Last month Biogenesis, a nondescript clinic a short hop from the University of Miami, quietly closed its doors. It purported to be an anti-aging clinic offering medical treatments to boost energy and libido, but, as our sister paper the Miami New Times reports, it also offered professional athletes a one-stop shop for performance-enhancing drugs.
The clinic's owner, a failed entrepreneur-turned-Central American Health Sciences University-trained doctor named Anthony Bosch, has previous ties to PEDs. He was implicated after Manny Ramirez tested positive for banned substances in 2009. Since then, he has continued to operate what the New Times calls the "East Coast version of Balco."
Spreadsheets and hand-written records from the clinic obtained by the paper read like a Major League Baseball All Star roster, each player with a nickname. Alex Rodriguez show up in the records as "Cacique," a pre-Columbian Caribbean chief; Giants slugger Melky Cabrera, who was suspended last year after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, is "Mostro." And Texas Rangers outfielder Nelson Cruz is known as "Mohamad."
Cruz has never been tied to PEDs, but the New Times evidence that Biogenesis provided athletes with banned substances, and that Cruz was a customer, is very detailed. A July 2012 patient list from the clinic shows that Cruz purchased $4,000 worth of product from the clinic that month. In a handwritten note from last year, Bosch writes of Cruz: "Need to call him, go Thur to Texas, take meds from April 5-May 5, will owe him troches and... and will infuse them in May."
Neither Cruz nor any of the other players named in Biogenesis records responded to requests for comment by the paper. MLB issued a statement that the league is "always extremely disappointed to learn of potential links between players and the use of performance-enhancing substances and have been active in the issues that have emerged in South Florida... [B]anned substances ... have no place in our game."
