Alex Cabrera’s spectacular power career became entangled with performance-enhancing-drug controversies on several continents. In September 2000, while Cabrera was with the Arizona Diamondbacks, team officials discovered a package addressed to him that contained a vial later identified as Winstrol, an anabolic steroid, along with several hundred pills. The pills were determined to be legal over-the-counter diet products, but the steroid vial became a central detail in the 2007 Mitchell Report, which listed Cabrera among players connected to suspected steroid activity. The timing created an unusual loophole: before the contents were tested and before Cabrera could be subjected to a drug test, Arizona sold his contract to the Seibu Lions of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball. Cabrera denied knowing why the package had been sent to him and insisted that he had never possessed or used the substances. He was never recorded as testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs during his Japanese career, even while producing extraordinary totals, including 55 home runs in 2002 and 50 in 2003.
The controversy became more concrete after Cabrera left Japan. In 2014, he tested positive for stanozolol while playing in Mexico, ending his Mexican League career; a Mexican sports court later suspended the permanent ban imposed against him. His disciplinary history continued in Venezuela: he tested positive for Adderall in 2016, although a Venezuelan court later overturned that suspension, and he then tested positive for stanozolol in December 2016, receiving a 50-game ban from the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League. The sequence left Cabrera’s legacy divided between his status as one of Japan’s most feared foreign sluggers and a documented history of positive drug tests, earlier MLB steroid allegations, and disputed disciplinary outcomes.
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