Padres could face punishment for hiding medical records of players

ESPN’s Buster Olney is reporting that the Padres could be facing discipline for their procedures of documenting medical information. The Padres have been under review since August 5th. In short, the Padres, under their new head trainer Mark Rogow, ordered their staff to enter medical information in two separate databases, one for in-house use and one for MLB consumption.

As Olney explains the MLB uses one central database called Sutton Medical System. When teams are approaching a trade and need to share medical information they simply give access to the records to the opposing team.

The Padres decided during Spring Training to only register injuries and preventative medicine that caused or resulted in a player’s a trip to the Disabled List. In the past, and with most teams, the trainers would enter every detail from a massage to an aspirin. The Padres only entered the detailed information into their own database.

San Diego Padres may face discipline after hiding players' medical information from MLB database

Months later, when the Padres' directive to split the documentation was handed down, some Padres staffers were uncomfortable, according to sources, and some expressed that discomfort, with athletic trainers saying there would be backlash for this type of filing system.

The reason for this is simple. The Padres would get an edge when trading when they wouldn’t share all of their knowledge on a player’s health. The Padres told Olney that there was no intent to mislead other clubs. Oh okay, but...

According to the two sources with direct knowledge of the meetings, the athletic trainers were told that by splitting the medical files into two categories, the Padres would benefit in trade discussions.

This is a really bad look for the Padres and it’s already backfired on them with this review. As a result they’ve chosen to reverse a trade for Colin Rea with Marlins due to a complaint about an existing injury.

It really sounds like the Padres will be punished for these discrepancies in their medical files by the MLB and deservedly so, assuming there are rules against such actions.

Red Sox President Dombrowski says there are no rules:

“There are guidelines. There are strong guidelines. . . . The commissioner’s office has that with the medical staffs, yes. But there are no rules. There’s — you start delving into rules and all that stuff in baseball, (it’s) very complicated at times.”

Was this a breech in ethics or were MLB rules broken? It sounds like the former. Either way this could seriously affect the possibility of teams wanting to conduct trades with the Preller and company. In a more serious case it could apparently cause Padres President Mike Dee and GM A.J. Preller to lose their jobs.