Life in needle park
Young Dominican baseball players pump up on performance-enhancing drugs
Steroids and veterinary medications are readily available, Geoff Baker reports
LA ROMANA, Dominican Republic—A lonely grave in a cemetery plot filled with garbage and stench looms as the next battleground in the war over performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.
This is where they buried 19-year-old Lino Ortiz shortly after the Dominican catcher tried to get stronger for a tryout with the Philadelphia Phillies by injecting himself with Diamino, a veterinary supplement used to treat sick horses and cows. A dark baseball secret of this impoverished Caribbean nation of 8 million, home to stars such as Sammy Sosa, Vladimir Guerrero and Pedro Martinez, is how its desperate teenage players systematically use anabolic steroids and cheaper, more dangerous farm animal supplements in seeking out fame and riches.
These substances are legal here, sold over the counter in pharmacies and pet stores and given to players as young as 13 by parents and guru-like, freelance street agents — known as buscones — hoping to share in any future professional contract. In many ways, the cockroaches that now scurry across Ortiz's grave as rare visitors approach seem symbolic of a baseball system teeming with greed, exploitation and a drug culture that grabs players young and doesn't let go.
"He said he was going to get us a bigger house and make life better for our family," said Ortiz's younger brother, Jonathan, now 20, displaying the shared bedroom where his sibling often discussed his baseball dreams. "We'd talked about it since we were kids. How to succeed in life and grow up being somebody."
Instead, his brother took Diamino — a highly potent mixture of nine vitamins and minerals, including one not found in human supplements — slipped into a coma and died.
Results of Major League Baseball's drug program show major- and minor-league players from Latin American countries forming roughly 50 per cent of those testing positive for performance-enhancing substances. Some players blame language and misunderstandings about the tests for the curious results posted by a group comprising 26 per cent of major leaguers and 38 per cent of minor leaguers.
But an investigation by the Star this month in the Dominican Republic, the country producing the most players outside the U.S., has found another explanation for the failure rate is a baseball system in which performance-enhancing drugs are ingrained at a young age and carried into the pro ranks. Dozens of interviews with players, coaches, scouts, agents, doctors and top baseball officials detailed how such drugs flow off store shelves and into the bodies of cash-starved prospects.
Those prospects are now reaching the majors in record numbers, with Latin American players having doubled since 1992 and Dominicans alone forming 12 per cent of the big-league population. The talent game here is big business and even the Blue Jays, dormant in recent years, jumped back into it big-time last month with the $675,000 (all figures U.S.) signing of 19-year-old third baseman Leance Soto.
Players are taking shortcuts to a desperately needed payday. Empty needle packets litter ballparks, where players mix drugs in with Vitamin B-12 shots their buscones provide to hasten physical growth.
"Nobody knows exactly what percentage of kids are using drugs," said Jose Escarraman, an ex-buscone working to reform and organize his colleagues into a coaching association that can be better monitored for abuses. "But in a country like this, where signing a contract can change your life forever ... imagine what they'll be willing to do."
Escarraman said "people sipping their cappuccinos on Fifth Avenue" have no idea how desperate things here are.
4-10 months usually
