Major League Baseball has asked the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to help its investigation into whether several players named in an Al Jazeera documentary received banned drugs.
The two groups have shared information before but have never cooperated to such a formal extent.
"We've had discussions with USADA and are hopeful that together we can make progress in this investigation," said Dan Halem, MLB's chief legal officer, who oversees baseball's drug program.
...
The two groups will not be coordinating with the NFL, however. Two lawyers familiar with the MLB/USADA investigation said the NFL declined to coordinate with the other two organizations. The NFL has begun its own, mostly separate, investigation, although investigators in the two parallel efforts have communicated.
...
The partnership offers obvious benefits for both MLB and USADA. MLB gets USADA's institutional knowledge of the doping world, along with the quasi-governmental agency's extensive contacts with law enforcement. USADA gets to participate in an investigation that involves the nation's most powerful sports leagues, neither of which is under its jurisdiction.
Both bodies will be watching to see how aggressively the NFL pursues its investigation, however. While MLB gained a reputation as a zealous pursuer of PED users through the Biogenesis saga, the NFL has been widely criticized in anti-doping circles as not doing enough to fight the issue.