Major League Baseball officials said last Wednesday that during the early stages of its steroids-testing program, they did not call up players to their offices to inform them that they failed the drug test. The denial came as a response to a passage in the book written by Kirk Radomski, a confessed steroid dealer, entitled “Bases Loaded“. In this book, Radomski mentions a player, supposedly one of his clients, who told him that the commissioner’s office contacted various players in 2004 and asked them to come to the headquarters in Manhattan. According to what Radomski wrote, the commissioner’s office wanted to inform the players that they had tested for steroids last season, when testing had been initiated on an anonymous basis and without any penalties.

The significance of the passage is that it implies that officials might have been trying to lessen the number of positive tests in 2004 by warning players who had tested positive in 2003.

The player was quoted by Radomski as saying that he did not want to go to the headquarters, so he just kept asking the person who called him on what the meeting is all about until the person finally informed him that he had tested positive for steroid use.

Rob Manfred, baseball’s top drug-testing official, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that the passage in Radomski’s book was ‘categorically incorrect.”

According to him, they were by no means involved in that process; and any suggestion that they were involved is untrue.

What really happened in 2004, when steroids testing started in earnest, remains murky. In George J. Mitchell’s report on baseball and performance enhancing drugs, he stated that at least one player was informed in 2004 by the player’s union that he had tested positive in 2003 and will be tested again in the coming weeks. Mitchell also added that some other players who tested positive in 2003 might have received the same warning from the union. Mitchell did not mention any attempts by the commissioner’s office to tell players about positive tests or warning about coming tests.

Mitchell also brought up concerns about the union’s warning in his report because anti-doping experts have regularly mentioned that any advance notice can notably increase a player’s skill to avoid testing positive. The union has denied warning players since then.

Though the Mitchell report did not disclose the identity of the player who professed that he was given advance notice by the union, Radomski wrote that the player was in fact David Segui.

Segui could not be reached for comment. He has not denied the information in the Mitchell report about him buying performance-enhancing drugs from Radomski, yet he has never publicly said that he had received a warning from the union in 2004.

Manfred’s denial was the third time that contents in Radomski’s book have been contested. Mitchell said earlier this week that two important passages in the book were erroneous.

Those passage entail that Mitchell while on investigation, went fishing for information from high-profile players that he was suspicious about but had no clear-cut evidence against them. The passages also imply that he got the information from Radomski. However, Mitchell said that he and his investigators did not talk about any players with Radomski and that the dealer had not already identified his drug customers.

The book really has factual errors without considering the disputes. The Radomski book says that Jose Canseco and Roger Clemens were never teammates, but in fact, the two played together in Boston and in Toronto and with the Yankees.

It also claims that there was less of a family atmosphere around the Mets after Fred Wilpon bought out Nelson Doubleday’s share of the team in the early 90’s, when Radomski was still a Mets employee. Wilpon however, did not make the purchase until a decade later.

Radomski also wrote that after becoming good friends with Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden in 1988, he had allowed substituting his urine for Gooden’s twice, so that Gooden could pass drug tests. This was many years before steroid testing was enacted, though Gooden was being monitored for testing positive for cocaine during spring training in 1987 and then agreed to enter a rehabilitation clinic.

Radomski claimed that when he refused substituting his urine for the third time, Gooden tested positive and was suspended in 1988. Yet Gooden was not suspended for a positive cocaine test until 1994 which is six years after this anecdote seems to have been made.

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