The 13 baseball suspensions connected to Florida-based Biogenesis just announced today are notable, apart from the numbers of guys involved, for the fact that all are Latino — though Ryan Braun was also part of the case and was suspended last month.
Interesting. Not sure why. One possibility is that a group of Latino customers formed around this company, perhaps with Alex Rodriguez as the main guy. One of his nicknames in company files is “cacique,” I read. In Mexico, cacique means political boss.
Another possibility has to do with the “system” of churning out baseball players from places like the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, which sounds quite a bit like the old Hollywood studio system, namely pretty brutal and soul-crushing and surrounded by slimy agents, scouts and lawyers all filling boys’ heads with bad advice — one of which is that doping is just what you have to do.
I’ll be interested to see what further reporting reveals.
Of course, I mention this well aware that, in earlier cases, most of the players involved were not Latino.
