Though applauding Major League Baseball for taking decisive action in the battle against a) steroids and b) the Players Association, Newsday’s Jon Heyman suggests the war is not quite won.
Bud Selig gets kudos for sticking to the very penalties he proposed many months ago and especially for insisting that amphetamines — “greenies,” in clubhouse slang — be included on the banned list for the first time. Selig’s head clearly has come far out of the clouds.
And yet, he sounded, maybe, well … a little light-headed when he suggested baseball was on the road to “eradicating” steroids.
Introducing … neonjoint.com, a Web site tipped to me by a doctor who’s been around baseball for years and intended to help players and mere mortals beat drug tests.
Neonjoint.com isn’t hiding a thing. It says right there on its home page, “Attention Visitor: Look no further if you are serious about using a safe and legal product to pass drug testing that actually will work! … These products are NON DETECTABLE by drug testing labs.”
I’d suspect it’s all hooey, but my doctor friend insisted he knows of actual major-league players who are using this site as their road map to cheating.
“They have specific directions on how to pass every test known to man,” the baseball doctor said. “And this site gets changed every other day.”
My anonymous doctor friend isn’t so sure it’s even possible to eradicate steroids. Here’s how he assessed yesterday’s news: “The [inclusion of] greenies are good, and the stricter penalties are great … But what you have to be aware of is that while there are doctors and scientists getting paid some amount of money to make these tests, there are doctors on the dark side getting paid tremendous amounts of money for circumventing anything that’s on paper.