It’s amazing how quickly a breaking story can be covered from every conceivable angle. Early yesterday the reaction to Juan Rincon’s suspension was a mixture of shock, incredulity, and outrage. The details in the initial press release were sketchy, at best. It wasn’t clear what exactly Rincon might have ingested to merit the suspension, but it quickly became apparent –based on the immediate suspension– that it was something included on the list of banned performance enhancing drugs.
It sucks to the tenth degree that MLB doesn’t release information on what chemical is detected in the dirty piss of violaters of its policy, because the secrecy ultimately raises as many questions as it answers. I’ve looked at that list of banned substances, and there are all sorts of things on there I couldn’t pronounce and which I wouldn’t recognize on a cold medicine label, let alone within the fine-print catalog of multi-syllabic nonsense that accompanies the average nutritional supplement.
We can presume, at any rate, that Rincon fucked up, and I’m not going to excuse his mistake, whether it was committed in ignorance or calculation. There’s been plenty of talk and analysis of the whole issue already, and though I’ll admit that I was initially shocked by the news, I’m not quite sure why.
But maybe that’s not quite true. I was shocked because Rincon is such a soft, mild-mannered, and physically unimposing character. None of those facts, of course, precludes the possibility that he used some sort of PED. Maybe, as some people have speculated, he used a little something to help his recovery time between appearances. Maybe he took something that he picked up somewhere, assuming because it came from a seemingly innocuous source that it was safe.
Whatever the case, I sure would like to know what that little something was, and whether, in fact, it was a little something or a big something. I’d also be interested in hearing how long these banned substances supposedly stay in a player’s system. Does Rincon’s result mean he ingested or injected something in the last two weeks? The last month? The last three months? Maybe none of that matters. I don’t really know, and I’m not sure I care.
I do wonder whether the team’s doctors or trainers might bear some share of the blame for the Rincon fiasco. Over the years there have been a number of occasions where I’ve had reason to wonder what’s up with the medical staff of the Twins. I wondered about it most recently during Grant Balfour’s sore arm saga, which, it sure seems to me, was allowed to drag out far too long, to the point where there was open suspicion that Balfour was a malingerer. We went through a similar situation with Joe Mauer’s knee last year, and if you want to go back even further (to Joe Mays and Eric Milton, for instance, or Scott Erickson) I think you’d notice a sort of disturbing pattern.
Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that when push comes to shove the agents of players tend to send them elsewhere –to the physicians of other teams– for a second (or third, or fourth) opinion? If Balfour hadn’t gone to Cincinnati would we all still be wondering about the source of his lingering forearm pain? Now, though, we know that he’s facing season-ending Tommy John surgery, and we’ve heard that just such lingering forearm pain should be a red flag for significant elbow damage.
Ultimately, I suppose, there’s no getting around the fact that Rincon’s to blame, even if he made a mistake of ignorance. It’s his career, his reputation, and his money that’s on the line, and the final responsibility is his.
What’s sort of disturbing about all this –for me, certainly, and I’m sure for most fans of the team– is that the obvious implication is that if Rincon is doing this shit, then so could literally anybody else on this team, or any other team.
The bottom line, though, is that it’s a ten-day suspension, and Rincon will be back in the fold soon enough. How people respond or what his suspension does to his reputation doesn’t particularly concern me, although I’ve no doubt the people in the organization are plenty worried about those angles. It does strike me as kind of pathetic that Juan Rincon is the most high profile player to be affected to date, but if this turns out to be merely an ugly blip in the season and the rest of the Twins pass their piss tests with flying colors, I hardly see how this can be the sort of thing to damage the team’s reputation in the long term.
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