|
Tom Verducci: MLB trying to curtail use of deer antler spray as steroid alternative and An in-depth study of college hoops' recruits behavior
|
|
|
|
Baseball sent a warning to its major and minor league players last week that may sound odd, if not comical, but is a sign of these drug-testing times: stop ingesting deer antler spray.Until the warning went out, baseball players, taking their cues from the body-building and NFL cultures, felt safe using a deer antler spray as an alternative to steroids with almost no risk of flunking a drug test.Deer antlers? Yes, chemists have figured out the velvet from immature deer antlers includes insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, a precursor to producing human growth hormone. The antlers are harvested from young deer, ground up and packaged into spray form. The substance is sprayed under the tongue. One manufacturer touts among its benefits "anabolic or growth stimulation," "athletic performance" and "muscular strength and endurance."IGF-1 is a banned substance, but like HGH, cannot be detected in the urine tests used by baseball. [Read the full article]
The AAU summer has come and gone, and as the calendar creeps toward the advent of games that actually mean something, many of the top Class of 2012 and '13 recruits will commit to colleges. Inevitably, a bunch of those recruits will cause heartbreak by either decommitting, asking out of National Letters of Intent, or enrolling and then transferring -- and jilted coaches will bemoan this as part of an epidemic that's hurting the sport. I've heard coaches use that exact word, epidemic, as a descriptor for what they consider a rising trend: Players no longer feel obligated to hold true to their word, or stay loyal to one team.The issue with the fickleness problem isn't that coaches are wrong. There's no way to argue that the rising number of decommitments is helping the sport; it's that it tends to only get discussed anecdotally, i.e. [Read the full article]
|
