NEW YORK (AP) -Donald Fehr denied allegations that his No. 2 official gave players advance notice of drug tests and defended the baseball players’ union against criticism that records of the anonymous survey should have been destroyed in 2003.
Questions about the 2003 testing intensified after Sports Illustrated reported last weekend that Alex Rodriguez was one of 104 players who tested positive that year. Rodriguez admitted Monday to using banned drugs.
Fehr, the Major League Baseball Players Association’s executive director, said there was just an eight-day span between the initial receipt of the test results and notice that a federal grand jury was seeking them as part of the BALCO investigation into performance-enhancing drugs.
Fehr said the union first received test results on Nov. 11, 2003, that the results were finalized two days later and that players were notified the following day, a Friday.
n learning this, we concluded, of course, that it would be improper to proceed with the destruction of the materials.”
The union negotiated with federal prosecutors in San Francisco until the following spring and pledged not to destroy the records. The union moved in April to quash the subpoena, and federal investigators obtained a search warrant and seized records from Comprehensive Drug Testing and samples from Quest Diagnostics.
Although the search warrant sought records of 10 players, the government found a spreadsheet with a list of 104 players who had tested positive; it then obtained additional search warrants and seized all records.
The case has been in the courts every since.
The union said the seizure of the wider group of records was illegal under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, and that the government had the right to only the records and samples of the 10 players.
Three U.S. District Judges agreed with the union in August and October 2004. The government appealed, arguing that because the records were on the same computer, it had a “plain view” right to all the materials. A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the government in a 2-1 vote in December 2006 and mostly reaffirmed its decision in January 2008.
held in December, and a decision is pending.
The loser could attempt to take the case to the Supreme Court.
Fehr also insisted Monday that no players were improperly tipped to upcoming drug testing.
“Any allegations that Gene Orza or any other MLBPA official acted improperly are wrong,” he said in a statement.
In its report, SI said Rodriguez was told by Orza, the union’s chief operating officer, that he would be tested in September 2004.
Fehr told Congress last summer that union lawyers spoke with 65 players on the government list that September.
“During these conversations, players were told that if they had not yet been tested in 2004, that they would be tested before the season ended, but that was something the players already knew before the conversations took place, because the agreement required that each player be tested once during the year,” he wrote in his July letter to Congress, which he cited in Monday’s statement. “They were not told (and no one knew) specifically when any test would be conducted.”
At the time, the testing period ended with the final game of the regular season.
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