Steroids plague baseball prospects in Dominican Republic

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 consisted of 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.

“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 (DSL), 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 that the union told him he was on the list, and slugger Alex Rodriguez, after a February report in Sports Illustrated, said he used steroids while with Seattle from 2001 to 2003. 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 below 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.

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 & Gabbana suits and luxury SUVs, and even the president scrambles to get a picture with them.

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