FORT MYERS, Fla. -- In the wake of a published admission by San Diego Padres general manager Kevin Towers that he "felt like I knew" star player Ken Caminiti was using steroids while with the Padres, Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino, who was CEO of the team during Caminiti's stint there, said he was unaware that Caminiti was a steroid user.
"I did not," said Lucchino, speaking by telephone from his Boston office, when asked if he knew Caminiti was using steroids when he was with the Padres.
Asked if Towers had come to him with concerns that Caminiti was using steroids, Lucchino said, "No, not that I can recall. You know, it's hard to separate now what you know after the fact from what you knew at the time. But I don't remember any discussions or warnings about it."
Caminiti won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1996, his second season in San Diego, and later became the first major league player to admit to steroid use. He died last Oct. 10 at the age of 41. The New York City medical examiner listed the cause of death as a drug overdose (cocaine and other opiates were found in Caminiti's bloodstream), coronary artery disease, and an enlarged heart.
"The most salient point is we were concerned about Ken Caminiti, but our concern was about Creatine, about alcohol, it was not really about steroids," Lucchino said.
In the edition of ESPN The Magazine that is scheduled to appear on newsstands tomorrow and is on the magazine's website, Towers is quoted by reporter Buster Olney as saying that he "felt he knew" Caminiti was using steroids.
"I feel somewhat guilty, because I felt like I knew," said Towers, who in Sunday's editions of the Globe said he believed that Jose Canseco's allegations of widespread steroid use are "90 percent accurate."
"I still don't know for sure, but Cammy came out [later] and said that he used steroids, and I suspected," Towers told Olney. "Selfishly, the guy was putting up numbers, and I didn't do anything about it. That's just the truth."
The Padres won the National League West in 1996 and two years later went to the World Series.
"The truth is, we're in a competitive business," Towers told ESPN, "and these guys were putting up big numbers and helping your ball club win games. You tended to turn your head on things. And it really wakes you up when someone you admire as a person is no longer around. You can't help but think, could I have done something differently four or five years ago that might have changed what happened to him?
"I hate to be the one voice for the other 29 GMs, but I'd have to imagine that all of them, at one point or other, had reason to think that a player on their ball club was probably using, based on body changes and things that happened over the winter."
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