So Much For the Refreshingly Honest Admission by Melky Cabrera
When San Francisco Giants All-Star outfielder Melky Cabrera was recently caught with a positive test for performance enhancing drugs, and was hit with a subsequent 50-game suspension, he flatly admitted his transgression.
The approach was refreshing, with many in the media saying that “at least he admitted to it”, as opposed to so many stars in the past who have concocted elaborate stories in an attempt to muddy the waters of guilt.
Here is an example from SB Nation:
Typically a player will say that the results of the test were tainted. Perhaps he didn’t realize what he had taken. Plans to appeal the decision are often thrown around at this point to at least create an opening in the court of public opinion for the most diehard fans — so at least a tiny section of Pac Bell Park will say, “I just don’t believe he really did it.”
Instead Cabrera went the direct route. He was honest, concise and vulnerable. He said he did it, offered an apology to all parties involved and went silently into the suspended night.
It was the right move and one that might save his reputation in the end.
Well that didn’t last mong.
San Francisco Giants star outfielder Melky Cabrera mounted a campaign to avoid his 50-game suspension that included a fake website featuring a fictitious product in an effort that was quickly uncovered by MLB investigators, the New York Daily News has reported.
Citing an anonymous source close to the case and an associate who told the newspaper he was “accepting responsibility for what everyone else already knows” concerning the fake site, the Daily News reported famed investigator Jeff Novitzky and agents from MLB’s investigative arm have begun looking more closely at Cabrera and the scheme purportedly hatched in July as they seek the source of the synthetic testosterone found in his urine.
“There was a product they said caused this positive,” the source told the Daily News. “Baseball figured out the ruse pretty quickly.”
…
The purpose was to fool MLB and the players’ union, while presenting them with the website and resulting phony product information, into believing Cabrera had ordered a supplement fraudulently spiked with testosterone, therefore causing the positive drug test, the report says.
So we’ve now gone from refreshingly honest, and the possibility that Melky may have saved his reputation by being truthful, to discovering one of the most elaborate schemes to avoid suspension since the implementation of the stricter steroid policy.
It is a cautionary tale for those who want so desperately to believe in their hero-athletes. Nothing is as it seems…
Mental Recession 