Miami New Times won’t give Major League Baseball its Biogenesis records, blasts Bud Selig

One of the still-hanging threads in the Biogenesis scandal is whether the Miami New Times, the alt-weekly that broke the story, would turn over its documents to Major League Baseball.

The story published in January and linked a handful of stars, such as Alex Rodriguez, Melky Cabrera and Nelson Cruz, to the Miami-area clinic run by Anthony Bosch, who is alleged to have sold performance-enhancing drugs out of his anti-aging facility.

Since then, baseball has been negotiating with The New Times to hand over the notebooks it obtained, which include detailed client records from the clinic.

The paper's answer came Tuesday. The New Times, in not these exact words, told Major League Baseball and Commissioner Bud Selig to take their request and shove it.

In a scathing editorial, The New Times not only said no, but blasted Selig for representing an "organization with a long history of getting things wrong." It cited a litany of baseball black-eyes, from the Black Sox all the way to the Mark McGwire steroid scandal.

Closer to home, the paper railed against Selig for not taking action against Miami Marlins' owner Jeffrey Loria, who in recent years has bargained for a taxpayer-funded new stadium in Miami, then traded away the team's top talent:

So this is the guy who wants our records? Isn't he the same commissioner who in 2002 approved the complicated deal that gave Loria the Marlins, betrayed the City of Montreal, and caused Loria's partners to accuse the artful merchant of racketeering?

The Miami New Times not turning over its documents means Major League Baseball will have a much harder time taking action against any of the players connected to Biogenesis thus far. (Since the original report, other news agencies such as Yahoo! Sports and ESPN have published more names that the New Times didn't).

Meanwhile, the Florida Department of Health is also investigating Biogenesis and Bosch.

As the New Times' editorial says: "So now it's up to baseball and Florida's health investigators."

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