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MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred Discusses Steroids and Starling Marte

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PITTSBURGH — Much of the drama and intrigue that has surrounded the last week of the Pirates’ regular season has been caused by the sudden and unexpected departure from the lineup of starting center fielder Starling Marte.

Marte still has 72 games remaining on his 80-game suspension. Since then, the Pirates have moved Andrew McCutchen back to centerfield, tried out a number of options without much success in right field and suffered a general offensive malaise that has the team tied for dead last in the National League with an 85 wRC+.

While the fallout of the Marte suspension has been significant, there have been very few answers as to why it happened. The steroid that Marte tested positive — Nandrolone — is an old-school, anabolic steroid that is one of the easiest for drug testers to detect.

In Marte’s statement released immediately after his suspension — the only statement he or his representatives have made on the subject — he referred to a lack of knowledge as a reason for his failure to abide by the rules of Major League Baseball.

That just isn’t true, according to Pirates trainer Todd Tomczyk.

“The league has unbelievable amount of initiatives as far as an industry for education for all players through the commissioner’s office, through the players’ association,” Tomczyk said on Wednesday. “[MLB joint strength and conditioning coordinator Tim Maxey] has multiple visits in Spring Training, multiple visits in the offseason and multiple visits in-season. So these players are well-educated. They have all the information. All of the supplements that these guys take have to through and extremely vetted process to have a certification called NSF.”

It’s impossible to say if Marte was actually unaware of the guidelines set forth by MLB. But he should have been. Since the MLB and the players’ association ratified a new collective bargaining agreement in December, there has been a significant uptick in the number of tests each player receives.

“Our athletes are tested more frequently than any athlete in any professional sport, both blood and urine and they are random,” commissioner Rob Manfred said Tuesday in a trip to Pittsburgh. “I am really confident in the strength of the program.”

In fact, Manfred went on to say that he feels that baseball has the toughest PED policy in all of professional sports and that it isn’t much of a secret.

“We hosted at our offices in New York recently the annual meeting of the Partnership for Clean Competition,” Manfred said. “It’s drug testing people not only from professional but amateur sports as well and I think there’s really widespread recognition in that room that Major League Baseball has the best drug program. By that, I mean testing as well as investigative capacity. The number of tests we do give the number of athletes we employ is the best anywhere in professional or amateur sports.”

So why and how did Marte test positive for a substance so easily detected? It’s possible that he just wasn’t aware that injecting an anabolic steroid was against the rules. It’s also possible that he was taking another supplement — one not approved my the MLB testing policy — that was tainted during manufacture. Or maybe he just thought he wouldn’t get caught.

Whatever the case, the Pirates are left to pick up the pieces, and general manager Neal Huntington has been handed the majority of the public criticism in the aftermath. Whether that criticism is just or unjust, there’s no question that Huntington has had the team he though he’d assembled gashed by things that are out of his control.

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