Do they even drug test in the Latin American leagues?
SCOUTING
SCOUTING; Drug Testing In Winter Ball
By Thomas Rogers
Published: January 9, 1986
In September, Peter Ueberroth struck an agreement with the Caribbean Confederation, an umbrella group of winter baseball leagues, that called for random mandatory drug testing of players in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, with the commissioner's office providing guidance and supervision. Spurred in part by this accord, a fourth member of the confederation, Venezuela, began two months ago to conduct urinalyses on its own, under the supervision of the nation's Ministry of Sport.
The Mexican winter leagues have a negligible smattering of players from the majors, but Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela have about 80, some 12 percent of the big-league total. And any or all of them were to be subject to the winter testing, notwithstanding the fact that the Major League Baseball Players Association had blocked the same kind of Ueberroth-proposed program back in the States. While in the Caribbean, the big-leaguers are members of local player unions, which decided to go along with the tests.
But the results of the commissioner's winter-league efforts have apparently been very mixed.
In Puerto Rico, where the Professional Ballplayers Association voted in early December to accept testing, the membership was startled to see Miguel Rodriguez, who's on the commissioner's staff, showing up in locker rooms unannounced to supervise. The players had agreed to urinalysis on the understanding that they would be given advance notice, and more than half of them - and all the major-leaguers - subsequently refused to be tested.
In the Dominican Republic, meanwhile, there's confusion. Ueberroth's program has a firm ally in Rico Carty, the former National League batting champion who now heads the Dominican Federation of Professional Ballplayers. The problem, Carty says, is that the testing supervisor whom the commissioner promised to send from New York has not shown up, and time is running out, since the Dominican season closes at the end of this month. Rich Levin, a Ueberroth spokesman, disputes this account, saying that tests have been carried out, though ''not necessarily with all teams or with all players.'' The results, he says, are confidential. Testing has apparently gone most smoothly in Venezuela, but even there hurdles have not been lacking. For instance, Joe Orsulak, the Pittsburgh outfielder, recently refused to submit to urinalysis because of the haphazard way in which it was being conducted. ''Frankly, I couldn't blame him,'' says Tom Kayser, a Pirate official who visited Venezuela in November. ''They didn't supervise the tests very well. They just said, 'Give us a sample,' then threw it in a box without marking names on it. Joe's feeling was, 'If they do it wrong, I'll get branded.' ''
After officials had threatened to suspend anyone who balked at testing, a compromise was worked out whereby Orsulak and three other players were flown to Caracas and allowed to meet with Venezuelan Government aides before delivering their samples to the lab, personally.
