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MLB

Confidentiality of previous steroids tests a concern for players?

By Tim Hall

Feb 25, 2009

The off-season didn't disappoint when Alex Rodriguez admitted to using a banned substance from 2001-03.  His name fell in line with several of the games greatest players that have been linked to using performance enhancing drugs in the past decade. 

Major League Baseball instituted mandatory random drug tests starting in 2004.  The players and owners agreed to harsher penalties for positive tests.

With the recent leak of Rodriguez's positive drug test, players have expressed concern about the testing that took place in 2003.

Donald Fehr, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, met with the media in Port Charlotte, Fla., and talked about how many players who were not in the league in 2003 and 2004 are not familiar with that agreement (steroid testing in 2003).

"We go through that with them, answer their questions and try to explain to them what happened here," Fehr said. "The reaction is different altogether, I think there are some people that, as I do, wish the complete confidentiality could have been maintained."

Fehr is confident that the game can move past the steroids cloud that has covered the sport with a little help from the media.

"The coverage has to become fundamentally more comprehensive and fundamentally more fair," Fehr said.

Jokingly, Fehr urged writers not to write that he hates the press, but did convey what he meant by being comprehensive.

"When somebody writes a story about 2003 it seems to me only fair to say 'first of all this happened several years ago, secondly there's different systems in effect now, third there is no reason to believe that what happened then is or could be happening now'."

Even Fehr himself feels that although this steroids era hasn't been good, the game hasn't been "irrevocably damaged" either.

 "I think that baseball is a game of such enormous appeal that it will continue to have appeal," Fehr said. "I think attendence and revenue in the last several years has demonstrated that."

The Fan's Dave Shore is in Port Charlotte, FL covering spring training for the Tampa Bay Rays.