Why Chris Davis turned to using a banned substance
Chris Davis knew exactly what he was doing when he started popping Adderall again. More than any sport, baseball’s relentless toll can ruin a player’s psyche, cause him to forget who he is and what he’s done, send him into the sort of spiral that makes him look for something, anything. Davis sought answers in a pill bottle.
The wonderment of his 2013 season had yielded to the misery of 2014, and when Davis’ troubles tracking the baseball out of the pitcher’s hand and concentrating continued, sources told Yahoo Sports, he turned to what he used in the past, well aware of the potential consequences. Major League Baseball on Friday smacked Davis with a 25-game suspension for his second positive test for amphetamines, a penalty that will bench the Baltimore Orioles slugger for the remainder of the regular season and eight postseason games, should the Orioles make the ALCS.
Long a proponent of playing clean – just last year he called Hank Aaron and Roger Maris the all-time and single-season home run champions – Davis found himself ensnared in the complex world of amphetamines. Since the league banned their use in 2006, players with ADHD – the Baltimore Sun reported Davis has been diagnosed with the disorder – have been scrutinized by the league as to whether they warrant medication. Amphetamine use in baseball dates to World War II, and its presence remains controversial, as the Davis case illustrates.
Nearly 10 percent of baseball players – 119 of the 1,200 on major league rosters – were given therapeutic-use exemptions for ADHD medications last season, according to a report released by the league. While ADHD skews male and the incidence in adults remains unclear because of the difficulty in diagnosing the disorder – doctors disagree on whether it’s overdiagnosed, underdiagnosed or simply misdiagnosed – one top ADHD doctor told Yahoo Sports five years ago that MLB’s awarding of TUEs “looks fishy.”
The difficulty manifests itself with players trying to get through the grind of a 7½-month spring-to-fall season, with constant travel, day games after night games and injuries sapping energy. They believe amphetamines help, so every spring, dozens of players apply for exemptions, hoping a league-appointed doctor will grant it. Though rejections exist, they’re not altogether prevalent.
Davis once held a TUE. He did not apply for one in 2013 or 2014, two sources told Yahoo Sports. The Baltimore Sun reported he did not have one in 2012, either. Why Davis stopped asking for an exemption was unclear, as is whether both of the positive tests came this season, or whether his first positive came in the past.
Whenever it happened, Davis clearly understood what a second positive test meant and took them anyway. And that’s where the cloudy morality of MLB’s drug policy turns into a proposition as clear as 20/20: Davis, as a union member, agreed that a second positive amphetamine test meant 25 games, and even though the Orioles were in the midst of a season in which they improbably led the AL East despite losing Matt Wieters and Manny Machado, he chanced it anyway.
And it’s more stupid than selfish, because certainly the intent was to help the Orioles overcome those losses, to play like he believed he should. A 53-home run, MVP-type season morphing into a Mendoza Line mess (.196/.300/.404) is enough to make any player question himself.
Even one Davis reveres.
“I was so frustrated that at one point I tried using a pep pill – a greenie – that one of my teammates gave me,” Hank Aaron wrote in his autobiography, “I Had a Hammer,” referring to a rough patch in 1968 when he sought something, anything. Aaron said he didn’t like how the amphetamines made his heart race and didn’t use them again.
Others did. Willie Mays ate greenies and drank red juice, an amphetamine-laced drink. A doctor testified that he gave Steve Carlton, Pete Rose, Tim McCarver, Larry Bowa and more players on the early '80s Phillies scores of amphetamines, a charge they denied, though Rose later admitted he beaned up during his playing years. Baseball and amphetamines have a peanut butter-and-jelly relationship, and the TUEs do little to dispel it.
This is what happens when morality and inevitability butt heads. Davis apologized through the MLB Players Association on Friday afternoon, releasing a statement that read, in part: “I made a mistake by taking Adderall.” And that may have been the only unquestioned truth of the day.
Whether the extra focus Adderall delivers translates definitively on a baseball field never will be clear. How baseball reconciles giving pills to one player because he acts out the symptoms better than another makes monitoring TUEs exceedingly difficult for a league that takes seriously the punishment of drug use.
The murkiness of Davis’ case only adds to it – and to the pain of the Orioles’ crack at a championship. Gone is a middle-of-the-lineup stalwart, for 25 games and perhaps the season, should Baltimore prefer to stick with its stretch team. The Orioles will determine that as well as Davis’ future, which includes an attempted comeback in 2015, free agency following the season and the truth of a drug suspension for the guy who liked to talk about “doing things the right way.”
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