Well, if he’s been juicing you could have fooled me looking at his stats lately. Photo team official
Over the Xmas holiday weekend, a bombshell broke in the sports media world. The Qatarian TV network Al Jazeera was to air a documentary titled “The Dark Side: Secrets of the Sports Dopers” on sunday 12/27/15 and had shared the entirety of the broadcast with the Huffington Post ahead of time. The whole video is available from youtube (via this link thanks to Deadspin.com).
While the “big scalps” claimed in the documentary were more on the NFL side (namely, Peyton Manning and a number of pretty well known NFL players, mostly related to the Green Bay team), there were two baseball players mentioned: Ryan Howard and our own face of the franchise Ryan Zimmerman. There was a third player actually captured on film (journeyman catcher Taylor Teagarden) who should probably get his resume updated, as I doubt he continues to have a job playing after this airs (he’s in the Chicago Cubs organization right now on a MLFA deal), probably faces a lengthy suspension already and would seem to be completely un-signable once its completed.
I dutifully watched the documentary on TV when it aired on 12/27/15. The premise of the show was to have the filmmakers take some (well known?) British sprinter and run him through the under-world of morally questionable doctors here and far in order to see just how easy it was to get PEDs these days. He traveled to the Bahamas, to Vancouver, to Austin and then took a long road trip with the primary name dropper, one Charlie Sly, all with the use of a hidden camera. Sly is the “source” who fingered Manning, Zimmerman, Howard and a slew of other pro athletes and was portrayed in the documentary as a “Pharmacy doctor” but per the Guyer Institute where he worked was actually an “unpaid pharmacy intern.” In the film, he frankly looks more like a sloppy college student than some mastermind of PED use.
Sly, of course, has already recanted everything he said in the film (as was announced during the showing of the program). So, between the clear “name dropping” going on and his lack of actual medical credentials, he’s not exactly a source who inspired confidence. But the problem I have is this: how does he decide to pick these specific athletes? I mean, Ryan Zimmerman and Ryan Howard are pretty random baseball players to pick. No basketball players named; just two aging veteran baseball players who certainly have not exactly shown the kind of career resurgences you’d expect for someone using illegal substances. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Maybe he got the two Ryans’ names from some other procedure they underwent at the Guyer institute that was completely legitimate. Who knows.
The Nats (and Phillies) have issued statements of support for their players. All those mentioned have (of course) issued denials. The Guyer Institute has announced that Manning wasn’t seen at the clinic during the time period in question. Some reporters have noted that it is common to prescribe HGH to women going through fertility treatments (guess what: the Mannings went through IVF and just had twins). And the Al Jazeera film-maker defiantly defending her work and saying that Manning hasn’t answered the charges.
I think in someways I agree with Will Leitch‘s take on it, as published today in Sports on Earth, that once they got a-hold of a big name that became the focus. There’s no “proof” to be had of any of these players other that the discredited and recanted word of one guy with a tenuous connection to the institute where this all supposedly occurred. How reliable is that?
Life in sports with PEDs is tough. Everyone’s a target in some ways. This documentary could be nothing or it could be completely legitimate, but the damage to all of these players is now done. Whatever the heck Delta-2 is, or any of the other mind-boggling slew of medications mentioned by Sly and the other slime-ball doctors caught on film, is immaterial. The players can say “there’s no proof” until they’re blue in the face. Mike Piazza is the best hitting catcher of all time and has been kept out of the Hall of Fame thanks to one reporter noting that he had “back acne” and jumping to the obvious conclusion (that he was ‘roided up). Is that fair? Nope. Is it reality in today’s baseball climate? You bet. Not that anyone was mistaking Howard or Zimmerman for hall-of-famers, but still its a shame that both guys’ reputations will take the inevitable hits.
Post Publishing Update 1/7/16: Zimmermann (and Howard) have filed suit. Here’s some links post-publishing.
https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/baseball-players-attorneys-spare-no-insult-in-lawsuit-against-al-jazeera
http://sports.yahoo.com/news/2-baseball-players-sue-al-jazeera-over-documentary-012353550–mlb.html
http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/14511191/ryan-zimmerman-ryan-howard-file-defamation-suits-vs-al-jazeera
http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/14515727/charles-ely-recanting-ryan-zimmerman-ryan-howard-ped-usage-allegations-problematic-al-jazeera-media
http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/01/06/ryan-zimmerman-ryan-howard-lawsuit-al-jazeera-peds-dark-side