Under The Knife 3/5/26

Hit Me Two Times

JURICKSON PROFAR, UT ATL (drug suspension)

I’ve always had a soft spot for Profar - if you look up his first home run, you’ll see me behind the home dugout in Cleveland. That doesn’t make me feel sorry for him at all, having tested positive, again, for the same drug he got caught using before.

Jurickson Profar is suspended for 162 games after testing positive for hCG, a second offense under MLB’s Joint Drug Program. If you’re looking for some exotic designer steroid, you won’t find it here. hCG is a hormone your body already knows. The issue isn’t what it is. The issue is what it does inside a system that’s trying to hide something else.

HCG mimics luteinizing hormone, the pituitary signal that tells the testes to produce testosterone. In a normal endocrine loop, LH rises, testosterone follows, and the body self-regulates. When an athlete uses exogenous testosterone or anabolic steroids, that loop shuts down. The body senses adequate androgen and stops producing its own. hCG can stimulate the testes to keep making testosterone despite suppression. It’s commonly used during or after a steroid cycle to maintain testicular function, restore endogenous production, or smooth the hormonal crash that follows a cycle. On its own, hCG can elevate testosterone levels. In context, it’s often part of a larger protocol. That’s why it’s banned. It’s a tool that supports or masks other performance-enhancing strategies.

Detection is more straightforward than some think. Labs measure hCG directly in urine and blood, looking at absolute levels and patterns. The hormone has a relatively short half-life. Depending on dose and frequency, it can be detectable for several days and sometimes longer. Micro-dosing might narrow the window, but it does not make the substance invisible. MLB’s program relies on WADA-accredited laboratories, strict chain of custody, and split-sample confirmation. An A sample that screens positive is confirmed by testing the B sample taken from the same collection bottle. That confirmation is about accuracy, not multiplication. One collection equals one potential violation. You do not get two offenses because the lab ran two tests on the same urine. It doesn’t last so long that he can blame one rogue usage.

For Profar to be facing a second offense, there had to be a separate violation. A different test date. A new positive. The idea circulating that this could be one use somehow counted twice does not square with how the program is structured. The safeguards exist precisely to prevent that scenario. Samples are coded, sealed, tracked, and stored. The B sample is an athlete’s protection against lab error.

So why risk it again? The charitable explanation is miscalculation. Players talk about detection windows as if they are train schedules. They are not. Individual metabolism varies. Testing is truly random and unannounced. The less charitable explanation is that some athletes convince themselves hCG is therapeutic rather than enhancing, especially if they are trying to normalize suppressed testosterone levels. Intent does not matter under strict liability. Presence does.

A second positive for hCG in today’s testing environment is a decision that Profar made, one that may cost him his career, but one that he may have felt he needed to risk to keep it.

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