Blue Jays’ Chris Colabello has ‘nothing to say sorry for’

Colabello steadfastly insists he never knowingly took any performance-enhancing drugs or illicit supplements that may have been tainted. He swears he took nothing but the certified supplements provided by the team. He’s intense in his declaration of innocence and unabashedly emotional about what he considers an unjust persecution.

“I have nothing to say sorry for,” he told the Star earlier this week in a wide-ranging interview before a Triple-A Buffalo Bisons game.

“At the end of the day, the unfortunate thing is I’m the only person that knows that.”

Colabello’s case has grown more intriguing as four other Major League Baseball players have since tested positive for the same drug, dehydrochlormethyltestosterone (DHCMT), which was developed by East Germany as part of its state-sponsored Olympic doping program and was once sold under the name Turinabol.

Nobody believes the spate of positive DHCMT tests is a coincidence. Whether due to improved detection technology, a testing flaw that is inadvertently catching innocent players or a tainted supplement, it depends on whom you believe.

The league and the testers say the science is unequivocal.

The players insist they did nothing wrong.

Their denials are unsurprising — it’s the predictable response for athletes caught doping — but the vehemence with which this particular group of players has claimed innocence has, in the very least, piqued curiosity.

In response to questions about the spate of DHCMT suspensions this season, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters at the all-star game earlier this month the league has been “extra responsive” to complaints from players in this particular case.

“There’s been cross-checking and testing between laboratories. All I can say is we are really confident,” he said. “I don’t know how it got there; I know the player doesn’t know how it got there. I know it’s there, and it’s against our rules.”

The league’s anti-doping investigative arm — its work led to the suspension of Alex Rodriguez and 13 other players in 2013 even though they hadn’t failed a test — is currently working to root out potential sources of the drug, which is only available on the black market.

The league has also told the Star that they know of “dozens” of products in the market that would lead to a positive test for DHCMT.

Even though Colabello has now served his suspension, he says he’s not putting the issue behind him. Since he doesn’t know how he tested positive in the first place, he says he has no way of knowing how not to test positive again. For the sake of the “greater good,” he says he wants to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.

“If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.”

He won’t discuss the details of his own investigations, but he believes he’s getting closer to finding an answer and is already looking forward to the day he is exonerated. He hopes that will come before the end of this season so his playoff ineligibility can be overturned.

“At the end of the day people are going to believe what they want,” he said. “My answers are never going to change. Never. Until the day I die.”

All major-league players are drug tested upon reporting to spring training as part of the league’s standard protocol. Random tests are then conducted throughout the season. Colabello, like many of his teammates, arrived at spring training before the first official report date and took his test five days ahead of schedule.

“I had nothing to hide.”

It wasn’t until a few weeks later he received a call from the players’ union telling him he had tested positive. He was bewildered and devastated.

“I thought it was a joke,” he says. “It was, like, the least believable thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

The stress of his pending suspension weighed on him and his performance tanked in the final two weeks of spring training. He carried that into the season, collecting just a pair of singles and no extra-base hits in his first 10 games. Off the field, meanwhile, he was “fighting for my life” as he went through the appeal process.

“I was trying to figure out every day how I’m going to prove to people I’m telling the truth. How do you do that? How do you prove a negative?”

Cody Stanley is asking the same questions. The former St. Louis Cardinals catcher has already twice tested positive for DHCMT, earning a 162-game suspension earlier this month.

“I will never apologize for something I didn’t do,” he said in a curiously terse, two-sentence statement. “We will not stop searching for why all of this has happened.”

Adding to the intrigue, Stanley recently told Fox Sports baseball columnist Ken Rosenthal he is currently appealing a third failed test. If he loses this appeal, as he expects he will, he gets a lifetime ban. Stanley’s case has raised eyebrows, given the unlikely scenario that a player would intentionally continue to use a drug even while serving a suspension for that same drug.

“If I was a player who had never tested positive, who was just going about my business in MLB, I’d be scared right now,” Stanley told Rosenthal.

Christiane Ayotte, who since 1991 has directed the World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab in Montreal where MLB sends its tests, said she did not want to discuss any specific cases, but agreed to speak to the Star about the testing process and DHCMT in general.

She has followed the ongoing controversy around DHCMT, but said there is no doubt about the accuracy of the tests.

“We’re not in the business of speculating about a test result,” she said. “We don’t report if there’s a doubt. It’s not like a bad pregnancy test.”

Ayotte said her lab saw almost no positive tests for Turinabol or DHCMT until the mid-2000s when a “designer steroid” called Halodrol entered the market and included a variation of the DHCMT molecule. Even then, the few positive cases came from Central or South America. Then, two years ago, she noticed a “rebirth” of DHCMT, which she says has since “invaded the market.”

Another reason for the increase in positive tests, according to Ayotte, is that three years ago her lab and others around the world improved detection technologies and identified a longer-term metabolite that together increased the detection window for DHCMT from about three days to as many as 50.

To be clear, neither Colabello nor any other suspended player tested positive for DHCMT itself; the tests found traces of a metabolite produced by their bodies when the drug is consumed.

“This molecule contains a chlorine atom and there’s nothing in our body that possesses a chlorine atom,” Ayotte said. “It’s so specific to Turinabol. All the cases we have, all the excretion studies, we find this metabolite, and we don’t find it in any other samples. From a chemical point of view we are 100 per cent sure. It’s not an interpretation.”

Ayotte said it’s impossible the players’ bodies could have produced the metabolite naturally. It could, however, be the result of mislabelled or tainted supplements.

“The guilty people are those distributing these steroids,” she said.

Dr. Don Catlin, the founder and former director of UCLA’s anti-doping lab and a leading expert on doping in sports, has reviewed some of baseball’s positive DHCMT tests, including Colabello’s. He says he wished the Montreal lab was more expansive in its documentation, but he has no doubt about the accuracy of the tests.

Catlin said he was not aware of any way a player’s body could produce the metabolite on its own, but he is currently studying the possibility — suggested to him by some of the suspended players — that the metabolite could be produced by an enzyme linked to endocrine cancers.

“I don’t believe those things,” he said. “But I’m looking into it because that’s the nature of the work. I’ve never had such a case, but that’s not to say it can’t happen . . . So far I haven’t found anything, but I think any time you have a clue it’s worth following up.”

Catlin said the spate of positive tests suggests there is a source somewhere — probably China or Russia — where another substance has been altered to include DHCMT.

“It’s a real phenomenon; it’s not a false positive,” he said. “There are multiple labs involved. The only common point is the sport of baseball.”

Colabello’s unlikely career path — a major-league breakout at 31 after a decade of minor-league obscurity, including seven years in the wilderness of the independent leagues — was one of the most popular underdog stories in all of sports last year.

When he failed his PED test, that same remarkable career arc was cited as further proof he had cheated. This makes Colabello’s blood boil.

“Why are people not allowed to get better?” he asked. “Why, over the course of your life, are you not allowed to get better at what you do? Why are people not allowed to get better at 30 years old? Do you know who the people are who are saying that? They’re the people that don’t believe in their minds that they can get better at what they do.”

Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson, Edwin Encarnacion — arguably the Jays’ best three hitters — all similarly bloomed midway through their careers after dramatically retooling their swings, just as Colabello did.

But he says he’s not worried about his skeptics right now.

He’s back playing the game that has always afforded him a means of child-like escape. When his mother, Silvana, was diagnosed with breast cancer last summer, Colabello said it was only when he was at the ballpark that he wasn’t consumed with worry.

“It’s the only place I’ve ever wanted to be.”

Colabello is eligible to return to the Jays on Saturday, but the team can keep him here in Buffalo as long as they like. He’s not fretting about if or when he’ll be called up.

He’s just happy to be on the field again.

What he says he loves most about baseball and missed most during his suspension is the one-on-one competition of hitting, when the odds are stacked in the pitcher’s favour. He’s drawing on that same mentality in the uphill battle to prove his innocence and clear his name.

“I love when everybody’s counting you out and you figure out a way to get it done,” he said. “That’s what this game’s all about.”