Padres Star Fernando Tatis Jr.’s Positive PED Test And Subsequent Excuse Mirror Past

Ever since 2004, the first year Major League Baseball implemented a drug-testing policy with penalties for transgressors, players caught doping have often come up with creative explanations for their performance-enhancing drug use.

“My mistake was because I was immature and I was stupid,” said former Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez during a 2009 press conference, in which he admitted — the first time — to using banned substances during his playing career. Rodriguez said then that his PED use stretched between 2001-03 when he played for the Texas Rangers.

Rodriguez’s admission came after a 2009 Sports Illustrated report that said he tested positive for PEDs in 2003, baseball’s survey testing year. “I knew we weren’t taking Tic Tacs,” Rodriguez said, referring to him and his cousin, Yuri Sucart, whom he outed then as his drug supplier.

Nearly a decade later, it was Robinson Cano’s turn to explain, after he received his first MLB doping suspension. Cano, the Dominican lefty slugger tested positive for the banned drug, Furosemide, a masking agent. Cano said in a 2018 statement that the drug “was given to me by a licensed doctor in the Dominican Republic to treat a medical ailment.

“While I did not realize at the time that I was given medication that was banned, I obviously now wish that I had been more careful,” Cano said. Two years later, Cano tested positive again, this time for the hardcore steroid Stanozolol and was suspended the entire 2021 MLB season. He forfeited $24 million in salary as a result. Cano is currently a free agent after being designated for assignment by three clubs this year, including the Mets.

San Diego Padres star shortstop Fernando Tatis, Jr. is the latest bold-face player to receive a lengthy suspension as a result of a positive drug test and use a “dog-ate-the-homework” excuse when he was caught.

The league announced August 12 that Tatis, 23, had tested positive for Clostebol, a synthetic form of testosterone. His 80-game ban without pay will carry through the rest of 2022 and into next season. If the Padres make the playoffs this year — the club is currently vying for a wild card — those games would count toward Tatis’ suspension.

Immediately following MLB’s announcement, Tatis issued a statement in which he said he “inadvertently” took the steroid to treat ringworm. Tatis hadn’t played the first four months of the ‘22 season after fracturing his left wrist during the winter, and the shortstop raised eyebrows during spring training when he was asked about being involved in a reported motorcycle accident.

“Which one?” he replied to reporters then.

Since being punished by MLB, Tatis has apologized multiple times for the positive test, including to reporters recently while Padres general manager A.J. Preller — himself suspended by MLB 30 days without pay in 2016 for submitting false medical records to the Red Sox — sat by Tatis’ side. In February 2021, the Padres and Tatis agreed to a 14-year, $340 million extension.

He will lose approximately $3 million in salary during the ban, and is making $5 million for 2022.

Tatis told reporters at Petco Park that he tested positive after using a skin medication to treat an infection, and that he obtained the medication in his home country, the Dominican Republic. Unlike in the U.S., steroids are legal in the Dominican and can be obtained without a prescription.

For Anthony Bosch — the mastermind behind the Coral Gables Biogenesis anti-aging clinic which was at the center of baseball’s 2012-2013 doping scandal — Tatis’ PED bust is yet another example that professional baseball players will always try to seek an edge.

“Ringworm? My a—. Tatis did not use (Clostebol) for ringworm,” Bosch said in a recent interview.

Bosch said in a broader sense, baseball has a forever challenge in its fight against PEDs — the advances in science and more sophisticated drugs that are harder to detect through testing are just some hurdles that the sport confronts with regard to anti-doping efforts.

When Rodriguez was suspended by MLB in 2013 for his ties to Biogenesis, he sued baseball, then commissioner Bud Selig and the Players Association as he fought his punishment. But attached to his federal lawsuit was independent arbitrator Fredric Horowitz’s ruling on A-Rod’s case.

That ruling, which came after a bruising arbitration hearing, reduced the original 211-game ban given by Selig to 162 games, the entire 2014 season. In Horowitz’s ruling were detailed descriptions of the drug regimen designed by Bosch for Rodriguez, including testosterone troches, or lozenges, and testosterone cream.

In a recent interview, Bosch said that players can “microdose” to avoid detection, but that even then, MLB has challenges with its drug-testing program.

“Look, they’re not catching everybody,” said Bosch. “If you’re not playing, if you’re rehabbing an injury, they’re not going to test you as often. Players can use that window of opportunity while they’re out.”

Before the league and players’ union agreed upon a new collective-bargaining agreement earlier this year, players were locked out during the labor dispute, and the drug-testing program was suspended. Bosch said then that the two sides should have used the opportunity to “revamp” the Joint Drug Agreement.

“The old one doesn’t work,” Bosch said earlier this year.

But the program worked against Tatis, and now a team loaded with talent due to team chairman Peter Seidler’s spending, will be without its marquee star.

“I’m really sorry. I have let so many people down,” Tatis said during his apology to reporters at Petco Park. “I have failed to every fan of (San Diego). I have failed to my country. I have failed my family. I have seen how my dreams have turned into my worst nightmares.”