TOKYO (REUTERS) — Major League Baseball, tainted by an off-season steroid scandal, could be “weeks away” from a new drug-testing policy, commissioner Bud Selig said Monday.
With several high-profile players, including six-time MVP Barry Bonds linked to BALCO, a San Francisco-based nutritional company embroiled in a steroid scandal, Selig insisted MLB would clamp down on drug cheats.
“I feel very strongly and very deeply about it. I’m very hopeful that in the coming weeks and months we can get to the policy that we need to get to,” Selig told Reuters in an interview.
“But what I say is these people haven’t been charged with anything. These are great athletes that have done extraordinarily great work. I don’t like to take anything away from them.”
Selig is pushing for a renegotiation of the league’s drug-testing policy before the current labor agreement expires in December 2006. The players’ union, meanwhile, has given no indication that it will expedite change to a new policy.
“Time will tell. There has to be a meeting of the minds,” said Selig, in Tokyo for season-opening games between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays this week.
“Everybody knows how I feel about steroids, everybody knows how baseball feels about steroids. There has to be zero tolerance for performance-enhancing substances in baseball.”
Bonds set a single-season home run record after he acknowledged taking BALCO nutritional supplements, while Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield — both in Japan with the Yankees — have testified to a grand jury investigating the company.
All three have denied using illegal substances.
Bonds’s personal trainer Greg Anderson has been indicted for steroid distribution.
Selig was anxious to stress that there was no evidence that players linked to BALCO were guilty of steroid use.
“There have been no accusations, there have certainly been no indictments. There is no evidence that any of these people did anything illegal,” said Selig.