It looks like Major League Baseball is ready to drop the hammer on the rest of the players involved in the Biogenesis scandal sometime this week, according to a report by The New York Post.
MLB is also set to announce a lengthy suspension for Alex Rodriguez, according to The Post.
“It always has been MLB’s plan to announce the suspensions at one time for the 15-plus players believed to be facing sanctions in the performance-enhancing drug case,” The Post’s Joel Sherman and Ken Davidoff wrote on Sunday. “MLB went early with Ryan Braun’s suspension because of his willingness to accept the penalty without appeal.”
The player who is expected to be hit the hardest for his alleged PED use is Rodriguez. The Post is reporting that his suspension could span the rest of this year and all of the 2014 season. The Post also points out that it’s still possible that he might receive a lifetime ban.
As for the rest of the players, MLB wants to announce their suspensions before there are fewer than 50 games remaining during the regular season, according to The Post. The significance of 50 games is that it is the suspension length for first-time offenders of MLB’s PED test. This case is different because there were no actual tests that were failed, but rather an investigation into Biogenesis involving these players. However, MLB looks like it will try for the same length of suspension, according to The Post.
Rodriguez is a different story because he has already confessed to using steroids.
“Rodriguez does not fit into this category. It has become evident MLB is going to demand Rodriguez’s punishment far exceed Braun’s,” Sherman and Davidoff wrote in their article for The Post. “That is because MLB believes the combination of being a user and obstructing the case demands a much stiffer penalty — especially because Rodriguez has admitted to previous drug use from 2001-03 and because MLB believes Rodriguez subsequently lied to its investigators in previous interviews about his usage.”
The Post also reported that associates of Rodriguez met with MLB officials to go over potential penalty lengths, although one of those associates told The Post that they are not looking to cut a deal like Braun did.
