At Home Plate - Drug testing policy, not leaked medical records, should be focus

Drug testing policy, not leaked medical records, should be focus

Written by Jonathan Leshanski (Contact & Archive) on February 11, 2013

The mania over the discovery of names of MLB players who were clients of Tony Bosch’s Biogenesis Clinic is embarrassing for MLB and especially for a handful of players. However the mania, at least for now, is quite overblown.

Photo by Steve Paluch, used under creative commons license.

The Biogenesis clinic -- unlike BALCO, which was pretty much a pure doping clinic -- was a legitimate business that apparently helped a lot of people. They sold plenty of legitimate products designed to help people lose weight, build muscle and via hormonal manipulations regain the feeling of youth.

There are plenty of clinics offering the same services. Heck, you only need to turn on any sports radio network to be bombarded by them promising to help boost your testosterone, make you a tiger in bed, and make you feel younger and better than you have in years. Yeah, those are the same kind of businesses as Biogenesis of America.

Some obviously are more legitimate than others. But these businesses aren’t required to report athletes who come to them looking for the elixir of youth or better performance. It’s called medical ethics and a right to privacy, something any medical clinic is supposed to observe. They also are supposed to carefully regulate and administer medications, as they are medically needed. The problem, of course, is that most of the things these clinics claim to treat are very subjective.

Oh and they have to be done by someone who is supposed to have a medical license, otherwise what it can boil down to is distributing controlled substances or drug dealing if you’d prefer. That’s what the Federal investigation of Biogenesis of America is really all about.

This is not an investigation led by MLB or even its agents. The Feds are under no obligation to release names or details to MLB or the press, and if they don’t charge Tony Bosch and his associates, the details never need to be made into public records and may never become evidence which MLB can use or even look at.

Except for that bit already leaked to the media.

After that the Feds have no responsibility to share any info with MLB or its investigators, and it could even be considered a violation of medical privacy if those records were made available if those athletes were treated by a medical doctor or if a judge decides that Biogenesis was a legitimate medical clinic.

The truth is that we may never know if any or all of these athletes were treated legally under federal law, state law or even baseball’s drug policy. After all, the evidence here at least thus far is of a more tenuous nature than that revealed by the Mitchell Report.

All of the named players may walk away without suspension and many might in fact be innocent (certainly they’ve all claimed it).

But the real issue here isn’t what’s in Anthony Bosch’s papers and the paper trail, but a factor that’s been very much overlooked. Not a single one of the players named tested positive for banned substances. That’s the real failure of baseball’s drug policy, and it’s where the mania should really be focused.

While the media may be condemning players named in Bosch’s papers, right now what we’ve seen a lot of smoke but not a lot of facts proving anyone is actually guilty. Once again we’ve seen guilt subjectively applied based on quasi-medical records but without a positive actually confirmed by MLB’s administered tests.

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