Baseball steroid report to name stars
A report on steroid use in US baseball to be released later today is expected to name as many as 80 players as performance enhancing drug users.
A former trainer for New York Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens, considered one of the game’s greatest players of all time, has admitted to the report’s authors that he supplied him with steroids, according to ESPN.com.
The Associated Press reported that former Senate majority leader George Mitchell’s report exposes a “serious drug culture within baseball, from top to bottom” and calls for beefed-up testing by an outside agency to clean up the game.
The report comes at the end of a year when Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants broke the career home run record, only to be indicted 100 days later on charges of lying to a federal grand jury about steroid use.
Just last week, Kansas City’s Jose Guillen and Baltimore’s Jay Gibbons were suspended for the first 15 days of next season, and media reports said they had obtained human growth hormone in 2005, after baseball banned it.
Much of the first part of the report will be based on evidence obtained from former New York Mets employee Kirk Radomski, and from information gleaned from the Albany district attorney’s investigation into illegal drug distribution that focused on Signature Pharmacy of Orlando, Florida, the Associated Press reported.
Radomski was required to cooperate with the investigation as a condition of his federal plea agreement last April. Radomski pleaded guilty to illegally distributing steroids, HGH, amphetamines and other drugs to players and is awaiting sentencing. Some professional athletes have been linked to the Signature probe, though none have been charged.
Mitchell was hired by Baseball commissioner Bud Selig in March 2006 after the publication of Game of Shadows, a book by two San Francisco Chronicle reporters about Bonds’ alleged steroid use.
An increase in the prowess of baseball players in the 1990s, which drew national attention when both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased Roger Maris’ single-season record in 1998, was accompanied by a rise in suspicion.
Maris’ record of 61 home runs had stood since 1961, but McGwire hit 70 that year and Sosa had 66. A bulked-up Bonds then shattered McGwire’s record by hitting 73 home runs in 2001.
