Former Red Sox Merloni Claims Sox Received Steriods Training

Former Boston infielder Lou Merloni claimed on Saturday that during his tenure with the Sox (98-03), they were given steroids training:

"I'm in spring training, and I got an 8:30-9:00 meeting in the morning. I walk into that office, and this happened while I was with the Boston Red Sox before this last regime, I'm sitting in the meeting. There's a doctor up there and he's talking about steroids, and everyone was like 'here we go, we're gonna sit here and get the whole thing -- they're bad for you.' No. He spins it and says 'you know what, if you take steroids and sit on the couch all winter long, you can actually get stronger than someone who works out clean, if you're going to take steroids, one cycle won't hurt you, abusing steroids it will.' He sat there for one hour and told us how to properly use steroids while I'm with the Boston Red Sox, sitting there with the rest of the organization, and after this I said 'what the heck was that?' And everybody on the team was like 'what was that?' And the response we got was 'well, we know guys are taking it, so we want to make sure they're taking it the right way'... Where did that come from? That didn't come from the Players Association."

Merloni has since backtracked a bit with a clarification of his statement, and former GM Dan Duquette chimed in with a disclaimer for a response. In his statement, Merloni made no specific claims of anyone on the team at the time using steroids, and said that the 'training' was more of a warning than an endorsement of any type.