Mark Teixeira spent five seasons playing alongside Robinson Cano with the Yankees from 2009 to 2013, so it’s hardly unusual that the now-retired first baseman was asked about Cano’s 80-game suspension for violating MLB’s performance-enhancing drug policy. His answer was pretty revelatory, however.
“Yeah, I don’t really want to get into too much detail. I love Robbie, I’m just not surprised,” Teixeira said Thursday during an appearance on Michael Kay’s radio show. “I don’t really want to go too much further. But I think a lot of people are kind of saying the same thing.”
Teixeira actually did get into more detail, saying it was more of a guilt-by-association thing.
“Let’s just use this situation here. Robbie Cano’s assistant was on the list for Biogenesis,” Teixeira said, referring to the clinic at the center of Major League Baseball’s 2013 PED scandal. “Now, of course, [he] had an assistant, you know, buy stuff for him. Alex Rodriguez got popped by Biogenesis and [former Yankees outfielder Melky Cabrera] got popped. They were best friends. When someone gets lumped into that group, it’s because there’s evidence. There’s a paper trail, there’s a smoke trail.”
MLB suspended Rodriguez for the entire 2014 season after the league found that he had received testosterone and human growth hormone from the Biogenesis clinic in Florida and then attempted to cover it up. Cabrera, a Yankee from 2005 to 2009, was suspended for 50 games in 2012 while playing for the Giants after he tested positive for high levels of testosterone. He was linked to Biogenesis in subsequent reporting about the subject.
Cano’s suspension — he tested positive for Furosemide, a diuretic often used to dilute urine samples and cheat drug-testing regimens — was the first of his career. He admitted that he took Furosemide and said it was given to him by a doctor in the Dominican Republic to “treat a medical ailment.”
“For more than 15 years, playing professional baseball has been the greatest honor and privilege of my life,” Cano said. “I would never do anything to cheat the rules of the game that I love, and after undergoing dozens of drug tests over more than a decade, I have never tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance for the simple reason that I have never taken one.”
Testing positive for a diuretic does not merit an automatic MLB suspension unless the league is able to prove it was used as a masking agent.
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