SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic — Whenever he hears about another baseball player from the Dominican Republic testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, an all-too-common occurrence among his countrymen, Jenrry Mejia feels the same intense emotions: sadness and empathy.
Once a promising young closer for the Mets, Mejia, 33, can speak from experience. Since Major League Baseball and the M.L.B. players’ union agreed on suspensions for first-time offenders beginning in 2005, no player has been disciplined more than he has: His third positive test, which came in 2016, triggered a lifetime ban.
Mejia, then in his mid-20s, reacted rashly to the punishment and accused M.L.B. of engaging in a conspiracy against him. The lifetime ban was reversed two years later, after Mejia apologized to M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred for his actions, and he was conditionally reinstated, though he has yet to make it back to the majors.
Since then, Mejia has spoken frequently to younger players about the dangers of steroids and how they derailed his career. So after Fernando Tatis Jr. of the San Diego Padres got an 80-game suspension in August for testing positive for a banned performance-enhancer, Mejia said he wanted to give the 23-year-old Tatis — or any suspended player — some unsolicited advice.
“What he doesn’t need is people throwing dirt on him,” Mejia said recently in Spanish. “He needs someone to talk to him and say that it’ll be OK. Everyone knows the situation is bad. But show your face, admit the mistake and keep going.”
Tatis’s positive test — a jarring event because of his status as an emerging superstar — is just the latest example of a distressing phenomenon among players from the Dominican Republic. Since 2005, there have been 1,308 positive cases among major and minor league players. According to M.L.B., of the 30,000 drug tests it conducts around the world each season, 0.2 percent are positive for performance-enhancing substances, half of which are from players from the Dominican Republic.
For every Robinson Canó, Melky Cabrera and Bartolo Colón who tested positive, many more Dominican minor leaguers have been caught. And the most common banned substances in use are old-fashioned anabolic steroids that were prevalent in other sports decades ago.
Dominicans play at all levels of baseball, with eight in this year’s World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros. But the percentage of Dominicans testing positive for banned substances is out of proportion with their representation in the game. Of the 975 players on teams’ Opening Day 28-man rosters and inactive lists this season, 99 — just over 10 percent — were from the Dominican Republic. The percentage was believed to be greater in the minor leagues.
“It’s lamentable,” Junior Noboa, a former major leaguer and the country’s national baseball commissioner, said in Spanish in a recent interview from his office in Estadio Quisqueya in Santo Domingo. “It’s lamentable that after all of the talks and everything that is done that they keep making these mistakes.”
Baseball officials, players, doctors and doping experts offered a variety of explanations for the positive drug tests.
“A scout looks at your player and if he’s already 16 years old, he’s too old,” said Felix Mena, a private trainer who began working with Mejia when he was 15 and said he runs a drug-free program. “So with a kid at 12 years old, you have to start getting him to compete and doing things that shouldn’t be done. It’s the system that sometimes carries people away. And there’s poverty, so it’s something social. And you can buy a lot of stuff without prescriptions, like pills and injections. It shouldn’t be like that.”
Mena is not exaggerating about the ages of the players involved. Unlike players in the United States or Canada, who are drafted after high school at 18, or after multiple years of college, international amateurs can sign as free agents with M.L.B. clubs as young as 16. But in the race to secure the next great talent, teams often reach verbal agreements with players several years younger than that, creating a frenzied market that critics argue breeds corruption and steroid use.
Even after those players become professionals, Mena said the excel-at-all-costs mentality continues. “‘I want to risk myself because someone else got $20 million and I want to get the $20 million,’ so they take a risk because of the culture of chasing money.”
The gross national income per capita in the Dominican Republic was about $8,200 last year, according to the World Bank. Because even a modest signing bonus can be life-changing for a Dominican family, children often put secondary school aside to focus on baseball training. And when they do sign, players have to pay their trainers, who double as agents, as much as 50 percent.
“In the United States, the player is basically made in a school, in a program where there is protection and safeguards, and there is a draft,” Mejia said. But in the Dominican Republic, when players aren’t throwing hard enough as teenagers and getting the attention of scouts, Mejia said, they, their parents and their trainers sometimes get desperate.
“You look for something to take, thinking that the banned substance can supposedly help, but really it can make the situation worse,” he said, adding later, “Anyone can go to pharmacy or veterinarian and they’ll sell it to you.”
There is a popular thought in the Dominican Republic that banned substances are a quick fix, said Milton Pinedo, a doctor and the president of Fedomede, the Dominican Federation of Sports Medicine, the body that runs the doping testing for the country’s Olympic programs, including the national baseball team.
“That affects trainers and parents,” Pinedo continued, “who have that belief that using banned substances will be a path out of poverty and the youngsters are going to perform and sign early. The abnormal belief in steroids gives them power that they really don’t have.”
Pinedo listed two other main factors why professional Dominican players end up testing positive more often. He pointed to the lower education levels in the country, particularly among baseball players. As a result, he said, people “cannot discern or differentiate what’s true and what’s not” about steroids.
The third factor, Pinedo said, was perhaps the biggest: the country’s loose controls on banned substances, which can be bought “liberally in the pharmacies and don’t require prescriptions.” Even antibiotics can be bought without a doctor’s order. Older anabolic steroids like stanozolol and boldenone, he said, are popular because they are easily accessible.
“Those are medications that are made in the ’80s and have medical uses,” he said. “Other steroids are designer steroids that are more expensive.”
Victor Conte Jr., the central figure in the BALCO steroids scandal that linked the use of P.E.D.s to some of the country’s top professional baseball, football and track and field athletes, said he believed some baseball players were still circumventing the testing program. But Dominican players using the older drugs are easier to catch.
“Nobody should ever use any sort of an anabolic steroid like that,” said Conte, who pleaded guilty to distributing steroids and money laundering in 2005. “And the reason is because they’re so easily detectable up to six months, if not a year. And even in the cases of like nandrolone, there’s a case that 18 months after injection it was still detectable.”
Pinedo said professional baseball players in the country tested positive at much higher rates than Olympians. He said the most recent positive test among their international athletes came in 2019 — and it was a baseball player participating in the Pan American Games.
“There is no political willpower,” said Pinedo, who has called on the Dominican government to enact tougher restrictions on certain substances. “It’s controlled in many other places. What you’re promoting isn’t baseball, but damaging the health of youth. And the health of the youth is more important.”
Noboa, who is working to reform the player development system in the country, said his office was hoping to receive legislative approval for more resources and power to tackle the doping problem at a young age, from working with parents to better educating players to punishing trainers to testing at independent academies.
“We have to start with the kids from when they’re playing Little League,” Noboa said. “That’s where we have to focus primarily so that when they reach an age when they’re aware, they know that if anyone offers something — ‘This is only for a little bit of time and will help with an injury’ — they say, ‘No, none of that and nothing that’s not on the approved list.’”
M.L.B. established a program in the Dominican Republic in 2018 in which trainers receive an M.L.B. stamp of approval as long as they allow the league to conduct regular unannounced drug tests of their players. This year, M.L.B. was expected to conduct the most tests ever in the minor leagues and in the Dominican Republic.
While the M.L.B. players’ union declined to comment on the issue, M.L.B. responded with a statement: “The league has committed substantial resources, staffing and programming with the goal of PED deterrence across the minor leagues.”
It continued, “As a result of these efforts, in part because of the program’s transparency, the positive test rate among minor league players in the Dominican Republic has been less than 1% for ten consecutive years, and is down 85% since the start of the program. We will continue to enhance and support our programs toward the goal of further deterrence and player safety.”
On a recent morning, Mejia met with Mena. In between playing in the Mexican professional league during the regular season and the Toros del Este in the Dominican winter league, Mejia played catch with the young players Mena is training now. Over the years, Mejia has gotten to know them and has warned them about P.E.D.s.
Mejia’s story is a cautionary tale. In April 2015, he was suspended 80 games for testing positive for stanozolol. Three months later, he was suspended 162 games for testing positive for stanozolol again but also boldenone. And in February 2016, he received the only permanent ban in the antidoping program’s history when boldenone was again found in his system. He said that it was all from one usage — he claimed he didn’t know some B-12 vitamins he took while sick in 2015 had steroids — and simply stayed in his body that long. Once there, he said it didn’t help him throw harder.
Intentional or not, Mejia said everything in his body was his responsibility, and thus it was his fault. While a prospect may turn to steroids to help earn his first professional contract or reach the majors, Mejia was already there. He said the reasons for using at that level are different. Tatis had already signed a 14-year, $340 million deal when he tested positive but he was working his way back from a wrist injury he suffered in a motorcycle accident in the off-season.
“The temptations are like, for example, you have some pain that you don’t want to admit,” Mejia said. “Or you want to overcome it and you think this is going to help you. Or you want to throw harder or you want to show more. But that’s not the way. You’re sometimes not mature until you’re like 32 years old. You sometimes think like a child. Why are you looking for this when you’re already at the highest level?”
Mena welcomed more scrutiny for trainers throughout the country and argued against what he called a “bad culture” of parents who see their children as the means to prosperity and forsake education.
“If the government of ours takes a concrete position of what should happen, and if you don’t follow the guidelines, you’re arrested or fined,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re the parent. What responsibility does a 12-year-old kid have? The kids aren’t looking for steroids. It’s given to them. The government has to investigate and have a firm hand. Us trainers need be controlled and directed and be told that this shouldn’t happen and if it does, we’re held responsible.”
Nelson Cruz, the Washington Nationals designated hitter who is widely viewed as a leader among Dominican major leaguers, said it was encouraging that the rate at which his fellow countrymen have tested positive had decreased.
Cruz, 42, had his own experience with performance-enhancers: He was suspended 50 games in 2013 for his connection to the Biogenesis scandal in Southern Florida that ensnared more than a dozen players, including Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez. He commended the educational programs in place now that he said weren’t around when he was younger.
“M.L.B. is doing a great job giving talks and counseling about it, to prevent what’s going on there,” he said recently, adding later: “It’s a process, like everything in life, for it to be eradicated for good. It’s something that will take time. We, as Dominicans, have to face the reality and we have to try to improve this.”
In the meantime, Mejia said he would continue preaching to children and praying for a second chance at the major leagues. The closest he got to returning was spending the 2019 season with the Boston Red Sox’ Class AAA team, but he posted a 6.38 E.R.A.
“I’d love to return to the United States, even for one day,” he said, “so I can say that I fell, I persevered and I returned to the big leagues.”
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