Yasmani Grandal moving past Biogenesis

PEORIA, Ariz. — Yasmani Grandal made mistakes. He paid his penance. He returned to the game.

As Everth Cabrera prepares for his final leg down the road to redemption, one lesson above all others can help carry the Padres’ 27-year-old shortstop through the coming months.

Grandal learned it well a year ago as he returned from his 50-game suspension. Even as he rehabbed his right knee throughout the offseason, Grandal made it a point to pass along anything he could to assist in Cabrera’s return to the game.

“You can’t take it back,” the Padres’ 25-year-old catcher said. “That’s the hardest thing to do. You keep on looking back. ‘What if? What if I had done this or what if I had done that?’ You can’t do that.

“Once you do that, you’re done. Your season is done. All you’re going to be doing is thinking about that.”

That, of course, is Cabrera’s and Grandal’s place in the sport’s largest police action since baseball banned eight players for life for throwing the 1919 World Series. The crime this time is documented evidence linking more than a dozen players – from a would-be Hall-of-Famer to an MVP to All-Stars to minor league free agents – to the purchase of banned performance enhancing drugs from a now-defunct Miami anti-aging clinic.

What followed Miami New Times’ initial report last year played out like a cable TV courtroom drama:

With the newspaper refusing to hand over its copies, Major League Baseball officials paid former employees of the Biogenesis of America clinic for documents to head off suspects’ reported efforts to keep damning evidence away from investigators.

Three names on the documents – including Grandal – had already served 50-game bans following failed tests from the 2012 season. The first to cop in this lot, Ryan Braun, was a suspected user who used technicalities to fight a failed test during his NL MVP campaign in 2011. He got 65 games.

From there, three All-Stars – Cabrera, Nelson Cruz and Jhonny Peralta – were among the dozen who accepted 50-game suspensions last August as the biggest name in all of this, Alex Rodriguez, lawyered up to fight the 211-game ban thrown at the game’s highest-paid player. An independent arbiter later settled on 162 games – or all of the 2014 season – for Rodriguez, who is now reportedly refusing to pay millions in legal fees racked up in appeals and lawsuits that were ultimately dropped.

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(utsandiego.com)