Chapter[ VI. Incidents Providing Evidence to Baseball Officials of Players’ Possession
or Use of Performance Enhancing Substances ]
Section[ D. Shipment of Steroids to Arizona Clubhouse, September 2000 ]
D. Shipment of Steroids to Arizona Clubhouse, September 2000
Sometime in mid-September 2000, a clubhouse employee with the Arizona
Diamondbacks discovered a bottle of anabolic steroids and several hundred pills in a package
that had been mailed to the Diamondbacks’ ballpark in Phoenix. Clubhouse attendants knew that
the package had been intended for Alex Cabrera, then a player on Arizona’s major league roster,
who had been searching for the package for several days. They gave the box to the team’s
athletic trainer and told Cabrera that the package probably had been lost.
After he learned of the incident, Joe Garagiola, Jr., the Diamondbacks’ general
manager at the time, reported the discovery to the Commissioner’s Office. The Commissioner’s
Office retrieved the package and sent the drugs to the Drug Enforcement Administration for
evaluation, which confirmed that the vial contained Winstrol (stanozolol), an injectable anabolic
steroid, and that the pills in the box were over-the-counter diet pills.265
By the time the DEA confirmed that the shipment to Cabrera had contained
steroids, his contract had been sold to the Seibu Lions in the Japan League. Manfred therefore
did not seek permission from the Players Association to subject Cabrera to “reasonable cause”
testing for steroids.
265 Letter from Special Agent Lewis Rice Jr. to Kevin M. Hallinan, dated Oct. 16, 2000.
94
With “reasonable cause” testing unavailable, Hallinan and his staff were given
clearance to conduct an investigation into the shipment. Using a combination of local private
investigators and employees of the Commissioner’s Office, baseball conducted a substantial
investigation over the following several months that included interviews of several witnesses in
both the United States and Venezuela, including ultimately Cabrera, who asserted that he did not
know why a package addressed to him from Martinez contained “greenies” and steroids. As a
result of the investigation, the security department learned that players with the El Paso Diablos,
a minor league affiliate of the Diamondbacks, regularly crossed the border into Mexico to
purchase steroids.
Manfred and his then-deputy Frank Coonelly of the labor relations department
would not agree to seek permission from the Players Association to interview active major
league players who might have had relevant information about the incident, telling security
director Kevin Hallinan that it would be “tough sledding” to get the Players Association to agree
to those interviews. As a result of the investigation, the security department held training
sessions for minor league teams in El Paso, Wichita, and Tulsa about the dangers of steroids and
of hangers-on who might facilitate the illegal purchase of steroids.
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