The fact that ballplayers are using a spray made from ground up deer antlers as some sort of performance enhancer a la HGH is not news. We wrote about it back in January. What’s new, per Tom Verducci at Sports Illustrated, is that Major League Baseball sent a warning to players last week that they shouldn’t use a particular brand of the deer antler spray because it could lead to positive drug test results due to contamination of some kind.
As I noted back in January, the funniest thing about the deer antler spray business is not that it’s, you know, deer antler spray. It’s that players are taking it -- and the league is at least starting to get a bit worried about it -- despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that it actually enhances athletic performance in any way. Yes, the active ingredient — a substance called IGF-1 — is one of the main proteins in human growth hormone, but they haven’t linked HGH to any performance enhancement either.
I predict that eventually we’ll have outraged interviews with WADA officials about how baseball has no test for deer antlers and thus doesn’t take PEDs seriously and all of that attendant baloney.
And that’s before PETA gets involved.
NOTE: The pic comes from the cartoon that I thought was, bar-none, the funniest thing I ever saw when I was a kid. To this day, my brother and I repeat the “yeah, he had antlers like this!” line.
