How a PED bust ruined one of my favourite baseball stories
Say it ain’t so, Pro!
As members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox – nicknamed the Black Sox for reasons that are hurtling towards you right now – left Cook County Courthouse in that city, having given evidence in a case that alleged a number of them had taken bribes to throw the World Series, legend has it that a newsboy ran up to ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, their superstar outfielder, and pleaded with him.
“Say it ain’t so, Joe!”
Well, reader, I was that newsboy, upon hearing that Jurickson Profar was banned for 80 MLB games plus all playoff action due to testing positive for a masking substance, used to disguise the presence of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).
Profar is no Shoeless Joe. But I loved watching him in 2024. I mean, check this out. The whole clip. Make sure you catch the reverse angle.
That’s Profar, playing left field for the San Diego Padres in a crucial playoff game against the Dodgers in LA, putting the shine on fans that he’s going to have to play right in front of for the rest of this game and others yet to come. First of all, that’s fun shithousing. Plus it takes cojones and talent – he went into the crowd to rob a home run from Mookie Betts.
This was the last series Profar played as a Padre. This was his second stint in San Diego and this time they had signed him for one year on a $1m contract. Peanuts for an everyday player in MLB. Profar was the best value in baseball last season, because he had been below average up to that point, despite having been one of the biggest prospects in the sport when he first emerged.
In 2024 he was fantastic, career-high in pretty much every offensive category, including home runs and batting average. The funnest component of a super-fun Padres team. At the expiration of that one-season deal, the Atlanta Braves signed him to a three-year, $42m contract, aged 32.
"Based on last year, we had Jurickson as the second-best free-agent bat," said Alex Anthopoulos, their president of baseball operations. The first-best free agent bat was $800m Juan Soto.
What a story. Profar had been drinking at the last-chance saloon, but now he was ordering magnums of Cristal with the sparklers on top, in the finest boozers Atlanta has to offer.
Except it turns out the Cristal was laced with PEDs. And those sparklers? Actually syringes. God, it makes you sick to think about it.
Not content with shitting on my favourite player story of 2024 and making Alex Anthopoulos look like a mug, Profar has also raised a cloud over the whole of San Diego.
San Diego have been tons of fun for a few years. Slam Diego, they call it. They spent big on some exciting players, none more so than Fernando Tatis, Jr., who looks and plays baseball like he’s starring in a movie about a very good-looking, impossibly cool and incredibly athletic charisma factory.
But Tatis, too, was suspended for 80 games, in 2022. His ban was for a positive test for Clostebol, an anabolic steroid, which he said he had taken in ringworm medication that he hadn’t checked. File under ‘PED excuses you can’t take seriously’.
So now I’m thinking, Fernando was doping with the Padres. Jurickson had masking agents in his system at the start of the season after he left the Padres.
Can I still believe in San Diego?
Any analysis of PED use in pro sport has to conclude that the dopers are ahead of the testers. And the rewards for a player like Profar, clinging on to a place at the top table until the season of his life, far outweigh the penalty of 80 games without pay.
So maybe the better question is: can I believe in baseball?
Yuck. More soon, less drugs.
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