The Actual “Steroid Scandal”
Jurickson Profar was suspended this week for violating MLB’s steroid policy. He will miss 80 games, and be ineligible for the postseason. Profar became the sixth different player to be suspended for PEDs since the start of the 2022 season — all of whom were foreign-born.
Fun fact: Since the beginning of baseball’s steroid testing regime, in 2005, ~65% of the players suspended for violating the league’s drug policy were born outside the United States. This despite the fact that over 70% of the league was born in this country.
When you first hear a statistic like that, your first instinct might be to invoke some cultural explanation: Oh, foreign players must be more desperate to stay in the big leagues, perhaps because the wage premium for even a fringe player is bigger, or maybe because they face tougher standards thanks to racial discrimination.
But when you zoom out, you see that the issue is really specific to one country: the Dominican Republic. Dominican-born players make up nearly HALF of all steroid suspensions, despite only making up ~11% of the league. This seems to undercut any explanations that depend on racial discrimination or economic disparities between countries, since those would presumably apply to players from Venezuela or Mexico or Panama as well. The DR is a poor country, but it’s not so much poorer than those countries that it could explain the extreme overrepresentation of Dominican players on this list.
No, the most probable explanation is that this is a story about regulation. What seems to be happening is that MLB’s testing policy is mostly punishing players for taking substances that are legal in their home country, but which, because of differences in regulation or enforcement, contain hormones or synthetic substances that can boost testosterone levels.1 It’s not clear at all if players are taking these substances to gain some competitive advantage, or if they’re just taking standard medications or supplements commonly for sale in their country, which nevertheless contain banned substances. What IS clear is that this is a stupid, unfair system that has the effect of punishing people who really haven’t done anything wrong.
And yet all around the league, the reaction to every failed test is universal condemnation. A couple years ago, Fernando Tatis Jr., a budding superstar, got suspended for taking Clostebol, which he claimed got in his system because it was in an ointment he took for ringworm. Everybody dismissed that explanation out of hand, and laughed at how stupid of an excuse it was — even though ringworm medications containing Clostebol ARE sold over-the-counter in the Dominican Republic, and even though he DID seem to have ringworm.
People around baseball just learned all the wrong lessons from the “Steroid Era.” They immediately assume the worst about the game’s biggest stars because the takeaway from the 1990s was that everyone on the game was secretly juicing and that trace amounts of untested hormones can turn players into superstars. Indeed, every time a well-known player like Profar or Tatis tests positive, there is an immediate rush to ascribe all his accomplishments to drugs.
“Look at Fernando Tatis’ home run totals! In 2019-2021, before the failed test, they were way higher than they are now. That proves the wonder drug Clostebol made him hit home runs!”
Nevermind that the home run rate AROUND THE WHOLE LEAGUE was much lower from 2022-24 than in 2019-21…
“Look at Jurickson Profar, who had the best season of his long career right before his failed test. That proves this hormone that tells pregnant women to stop menstruating made him an All-Star!”
Nevermind that Profar passed eight drug tests last season, and that it was his increased OBP, not any increase in power (he hit just 24 home runs, but led the team in walks) that accounted for his increased offense in 2024…
It’s not just that people believe these same, easily disprovable myths about steroids decades later; it’s that now we’ve built an entire punishment apparatus that is clearly unfairly punishing foreign-born players more than native-born players. I have never once seen anyone around baseball try to seriously explain why their tests catch so many Dominican players2 — it seems like people just believe so many stupid things about steroids that they’re ok accepting “Dominicans just love PEDs way more than Americans.”
And yet people are comfortable using this system to suspend players, alter the postseason, and dock guys millions of dollars in pay. You now even have people arguing that players’ contracts shouldn’t be guaranteed based on these tests that OBVIOUSLY DO NOT WORK. This is way more “scandalous” to me than anything steroids supposedly did to the “integrity of the game,” but I suppose it’s a matter of whose integrity you are trying to protect…
For example, look at the substance Profar was just suspended for taking: human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG). Known as “the pregnancy hormone” because it is produced by the placenta during pregnancy, HCG is sometimes taken by men trying to treat issues like infertility or low testosterone. In theory, it could be used to boost testosterone levels and gain a competitive advantage, but the actual evidence of it increasing testosterone production in healthy adult men is limited to nonexistent. More likely, it’s just the kind of substance you put in a hypothetical “wonder drug” that is supposed to have magical effects, and would is therefore likely to be found in unregulated drugs and supplements.
To be clear, Profar is from Curaçao, not the Dominican Republic, but the larger point still holds.