MLB drug investigation: League wants to interview implicated players

As part of their ongoing drug investigation, Major League Baseball is planning face-to-face interviews with Alex Rodriguez, Gio Gonzalez, Nelson Cruz, Bartolo Colon, Melky Cabrera, and Yasmani Grandal about their presence in the Tuesday report linking them all to an alleged PED clinc, reports Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports:

Major League Baseball plans on interviewing all of the players accused of receiving performance-enhancing drugs from the Biogenesis clinic, though the league hopes first to obtain the documents that tied Alex Rodriguez and other major leaguers to human growth hormone and synthetic testosterone before moving forward with potential disciplinary action, sources told Yahoo! Sports.

The league's investigators will head down to Miami in the next few days with the hopes of retrieving as much hard data from the Miami New Times as possible, including the names of the players mentioned in the clinic notebooks but not in the publication's final report.

If the league's Department of Investigation (DOI) is able to bring back hard copies of the evidence from Florida, it will make it much easier to them to dole out 50-game suspensions -- if they see so fit -- and launch investigations into the other players tied to the clinic.

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Contrary to earlier reports, the DOI is not working in conjunction with the federal government but separately. According to Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times, federal investigators are under no obligation to give the information uncovered in their own investigations to the league because baseball and the player's union have declined to operate under the jurisdiction of the US Anti-Doping Agency (the one that just destroyed Lance Armstrong).

Thus, the league must seek out any and all info themselves in order to stop the proliferation of PEDs in the sport and dole out punishments.

It's unknown whether any of the players implicated are actually required to appear for interviews with investigators, but one assumes a refusal to cooperate could be perceived by the league as an admission of guilt.