Dee Gordon denied intentionally taking performance enhancing drugs:

“Though I did not do so knowingly, I have been informed that test results showed I ingested something that contained prohibited substances. The hardest part about this is feeling that I have let down my teammates, the organization, and the fans. I have been careful to avoid products that could contain something banned by MLB and the 20-plus tests that I have taken and passed throughout my career prove this. I made a mistake and I accept the consequences”

At this point, and especially after the Ryan Braun and Alex Rodriguez situations, I tend not to give players the benefit of the doubt. It makes much more sense to me that Gordon started using before the 2014 season and beat the tests until now.

If Gordon is telling the truth however, it leads to a good point by Craig Edwards at FanGraphs:

Earlier this week, Ken Rosenthal talked with multiple players about the current system for suspending PED users, covering a wide range of issues: the efficacy of the system (in light of players who’d been caught outside of testing), the penalty and whether it was too lax, and the possibility of tiering suspensions if a player knowingly took a banned substance. These are thorny issues.

While certainly some players have been caught outside the testing process, enough of them have been caught to presume the system works to some degree and that it makes players aware of the risks — professionally, that is — associated with taking banned substances. The length of the penalty could be modified, but there’s a delicate balance between players purposefully cheating and those who are negligent about what they put in their body. Eighty games with essentially no excuses available provides a significant punishment for cheaters. It acts as deterrent for those who might cheat, helps to increase awareness of what goes into a player’s body — and, at the same time, still provides some recourse for those without malicious intent. No testing system is perfect and innocent parties could get caught up. Eighty games provides a midpoint for the varying concerns associated with the testing and suspension process.

I’m starting to wonder if the disincentive to use should somehow be modified to include an incentive to stay clean. If Dee Gordon used PEDs to improve his performance the last two years so he could land a big contract, missing 80 games in a low salary year of that contract isn’t a big deal. In fact Gordon makes out pretty well, making a lot of money even if he doesn’t play well the rest of his career. I can’t see the players agreeing to remove the guaranteed money that they won in early CBAs.

The players, however, don’t like what’s going on. How about something permanent that:

• Allows the cheater to keep playing clean
• Doesn’t give a money break to the owners
• Provides an incentive for others to stay clean

My idea would that anyone caught using PEDs would forfeit half their salary for the rest of their careers. That salary, rather than going into the owners pockets as it does during a suspension, would be divided by the clean players. So in the case of Alex Rodriguez, about $11 million would get divided by about 1200 players, so each players would get about $9,000. On a second bad test, the player would be banned from the game. There would be no suspension for the first test, just the salary redistribution. The hope would be that eventually the payouts to others would be 0. People caught using would not be allowed to collect the benefit, even if they stay clean.

This is a good disincentive for the superstars under long-term contracts. That’s a huge piece of change they are losing. It’s a good incentive for marginal players to stay clean, since they could get a significant boost to their minimum salaries.

Right now, it’s all punishment. The suspension and the short term money lost is obviously worth the risk to some players. An added incentive might push the balance more toward compliance. I’m sure there are potential problems here, but I doubt making just the suspensions longer are going to work.