Report Adds to Doubts on Rodriguez Doping Denials
Alex Rodriguez tested positive for a banned stimulant in 2006, the first year Major League Baseball tested for the substance, according to two people with knowledge of the drug testing results. The positive test raises questions about public statements Rodriguez has made in connection with the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
The people spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing drug testing results that are supposed to remain secret.
A spokesman for Rodriguez said on Sunday that Rodriguez had never tested positive for the substance.
Rodriguez was not publicly identified at the time for the test because under Major League Baseball's drug testing program, players are not sanctioned the first time they test positive for that substance. A second positive test is publicly disclosed and the player is suspended for 25 games.
The recent suspension of Rodriguez, the Yankees' third baseman, by Bud Selig, the commissioner of baseball, was not related to his use of stimulants. Rodriguez was suspended for 211 games by Major League Baseball, which believes he used steroids and other banned drugs. He has appealed the suspension. He is currently waging a public-relations war on the tactics the sport used in its investigation of him.
The baseball sluggers Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds have been previously tied to positive tests for stimulants in 2006. Like Rodriguez, they were also dogged by allegations that they used steroids.
Stimulants - known among baseball players as greenies - had long been used by players to get through the sport's grueling 162-game schedule. But the substances, which increase energy and reaction time, were banned before the 2006 season, three years after testing began for steroids.
Rodriguez inadvertently raised questions about his own use of stimulants at the beginning of spring training in 2008.
At the time, the sport's drug testing program was under intense scrutiny. Two months earlier, George J. Mitchell had released his report on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the game, naming many players, including Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, for their links to doping.
In one of his first interviews in spring training in 2008, Rodriguez, who had not yet been publicly tied to doping and was on track to break Bonds's career home run record, tried to defend the drug testing program, saying that he had been tested '9 or 10 times' the previous year.
That number of tests, however, raised many questions because it was significantly higher than baseball's drug testing program called for at the time for nearly all players.
The program that year called for all 1,600 players to be tested at least two times. Another 600 tests were conducted that year on players during the season and 60 more random tests were conducted in the off-season.
A player had a 1 in 600,000 chance of being selected for seven random tests and a 1 in 9 million chance of being selected for eight tests.
But as part of baseball's drug testing program, some players could be tested many more times. That group included players who tested positive for stimulants for the first time in 2006 and were subjected to six more tests over the next year.
'That's not true,' Rodriguez said at the time when asked whether the increased number of tests he had undergone was because he had already tested positive for stimulants. 'It couldn't be more false - 100 percent false.'
Later that day, he released a statement saying that his 'quote from earlier today was taken literally.'
'I was not tested 9 or 10 times last year,' he said. 'I was just using exaggeration to make a point. My intent was simply to shed light on the fact that the current program being implemented is working, and a reason for that is through frequent testing. I apologize for any confusion I may have caused.'
Gene Orza, then the chief operating officer for the players union, subsequently addressed the issue and tried to counter the notion that numerous tests of one player were a tipoff that there had been a previous positive test.
'Once you are picked to be tested you go back in the hat and can be tested again,' Orza said. 'The inference that a player who is tested a lot must have tested positive for something is wrong. I don't know what Alex is talking about. I think he meant to say he was tested a lot of times. Lots of players have been tested a lot of times.'
At a Congressional hearing in January 2008 to assess the validity of Mitchell's report, Selig, the baseball commissioner, and Donald Fehr, the head of the players union, were harshly criticized about the use of stimulants in the game.
Documents the commissioner's office and the players union turned over to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform showed that the number of major leaguers claiming therapeutic-use exemptions for attention deficit disorder had mushroomed to 103 in 2007 from 28 in 2006, the year that testing for stimulants began.
Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, said that players were brazenly getting around the ban on stimulants by making attention deficit disorder claims that allowed them to use stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall. He said that such diagnoses were 'almost eight times the adult use in our population.'
'We are trying to break down why it happened and how it happened,' Selig said at the time.
Fehr tried to explain the number of exemptions by saying that the increase might be because of the fact that players have a younger average age than the rest of the population.
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