He singled out Ryan Braun as a particularly reckless user. “Ryan Braun had something called troches—they called it gummy bears—they’re actually lozenges. They had testosterone in them—fifteen percent. I already had these guys juiced, so all they had to do was, this was an activator. A little testosterone. They would drop it in the first inning—it was gone by the fifth inning—and unless you pulled him out of a game and tested him, you would never find out. So you could test him before and test him after and never know.”
“And so what happened with Braun was real simple,” he said. “The guy took, like, thirty gummy bears. He took one in the third inning, then he took one in the fifth inning, then he took one in the seventh inning, then he took one . . . he was just popping it like it was—candy.”
Bosch re-created a conversation with Braun, and I had to smile after hearing the anecdote retold.
“How many did you take?”
“I took five, I took six.”
“How much did you take?”
“Okay. I took the whole thing.”