Too Many Are Unaware, Too Many Don’t Care

Yes, Tim Salmon says, it is scary what happened to Steve Bechler, a 23-year-old Baltimore Oriole pitcher who died Monday at spring training.

Yes, Kevin Appier says, it is worrisome that Bechler apparently was taking Xenadrine, a weight-loss product containing ephedra.

No, David Eckstein says, he would never, ever take a drug or supplement unless it was prescribed by a doctor. His father is waiting for a liver transplant. Eckstein’s family has been hounded by liver disease.

So Eckstein gets it.

Too many athletes don’t.

During last year’s baseball labor negotiations, the owners wanted to include ephedrine as a banned drug that would be tested for. Ephedra, and its derivative, ephedrine, is a Chinese plant extract that boosts energy levels and helps in weight loss. It can cause your pulse to race, your heart to beat faster. It makes your internal systems speed up. Sometimes this is OK. Sometimes this isn’t.

Baseball owners had noticed that the deaths of two prominent football players -- Minnesota’s Korey Stringer and Northwestern’s Rashidi Wheeler -- had been linked with the use of supplements containing ephedrine.

But baseball players, through their union leader Don Fehr, argued strenuously, and, ultimately, effectively, that it was an invasion of privacy if athletes were to be drug tested for legal substances. It wasn’t, Fehr said, anybody’s right to know what legal substances players put in their bodies.

And that’s the problem.

No one wants to know.

No Oriole wanted to tell Bechler, a young man recently married, with a baby on the way, who came to camp heavy enough that his manager mentioned Bechler’s poor conditioning, that a bottle of Xenadrine was not the way to go.

No one wants to know exactly what it is our favorite players might be putting into their bodies to get bigger, stronger, faster, leaner, more muscular.

Salmon doesn’t think it’s his business to tell any Angel teammate to put down the pills. Salmon, smart and serious, a man with a wife and children, has taken creatine and Xenadrine and other nutritional supplements.

He did it because he’d feel a lack of energy in the middle of a long baseball season or, as he’s gotten older, he’d have a harder time keeping off extra pounds in the off-season.

“I’d take the smallest dosage possible,” Salmon says, “and I’ve stopped taking anything now. But I don’t see the need for baseball to ban legal substances. They can be useful if they’re used in the right way and you understand what you’re taking and why.”

The supplements Salmon took are legal. He bought them at nutrition stores. They were helpful and caused him no harm. He says that it would be smarter, and eventually was his choice, to work with a nutritionist. A personal nutritionist would know everything Salmon took, prescribed or over-the-counter, would know his medical history, would create a nutrition plan for him.

As Salmon heard more about the possible side effects of creatine and as he read more about the possible consequences of Xenadrine, he has stopped taking them. He isn’t worried about arriving at spring training a few pounds heavy or without all the definition he’d like in his upper arms.

But he is also a 34-year-old veteran with a distinguished resume, a guaranteed contract and a place on the roster. Bechler didn’t have that advantage.

There is increasing evidence that there is no place for any type of ephedra in serious sport. The Olympic sports, the NFL and the NCAA have banned ephedra. Ephedra is a short cut, an easy way out, a quick, unhealthy, unsupervised solution for a failure to keep in big-league condition. No serious athlete or franchise or sport should allow the stuff. It should be discouraged and counseled against.

Salmon argues that a blanket ban is throwing the good out with the bad. So does the ephedra industry.

Appier, a veteran pitcher who says he has used various supplements but only after having studied what he takes, says it is an individual’s responsibility to know what he’s taking and what might happen.

A young man has died, though.

Explain to Appier that all the study in the world on Xenadrine or creatine or anything else won’t help if it turns out you have an undiagnosed health condition -- a faulty liver or slightly enlarged heart or high blood pressure.

And Appier stops and says, “That’s a good point.”

Explain to Salmon that the bigger a man is, the faster he is prone to suffer severe effects of heatstroke and the more likely he is to become dehydrated from the speed-up effect of ephedrine and Salmon says, “That’s an interesting point.”

A college coed who runs over to the nearest GNC store to buy a bottle of Xenadrine so she looks nice on the beach during spring break is not the same as a 240-pound athlete who buys Xenadrine to help him knock off 10 pounds, quick, in the first few days of spring training even while he’s running laps in the sun and heat and humidity and lifting weights in the clubhouse.

Salmon says, “Wait until the government makes the stuff illegal.” But maybe these supplements are helpful to 99% of the population and only harmful to the 1% of superior athletes who push their bodies in ways the rest of us can’t.

While Eckstein said that he’d “never even think about taking a supplement,” he also said he had no real idea of what ephedra was or did. Bechler probably had no idea either.

We encourage athletes to be bigger, faster, stronger. And we don’t really care how they get there.

The Lakers’ Shaquille O’Neal is being roundly criticized for sitting out because of a sore knee and aching toe. He is being encouraged to “do what it takes” to get on the court.

If “what it takes” is a whole lot of painkillers, that’s what is demanded by the fans and media of the highly-paid athlete.

Salmon says he worries about that. “I couldn’t get through a season without the painkillers for my knee or my back or my shoulder,” he says, “and I do think about the consequences of that 10, 20 years down the road.”

Yet Shaq gets ripped for not shooting up, loading up, doing what it takes. And doing it right now.

Bechler did what he thought it took. And now it’s too late.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.