Alex Rodriquez Passed Every Drug Test Before His Year-Long Banning: So How Many Other Players Are Still 'Juicing Up?' - 60 MINUTES Didn't Bother To Ask

Alex Rodriguez (Photo by Keith Allison)

By Travis Waldron
The headline news from 60 Minutes interview with Anthony Bosch, the crank doctor at the center of the Biogenesis drug scandal that enveloped Major League Baseball throughout 2013, is easy to spot: Bosch claims he supplied New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who Saturday was handed the longest drug-related suspension in baseball history, with performance enhancing drugs like human growth hormone, insulin growth factor-1, and testosterone. Sometimes, Bosch even personally injected Rodriguez, and he did it all in exchange for $12,000 a month...

Start with the fact that Bosch provided details that, if true, aren’t just damning for Rodriguez but for the entire testing regime Major League Baseball has in place. Bosch claims that he began providing Rodriguez with banned drugs in 2010, two-and-a-half years before the Yankee star was implicated as part of the Biogenesis scandal. During that time, Bosch says, Rodriguez passed no less than a dozen MLB-required drug tests. How easy were the tests to beat? Bosch said he gave Rodriguez one product, a testosterone “gummy,” that could be ingested before a game, improve Rodriguez’s performance, and be out of his system by the time he returned to the locker room nine innings later. Whether Bosch is being completely truthful about the drugs he gave Rodriguez or their effect, this much is clear: Rodriguez never failed a test. So either he didn’t take the drugs, as he asserts, or the tests failed to catch him.

[60 Minutes] could have followed up that information by asking Bosch and, more importantly, Selig and other MLB officials a simple question: if it’s that easy to beat tests, how can we possibly know how many players are using without getting caught? In other words, how do we know baseball’s testing system is effective at all?

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