When testing for human growth hormone begins in Major League Baseball next spring, the sport will be moving cautiously into uncharted territory. Each player will have a blood test for the substance in spring training. But during the season, the testing will be stopped. After the season, it will resume.
The owners and the players will then decide whether to do in-season testing in 2013, something the owners are clearly hoping will happen. This on-again, off-again schedule for testing in the first year underscores just how daunting it is for the players union to agree to blood testing for the first time, particularly when other professional sports leagues in North America do not do such tests.
Over the past decade, dozens of baseball players, including Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, have been tied to H.G.H., which antidoping experts claim can help players recover quickly and build muscle mass but which cannot legally be used without a prescription.
It is a substance that has proved extremely difficult to detect, but baseball will now try, moving ahead of other leagues like the N.F.L. There, the players have backed away from the H.G.H. test, raising various reservations. That did not keep baseball’s union from saying yes, but it is a cautious affirmation, one modest step at a time.
“None of us have experience with blood testing as we do with urine,” Michael Weiner, the head of the players union, said in a telephone interview Tuesday evening, hours after he and Commissioner Bud Selig ushered in a new five-year labor deal for baseball that is highlighted by the H.G.H. issue.
Indeed, baseball players have been giving urine samples for steroid testing for much of the last decade. But blood testing was forbidden territory, with players giving blood only as part of their physicals during spring training. Now players will have to get used to the idea of phlebotomists’ entering clubhouses before or after games.
But not any regular-season games in 2012. Weiner said players were different from other athletes because they played every day for nearly seven months. Thus, he said, the union wants to be sure the testing is not interfering with players’ health and safety. So for now, the testing will be limited — February and March and then post-October.
Rob Manfred, the baseball official who negotiated the collective bargaining agreement with Weiner, acknowledged that the union wanted to proceed cautiously. “It is a question of starting where we are with the things we agreed upon and engaging in a process moving forward that we and the union are comfortable with,” he said.
Actually, by taking blood samples from more than 1,200 baseball players next spring, baseball will be doing more comprehensive H.G.H. testing than the World Anti-Doping Agency, which oversees Olympic athletes. In 2010, only 3,425 H.G.H. tests were conducted on the tens of thousands of athletes subject to WADA testing.
For years, WADA was one of baseball’s biggest critics, accusing it of looking the other way on doping. But on Tuesday, its director general acknowledged that baseball had in some ways jumped ahead of his organization.
“This is very significant,” the director general, David Howman, said of baseball’s commitment to test everyone for H.G.H. “At last we are in a position where we can say that Major League Baseball is taking a leading role. This is something we are concerned about regarding our own testing.”
The H.G.H. regimen for 2012 is similar to how baseball introduced steroid testing. In the first year, 2003, players were subject to anonymous survey testing. Penalty testing did not begin until a year later, and it was only in 2005 that players faced a suspension if they tested positive for the first time.
Under the deal, players who test positive for H.G.H. in spring training or in the off-season will be suspended for 50 games.
Howman said the union’s approach to the issue of doping had changed significantly since Weiner took over in 2009. Under the tenure of Donald Fehr, who led the union from 1983 to 2009, he said, union officials never responded to WADA overtures. “Now,” he added, “we are exchanging information.”