Friday, May 15, 2009

Foreigners to get drug-tested, if they play in the KBO.

The Korean Baseball Organization has said that foreign players in the league will be subject to drug testing, although it hasn't been decided when or how the program will start. The league has tested Korean players since 2007
but exempted foreign athletes who strongly refused to be the target of the drug screening.

Perhaps there's more to it than that, but as we've seen time and time and time and time again in North America, baseball players can't be trusted to be clean, and they really have no leg to stand on with their objections.

As the Herald and the Joongang Ilbo both point out, Daniel Rios is an example in Korea. He had five decent before recording 22 wins in 2007. He then signed with Japan, and tested positive for anabolic steroids in 2008.

This isn't related, but I was interested to read East Windup Chronicle demonstrate that the papers can be just as ignorant when it comes to covering foreign players as when they're covering foreign teachers.

3 comments:

Aaron said...

I wasn't quite sure what to make of this. On one hand it's ridiculous for the league to single out foreign players for doing steroids. KBO players aren't above it.

On the other hand I think most of the players who end up coming here are trying to save their fledgling careers and are more apt to take take steroids, make a few hundred grand and ride off into the sunset.

They're panning for gold, if you will. Cough.

Brian said...

But from the articles it looks like they're not singling foreign players out.

Anonymous said...

While this doesn't relate specifically to Korea, have you seen this recent article on the slapdash job / ignorance displayed by certain papers?