He looked away.

“Ty—”

“I take vitamins. Lots of us do, but me more than the others because my body has taken a hit from the leukemia, and I get run down faster. I take added supplements and proteins.” He met her gaze then, his own earnest. “We’ve talked about this, Holly. There’s nothing wrong with making your body as fit as you can get it, especially for an athlete in a sport where you’re considered old at the age of thirty. You have to be fit for as long as you can be.”

“I understand that. Vitamins are one thing. But stimulants—”

“Natural ingredients,” he maintained. “All from plants. Nothing manufactured.”

“But—”

“Is eating celery and carrots all damn day long considered strength building?”

“Okay,” she said, nodding. “But smoking opium is dangerous, isn’t it? Because that’s a plant, too, Ty. A natural ingredient. It doesn’t make it right.”

“Look, I’m not saying I’m taking anything, but you should know, I don’t see a problem with it. I think the rules are too strict.”

“Can I quote you?”

He stared at her a long beat. “I guess I don’t see a problem with that.”

“Thank you for your time.” She went home and called the other players on the roster, one by one, asking each of them their stance on undetectable and banned substances. She got a variety of answers, but the bottom line was the same. Unlike Ty, each of the rest of them viewed a banned substance as unacceptable, in whatever form it took.

She stared at her blank computer screen, then started typing. She wrote the article she wanted to write. Well, not quite the way she wanted to write it, but close enough. She started with how the MLB and the commissioner’s office had forever changed the way athletes viewed banned substances by putting in mandatory testing, which was great, except that testing wasn’t always accurate, and there were athletes still managing to use. There would probably always be certain athletes who managed to use.

She went on to explain that so much was expected of athletes in this day and age, the pressure not only to beat long-standing records but also to shatter them, and to do that, the athletes needed to constantly increase their strength. With conventional steroids and enhancers closed off to them, some were turning to less tried-and-true methods. Herbal and natural remedies, for one. But just because a drug was made from a plant extract didn’t make it any safer than the manufactured ones had been.

Or any more accepted.