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Chicago Cubs react to Gordon's PED suspension

Is it time for major-league baseball to once again sound the alarm on performance enhancing drug use?

Last week, Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Chris Colabello was suspended 80 games after testing positive for a performance-enhancing drug.

Early Friday, Miami Marlins second baseman Dee Gordon - who led the National League with a .333 batting average last season and won the batting title - also received an 80-game suspension for using PEDs.

"I think the bigger the star, the more upsetting it's going to be," Cubs second baseman Ben Zobrist said of Gordon. "This guy is supposed to be one of the better young players in the game, and all the facts will come out eventually. I'm not going to throw him under the bus because I don't know anything about it. It's not a great thing as players to think about, but I think we have to remember all the guys who have done it the right way and keep focusing on that because there's always going to be people trying to cheat the system.

"There was (cheating) back in the (19)40s, '50s, '70s, '80s, you name it, whatever decade. There were people trying to cheat the system and they were just getting away with it at that point. Thankfully, we're doing a lot to clean it up."

Major-league baseball has cracked down on PED use considerably since the 1990s, but as Gordon and Colabello show, the game is still not 100 percent clean and probably never will be.

Much like Colabello, Gordon said he did not willingly take a banned substance.

"You hate to see it," Cubs right fielder Jason Heyward said. "It's part of the game. In life, no one is perfect, people that make mistakes and there's people trying to get an edge at any point in time. I feel what you're hearing from the most recent two guys is that they didn't realize what they were doing and they made a mistake in something they took and that's that."

If big-league players are unaware of what they're taking at this stage of the PED crackdown, maybe they deserve to be suspended.

"It is hard to imagine, having gone through what we've gone through as an industry for a long time, the testing that's in place, to think you'd be able to circumvent that somehow seems to be almost impossible," Cubs manager Joe Maddon said. "It's surprising. I don't really know (Gordon). I know that he's really good. I know the difference he made for that team.

"You have to get inside somebody's head. You probably have to weigh the worth in a sense, whether to try it and then maybe attain a large contract, is it even worth that? I don't know. We all process chance differently."

Bryant update:

After spraining his right ankle while running the bases in Thursday's win over the Brewers, Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant was not in the starting lineup Friday against the Braves.

Manager Joe Maddon said Bryant might have been able to help the Cubs late in the game Friday, but it might be best to let the young slugger rest a few days and fully heal.

"They (sprained ankles) are tricky," Maddon said. "(Trainer) P.J. (Mainville) seems to be optimistic about this whole thing. I think if we just kind of rest it a little bit right now and not really abuse it, it will go away relatively fast. The thing with sprained ankles is to re-jam it somehow. That's the problem with an ankle.

"You can feel fine after a week, two weeks, and all of a sudden you just hit it wrong and you feel it."

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