Giants' Cabrera created fake Web site to avoid drugs ban?
A report emerges that the San Francisco Giants Melky Cabrera allegedly contributed to creating a fake product and Web site in order to fool investigators after his testosterone levels were elevated.
Sometimes those you admire can have a very soft underbelly.
My San Francisco Giants this week lost outfielder Melky Cabrera to a 50-game drug suspension. His testosterone was elevated, so it was said. The Melkman seemed to have poured the cream of his career down the drain.
Couldn't he find an elevated reason to get out of the suspension, cynical, loving fans cried? This is what appeared to work for the Milwaukee Brewers' Ryan Braun, who found a loophole in the chain-of-evidence rules.
Today, allegations have emerged that Cabrera and some of his associates may have used to Web to create a highly elevated ruse.
As the New York Daily News reports it, a known associate of Cabrera, Juan Nunez, allegedly spent $10,000 to create a Web site advertising a performance-enhancing -- but entirely fictitious -- product.
The idea, so the allegations suggest, was to prove that it wasn't Cabrera's fault that he ingested something he shouldn't have. There is a clause in MLB's collective bargaining agreement that may exonerate those who genuinely had no idea they were taking something they shouldn't.
It may well be that Major League Baseball sometimes employs the milk of the milk, rather than la creme de la creme. However, its investigators seem to have not been fooled as some are by Nigerian princes.
They allegedly asked questions, wondering who was behind the site, and then the Melk bottles that has been neatly constructed into a pyramid allegedly crashed down.
The New York Daily News says that there is no evidence that Cabrera's agents were involved in the alleged scheme. The Web site was, though, apparently part of a presentation that Cabrera's people made to Major League Baseball and the players' union after his positive test.
The whole thing has now become frightfully curdled as Federal investigators, long, expensively and pointlessly obsessed with drugs in baseball, are now reportedly involved.
How odd that someone with the world in his grasp might have let everything now slide to the mound.
Surely someone might have warned any of those allegedly involved here that the Web is a very public marketplace, one where your secrets spill out on an hourly basis.
Now, sadly, we may be in a situation where those "Got Melky?" T-shirts have an entirely unintended meaning.