From ESPN today...
Not long after federal agents knocked on Jason Grimsley's door, I got a call from a supplement designer who's hawking his product. He claims it will be bigger than Andro, but they all say that. What got my attention was when he told me that three MLB strength coaches had called him to ask about his assertion that it won't trip a drug test. "I'm not advertising that," the designer, William Llewellyn, says about his X-Factor, which contains a fatty acid found in red meat. "But it's turned into a big selling point."
I've known Llewellyn since I helped put him on the cover of this magazine for a 2003 story about chemists who try to stay one step ahead of drug testers in sports. There has been a lot of water under the Bay Bridge since then: the cream and the clear, the congressional hearings that forced tougher penalties for baseball's steroid users, Barry passing The Babe.
But Llewellyn got me wondering about the sport's 33-page Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment policy. Sure, it was partly created to stop Congress from intervening in baseball's affairs. But this policy, a compromise between MLB and the players association, was also supposed to give us fans peace of mind. When a player like Albert Pujols -- who was flirting with a record home run pace before his oblique injury in early June -- insists he's clean, we desperately want to believe him.
So I decided to find out exactly what "clean" means....
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2492703
