I take Furosemide daily for my CHF so my ears perked up when I heard about the Cano suspension. It seemed odd that a diuretic would be banned but as it turns out it isn’t. The diuretic simply flags an investigation by the independent administrator who determined that it was used as a masking agent and the MLB investigation concurred. Furosemide is used primarily to treat CHF and sometimes to reduce blood pressure, there are few other legitimate uses so a relatively young man like Cano would almost certainly not have it prescribed legitimately. It is sad though as he was probably a lock for the 3,000 hits and the HoF, but that’s over now.
Yeah -- and Cano's statement, that he was prescribed the diuretic by a "licensed doctor" in the DR for a completely unspecified "medical condition" just does not hold water. A healthy individual in his/her 30's just has no ongoing medical need for a diuretic. If Cano had a medical condition that
did require ongoing diuretic use, the
only way it would be acceptable to MLB would have been if the team doctors had come to that conclusion and had prescribed the medication. Only then could the team, and the player himself, go to MLB and plead that the diuretic was, indeed, addressing a real medical condition, and not being used to mask PED traces in the urine samples players are required to provide.
It's particularly disingenuous to reference a doctor in the Dominican, where Cano has not been since the off-season. You don't get a diuretic prescribed during the off-season, even if there was a good reason for one (which there almost could not be), and keep enough to be carrying and using it three months later. And it's terribly convenient to claim you used a doctor not in the U.S., so there is no paper trail available to MLB investigators.
In terms of the timing on this, I'm assuming the urine tests are given at several unannounced times during the year, and that this result was not, for example, from a urine sample taken at the beginning of spring training. And seeing as how it's pretty seriously unlikely that any unlikely-to-begin-with medical condition would be diagnosed, and had medication prescribed, from the DR while Cano was in the U.S. the entire time, his statement comes off as a pretty obvious, and clumsy, lie. It comes off a lot more as "I should have been more careful cheating, so as not to get caught" as opposed to "I should have been more careful about what kinds of medications I took".
An immediate admission that he had taken something he shouldn't have, panicked, and gotten hold of/taken a diuretic to cover it,
might have salvaged a small shot at the HOF. We could at least have seen what an immediate, overwhelming mea culpa could have accomplished when it comes to HOF voting. As it is, the clumsy and obvious lie is enough to put a dagger into any possible HOF chances for the man. Which is a shame, he has had a Hall of Fame career. But the fact that he was caught covering up, this late in his career, calls into question just how he managed that HOF-level performance all these years. I, and likely the BBWA guys who vote for the HOF, will just assume that it was from being more careful -- about not getting caught cheating.
