Sorry MrRizzo but Im not being paranoid, Im being objective. Why is this list not fully published with ALL players listed? Its a load of bullcrap to single out these players and now demonize them, when in fact, most players have used or are using some sort of enhancers.
These young players should be counseled and educated about the risks and side effects of these medications. Their easy way up doesn't pay off in the long run so they need to realize this before ruining their futures.
One more thing, we sell hundreds of thousands of dollars a month of GH, Steroids, Testosterone injectibles and gels, estrogen blockers, needles, etc...and not one of those is purchased by a Dominican. White America is doing more steroids than any other population group in the world.
Publish the full report with all names listed and this steroid issue will come to pass.

I hope that the next name release is not a Dominican.. Are they waiting for someone else to open their mouth like
Sosa
Arod
Ortiz
Manny
Tejada

For some Dominican players, steroids worth risk


SAN PEDRO DE MACORIS, Dominican Republic -- A monument to baseball greets visitors to this city known as "the cradle of shortstops." Children in San Pedro de Macoris grow up playing ball behind tin shanties and on fields cut from sugar plantations.

Bernardino Jimenez was one of those kids. He became a victim of his own dream.

Desperate to lift his family out of poverty, the lanky infielder put himself in the hands of an agent who had him injected with a mixture both say they thought was legal vitamins. They were wrong.

After being signed to the Arizona Diamondbacks' training squad last year, Jimenez tested positive for Boldenone, an anabolic steroid used in horses, and was slapped with a career-stalling 50-game suspension.
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"They said I would get to travel to the United States and play there. Because of this I held myself back," the 19-year-old Jimenez says, taking a break from batting practice near the metal-roofed shack he shares with six siblings, two nieces, his mother and an aunt - a home that sits under the belching smoke stacks of a sugar refinery.

Jimenez's case is just one example of a disturbing trend in this hotbed of baseball talent.

Of the 69 minor leaguers suspended for using banned substances in 2008, nearly two thirds - 42 - came from the Dominican Summer League, a developmental program for Latin American players housed in secluded palm tree-lined campuses owned by big-league teams. This year, 31 of the 71 minor leaguers suspended for using banned substances came from the DSL.

In the major leagues, where performance-enhancing substances have been a divisive issue for more than a decade, players with Dominican roots have also been at the center of several high-profile drug cases.

Sammy Sosa and Manny Ramirez have been accused in stories by The New York Times of being on a list of more than 100 players alleged to have tested positive during an initial drug survey of MLB players six years ago. David Ortiz has acknowledged the union told him he was on the list, and slugger Alex Rodriguez, following a February report in Sports Illustrated, said he used steroids while with Seattle from 2001-03. Rodriguez said a cousin obtained a substance he knew as "boli" in the Dominican Republic.

If Dominican players are overrepresented in substance use scandals, it's partly because they also are overrepresented in the game. Eighty-one of 818 players on major league opening-day rosters and disabled lists were born in the Spanish-speaking republic - second only to the United States.

And while some young U.S. players use performance-enhancing drugs, they generally have more options besides baseball than their Caribbean neighbors do.

For up-and-coming Dominican players, the lure of drugs is simple: all the money baseball can provide. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is a nation where a quarter of the 9.7 million people live under the poverty line. Steroids, growth hormones, amphetamines and other performance-enhancing substances banned by baseball cause health problems - from infertility and depression to heart disease - but such long-term issues can easily get ignored in the face of daily hardship.
Continued............................

For some Dominican players, steroids worth risk..............................................Page .........2 ...................Many people take much bigger risks in the near-term, like the thousands who chance death each year aboard overloaded, illegal boats bound for Miami or Puerto Rico. Their goal is just to find a minimum-wage job.

Baseball, meanwhile, is a ticket to untold riches. Superstars such as Pedro Martinez come home to ramshackle neighborhoods each winter in Dolce & Gabana suits and luxury SUVs, and even the president scrambles to get a picture with them.

On signing day, Jimenez landed a $55,000 bonus with Arizona. Even after his trainer's cut, Jimenez reaped what it would take his mother at least 14 years to earn sewing clothes in a factory for U.S. export.

"Here the only way to get out of poverty is baseball," said Leandro Sepulveda, a San Pedro de Macoris businessman who was formerly Jimenez's agent and trainer. "That's why people are willing to do anything."

One problem is availability. Steroids and other substances are sold in neighborhood pharmacies and rural veterinary shops without a prescription, though increased scrutiny in recent months has made some stores less willing to stock them. League officials say some also unwittingly self-medicate with banned substances to fight colds or aches in the offseason.
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"We have no control over the young guys as a league. We try to help and we try to give them the necessary education, but they live in someone else's house," said Dominican Summer League chief Orlando Diaz.

The league is trying to crack down. Since 2003, educators armed with videos, testimonials and power-point presentations have been giving biweekly anti-drug talks, and players are subjected to three random urine tests a season. The 50-game suspensions have been in place since 2007 and, to hear players throughout the league talk, the deterrent message is starting to get through.

"If a player tests positive down here, he knows that his career might be in jeopardy," says Pablo Peguero, the San Francisco Giants' chief scout for Latin America.

MLB realizes performance-enhancing substances are far more easily available in the Dominican Republic than the United States, where regulations have been toughened and many supplements became prescription-only starting in January 2005.

"We think it would be helpful if the legal framework in the Dominican Republic were similar to ours in terms the regulation of performance-enhancing drugs," said Rob Manfred, MLB's executive vice president of labor relations.

It is hard to overstate the power baseball holds over the Dominican Republic.

The game was brought here by Cuban war refugees in the mid-19th century. When U.S. Marines invaded in the early 20th, they found professional local baseball teams already good enough to beat them. Dominican players broke into the majors about a decade after baseball's color line was shattered, with Ozzie Virgil in 1956, and within a few short decades they were among the best in the game.
In the balmy winter, fans pack raucous stadiums, rum and empanadas in hand, to cheer local teams with current major leaguers on the rosters. Images of Ortiz and others are used to sell everything from soft drinks to Viagra knock-offs. A major bank bills itself as "the official sponsor of the dream of making the major leagues."

In summer, the big-league academies go into full swing, with the 33 teams of the Dominican Summer League facing off with the same uniforms and equipment as their parent clubs.

Jimenez's hometown of San Pedro de Macoris alone has sent at least 73 players to the majors, including Sosa, Alfonso Soriano, Tony Fernandez and Robinson Cano.

Everything around young hopefuls trumpets the rewards of a baseball career.

Jimenez, a lean, muscular prospect with close-cropped hair, grew up outside town in a batey, one of the scores of worker camps for Haitian and Dominican sugar cane cutters that dot the countryside and are known for deep poverty and high rates of AIDS and other diseases. It was there he learned to field grounders on the rough dirt, and word spread outside the batey that he had "the tools."
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Before long, Jimenez was drawing the attention of buscones - blends of trainers, scouts, language coaches, guardians and agents who often are the only link between illiterate families and major league clubs. Some are former players with tightly organized camps that drill in Santo Domingo parks, others are untrained opportunists, but all have one goal: a percentage, sometimes more than half, of signing bonuses that can range into the millions of dollars.

Jimenez ended up with Sepulveda, a smooth-talking entrepreneur only eight years his senior who sports his own set of rippling muscles and is partial to tight polo shirts. He had no playing experience of his own, but offered something even better to an impoverished mother looking out for her son - free room and three meals a day in a new, concrete house.

"I am a civil engineer and I work in construction. But four years ago, I realized baseball was giving out money, so I got into this," said the trainer, who also represented recent Houston Astros pitching signee Miguel Cedano.

There the stories diverge. Jimenez says that Sepulveda's cousin, a nurse, injected him every other day with a serum to improve his play. Though Sepulveda told him it was Vitamin B Complex, the prospect now believes the shots contained the steroids that triggered his suspension.

"I did not know what they were putting in me," Jimenez says, brushing off his gray Diamondbacks practice T-shirt and black mesh Diamondbacks practice shorts.

Sepulveda denies breaking any rules, saying he gave clients vitamins and the protein supplement MegaMax but that everything was legal according to baseball's list of banned substances. But he was also quick to say that other buscones take shortcuts, including lying about players' ages, to get more money on signing day.

"In this country people have to pull some tricks to get anything. Look at the politicians," he said.

After the positive test and the suspension, the two stopped talking. Jimenez was suspended for 50 games over the end of the 2008 season and the beginning of 2009, losing more than $1,000 in pay and, more importantly, valuable time he could have spent developing his game and impressing the scouts.

Now, Jimenez said, he is taking no chances. With the season over, he said he is practicing five days a week with friends in the neighborhood, substance-free. In fact, his play improved after his suspension ended, his batting average rising from .165 to .238 and fielding percentage from .855 at shortstop last year to .955 this year at second.

Shirtless boys surround him as he talks, and Jimenez fumbles with a bat, watching a rickety truck rumble by on the dirt road.

"The first thing I am going to do (when I make the majors) is take my sister out of here," he said. "I still have a lot of hope."

Youth baseball trainer tied to drug, weapon bust in Dominican

Story Highlights
Jose Gabriel Arias Castillo had 244 packets of cocaine and two submachine guns
Arias Castillo is a former pitcher in the Philadelphia Phillies minor league system
The drugs may be linked to international fugitive Jose Figueroa Agosto's crime ring
A Dominican youth baseball trainer used baseball equipment bags identical to his players' to conceal some of the 293 kilos of cocaine and weapons that authorities seized on Sept. 17 in what they called an "unprecedented" raid. Jose Gabriel Arias Castillo, 35, had 244 packets of cocaine, two P-90 submachine guns, a rifle equipped with a silencer and telescope along with several other weapons, thousands of bullets and a drug press in a Honda Ridgeline pick-up truck parked near the home where players in his care resided.

Arias Castillo, a former pitcher in the Philadelphia Phillies minor league system, seemed to be making a smooth transition from athlete to trainer -- or buscon, as those who train, house, and feed Dominican prospects in exchange for a percentage of their bonuses, are known. He had recently signed one pitcher to a major league contract for a little more than $300,000 and helped another player to a $75,000 bonus.

The Dominican Republic's National District prosecutor, Alejandro Moscoso Segarra, told reporters in Santo Domingo that the drugs may be linked to international fugitive Jose Figueroa Agosto's crime ring. Figueroa Agosto is wanted by the FBI, among other international crime-fighting agencies. One published report in the Dominican Republic estimated that Figueroa Agosto's ring moves $200 million monthly in drug money.

It is unclear how many teenage prospects Arias Castillo trained and housed at his academy in the Villa Mella neighborhood north of Santo Domingo, but a spokesman for the Dominican's National Direction of Drug Control (DNCD, as it's know by its Spanish-language acronymn) says that authorities do not suspect the prospects of any involvement at this time.

SI.com's calls on Friday morning to two phone numbers on file for Arias Castillo went directly to voicemail. DNCD spokesman Roberto Lebron said that Arias Castillo is being held in jail while he awaits a hearing with a judge.

One international scout described Arias Castillo as a "very low-profile" trainer. Other trainers in the Dominican Republic who knew Arias Castillo and spoke to SI.com noted that -- as his two recent signings indicated -- his program was gaining momentum and recognition by MLB scouts and aspiring players. Known as "Ban Ban" or "El Pelotero" (The Ballplayer), Arias Castillo pitched for the Phillies' Appalachian League team in 1996, compiling a 10.98 ERA in 10 2/3 innings over five games.

Arias Castillo's arrest, while isolated, underscores a growing fear among Latin American baseball scouts and executives: That baseball signing bonuses maybe becoming a preferred method for laundering drug money. The millions of dollars teams issue in signing bonuses, combined with cash payments that players often issue their trainers, create ideal conditions for money laundering on an island that narcotics traffickers often consider the gateway to both the U.S. and European drug markets.

Baseball trainers like Arias Castillo are not subject to regulations or background checks by either the Dominican government or Major League Baseball. MLB has long insisted that it has no authority over coaches or players who are not employed by an MLB team. Baseball's Department of Investigations, however, has drafted a watch list for scouts, warning them of trainers with a track record of steroid users, document fraud or other major problems.

"It's only a matter of time," one international scouting director said, "before one of us gets shot or killed."

this society needs help ! Not bonuses and Buscones they are leeches

Injections Can Make, or Break, Young Dominican Baseball Stars
Angel Franco/The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
Published: October 24, 2009

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — The effort to build a better baseball player begins early here, with boys as young as 14 routinely receiving injections of over-the-counter vitamins and painkillers from handlers who stand to profit from their players’ prowess.
The handlers, who are known in Spanish as buscones, are part agent, part trainer and part coach. They make no secret of the injections, which are given to the boys several times a week as they prepare for a chance to play Major League Baseball.

The goal, the handlers said in interviews, is to strengthen players for tryouts that could yield signing bonuses of $10,000 to $3 million, of which handlers receive 10 percent to 50 percent.

Major League Baseball officials said they believed the financial enticement, combined with a culture ingrained with the notion that injections can improve performance, helped explain why Dominican players test positive for banned substances at a far greater rate than players from anywhere else.

Dominican-born players make up about 17 percent of major league and minor league teams in the United States and Latin America, but about 38 percent of the players who tested positive for steroids and other banned substances since 2005 were Dominican.

Since 2008, when Major League Baseball instituted drug penalties here, more than half of all suspensions have occurred in the Dominican Summer League, where many newly signed Dominicans begin their careers.

When investigators for Major League Baseball asked why they tested positive, several players said their handlers had provided them with the substances, according to people in baseball who were briefed on the interviews. Some said they received the substances before they signed with major league teams, the people said.

Baseball officials have provided Dominican law enforcement authorities with evidence that some handlers provide performance-enhancing drugs, the people said. A spokesman for baseball declined to identify the handlers but said in a statement that Commissioner Bud Selig had “devoted a massive amount of resources” to fighting age and identity fraud and drug use here.

Sandy Alderson, a longtime baseball official, was appointed to make comprehensive recommendations to address the issues. The spokesman said that “given the scope of the problems, however, the cooperation of the Dominican Republic government will be necessary to achieve fundamental reform.”

Handlers interviewed here in recent weeks said they gave players injections containing only vitamins and painkillers. They said their favored solutions contain vitamin B12, which they said increases the players’ appetites, energy and muscle strength, and anti-inflammatory painkillers. Some said they arranged for their players to receive injections at pharmacies and doctors’ offices.

“I can’t afford to give them meat,” the handler Víctor Báez said, explaining why he injects his 30 players.

Medical authorities in the United States said that regardless of the substances’ makeup, the practice of giving regular injections to teenagers raised medical and ethical concerns.

“It borders on child abuse,” said Thomas H. Murray, a medical ethicist who has written about performance-enhancing drugs for more than 30 years, noting that B12 would have little to no effect on making a player stronger and that painkillers given to boys could have detrimental effects over time. “It’s saying that the road to success is paved with hypodermic needles.”

Murray added: “Even if it’s only a painkiller that you are giving them, you don’t want to mask pain of a kid at 14 or 15 because the pain is telling the kid that they are pushing their bodies too far. It can have lasting damage to the joints to push too far, and you need to know when to stop.”

Dr. Michael J. O’Brien, a sports medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital Boston and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, said anti-inflammatories were often injected for a short time for severe pain.

“I am uncomfortable with the idea of a doctor not overseeing any type of injectable drug, particularly an anti-inflammatory,” O’Brien said. “Anti-inflammatory injections should be administered in the short term because they can lead to ulcers and kidney disease, especially if they are given in high doses or for a long period of time.”

The buscone system has developed as this island has become a rich producer of major league talent over the past two decades. It has produced myriad problems for Major League Baseball. Some Dominican stars, like David Ortiz and Sammy Sosa, have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

In the past year, several scouts for major league teams were fired for a kickback scheme in which they conspired with handlers to steal from players’ bonuses. The Washington Nationals gave a $1.4 million bonus to a player, then discovered that he and his handler had lied about his age; the player was actually four years older.

Baseball has little authority to monitor how a player is handled before he is signed. Dominican law prohibits drug testing on any citizens until they are employed, so players cannot be tested for drugs until they sign with major league clubs.

Beyond the health issues, baseball has economic incentives regarding players’ possible use of performance-enhancing drugs. A pitcher who can add 5 miles an hour to his fastball may add hundreds of thousands of dollars to his signing bonus. So, too, can a hitter who adds 10 feet to his line drive.

But a player who has inflated his performance through drugs faces a stark choice after signing. He can continue to use the substances and risk testing positive — which results in a 50-game suspension for a first-time offense — or he can stop using the substances and risk losing the extra zip with his arm or his bat.

Gaining the cooperation of the Dominican government has been difficult. Major league officials began lobbying top Dominican law enforcement officials for help in 2008. This summer, Dan Halem, a top baseball labor lawyer, and Alderson told the Dominican authorities that if the government did not address the problems, major league teams would probably begin to close facilities where they develop young players. That would drain millions of dollars from the island’s economy. The Dominican authorities agreed to appoint a special prosecutor to look into suspicious handlers, and the baseball officials agreed to provide the evidence they had uncovered. No charges are known to have been brought.

During the 1990s and the first part of this decade, Major League Baseball was slow to react when performance-enhancing drugs became a major issue. When law enforcement officials tried to gain baseball’s cooperation, league officials said they either knew little about the problem or could not help.

Now some handlers say they believe Major League Baseball is trying to hurt their credibility so teams can pay less for their players. Báez, who said he has never given his players performance-enhancing drugs, said Major League Baseball’s top investigator tried to question his players about whether he had given them steroids.

“I called him back and said, ‘What do you want, a lawsuit?’ “ Báez said. “None of the 22 players I have had signed ever tested positive.”

The handlers also blame baseball for wanting to sign younger players. Over the past three years, the handlers said, major league teams have become more interested in signing players at 15 ½, the minimum age under Dominican law. They said that has prompted them to start giving young players injections and to make their training more strenuous. The handlers said that they now seek 11- and 12-year-olds and try to project how good they will be when they are 15 ½, and that this has encouraged others to lie about their players’ ages.

“It has forced guys that have a really good 19-year-old to present him as a 16-year-old; that’s if they don’t do the legal thing,” said Geovanny Blan Veras, who handles two pitchers. Félix Guillén, a young handler here, said he learned which substances were safe to inject in his players by taking a sports medicine class at the local university. He said he clears the injections with parents and goes to the players’ houses to administer the shots, which he said he gives to each player every three days.

Guillén said he believed the sports medicine class set him apart from other handlers and gave parents more confidence that he knew what he was doing.

“That’s the only way to explain how I’ve been able to go above programs that have been around seven to eight years,” he said.

Ramón Mariano, a husky 21-year-old left-handed pitcher, said that he began receiving B12 injections when he was 15, from his handler and at local pharmacies. In 2008, he was expecting a promotion to an Arizona Diamondbacks minor league team in the United States but those plans fell apart after he tested positive. Mariano did not blame the injections, instead saying he believed it was a protein shake that his handler had told him to take.

“Right now, I’ll stay home and practice to see if I can get a new contract,” he said recently, sitting in the living room with his parents, who used his signing bonus to build their home. “I have been offered to play for Mexico, but I would like to try to sign with another one of the organizations.”

This is what the fans pay to watch and enjoy...Home runs.
I am shocked by the US double morals in every single facet. How this country has the cocos to talk about drugs...The drug king of the world...Congress is concerned about drugs in Baseball and illegal drugs produced and brought into the country, while the same ones tolerate to have families in Mendocino, CA producing high quality marijuana and selling legally in the US.
The same guys that condemn Nuclear weapons in the hands of some countries were the ones that applauded the victory over Japan by dropping two bombs and killing thousands. But the one that makes the rules is the only one allowed to break it...Mean while let's sit and enjoy the circus.

This is rubbish you are talking and trying to shift some blame ....the subject is youth in the DR from the Nagua nitwit to the mets pitcher who was armed and dangerous this is about.... ......."
Dominican-born players make up about 17 percent of major league and minor league teams in the United States and Latin America, but about 38 percent of the players who tested positive for steroids and other banned substances since 2005 were Dominican.

Since 2008, when Major League Baseball instituted drug penalties here, more than half of all suspensions have occurred in the Dominican Summer League, where many newly signed Dominicans begin their careers............ .you want to kill the messenger

I just want to enjoy the circus...good show.