Melky Cabrera, outfielder for the San Francisco Giants, has begun serving a 50-game suspension from the league for using illegal performance enhancing substances. Under the rules of baseball, a player who tests positive for substances can try to prove that they ingested the substance unwittingly, that they were duped by the dope so to speak.
Apparently, Cabrera and his associates created a fake website that was made to look as if it was selling legal substances.
The New York Daily News, which first reported on the scheme, says:
“There was a product they said caused this positive,” one source familiar with the case said of Cabrera’s scheme. “Baseball figured out the ruse pretty quickly.”
MLB’s department of investigations quickly began asking questions about the website and the “product” — Where was the site operating from? Who owned it? What kind of product was it? — and quickly discovered that an existing website had been altered, adding an ad for the product, a topical cream, that didn’t exist.
Cabrera was due to make $6 million this year. On the one hand, it’s astonishing that someone would jeopardize that kind of money (and future earnings) by such a bonehead stunt. Then again, when you can make that kind of dough, it’s tempting to do whatever you can – fake sites and illegal drugs included – to try to preserve it.
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