MLB

Yankees’ Teixeira doesn’t think PED use ‘will ever go away’

TAMPA — Mark Teixeira has been as outspoken as any baseball player about his desire to rid baseball of illegal performance-enhancing drug usage. But Wednesday, he acknowledged the reality of the situation.

“I don’t think it’ll ever go away,” Teixeira said of illegal PED usage, before the Yankees played Baltimore at Steinbrenner Field. “It’s just like taxes. The IRS can do everything they can. People are going to cheat on their taxes. The IRS can do everything they can to try to stop it. It’s not going to be 100 percent perfect.”

Teixeira is a former Yankees player representative and is very involved in the game’s larger issues. This morning, Players Association executive director Michael Weiner met with the Yankees; Weiner convenes with every club during spring training.

Weiner’s arrival prompted discussion of the illegal PED issue, and Teixeira agreed with Weiner that more stringent testing, rather than tougher penalties, is the best route to a cleaner game.

“If guys get caught, (a suspension of) 50 games and your name being tarnished, that’s a heck of a penalty for any player,” Teixeira said. “…I think the problem is that guys think they’re ahead of it. So I would rather fix the science side than just try to say, you’re banned for life the first time. I think that’s a little overboard.”

Teixeira described himself, fairly accurately, as someone who annually puts up about 30 homers and drives in 100 runs.

“And there were times when there guys with 60 and 140,” he said. “And you go, ‘Goodness, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t take that many swings. I can never hit 60 home runs.

“Those days are over. Guys aren’t hitting 60, 70 homers anymore. In that case, people can look at it and say, ‘OK, we’re back to a more normal time period.’ …The days of guys being twice the size they should be and hitting 60 homers a year, I think those days are over.”

Nevertheless, as Teixeira acknowledged, there never will be a time in which no player tries to gain a competitive edge.

“I think we’ve done a good job of cleaning it up, but there are always going to be outliers,” he said. “Cases where a guy either intentionally or unintentionally breaks the rules. To think that we’re going to solve every one of those issues would be naïve.”

Ultimately, Teixeira said, “I don’t ever want a kid to look at me and say, ‘Oh, he just three hit homers in a game, he’s probably on steroids.’ That’s just a tough thing. It’s part of our job. It’s been a part of baseball for a long time. And it’s not going to go away. We just have to in our minds know that we’re doing everything we can.”