't look down on a player who decides to use HGH because the game is so brutal on your body. And they have banned certain painkillers now, like Tordall, that guys used to take and cut down on certain opioid prescription painkillers that they feel like they need it for the recovery. So it's part of the culture of the game.

The testing's not as good. Of course it's more extensive. And when people say something like, well, hockey doesn't have a problem because why would you need it or the NBA doesn't have a problem, kids take performance-enhancing drugs in high school chess. So, you know, where there's no money at stake, they're not doing it for the groupies. So you're going to say that

an NFL or NBA or NHL athlete who lifts weights and runs and wants to be faster and stronger, that those guys aren't going to take drugs, it really is kind of ridiculous. But you're right, baseball gets the attention. And when you see a positive in another sport, you really don't get the same sort of backlash about it. A lot of the backlash from the, you know, the height of the steroid era was this feeling, I think a lot of people had that it was an open secret in clubhouses and that you could do it, you know, relatively with impunity with regards to your peers. Is there any sense that the stigma of using drugs in baseball clubhouses is weakening with, you know, sort of a generation removed from the big PD scandals? Or is it still something that you really have to do secretly, you're not

even necessarily going to have a, you know, a sort of a partner in the crime, because this is a very isolated endeavor? Well, my, my understanding of it, and I got a big caveat, which is that really most of what I hear is through other baseball journalists. I'm not in the clubhouse anymore. I was a beat writer for years, but I talked to a few players, but I got the same thing from a lot of different colleagues who are in clubhouses, which is they did see a genuine shift in the culture that the whole PD issue was, you know,

maybe the most divisive issue the union had faced since its founding. And you had players standing up saying, I think it's ridiculous that I've got to compete for my job against somebody who doesn't really have the skill to be here. And that ethos sort of took over. And from what I understand, it didn't obviously eliminate doping, but it drove it to the underground. The testing did part of that. But what you've seen in any case that's come up since then is that it happens in pockets. Again, most of the positives that you see are individual cases of kids from the Dominican. But when you see it in major league clubhouses like Biogenesis, those

were all guys from Miami. They were all connected to Tony Bosch. They all kept it very secret. So the stigma in it really has changed. And it's a far cry from when I was covering baseball and I was in the clubhouse once and, you know, players would joke about, you know, who's on, who's not. At one time, a pitcher reached down and pick up a little green pill and a writer said, what is that? And the pitcher looked at him like, are you an idiot? How do you not know this is amphetamines? Of course it is. Didn't even try to hide it. Those days are long gone. So all of these players who've been suspended recently have professed their innocence or at least their ignorance of having knowingly done anything wrong.

And I guess I have two questions about that. But the first is that assuming that some of them are just saying that and actually did something knowingly and given what we know about the past precedents here and how many players have professed their innocence and then eventually been proven to have done something and come out and acknowledged it or apologized. I mean, is there still a benefit to claiming not to have done anything? Does it really serve the player's purpose at this point? Because, you know, there's so much skepticism anyway, whenever a player says that. There really is. I mean, I've talked to Chris Colabello and Daniel Stumpf, two of the three players who tested positive for Terenobal. And look, they make a very strong case.

And I even said to one of them, if you're a con man, you're good at it. You know, it was they make a very compelling case. A problem is history is full of people who made compelling cases like A-Rod, Brian Braun, you know, on and on. Marion Jones was, you know, people like, well, how could she be that adamant if she really didn't, if she really took anything? People lie. So that's what those guys are fighting against. What's different about this case, and I'm not saying anything, I think I'm fairly jaded after covering this for this long,

but the questions I have are, one, why that drug? It doesn't make sense. Two, why did they test positive in spring training when the one time a year you know you're going to be tested? Baseball's answer to that was, well, it was a trace metabolite, meaning it had been in the system for a long time. They likely took it well before spring training, thinking it would have cleared their systems. And they didn't know that the testing had improved to open the window of detection from like a week to, in some cases, months.

You know, so that all makes sense. that all makes sense. But when they get together with UFC fighter Frank Mir, who tested positive for the same thing, and say they're all in it together, they're all sharing notes, they all believe that the other one didn't use it, it just sort of makes you raise an eyebrow anyway and say, all right, is it possible there's more to this story? They recognize it doesn't matter. They're suspended. Nothing will change that. Even if they can prove that it was completely unintentional, it was in some tainted substance, there's no way to reduce the suspension because it's still an anabolic steroid. There's not a provision to cover that.

So, I mean, the best reason to maintain your innocence really would just be if you're innocent. But otherwise, I think it's really about convincing a team that it's worth keeping around or bringing you back once you're off that suspension. Although, correct me if I have any of these details wrong, but with Raul Mondesi, he did get his suspension knocked down somewhat because he was able to convincingly show that it was an honest mistake. Is that a precedent-setting decision? Yeah, it is. He's the very first one that that happened to. And it was really because of the drug he took, clenbuterol, which is used as a stimulant. In fact, the rule was created because of that drug. Guillermo Mota, who had

tested positive for steroid once and then was one of the very few people who said, yeah, I did it. I did it on purpose. I did it to cheat. I'm sorry. And then he got popped again for clenbuterol. And that time he said, look, I swear I don't know how I got it. MLB and the union looked at his case and realized it came from a cough syrup in the Dominican, that it was unintentional, but there was nothing in the drug program then to allow you to reduce the penalty. So for a second offense, he got 100 games for something they admitted he didn't take and gave him little benefit. So they changed that rule. But there are certain drugs like any anabolic steroid like Terenobal, you won't get a reduction. So if these guys have been popped for Clenbuterol, maybe they could make a case.

And if anybody else takes that same cough syrup, if you're in the Dominican Republic and you have a cold, be really careful about what you take. But with a steroid, there's no walking it back. I'm very curious about the culture of how these things are sold and marketed and distributed. When a player who does intend, who is actually intending to get a performance enhancing drug, a player who does intend, who is actually intending to get a performance enhancing drug goes out looking for one, does he ask for the Terinabol or does, are these things marketed under some like name, like the, you know, like the heroin and the wire, or is it like, do they just say, do they just say, give me the dope and somebody who's smarter than them takes care of it all for them? My understanding is that in most cases,

what happens is word of mouth, player to player, or a player working with some kind of trainer, somebody usually a gym away from the team. The guy says, I've got something that will help you. Sometimes it's pitched as it's just a recovery thing, or it's just to get you back up to speed, it's pitched as it's just a recovery thing or it's just to get you back up to speed or hey i know some other guys who are doing this um there's no way you'll get caught it really depends whether the player wants to cheat or wants to talk himself you know into uh convincing himself that he's only doing it for a noble reason like overcoming an injury and getting back there for his teammates. But they put themselves in the hands of a guru. And whether it was Barry Bonds with his trainer, Greg Anderson, Roger Clemens with his trainer, Brian McNamee, all those guys at Biogenesis with Tony Bosch, they just entrust themselves

to these people. And it always blows up on them. You rarely see somebody who just on their own went out got everything they needed if they wanted to it's not hard to do you know you can order all these things online you could go to any gym start asking around somebody's going to hook you up you've got cases where players have had people ship things to family members or friends to hide the uh you know, hide the paper trail. You know, it's something investigators look for when they get wind of something.

But a lot, that's what happens like that in a little cluster where it starts getting around. Hey, this guy can help you. And it's not a surprise that a lot of times you see guys who are borderline players, especially what they call, you know, 4A players, a little better than AAA, can't quite stick in the majors. That's somebody who's really looking for something, and it's to help him keep a job. In your opinion, does the fact that a few players were popped around the same time for the same substance make it any more or less likely that they are telling the truth?

I'm trying hard not to draw a conclusion. It's a question to me that's interesting and worth asking because I couldn't find any other common thread between them. The only one was that two of them, Cody's family and Daniel Stumpf, were teammates in the Arizona Fall League two years ago. But that's kind of a leap from that to how they would both have a tournament ball positive in 2016. So, you know, because there was no obvious connection.

But by Genesis, it was different. I mean, the reason we started looking into it, because you had three guys who tested positive for a fact that fast acting testosterone, all with Miami connections. And we started asking around and someone said, you should be looking at this guy, Tony Bosch. With these guys, there's nothing. And I've spoken to people who are very familiar with MLB's investigation, and they said MLB, you know, that their investigators haven't found anything to connect them either. So those are questions I'd like to have answered. Those players have sworn that they're going to keep looking until they figure out what it is. I'm curious to hear what they come up with.

And does a positive test sway you one way or the other as far as, you know, whether the player was taking something before whatever triggered the positive test? Because there does seem to be a tendency for people to read the news and say, well, Dee Gordon and Chris Colabello, you know, they just got caught. They are coming off big years. Of course, they were taking something that helped them get those big years. But of course, Of course, they were taking something that helped them get those big years. But of course, the thing that they tested positive for was after that year. So if they had been taking something, then if it was working, then either they stopped taking it and switched to a certain substance or, you know, they were taking this, but it wasn't caught by the test for some reason. So it doesn't totally make sense or it doesn't totally follow that if you were taking something recently, then you must also have been taking something before.

So does it make it any more or less likely? Do you think that these players were doing something before the period that triggered this test? I don't think you can make that leap. Just, you know, logically, there's nothing to base it. It's an old fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, after therefore because of, I guess this would be the opposite. I think it's easy to assume that because they're a profile, right? They're guys who, just as you said, had career years. A guy like Colabello who was playing independent ball all of a sudden becomes this productive major leaguer.

Yeah, you're going to wonder. And then he gets busted and nobody's that shocked. It doesn't mean that he was doing it. But the things that I would look for are one, were there other drugs that he was caught with? It's rare for somebody who's doing a smart regimen to turn up positive for one drug. Usually you're stacking. Otherwise, the drug that somebody tests positive for is something that they take when they're coming off a regimen, something to kickstart the cycle. Something like Manny Ramirez got nailed for, a prescription for human chorionic gonadotropin,

which you take to stimulate your body's own testosterone production because when you take steroids, your body stops creating it endogenously. So that's an interesting one to me. But then again, if they were stacking Terenobal with something else or taking some kind of supplement, it's possible that anything else that was dirty just would have washed through their systems. If they were taking something before that was effective, why would you switch to Terenobal? That doesn't make any sense. You know, Stump was kind of funny. His defense is, he said, dude, I don't even work out.

He said, I'm the least likely person. He said, not only do I not take any supplements, he said, but I don't even lift and I get a ton of grief about it. That's not proof of anything either. But there are just enough things that make it interesting. I don't want to go so far as to say that I think their denials are credible, because I just don't know. But their denials are worth investigating. And after this news came out, there was a wave of reactions, you know, calls for harsher penalties, even more extreme calls for the ability to just void contracts retroactively. And we're still talking about a

fraction of 1% of players in Major League Baseball, unless you think that this represents the tip of an unseen iceberg or something. So did any of that seem persuasive to you? Did you hear about this or report this and think baseball needs to do something? Or did you just think this is unavoidable and they are coping with it the best they can? Well, I think there are some things they could be doing. I mean, you know, one to get, you know, really step back is turn their testing over to an independent organization like USADA. Baseball's program has been successful because by all measures, Bud Selig really bought into it and told Rob Manfred,

we are really going to go after these guys. No other American sport has done that. In fact, really no sport has done that to itself. And as long as there are issues with who's in charge of the program, there's always the potential for corruption. I'm not accusing baseball of it. In fact, other sports have kind of mocked them, like, why do they go so hard after their own guys? And I'm not accusing the NFL of anything either. But the fact is, when you administer your own program, there's that possibility. I mean, look, I want to take a really extreme example. Look at what's going on in Russia. There's incredible news about how they were actually running a respected lab. Their scientists were some of the best in the world at this, but all of a sudden,

you know, Putin's government gets involved, says we're going to win. And now you have today the, you know, the man who ran their anti-doping problem program confessing to the New York Times how they were able to beat the system so effectively. So transparency is an issue, even though it doesn't look like anything we're seeing with the positives is related to that. That's kind of a separate thing. The issue of harsher penalties, that's been there for a while, and that really seems to come from players saying there are still guys doing it. But when people are surprised, I think it's usually just because they were naive. When I hear fans ask me,

when's it going to end? I say, well, as soon as tax cheating ends, you know, as soon as murder ends. I mean, these are all things that are illegal and punished, but people do it. It's always going to be part of the game. It's just a question of how much can you minimize it? And how credibly is your sport going after it. Baseball right now can say that their program is very credible, but you still cannot look at an individual performance on a field and have 100% certainty that what you're seeing is purely the result of that athlete's work. The spate of suspensions recently, like you say, like you write, seems to be as much about the advance in the testing as about an increase in the drug use. Does the league have to inform the union, the players,

when there's a change in their testing, in their methods? Is this something that has to be bargained at all? Or do they kind of have carte blanche to use whatever works best and keep that somewhat secret? All of it is subject to bargaining and when they sign up with a certain lab like you know they use the Montreal lab to analyze your samples there's usually an understanding that whatever technology they come up with and adopt if WADA adopts it they'll use it as well and it took a little time for this technology to catch turinibol to get from the labs where it was thought of in Russia, funny enough, to where the rest of the labs around the world adopted it. The only time there's another issue is something like with HGH.

There's a test everyone uses now that is a really short window. It's like really a day or two to catch somebody. There is another test that is more sophisticated. It was supposed to have a longer window of detection, but it has not been approved yet for international use. And so there's language in their drug agreement that you keep an eye on that, and that once it's available, if it's accepted worldwide, baseball will adopt it too. But usually they're in lockstep on all of this. And I think lastly, are you still aware of any forthcoming suspensions?

Not by name. I know there are a couple more in the pipeline. I know one of them, I believe, one of them is a Terena ball. I don't think any other names. I mean, what I reported last week was that it was going to be about four or five names. We've already seen three of them, and the biggest name out of it so far is Raul Montes Jr., and that's really just because of, you know, that very recognizable name of his, and that he's a top prospect and, you know,

got to quite the major league debut. So, you know, no big names. People really wonder that. You get all these tweets from people asking, basically they're making requests. They assume it's somebody they hate on a rival team, but public and you're good at that job. Does it say anything about the system? Does it speak ill of the system that you are able to find anything out? And is there even a vague way in which you can tell us why it is that this stuff sometimes does surface when it's supposed to be sealed? I got to be really careful how I say it. I will say this. In my experience, both MLB and the Players Association take the confidentiality provisions very seriously. And I will also point

out that anytime one of these comes out, people immediately assume it's MLB or it's the union leaking it. Really, MLB, why would the union leak it? There are a lot of places to get this information, a lot more than people think. In this case, I was able to find out that there were names in the pipeline, but I didn't get the names. And other times, some of the information we've got, it's been completely independent of the anti-doping program that baseball or some other sport has. So it's not really a case where their privacy through that process was violated. It came from somewhere else. And I've had people ask me, well, you know, isn't that like an invasion of somebody's private medical records? No, it's,

you know, the confidentiality of that is an agreement between baseball and the union to keep the names of people who violated policy and potentially the law secret. It's not HIPAA. This isn't private medical information. So I don't ethically have an issue with that at all. But we're also careful about what we report to make sure we know it's right and that it's not just a suspicion or a rumor. You are so very, very mind-blowingly good at your job that I just expect you to have the names. And in the past, you've had the names. Is it getting harder for you to get the names?

As this has become more a part of the structure of the game, have the organizations or have the different interest groups sort of gotten a little bit better at keeping these things secret from you? Oh, God, I hope not. I don't know how much it's changed. I mean, different sources. Every case is different, really. It's never been easy to get something from a really confidential system. These things are all different. On the other hand, when you do something long enough, after a while, you get a reputation for doing it. And I think sometimes you have the advantage of people looking for you as opposed to somebody else on the other hand with biogenesis the Miami New Times this was published so I'm not really giving anything away but the Miami New Times got the names got all the documents from this employee who worked there

Porter Fisher because he reached out to ESPN, sent an email and said he was trying to get in touch with me. And somebody from some office I never heard of wrote back and said, oh, we don't give that information out, just mail it. And so he said, well, the hell with that. And he went to the Miami New Times and he gave them boxes of documents. So it doesn't always work out. And you can't really count on a whistleblower to just call you up out of the blue. All right. Well, TJ is great at covering this, great at covering other sports subjects. You can find him on Outside the Lines.

You can find him on Twitter at TJQuinnESPN, and we will link to his recent reporting, but you can stay tuned for updates from him. Thank you, TJ. Thank you, guys. It was a pleasure. All right. Thanks for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. Today's five people who have already done so, Michael Farrar, William Andreas Viglakis,

Amanda Rose, Joe Ditalve, and Jeff Gilbert. Thank you. You can also buy our bestselling book. The only rule is it has to work. If you want to find out more-selling book, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work. If you want to find out more about the book, you can do so at its website, theonlyruleisithastowork.com. If you haven't read it yet, you can see reviews and excerpts and interviews there. If you have read it, you can also check out the photos and videos and stats. If you like the book, please review it at Amazon and or Goodreads. Every recommendation counts. And tell a friend.

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head over to Reddit and submit your question. Of course, you can really ask me and Sam anything, any day by emailing us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com or by messaging us through Patreon. So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Have a nice weekend. Enjoy your copies of Uncharted 4. That's what I'll be doing. And we will be back with another show on Monday. I don't know my elbow from my ass I should be suspended from class Guys, I'm proud of you. You saved the firm from going under when a lot of people didn't think you could. And we did it our way, right?

I mean, it's an unusual approach, this tag team thing we got. Yes, it is. I'm sure it threw a lot of people at first. How are they going to make this work? How are they going to keep that up? I heard a lot of that. Well, we showed them. Yeah, we did. And it all came full circle.

We thought it was about me learning from you. But in the end, it was really about you learning from me. Kind of. I don't know if that's exactly right. It was really about you learning from me. Kinda. I don't know if that's exactly right. That is just the beginning. Because now we know that this works. This has legs.

For as long as we want it to.