Five Yankees Minor Leaguers Suspended for Drugs

While the Major League season is in full swing and most of the minor league seasons are well underway the short-season and Dominican Summer League’s just opened this week and they opened with a bit of controversy. The game is not clean and it likely won’t ever be clean and the latest evidence of that came in the way of seven minor league suspensions from the DSL including five members of the New York Yankees DSL teams.

All seven players were suspended for 25 games each except for the San Francisco Giants right-hander Alvaro Diaz who was suspended for 56 games following a positive test for stanozolol. The Yankees lost catcher Oliver Cedeno from their DSL Yankees team while the DSL Yankees 2 lost LHP Jean Carlos De Jesus and RHP’s Arikson Ramirez, Leyfer Ramirez and Jhostin Vargas.

Under the minor league program a 25-game suspension is warranted for a first violation of use or possession of a syringe at a team facility, in team-provided housing or while traveling with the club. No word on what was said to be in the syringes or anything like that but one can use his imagination and a little common sense to see what was going on here.

The DSL Athletics also lost RHP Oscar Tovar for 25 games due to drugs. Tovar, Diaz and the five Yankees players now make 55 minor league drug suspensions this year alone under the minor league drug program. If they are doing it down there you think they will just magically stop when they reach the Major Leagues? I don’t.

MLB’S Adderall Exceptions Fall in 2015

Major League Baseball, and society as a whole truth be told, has a drug problem. The war on drugs that the government and law enforcement are fighting are against illegal street drugs but there is a bigger and much worse problem here in the United States, prescription drugs. Prescription drugs as a whole are good for those who need them and it’s not the drugs fault, it’s the people who abuse them. The people who Have “anxiety” who ruin it for all the people with anxiety and the people with “ADHD” that ruin it for the people that have ADHD as a couple of examples. Adderall is running rampant in Major League Baseball, although the exemptions for the anxiety and attention deficit disorder drug were down in 2015.

How many less exceptions were made in MLB from 2014 to 2015? One. Just one. When the final tally was made there were 111 therapeutic use exceptions (TUEs) approved for the use of Adderall in 2015. This is down for the second straight year after a high of 119 players received TUEs in 2013. 15% of MLB players are legally using the drug Adderall.

Ten players tested positive for banned substances in 2017, seven for PED’s, two for stimulants and one for supplement DHEA. No players tested positive for HGH. Five of the seven PED tests showed that Stanozolol was used, which is the new name for Winstrol that you undoubtedly remember from the Mitchell Report.

Drugs are still rampant in Major League Baseball and an independent committee is not being used to screen for TUEs and drug exceptions. Major League Baseball still has the final say though. 

Another Biogenesis All Over Again?

In less than 16 days Major League Baseball saw four different players suspended for the banned substance Stanozolol including the Minnesota Twins Ervin Santana and the New York Mets Jenrry Mejia. Joining those two were Seattle Mariners pitcher David Rollins and Atlanta Braves pitcher Arodys Vizcaino making many wonder if MLB has another steroid epidemic going on underneath their noses. New Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred thinks so and is planning a similar probe to the Biogenesis probe from 2013 that suspended 14 players including the Yankees DH Alex Rodriguez.

The main reason that Anthony Bosch and his anti-aging clinic down in Miami were found out was because of a string of testosterone positive tests that forced the league to look further into the matter and the same pattern seems to be evolving here with Stanozolol. This could amount to nothing or it could be another black eye for the sport, I guess you will have to just stay tuned…