You might think that baseball players would stay as far away from Victor Conte as possible. The BALCO founder's name is synonymous with illegal drugs, see Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, but Marlon Byrd of the Texas Rangers isn't put off in the least. He openly admits that Conte advises him and is proudly featured as a client of Conte's new company, Scientific Nutrition for Advanced Conditioning, on their website. There's no reason to believe that the supplements Byrd gets from Conte fall afoul of baseball's drug policy since he's never failed a drug test. Not that he bothered finding out what's in the pills and potions he gets from Conte.
"I didn't need to," Byrd told Yahoo! Sports. "From our conversations, there was no need to ask."That seems like a pretty shocking point of view for a player in the age of increased testing. The more you think about it, though, the more you realize that it says a lot about the way that steroids became and remain an issue in baseball and all other sports.
Byrd is a competent big-league player, but he isn't a star and probably won't be more than a fourth outfielder at any point in his career. There are a lot of players who fit that description, so it makes sense that he'd do whatever it took to separate himself from the rest of the pack. That doesn't mean he'd knowingly do something against the rules, but it means that he probably doesn't care that much about what's in the supplements as long as he feels they help him optimize his performance.
Conte still is a bad namge around baseball clubhouses, the Rangers asked pitcher Scott Feldman to stop using one of his supplements in 2007, but he may be back for good. Byrd says that he feels like his supplement regimen gives him an edge over the opposition, which is the kind of thing that's likely to make an impact with other players looking to carve themselves a niche in the big leagues.
That opens up the question of just what a performance-enhancing substance is, but that's another can of worms for another time.
