WAR ON DRUGS
MLB: If you help players cheat, you’re going down
Major League Baseball makes it clear in the case of Melky Cabrera that it isn’t just coming after drug cheats now, it’s coming after anybody who ho helps them cheat.
It means anybody who helps them not just try to beat its drug policy, but ut make a mockery of it at the same time. We know Cabrera broke the laws of baseball. Eventually we’ll find out if he — and anybody working with him — broke real l laws.
“What you’re really seeing with h Cabrera,” a source close to the in- nvestigation said on Sunday, “is that at baseball is prepared to do whatever er it needs to do to defend its process.” .”
Because of the Sports I-Team’s fine reporting in Sunday’s Daily News, you see the crazy way it played out with Cabrera. There have been guys before him who tried to lie their way out of drug trouble. Or jumped through a ridiculous chain-of-custody loophole the way Ryan Braun, , the 2012 National League MVP, did after Braun’s own positive drug test.
Cabrera, though, he’s the first to set up a fake website and invent a fake drug to explain away a positive test for synthetic testosterone, all because the MVP of the most recent All-Star Game was looking at a possible free-agent score this winter that could have made him $50 million or more.
Now the question becomes whether anybody involved in this could face criminal prosecution. This is, after all, a scam involving a drug program run jointly by Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association, an association which obviously has members still looking for any way to beat a policy that its own leaders helped write, and help run.
The guy who has taken responsibility for Cabrera’s website is named Juan Nunez, described as a “paid consultant” to Cabrera’s agents, Seth and Sam Levinson. Both Levinsons say they had no knowledge of the website, and that the $10,000 that Nunez paid to acquire the website sure didn’t come from them. It doesn’t change the fact that Nunez was their consultant, and Cabrera is their client.
Of course baseball is well within its rights to ban Nunez. But apart from that, the sport has no subpoena power. The government does, along with the ability to get Nunez to flip. It is perhaps why this case has come to the attention of Jeff Novitzky, a criminal investigative agent for the Food and Drug Administration.
“If Cabrera or people working with him had anything whatsoever to do with putting up a fake website and a fake product, they should have substantial concerns,” Tom Harvey, a New York defense attorney and a legal analyst for this newspaper, said Sunday. “And there certainly could be criminal exposure, especially on a conspiracy count.”
You know by now about all the people who say they don’t care about steroids or human growth hormone or syn- thetic testosterone, say that if f other guys aren’t willing to go to the needle to get bigger numbers and bigger contracts, well, their loss. And by the way? People have a right not to care about what Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens or Lance Armstrong or sprinters or swimmers are using to beat drug testing and the people against whom they’re y’re competing. But if the rules about drugs d don’t matter in sports, then what rules do matter? If you don’t care about Bonds and the Michelin Man body he had when he was hitting 73 home runs, if you don’t care how Armstrong might have gotten to the Champs-Elysees, then what do you care about when you are watching sports?
If you don’t care about what you’re watching being on the level, then why watch in the first place?
So if baseball, with the help of the feds has to go after enablers and hangers-on and agents and even cousins like Alex Rodriguez’s Cousin Yuri (remember what a help he was when A-Rod says he was using performance-enhancing drugs in Texas?) to defend its policy and its process, it seems fully prepared to do that.
And the Players Association, which spent years under previous leadership protecting the guilty instead of the innocent, better go along. We learn about more than just a phony website with Cabrera. We learn that in the future a positive drug test won’t just involve the player who gets sus- pended. It will involve unindicted co-conspirators in the world of baseball drugs.
Cabrera thought he could beat the process, and the rap, the way Braun did, Braun with his high-powered agents from CAA behind him, and crisis managers, and fancy lawyers. You ought to know that at one point early in the process Cabrera actually thought about calling Braun’s lawyer.
He better think about calling one now. As should anybody who helped him. The game just changed, because of another guy who thought the rules of the game applied to everybody except him.