Robby Cano, Doncha Know! (About His Second Failed Drug Test, That Is)

In the first half of the career of Robinson Cano, John Sterling would often let loose the home-run exclamation, “Robby Cano, doncha know!”

More than a few listeners groaned when they heard the longtime New York Yankee radio announcer unleash this and similar hosannas created for each player. But it was hard to be displeased with this particular subject.

With his smooth fielding, the sweet swing seen in the accompanying photo, and overall consistency, Cano easily sustained comparisons with Bobby Richardson and Willie Randolph, two quiet but key pillars of past Yankee championship teams. When he became a free agent after the 2013 season, he was in position not merely for a hefty salary increase but, if he remained on his trajectory at the time, for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Fans like me had plenty of reason to lament Cano’s decision to spurn the team’s seven-year, $160-million contract offer for the Seattle Mariners’ 10 year, $240-million proposal.

His move across the continent, coinciding with the deterioration of more celebrated aging stars like Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira, marked the team’s steepest fall from grace since its millennial glory days. Replacements Starlin Castro, Brian Roberts, Donovan Solano, Stephen Drew, Jose Pirela, Gregorio Petit and Tyler Wade exhibited none of his staying power or steady brilliance, even as Cano earned three more All-Star appearances.

These last couple of days, that gloominess appears wildly misplaced. It wasn’t only that, through seven subsequent seasons with the Mariners and New York Mets, Cano never played in a single postseason game, as he had done in all but two of his nine years with the Yankees.

No, it’s because, following a second failed drug test that this time triggers a season-long suspension, his career may be over, along with any chance of entering Cooperstown as anything more than a tourist.

It’s hard to feel sorry for a player who acted so myopically and maddeningly, in multiple ways:

*By watching what happened to Yankee teammates and friends Rodriguez and Melky Cabrera, Cano should have realized he ran a grave risk of being caught for using substances banned by major league baseball;

*When he was suspended for 80 games after testing positive in 2018 for using Furosemide, Cano said in a prepared statement that it was not a “performing-enhancing drug,” even though it has been used to mask the presence of steroids and other banned substances, and insisted that it was “given to me by a licensed doctor in the Dominican Republic to treat a medical ailment,” without naming either the physician or condition—a lame contention similar to a past President’s insistence that he “didn’t inhale” when he smoked pot;

*When he resumed his career, this time after being traded to the Mets, Cano should have known that the scrutiny he would endure in the nation’s media capital would be even more intense than before;

*With his second failed test resulting from the presence in his system of Stanozolol, the same drug leading to the suspension of Rafael Palmeiro 15 years ago, Cano ignored the lessons of history—and used a substance even easier to detect than Furosemide;

*With the increased drug testing following the 2013 Biogenesis investigation that ensnared A-Rod and Ryan Braun, Cano should have understood that his chances of avoiding discovery for a prolonged period were growing ever more limited.

In a statement released after the test results were released, Mets President Sandy Alderson could barely conceal his extreme irritation with the star once considered a cornerstone of the team’s future pennant hopes:

“We were extremely disappointed to be informed about Robinson's suspension for violating Major League Baseball's joint drug prevention and treatment program. The violation is very unfortunate for him, the organization, our fans, and the sport. The Mets fully support MLB's efforts toward eliminating performance enhancing substances from the game."

At least, by forfeiting his entire salary for 2021, Cano has given the Mets $24 million that they can use on coveted free agents—and the ability to place Jeff McNeill, a player 10 years younger than the veteran, into his natural position at second base.

(In a blog post for station NBC Chicago, Gordon Wittenmyer can barely restrain himself in considering how this Cano-generated maneuvering might lead to an intense round of calls between the Mets and a Cubs team seeking to offload expensive contracts.)

Cano has also given Bronx Bomber fans two things: gratitude, with Thanksgiving only a week away, that Brian Cashman didn’t make Cano an A-Rod-style albatross with a decade-long contract seven years ago, and  the freedom to speculate about the Yankee GM's reluctance to offer a more whopping salary because of Cano’s rumored source for his prodigious power numbers.

(Cashman’s 2018 disclaimer to USA Today reporters Pete Caldera and Steve Gardner that he would have been “compelled to tell'' major league baseball about Cano’s PED use, or incur a fine in excess of $1 million and possible loss of his job, does not resolve that question, given the GM’s carefully worded follow-up: "Knowledge is one thing, suspicion is another.'')

As for Cano, his acceptance of responsibility for “everything that goes into my body” comes too late for a player whose career statistics—including a .303 batting average, 334 home runs and 2,624 hits—would have made him a near-certainty for eventual enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. I guess maybe he’s banking on the short memory of Cooperstown voters, just as he once believed he could evade tougher drug-testing regimens for as long as it took.

(The accompanying photo of Robinson Cano, then playing for the New York Yankees, was taken on May 17, 2008, originally posted to Flickr as "DSC_0049"and cropped by UCinternational.)

Quote of the Day (Wall Street Journal, Comparing Nelson Cruz and Babe Ruth)

“In 37 career postseason games, [Nelson] Cruz’s production is largely comparable to what [Babe] Ruth did through the first 37 of his 41 career postseason games. Cruz has more home runs (16 to 13), more hits (41 to 37) and more RBI (32 to 27) in only two more plate appearances than Ruth had over the same span.”—Brian Costa, “The Count: Babe Ruth or Nelson Cruz? Not an Easy Choice,” The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2014

Few articles in The Wall Street Journal—even those editorials that sound like bad leftover musings of Gilded Age plutocrats—have left me sputtering with rage quite as much as the one quoted above. Oh, yes, Costa allows that Babe Ruth was a pretty fair pitcher during the postseason—an accomplishment that Nelson Cruz (pictured) can never hope to duplicate—and, if the writer wanted to explore defense a bit further, he could note that The Bambino, unlike Cruz, not only played the outfield on a regular basis but also that, early in his career, Ruth’s arm made him one of the better corner outfielders in the game.

But no—Costa is leaving out something far more fundamental. The only things that Ruth put into his body that could be considered outside the norm were gargantuan portions of hot dogs and beer. In contrast, Cruz, as every baseball writer knows, was suspended for 50 games in 2013 as part of the Biogenesis performance-enhancing drugs (PED) scandal.

Every baseball writer knows this, but you’d be surprised how few are inclined to bring it up this time of year—in fact, this year at all. The only notable exception I can think of was back in early July. At that point, John Lackey, then still with the Boston Red Sox, and smarting after a pasting (a homer, a double, and a single) given him by the Baltimore Orioles “slugger,” made one of those no-comments-that-say-everything: "I've got nothing to say about him. There are some things I'd like to say, but I'm not going to. You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff."

The media love a controversy as much as anything else, and they couldn’t have been happier when O’s skipper Buck Showalter retaliated with one of his own no-comments-that-say-everything: “Everybody needs to make sure that their own backyard is clean."

Now, sensing a feud, reporters were happy to provide a bit of context: Lackey was making a veiled reference to Cruz’s enforced sitdown, while Showalter had in mind the failed (and mysteriously unexplained and undisciplined) 2003 drug test by Bosox designated hitter David Ortiz.

I’m not a fan of Lackey, who showed class neither in downing fried chicken and beer as his old team choked in manager Terry Francona's last season nor in calling the resulting controversy about it “retarded.” But his sullen no-comment about Cruz was entirely warranted—especially the part about how “You guys forget pretty conveniently about stuff." 

This time of year, on the air and in print, it’s all about how Cruz is killing the ball. Players, front offices, and broadcast booths all have vested interests in accepting retiring Major League Baseball (MLB) Commissioner Bud Selig’s belief that everything is fine on the Good Ship Lollipop, and that nobody would even think of trying to circumvent the sport’s PED ban.

It is unpleasant to think and write this, but who is to say that Cruz is not resorting to PEDs again? Two prominent similar cases of this phenomenon have already occurred, involving Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez. In the case of A-Rod, the discovery of his continuing involvement with PEDs came not from a positive drug test but because of a lengthy and damning paper trail.

In fact, many of the players detected by the drug program have been minor-leaguers—i.e., too young and stupid to realize that human growth hormone rather than steroids is more likely to boost performance without triggering a positive identification.

You would think, then, given this background, that Costa might have learned the importance of avoiding categorical statements by looking at a past headline from his own paper, back in 2012: “Earth to Tigers: Stop Pitching to Nelson Cruz.”  That was printed at a time when, it is reasonable to believe now, Cruz's blazing postseason performance resulted from a steroid regimen.

When the Texas Rangers decided to part ways with their longtime player following his 2013 suspension, Cruz signed a one-year deal with the Orioles worth $8 million. As a free-agent following a monster year, he can now expect a sizable increase in his contract no matter what team he signs with—a nice bit of change for a player entering his mid-30s. All the more reason, then, why he might choose to go with the odds and try to resort to PEDs again.

Two weeks ago, Costa’s Journal colleague Daniel Barbarisi wrote about the icy treatment he received from Derek Jeter after a tweet that joked about meeting the Yankee icon and his latest glamorous girlfriend, Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Hannah Davis, in an elevator.  Perhaps Costa dreads a similarly wintry reception from the entire Orioles clubhouse.

But Jeter’s annoyance, however seemingly petty, had a point: his private conduct, unless it was illegal, had no bearing on his on-field performance. The same cannot be said for Cruz: Almost certainly, the past PED use of  “Mohamad” (the nickname for the player on a July 2012 client list kept by Biogenesis head Anthony Bosch) meant that pennants had been decided, careers made or unmade, because of an unfair advantage he possessed.

So, with the Orioles having moved on now to the American League Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals, instead of the media launching the same, boring questions (e.g., “What was on your mind when you stepped to the plate late in the game with guys on base?”), let’s see Cruz answer these questions instead:

*If you are swinging the bat so well now, why did you feel the need to use PEDs in the first place?

*How long had you been using steroids before you were suspended?

*Do you retain ties to anyone who helped you get around the drug-testing program before, as Alex Rodriguez did with his "Cousin Yuri"?

*Did you use steroids in prior playoff appearances? If so, how can we be sure that you aren’t doing it again?

So, back to that article’s question: “Babe Ruth or Nelson Cruz? Not an Easy Choice.” Really? I mean, you’re kidding, right?

‘Bad Business’: A-Rod, Stranger to Truth

“As you can imagine, I’m feeling left out, I can’t be with the team at spring training and this leaves an empty hole in my life. And on top of that I’m dealing with the backlash of all these ugly rumors and false stories. […] Of course I am very concerned about these rumors and about what the team is doing and saying about me. … People have been telling me that you have an 8% bounty on my contract.[…] Maybe all of this is coming from my cousin […], who knows. He claims he met with the Yankees and that you are after me and it has me concerned. I hope this [e-mail] is the start of us clearing the air between us. I don’t want us to be enemies. I am loyal to the team. I only want the best for the Yankees organization. But I do need reassurance from you and I need to know what is going on. It is bad business for everyone.”—New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, e-mail message of February 28, 2013 to team president Randy Levine, quoted in Steve Fishman, “The A-Rod E-Mails—The Slugger and the Suit: A Baseball BromanticTragedy,” New York Magazine, January 6-13, 2014

Ten years ago this winter, the New York Yankees, faced with a major decision about one of their heroes, reacted the way they usually do: unsentimentally, some would say even heartlessly. Aaron Boone—already known to hundreds of thousands of bitterly disappointed Red Sox fans as “F-----g  Boone” for his walkoff homer beating their team in the American league championship series—had phoned the Bronx Bomber brass with the news that he had wrecked his knee in a pickup basketball game.

Boone could have done what hundreds of pro athletes would have done in the age of the lucrative contract and lie. Instead, he admitted to doing something forbidden by his contract.

For their part, the Bronx Bombers could have waited a year for their recent hero to rehab the knee while they filled his hole in the lineup with temporary and/or low-priced talent. Nothing doing. The team reacted to the disclosure by their third baseman—already, in less than half a season, hugely liked by teammates—by voiding his contract, releasing him, and trading for the man many regarded as the best player in the game: Alex Rodriguez.

After all this time, can we really be sure that the Yankees aren’t sorry that they pulled the trigger on one of the true blockbuster trades in their history?  True, Boone was never again the player he was before his injury, and he was forced to retire five years ago following open heart surgery. But nobody could deny his heart on the diamond, nor his clubhouse chemistry.

The latter was precisely what was missing once A-Rod came aboard. For all his gaudy stats, he lifted the Bombers to only two pennants and one World Series win during his 10 years with the team. It hardly justifies his mammoth contracts. Worse, he became a flashpoint and symbol of futility in the Yankees' pennant races with the Boston Red Sox--contests that the Bombers increasingly came to lose (three World Series championships for the Bosox during that time, one for the Yankees).

Seattle Times columnist Les Carpenter displayed more foresight than he ever could have realized 10 years ago when, summing up Boone's departure and A-Rod's arrival at the Yankees, he wrote: "In this spring of Yankees chaos, Alex Rodriguez and steroid suspicion, the best story has been lost. Aaron Boone told the truth when it really would have paid to lie."

As it did for A-Rod--till now, when only his legal team is profiting.

As we witness the start of A-Rod’s season-long suspension from baseball—and, very likely, the end of his career—the e-mails between him and Randy Levine take on particular interest as points in the road in the estrangement between player and team. To be sure, Levine hardly comes off as a saint with his odd attempts at what he must have conceived as jock humor (e.g., wondering when Robinson Cano’s “steroids” would kick in), stroking the ego of his insecure slugger, and final descent into PR lingo, as relations between player and team grew tense. But he certainly appears in a better light than the Yankees’ decade-long albatross.

The above quote from A-Rod continues the same tone of wounded disbelief as his most recent statements to the press involving Bud Selig, the Yankees, arbitrator Fredric Horowitz, the players’ union—everyone but Barack Obama. He remains supremely oblivious to the thin legal ledge on which he finds himself—and, more important, to the realization that his own choices in life placed him there.

“Steinbrenner would roll in his grave if he knew what was happening!” A-Rod was complaining to Levine by last summer. Not so. If history is any guide, the late principal Yankee owner would have been at least engaging in a public spitting match with his cleanup hitter, and very likely doing everything up to (and, likely, beyond) the legal limit to abrogate their contract. (After all, The Boss paid lowlife Howie Spira $40,000 for any dirt he could dig up on Dave Winfield—whose only offense was not helping the Yanks win the World Series.)

About that “bad business” A-Rod bemoaned:  He is solely responsible for his troubles stemming from Biogenesis founder Anthony Bosch. If Rodriguez felt an “empty hole” in his life over not being able to attend spring training a year ago, imagine how he must feel now. A team trying to turn over a new leaf from a disastrous season would make him feel about as welcome as a skunk in a perfume factory.

The Yankees want the story of their spring training to be Jacoby Ellsbury and Brian McCann joining the team, and Derek Jeter coming back from his injury. They do not want it to be about the man who, according to Anti-Doping commission Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart, had taken “the most potent and sophisticated drug program developed for an athlete that we've ever seen”—even exceeding that of Lance Armstrong.

A-Rod’s legal team is correct: ‘Roid-runner Bosch is hardly a model citizen. All the more reason, then, to wonder why Rodriguez, already outed as a juicer in 2009, would pursue a business relationship with a man who could only remind people of A-Rod’s greatest disgrace.

In addition to Bosch, there was A-Rod’s “cousin” Yuri Sucart, who, he admitted upon being exposed as a juicer five years ago, had procured PEDs for him; Canadian HGH advocate Anthony Galea, about whom A-Rod testified to a grand jury a year or two ago; Angel Presinal, a banned baseball trainer; and, perhaps most sinister, Jorge “Oggi” Velazquez, a former liquor store owner and  proprietor of a now-defunct anti-aging clinic, a guy with a 20-year rap sheet for grand theft, drug offenses,  burglary, and, most recently, domestic violence. “Oggi” is the kind of character that major-league baseball has feared since the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, a criminal with the potential to affect the outcome of games—and, investigators believe in this instance, the transmitter of threats to Bosch if he didn’t help cover up A-Rod’s use of PEDs.

Say goodbye, then, to “A-fraud”—the teammate the Yankees strongly (and probably correctly) suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs as far back as 2005…the teammate they still turned out to support at a 2009 press conference where he owned up to steroid use with the Texas Rangers...a teammate who spoke so often of his "band of brothers" in the locker room, yet so anxious to avoid detection again last year that he threw fellow Yankee Francisco Cervelli under the bus to investigators, in a desperate attempt to deflect attention from himself.

Say goodbye to pointless friction with the clubhouse and front office—with managers Joe Torre and Joe Girardi walking on eggshells about dropping him in the batting order in the playoffs, despite unbelievable futility at the plate; with Levine telling him he needed to “put up or shut up”; with general manager Brian Cashman, in the only instance of this that I can recall in his years with the team, calling a player (A-Rod) a liar.

Say goodbye to a man addicted to the spotlight and its perks (enumerated by then-agent Scott Boras in A-Rod's first go at free agency, in 2000)-- a private office at Shea Stadium, his own marketing staff, his own merchandise tent at spring training, a luxury box, the use of a private jet, and billboards galore—amenities that former Mets GM Steve Phillips rightly said would lead to a roster of “24-plus-1.”

Say goodbye to a world-class narcissist: a guy stupid enough to have a list made about his “13 Most Hilariously Embarrassing Moments” on the blog Total Pro Sports that many will find woefully incomplete; a guy photographed kissing himself in the mirror for a Details Magazine photoshoot, having agent Scott Boras announce that he was opting out of his first Yankee contract in the middle of the Red Sox' clinching game in the 2007 World Series, and flirting with swimsuit models during a Yankee playoff loss.

Say goodbye to someone who, by all accounts, was hopelessly messed up by his father’s abandonment of his family, yet managed to do the same thing when his wife divorced him because of one extramarital affair after another (including with that long-in-the-tooth cougar, Madonna).

Say goodbye to an entire lingo associated with A-Rod and PEDs: testosterone creams and lozenges, pregnenolone, clomiphene, “gummies,” "boli," “cohete” (Spanish for “rocket”), HGH, IGF DHEA, and GHRP 2/6.

Say goodbye to pitiful postseason performances (really, only two series over 10 years when he made a difference—both against the Minnesota Twins), despite the sophisticated PED regimen discussed above.

Say goodbye to warnings and sitdowns in Bud Selig’s office with the slugger—about his penchant for high-stakes gambling, about trips to Canada to visit Galea, about his involvement with Bosch.

Say goodbye to a player who, after admitting to using PEDs while with the Texas Rangers and banned because of overwhelming evidence of having done so from 2010 through 2012, can no longer credibly argue against the rumor reported by Selena Roberts that he has been using PEDs since high school.

Say goodbye, then, to the man who succeeded the honorable Aaron Boone at third base for the Yankees: someone who’ll never fulfill his ambition to hit 800 career home runs, but who runs a fair chance of being baseball’s all-time liar and cheat.

(The photo shows Alex Rodriguez on at Ameriquest Field on May 22, 2004, toward the start of his usually tortured tenure with the Yankees.)