Lou Merloni dropped a bomb on Saturday during a Comcast Sports Net show cleverly entitled The Baseball Show:
“I’m in Spring Training, and I got an 8:30-9:00 meeting in the morning. I walk into that office, and this happened while I was with the Boston Red Sox before this last regime, I’m sitting in the meeting. There’s a doctor up there and he’s talking about steroids, and everyone was like, ‘Here we go, we’re going to sit here and get the whole thing — they’re bad for you.’
“No. He spins it and says, ‘You know what? If you take steroids and sit on the couch all winter long, you can actually get stronger than someone who works out clean. If you’re going to take steroids, one cycle won’t hurt you; abusing steroids it will.’
“He sat there for one hour and told us how to properly use steroids while I’m with the Boston Red Sox, sitting there with the rest of the organization, and after this I said, ‘What the heck was that?’ And everybody on the team was like, ‘What was that?’ And the response we got was, ‘Well, we know guys are taking it, so we want to make sure they’re taking it the right way.’ … Where did that come from? That didn’t come from the Players Association.”
Merloni clarifed his statements a bit for the Boston Globe:
“It was like teaching your teenage daughter about sex education,” Merloni told the newspaper. “The organization acknowledged that there were likely players using steroids, and basically, ‘If you’re going to use them, this is how you use them so you don’t abuse them.’”
Merloni was in the Red Sox’s Minor League system in 1996 and1997 and played for the big league team from 1998-2002. And, yes. Yes that is Lou’s wife pictured above.
Say this is 100% true. I’m not sure what to think about this. This is just more proof of how much Major League Baseball and their teams knew. Everyone turned a blind eye.
Although steroids without a prescription would still have been illegal at that time, the MLB did no have rules against the substance. I suppose that means that if the Red Sox as an organization told players how to not hurt themselves when using such substances than as far as the law of the MLB goes; they have done nothing wrong.
With the events of the past several months including A-Rod and Man-Ram this really does not mean a damn thing anymore. Nothing worse can come out for the MLB at this point. Literally the only thing that will hurt me anymore is if Griffey is implicated. Alright I guess Puljos would be the final huge blow for the era as well. But I really do not even care if Puljos did juice at this point… that is how far out of control this ship guided by Mr. Selig has finally gone.
