On Thursday, a lot of strange stories broke in MLB. One of them was the son of former big leaguer Scott Brosius making a comment on social media that Mike Trout takes performance-enhancing drug HGH. Furthermore, baseball allows this exemption for a thyroid disorder.
Now, Trevor Bauer tells Daniel Roberts (a finance reporter for Yahoo) that players generally know about this and don’t care. In fact, it sounds like this rather large news item is commonplace knowledge amongst Trout’s MLB peers.
Trevor Bauer tells me Mike Trout has an exemption from the league for therapeutic HGH for thyroid issue, and that players know this and generally don't care– says there's a whole complicated process to qualify for such an exemption from MLB.
— Daniel Roberts (@readDanwrite) January 17, 2020
Then on Friday, Bauer did an AMA session over at Bleacher Report. Within it, he touched on the context of PED use in baseball. Here is what he said.
How prevalent are PEDs in the game today? (not asking for names just a percentage) (from @PhillipMackroch)
That’s a great question and it’s complicated. There are certain things that you can take legally if you have certain conditions that not everybody is able to take. For example, Adderall if you have ADHD, so that’s technically a ‘performance’ enhancer. A decent number of guys have that.
In terms of guys taking something illegally and skirting the rules, I would say I’d put it in the 10-ish% range of the league. I think that gets you close. It’s not 50% but it’s not 0% either.
So, there you have it. According to Bauer and Scott Brosius’s son, Mike Trout is one of the 10 percent who use some kind of PED.
Obviously, this isn’t something baseball is going to want getting out and discussed if it’s true. And as a fan of Trout, I just want this story to go away.
