Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Somebody talked

Officials for Major League Baseball said Wednesday that in the early stages of its steroids-testing program it did not summon players to its offices to tell them they had failed drug tests.

The denial came in response to a passage in “Bases Loaded,” a new book written by Kirk Radomski, the confessed steroids dealer. Radomski wrote that a player who was one of his clients told him that in 2004 the commissioner’s office contacted various players and asked them to come to headquarters in Manhattan. The commissioner’s office, Radomski wrote, wanted to tell the players they had tested positive for steroids the previous season, when testing had been introduced on an anonymous basis, without any penalties.

The passage in question is significant because it implies that officials might have been trying to limit the number of positive tests in 2004 by warning players who had tested positive in 2003 . . .

. . . In a telephone interview Wednesday, Rob Manfred, baseball’s top drug-testing official, said that the passage in Radomski’s book was “categorically incorrect.”

“By no means were we involved in that process; any suggestion that we were involved is untrue,” he said.

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