BoSox Blotter

A couple of years ago while I was stationed in Japan with the USMC, I was fortunate enough to play baseball with a AA Japanese Business league club. While playing for the Iwakuni JMSDF team I injured my shoulder. I spent 1 year and 4 or 5 months in physical therapy (PT) pre and post surgery. A steroid gel was used to help aide in healing and strengthening the tendon damage. Now the USMC has a zero tolerance policy on drugs including steroids. If in the event I popped on a drug test I could be wavered because all of this was administered by the US Navy. I needed the steroid gel to help speed up my recovery time so I could resume normal duty. Now if I had tested positive for steroids and didn’t have a medical record and was the size of Jose Canseco, thing may be different.

I guess where I’m going with all of this is…..Why can’t a player be issued a steroid gel, like I was, to treat an injury? Let’s take post-surgery Barry Bonds for example. The type of surgery he has had is a real common surgery. He had arthroscopic surgery on his knee. Basically the docs went in and scraped away all the damaged and scarred tissue, cleaned it up a little. Maybe at most, this surgery would put you out 4 months. Allot of Marines had this done later in their careers due to many miles of running. Now if he were administered a steroid treatment in his post operation PT schedule he may have been playing by now. Maybe he wouldn’t have got all those infections. I can’t tell you for sure, since I’m not a doctor but maybe. You’ve also got to understand that the steroid treatment has a small amount of steroid. It will not make you a roid rage freak after applying to your skin.

Now I imagine this is what you are thinking. Look at all the loop holes. Every one gets a small surgery and has the team trainer issue them the goods. MLB would have to regulate this. Oh No! MLB can’t regulate what they got. MLB would have to make the team doctors liable for any wrong doing. Example: Mark McGwire has sore back, so stick this needle in his butt. That’s wrong. What about all those Tommy John victims? Maybe this can help, but his has to be done right. If Randy Wolf comes back next year with a Popeye forearm something may be fishy. I would say that most guys that get injured want to back on the field as soon as possible. Not have a simple injury linger on. I would also make it able to be wavered only if there is surgery. That way the guy with turf toe isn’t getting any vitamin S for free. Yeah it may hurt…. but suck it up!

S

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 at 9:39 am and is filed under Red Sox Dailies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.