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Wiggins’ Future With the Padres Is Up in the Air

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Alan Wiggins, whose baseball career has been interrupted twice in three years by cocaine abuse problems, has completed four weeks of drug therapy and has been cleared by doctors to rejoin the Padres, but club President Ballard Smith says he won’t let Wiggins back on the field this season.

Smith’s stance “flies in the face of the (drug) agreement” between team owners and players and “cannot be justified,” said Eugene Orza, associate general counsel of the Major League Players Assn.

Three weeks ago, Smith announced that Wiggins would not be allowed to play for the Padres in 1985. When Wiggins was arrested in 1982 on cocaine possession charges and suspended for 30 days by former baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Smith had warned him that a drug relapse would result in his termination from the team.

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